Remembering My Father

(presented at Dad's memorial service, Community Unitarian Universalist Church of Brighton, August 16, 2014)

I am told I have nice hair.  It's wavy and thick and firmly rooted.   My barber, Judy, when first seeing it, ran her giddy fingers through my scalp and asked where I got it.  "I got it from my dad," I said.  Dad sported a reddish-blonde crop that he combed straight back.  But in his last years, as he spent about twenty hours a day sleeping on one side of his head or the other, his hair, now turned white, became a mini mohawk from the constant pillow pressure.

I don't really care whether my hair is one thing or another, although I would reject his cockatoo look.  My hair: I get it from my father.  But of some greater importance, he also gave me his world.  When I came of age, we lived in Turkey.  Together we stood on the walls of ancient Troy and cruised the Anatolian plateau for Hittite ruins. On the Black Sea, we watched Turkish women in rainbow bloomers rake hazelnuts on flat rooftops, and we shopped for hammered copper tables and Turkish carpets in old Ulus.  In Istanbul we stayed at the Tarabya Hotel on the Bosphorus where by day we got lost in the Grand Bazaar and at night dined on swordfish baked in a bag, shish kebab, and sweet white strawberries.  It seemed that in Europe, Mom and Dad dragged Julie and me to every cathedral and chapel they could, until, as Dad so loved to tell it, I shouted, "If I have to visit one more church, I'm going to convert!"  

While living in Indiana some years before, we floated down the Tippecanoe River on tippy canoes and cast Mepps spinners at smallmouth bass.  Once when he landed a feisty three-pounder, I pounded his back in celebration.  He would later share with me how prized a moment that was, not so much catching the fish, but the back slapping from his son.  From 1960 to 1968, we attended every home football and basketball game at Purdue University.  After a basketball game when I was 11, my coat fell to the ground under the bleachers, and as I was a small kid, I climbed the 10 feet down to retrieve it.  An enormous security guard approached in that no-man’s land, grabbed my shoulders, and shook me so hard my head bounced like a balloon on the end of a stick.  I'll never forget when Dad saw this attack, he reached a panicked arm down through the floorboards and screamed, “That’s my son!  That’s my son!"  When I was a very small child and ready for bed, he would hoist me over his shoulder and try to sell me as a sack of flour to my mother.  Then I would stand on his shoes as we walked down the hall before a story.  He taught me to ride a bicycle and to play chess, although at certain times, I can't forgive him for introducing me to golf. 

Dad never spanked, never squeezed an arm or slammed a door in anger.  I was never grounded or lost privileges.  And believe me, I was no angel.  I created a mountain of teenage mayhem and many a parent would have been right to chain me to the water heater.  But my father had not the heart or mind to control or shame others.  I remember that when dealing with one of my many bad choices, I shared how I hated to disappoint him.  Dad said that my disappointing him was impossible, that I never had, never could.  Confound, maybe, but never disappoint.

One night my brother Mark and his high school friends were apprehended by the West Lafayette Police Department for performing a so-called, Chinese Fire Drill.  While waiting at a red light in town, all six jumped out of the car and proceeded to race around the vehicle, screaming like madmen, until the light turned green.  Then just as quickly, they jumped back in and were on their way.  The arresting officer was not amused and the cops later called Dad in the wee hours to come pick up his son who waited with head hung low.  The ride home was stone silent until Dad couldn’t take it anymore.  He exploded.  With howls of laughter!  He could not have been prouder of his juvenile delinquent and loved to tell the story at the dinner table.

For more than 20 years I fought a non-stop battle with drugs and alcohol.  Dad, of course, was a powerless bystander, but a keen observer, and I exerted exhausting energy in trying to exhibit control.  Dad stayed out of the fray, but his mere presence in my twisted world served to compound the guilt.  One unforgettable day when loneliness had me cornered and my hands trembled from thirst, I let down my guard and shared an honest moment with my father.  I confessed that I was suffering, that alcohol had me by the throat.  And he responded in his gentle way, "I envy you."  Envy?  But Dad, how, of all feelings, could you possibly feel envy?  To which he said, "Because, son, you have a purpose."  And in that instant, while his comment seemed mysterious, my father gave me a ribbon of hope.  That purpose, as I would discover some years later, was to find the courage to surrender, and by surrendering, discover peace.

Whenever Dad met others, they got the genuine article.  In less than twenty seconds, they would greet a fellow pilgrim with the common stripe of humanity.  He never masqueraded with a fictitious sense of self, and as a Midwesterner and former Californian, despised arrogance and elitism.  Dad was a gifted storyteller and as children we often demanded that he tell again and again our family legends.  He developed this talent as a boy in Springfield, Illinois, during the Depression when he would return from a Saturday double feature and regale spellbound neighborhood children with the high dramas, children who could not get a dime for admission.  It's no wonder that Dr. Bohnhorst was such an effective and beloved teacher.  Whenever one of his students has learned that I am their teacher's son, they share how much he and his classes meant to them.  Dad may hold the record as the most hugged professor in Michigan State University history.

Dad liked his steaks very rare and would kindly send back an entree if the middle were not red enough.  He liked his ice cream chocolate and his pie cherry. Way back in the day, he preferred his martinis dry and savored a pipe tobacco called Amphora.  He loved Mozart and would exclaim, "My God, he wrote an entire symphony at the age of six. Age six!"  He loved Beethoven and would exclaim, "My God, he wrote the Ninth Symphony when he was stone cold deaf!  Do you hear me?  Totally deaf!"  He loved Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp.   He believed Moby Dick was the greatest novel of all time, and Dad dubbed himself Ahab when playing bridge on the Internet.  And releasing my father into the great art museums of Europe was like unleashing a child on Christmas morning.  After moving through the Sistine Chapel, he said, "I can die happy now." 

My memories of Dad almost always include my mom.  Ben was not Dad, and Marie was not Mom without the other.  They had a fantastic marriage and were their own people.  Unfortunately, their only wedding photograph had them posing in front of the church, cut off at the neck.  She was the slightly better bridge player.  Dad worshipped her and they explored the world together.  Somehow, they felt comfortable with Unitarians.   After he retired, and with Mom rooting him on, Dad became a poet.  He found meaning in simple things, like feeding birds, and published, among others, a book of poems entitled "A Sermon on the Sufficiency of Feeding Finches."

My wife Sue and I had the privilege of taking care of Dad at home for about five years.  Mom had died and he remained diminished mentally from a stroke in 2001.  He was frail and slowly trailed his walker between rooms, marking his tiny steps with the words, "Putsa, putsa, putsa."   A few times every day while sitting in the living room, his blanket over his lap, out of the blue he would shout, "I have a question!"  To which I'd respond, "What's your question?"  And he would cry out, "What makes you such a sweetheart?"  Or he might shout, "I have a question! Why do I love you so much?"  After a while I suggested his persistent affection might be the result of indigestion.  He'd say, "Indigestion? Oh, bullshit!"  And so it would go.  Now and then he would end up in the hospital from this or that.  One basic conversation between nurses and patient always seemed to arise:

NURSE: How are you doing today, Ben?

DAD: I’m old! Old and decrepit!

NURSE: Decrepid?

DAD:  Decrepit. With a T.

NURSE: Oh, okay. Well, lay back down on your bed.

DAD: It’s lie back down, my dear. The verb is to lie.

Always the English teacher.  And even in his last year or two, with his memory vanished like the Model T, if you recited the first few words of a Shakepearean sonnet, say Sonnet 29, he could proceed without error or pause, and proclaim with a certain bravado:

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

And look upon myself and curse my fate."

When I was a boy of five or six, my father, the young professor at Oglethorpe College, would sometimes pace back and forth across the rooms at home, pipe in mouth, puzzling out life's predicaments.  I would fall in behind him, trying to keep pace, and strode those floors like my leader.  In a way, I always have.  As I've adjusted my bearings over 62 years, I have taken signals and learned lessons from the greatest teacher I have ever known.   In all this world, Dad is the person I admire most, in all the love that he has been.  From my back porch where I write, cardinals and goldfinches are having their frantic fill of sunflowers from my feeders.  This brings calm and a simple and loving purpose.  I must get it from my dad.

Season's Bleatings -- 2013

From my forehead this morning, right on cue, sprang a single crimson pimple.  Like a rooster at dawn, this zit yearly crows, "Time to write the Christmas letter!"  You might think I can see that we are in the Season -- that no one could be that deaf and blind to the rumble and the jingle.  But not so, my friends.  You see, with practiced and monastic devotion, I only dwell IN THE MOMENT.  The world's distractions no longer jar me from the HERE AND NOW.  No, I am so in tune, it's my body tissues which set off alarms when worldly duties call:   A runny nose, for example, means a light bulb needs changing.  Earwax buildup forebodes a leaky faucet.  A canker sore:  it's time to reset the rat traps.  When the pimple pops, I obey.

It's been a banner year, this two thousand thirteen.  There was a wedding, world travel, a master's degree, new jobs, a reunion with long-lost cousins, good health, and tomatoes from the garden. Although Sue, I'm afraid, lapsed further into social deviance and depraved behavior:  She is addicted to on-line fabric shopping, creates quilts and purses, has joined a book club, and, I'm sad to report, now subscribes to HGTV magazine.  Yes, I know... worrisome.  

After a 12-year courtship, Brendan and Jodi got married at the zoo in Grand Rapids.  It took Jodi the full 12 years to finally stomach the idea that Bohnhorst would be her last name.  It was an elegant affair.  There was a cellist playing Bach, white table cloths, ice cubes in the water, air conditioning, a funicular -- all attended by 100 fully-clothed guests.  Elizabeth mastered a creative writing degree in Georgia, then moved with boyfriend Roger to Austin.  There, she nabbed a job as a "personal assistant" to a wealthy heiress from Arkansas who hired her on the spot after Liz recited to her one of Liz's poems.  Meanwhile, her long-eared dog has taken to wearing a rainbow-colored tutu.

With a thousand thanks to friends Dan and Debi, Sue and I traveled to Italy in April and suffocated on pasta and pizza, in piazzas and perfect weather. We promenaded upon Pompeii and Positano.  You can write on my tombstone, "He drove the roads of the Amalfi Coast and did not have a relapse..." With another thousand thanks to cousins John and Inge, and ol' friend Jay, we traveled to California in October and felt right at home in Alcatraz.   We broke egg rolls and fortune cookies with cousins not seen in 42 years.  I had my picture taken on the 18th green at Pebble Beach while mistaken for a harbor seal.  In my defense, the fog had just rolled in.

The 2013 tally:  Squirrels 8, Dog 0.  If you've been keeping track, these numbers tell that Dog has slowed down some.   Or maybe at age 11, she's become philosophical about The Chase, and made her peace with Futility.  As a consequence, the back yard squirrels felt a new birth of freedom this summer as they chattered and mocked me while I hit golf ball after golf ball into my practice net back there.  I had had about a hundred balls lying around, but when I  started to pack up in the fall, I noticed that about half had disappeared.  I privately accused the neighbor children, the little snot-faced thieves!  But the next day when I took Dog for a walk, I discovered dozens of golf balls in the woods off our back yard, half-buried no doubt by those freedom-loving squirrels, apparently for their future harvest.  In an indirect way, this was Dog's fault, her and her sense of futility, and I told her so. And another odd thing: the squirrels had buried only my Titleists.

My pimple has retreated, submerged for another year until this dirty Christmas duty rises again.  Now I can let go of worldly distractions and crawl back inside THE MOMENT.  Maybe I'll just lie there on the floor and stare upwards at our Christmas Ceiling Cobwebs.   Or maybe I'll stare emptily into my laptop screen, yearning that someone, anyone, will "Like" just one of my endless Facebook postings.  Ah, the stillness.  But what's this I feel?  Why, horrors!  It's a hard blue boil erupting on my back!  This feels serious... maybe the basement has flooded.

But before I grab my flashlight and galoshes...  Merry Christmas!  And...  Go Green!








  

The ABCs of March in Michigan

Published in Found Michigan, 03/06/13

Technically, it’s only 31 days. But to your itchy, dry skin, vitamin-D-starved cells, and cabin-fever-battered self-esteem, March might as well be that seemingly eternal last mile of a goddamn winter marathon. The snowbirds—i.e., the smart ones—get the hell out of here; those that stay, it’s amazing we don’t end up eating each other. For some perspective on the month ahead, guest essayist Tom Bohnhorst filed this complete alphabetical guide to navigating Michigan’s most depressing month. Bon voyage.

*    *    *

A is for advancing cases of mucus infiltration. Listen as you take a stroll down any school hallway and you’ll believe you’re at Midas Muffler. Hacking, coughing, the blowing of snot—germs love March in Michigan. The whole state should be quarantined.

B is for Bahamas or Bimini or Bermuda or the bars in Key West. It’s for dreaming dreams of anywhere warm. “B” is for taking your forefinger and twanging your lips while you mutter “buh-buh-buh” as you gaze at a calendar of the Caribbean.

C is for crunchy snow—the kind where, walking across a snow-covered yard after freezing rain, you randomly break through and skin your shin on the icy crust.

D is for dumb ducks. Ducks have wings and they can fly long distances. But Michigan ducks just swim around in circles on half-frozen lakes and ponds. Ducks, what the hell is wrong with you? Get your asses out of here!

E is for eternal, as in the 31 seemingly eternal, drag-ass, stuck-in-neutral days of March. Not 30 days. And certainly not 28. Studies have confirmed that time actually slows down in March. It has something to do with the choral droning of Michigan weathermen, day-in and day-out, with the same dreary forecast.

F is for filth. I bought a black car which looks stunning right out of the spotless auto wash. Stunning for about a block. Within a day, after a few miles of salted sand, slush, dirt, splattered mud, and snow plows, it looks like it’s been on safari.

G is for grey, including dark grey, light grey, greasy grey, grey grey, granulated grey, grey that’s almost white, grey that’s almost black, grey water, grey snow, grey skies, grey hair. And let’s be clear what “G” does NOT stand for. “G” is NOT for green and “G” is NOT for golf.

H is for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, straight from the jar, and everything high fat, high carb, high fructose, bad as hell for you, that I suck down like oxygen because Hellmann’s mayonnaise and its ilk are really really good at keeping the blues at bay. “H” is also for “Holy shit! I just gained 10 pounds!”

I is for… “I” is for… I was going to say, “I” is for igloo, but that would be a cop out. I’ll tell you what “I” is really for… “I” is for: I CAN’T TAKE THIS SHIT ANY LONGER! I can’t. It’s not “cabin fever” anymore; it’s “my cabin needs padded walls.”

J is for jammies. At 9 p.m., my wife informs me that she is going to put her “jammies” on. I ask her if “jammies” is derived from pa-JAW-mas. “No,” she says, “jammies is derived from pa-JAM-mas.” And I tell her I think pa-JAM-mas is adolescent and cutesy, while pa-JAW-mas is adult and correct. And she tells me her whole family always said pa-JAM-mas and, for crying out loud, we used “jammies” with our own children. And I take great exception to that and declare that no way in hell did we—especially I—ever use “jammies” with our own children and that my whole family always said pa-JAW-mas. I tell her that “jammies” sucks. And so it goes for five more minutes before she leaves the room to put on her jammies. I blame this asinine exchange and others like it on March. By the way, it is pa-JAW-mas.

K is for kiss my ass. They say attitude is everything. I’mma wanna tell ya: It sure as hell is.

L is for lack of vitamin D. “L” is for lack of sunshine. It is so rare to see a blue sky in March that when the sun appears, we think we’re having LSD flashbacks. Thousands stare for hours into blinding light-boxes believing they will ward off “seasonal affective disorder.” There’s no such thing, of course, but we allow the masses to huddle together under their unifying diagnosis.

M is for madness, as in March Madness. It’s a great paradox that it takes madness to restore sanity. It takes office pools and online brackets and rooting for Cinderella to keep us from chewing holes in the upholstery.

N is for numbed noses and numbed nuts. And worse than being numb is being numb to our numbness. We swim unaware in an ether of novocaine. We have been so cold for so long, we don’t realize until April that we’ve lost some of our fingers and toes.

O is for “Olly olly oxen free!” I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I get irritable. March Madness is still a few weeks away. Please forgive me. Come on over and help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge, if you can find anything in there. Probably can’t. Sorry.

P is for potholes. Everybody talks about potholes but nobody ever does anything about them. Except road commission crews. Those guys drive around with their steaming asphalt and fill in yawning hole after yawning hole with their persistent shovels. These are the heroes that battle decay and our winter’s discontent. They save our shocks and springs and prevent car passengers from getting hernias. Bless you, boys.

Q is for quarrelling. Walk through any apartment complex in March and you will hear, behind closed doors, constant explosions of slamming doors and bellowing arguments between lovers. Why then, you might ask, is there such a spike in birth rates in Michigan hospitals in December, nine months later? Three words: make-up sex.

R is for reruns. And God bless their little rerunny plots. Look outside and you’ve got blood-stopping cold in seven shades of grey. Look inside and you’ve got Kramer and George Costanza in HD on the flat screen. It’s a no brainer.

S is for sleet, snow, slush, slippery roads, severe weather, and more miserable S’s than I care to conjure.

T is for traumatic stress disorder (TSD), akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, except there’s nothing “post” about it. It lasts for exactly 31 days. Don’t expect treatment for TSD in March, because psychiatrists are too immersed in their college basketball brackets to deal with the suffering of others.

U is for Unguentine ointment, a winter staple and treatment for dry skin that you’ll be plenty familiar with once you turn 50. When I’m without my Unguentine, I like to rub my back in a door jamb, like a bear rubs its back on a pine tree.

V is for Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. If you run out of Unguentine, Vaseline will work. In March, nobody in Michigan cares if you walk around with Vaseline smeared all over your body.

W is a tie between windshield wiper fluid and “Where’s the remote?” If you have neither, both of these W’s can be a matter of life and death. Which is more important? Finding the remote is much more important.

X is for “X marks the spot” and how frustrating it is when, if you’ve marked your spot in November, try as you might, come March you can’t find any X anywhere because everything is covered in snow. Someone could put an X in a very obvious place outside and still not find which spot X marks. From November through March, all marked spots are useless.

Y is for Ypsilanti, Michigan. Ypsilanti experiences March in Michigan. Therefore, you should feel sorry for it.

Z is for “Zounds!!! A crocus!” The delicate, the precious, the sublime blue shoot of the crocus. It points heavenward through mounds of melting snow, undaunted, uncompromising, the knowing vertical climb of spring. We often see crocuses in March. They have the courage of David as they slay the monstrous Goliath of winter. That battle happens in late March, right as the madness subsides.

###

Tom Bohnhorst is a social worker and lives in Traverse City, Michigan. In 1973, he spent a harrowing night in a Turkish jail. To read more of Tom’s essays, visit his blog: Poopiderum. 

Comments are welcome at:  tombohn2@yahoo.com

Decrepit to a T

Published in Trop (tropmag.com)

I keep encountering old people. As part of my job as a social worker, they come hobbling in, creaky and wrinkled, and settle in to share their tales of woe. Sometimes they carry smells, are grey and bifocaled, and fill their application forms with long lists of medications.

I often pitied these prehistoric specimens before an epiphany spelled the alarm: THESE ELDERS ARE MY PEERS! I MYSELF AM A CODGER OF OLDE!

As proof, this morning when I dropped my wife at the library, she handed me a pack of sugarless cinnamon gum and said, “Here. This will give you something to do while you wait.”

Playing Words with Friends recently, I played an A in front of a word already on the board. Excited and confident, I played ADROOL, as in, “There I was, watching C-SPAN, my head anodding and my chin all adrool.” I felt crushed when this seemingly common state of being was rejected.

My wife must have figured that if I chewed sugarless cinnamon gum while I parked outside, this would prevent my nodding off and soiling the car upholstery with drool. As it turned out, the little gum box was empty. I then took her to mean that I could amuse myself by reading the ingredients of sugarless cinnamon gum. Meanwhile, she could peruse stacks of great literature, each of us according to our talents.
Hey, I may be dumb but at least I’m stupid.

My father just turned ninety and he now wears a bib when he comes to the table. His cranial synapses can get discombobulated, and he might try drinking a bottle of ketchup if you don’t intervene. Before the era of the bib, splotches of dried food would accumulate on his shirts and bathrobe. These telltale and crusty stains I dubbed “splog,” and they became locations of interest for dinner-table discussions. My wife once claimed she saw the Dalai Lama in a mustard stain. When Dad was living with us, we ran up quite the electric bill from the constant washing of his sploggy garments and sploggy lifestyle.

And now, I select which sweatshirt or sweater I wear by which of these possesses the least amount of splog. Drooling is not the least of the woes wrought by my advanced age. Like father like son, I suppose. I went to visit my long-lost brother last winter, and when he greeted me at the airport, dried remnants of navy bean soup adorned the front of his turtleneck. Like baldness, sploggishness runs in families.

Dad’s bib became a fixture at about the time he took a wrong turn. Sitting in his easy chair one evening, he announced officially, “When a man has to urinate, a man has to urinate.” With great exertion, he lifted from his chair, straddled his walker left and right, pointed it down down the hall, plodded forward in slow, tiny steps, and headed straight into the broom closet.

But judge not that my father has let go of life’s important lessons. During a recent hospital stay when yet again his diverticulosis erupted, Dad had this conversation with a nurse:

NURSE: How are we doing today, Ben?
DAD: I’m old! Old and decrepit!
NURSE: Decrepid?
DAD:  Decrepit. With a T.
NURSE: Oh, okay. Well, lay back down on your bed.
DAD: It’s lie back down, my dear. The verb is to lie.

No one has ever taken offense at these corrections, because my father is so dang sweet. He so loves his fellow man. Dad may not remember how many children he has, but if, perchance, you visit him, and you recite the first few words of a Shakespearean sonnet, say Sonnet 29, he will take the cue and proceed without error and without pause:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate.

And so on.

After I realized that I was older than many of the geezers I served, I took to spending long minutes gazing at my face in a close-up mirror. I had to agree: just when a guy starts to think he’s all grown up, the ol’ mortal coil takes a nosedive. It’s like falling asleep on a surfboard, only to awaken miles off shore, the tides of time pulling you outward. And as you try to paddle homeward, the great grasp of momentum only chuckles.

Acceptance can happen. Sometimes I chuckle when I pass by the broom closet. Now I rock in my father’s old easy chair and sometimes a gob of jelly will  seep onto my shirt. I have taken to chewing gum, stick after flavorful stick, my favorite taste cinnamon. It prevents splog, and stops the head anodding, the chin all adrool. And while chomping away, I might recall an old song or poem, and how earlier that day I walked into a room with no clue as to why.



Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com

Season's Bleatings - 2012

As another year draws its last gasp, we reflect on how our worlds have turned, our victories and our stumbles, and how we might have made a difference.  I, myself, in long moments alone, have pondered these questions, and always arrive at the same destination:  my golf game, in a word, sucks.   Oh, I had brief stretches of greatness, when my drives soared long and straight, my irons released crisp and true, and I could sink long putts with eyes closed.  But, my friends, those stretches were all too fleeting.  Most often, I hacked away at ball and turf like a drunken lumberjack with a dull axe.

Other members of the clan, however, have risen above the fray.  There's Brendan (29) down Grand Rapids way who bought a house with Jodi, his dearly betrothed.  They've torn out things and replaced with new, raked a few leaves, so that today they boast a splendid home to begin a life in marriage.  Yes, my friends, I said the word.  After only a 12-year courtship, in May they'll tie the knot at the zoo in GR where penguins will usher and lions will roar.  Brendan works as a banker, plays tuba for the Holland Symphony, and loves to hunt and fish.  Jodi plies her trade at a public health institute near Lansing and enjoys her toils as a budding gourmet cook. 

Elizabeth (27) is concerned about wrinkles.  She'll be coming around the mountain in May with a master's degree in fine arts from Georgia College.  Her poetry dazzles, and her work has been accepted by the prestigious literary magazine, The Pinch.   And for two years her university has selected her poems as the best for a national writers conference.  Amassing a thesis portfolio plus teaching college freshmen can surely twist a complexion, but to my eyes, her skin looks refreshingly smooth.  Her  boyfriend, Roger, chews with remarkably nice teeth, top and bottom.  He nabbed his master's last year from Georgia College and toils temporarily as an adjunct English perfesser there while he waits for Eliz to make her way around the mountain.

Sue Bohnhorst has become a creature of inflexible habit, I'm afraid.   The other day, for example, she made the bed right over me while I tried to sleep in.  She denied this was a random act of passive-aggressiveness, and chalked it up instead to "chemo brain."   You will recall that Sue underwent 16 months of brutal chemotherapy, 2010 - 2011, and now claims she is affixed to lists and daily chores to compensate for mental slippage.  I suspect this is true as there ain't a passive-aggressive hair anywhere near.  Speaking of which, Sue is grateful to have her hair back again.  And all of us are so blessed with her continued good health with nothing but excellent test results along the way.

And what would a holiday letter be without useless news about our gassy canines?  Dog continues to stand in the middle of the room and stare at us without blinking.  I cannot tell if she worships or pities us.  Brendan and Jodi this year added a puppy to their mix, an exuberant Llewellin Setter named Penny, who is trained to point at delicious upland  fowl. When we first met, Penny reminded me of the coiled snakes that spring in a frenzy from fake peanuts cans.  And there's Elizabeth's dog, Omar, a creature so devoted to his master that he sits on her feet when she is standing, and lies on her head when she is sleeping.

I still rattle around as a social worker in the amazing world of infant adoption. It doesn't really feel like toil, but more of an honor to be thus employed.  Now and then if the spirit moves, I'll muster up a thing for my blog or contribute an article to TROP, an online magazine that Roger and his friends started.  I got a kick out of catching bass from my new fishing boat, but gambling on football this year has been a total bust.  And spring isn't so far off, when once again I'll sharpen my axes and march off to battle with ball and turf.

Merry Christmas!


Comments are welcome at  tombohn2@yahoo.com

Crazy Like a Sheep

Published in Trop Magazine (tropmag.com)


The second time I was absorbed into a mass of humanity, I was living in Ankara, Turkey, circa 1973. A friend had invited me to a concert where some obscure Dutch rock band was performing. When we arrived, a throng had formed in front of the arena doors, and we took our stand in the growing, close-knit crowd. Over the next half hour or so, the crowd multiplied to thousands behind us and pressed forward so that I was encased like a twig in a logjam of Turkish men who desperately needed showers.

When the doors finally opened, the mass of us heaved forward and ebbed backwards so that no one of us had any control over whether he moved hither or yon. There was a current to that crowd, and miraculously, no one drowned or was trampled in the undertow. And like toothpaste, I somehow became squeezed upwards and as this enormous organism slowly was consumed through the entrance doors, my feet never touched the ground.

The object of this hysteria, I came to see, was not so much the blaring rock band itself, but the band’s sexy, prancing, taunting, peroxided lead singer in her skin-tight jeans and platform heels. I was much taken by how the audience was much taken by her. The all-male, all-wide-eyed spectators seemed to experience a simultaneous hard-on. They frothed, leaned in, spellbound—pacing he-wolves smelling heat. And a half hour into the set, the singer seemed to retreat from provocative and sassy, to back on her heels, to very ready to board the next Orient Express and get the hell outta Dodge.

This is the memory that jogs when I see reports of the human swarms that storm and stomp through stores in the wee hours of Black Friday. Theirs is a similar frenzy where the promise of a rockin’ sex fix is the equivalent of a rockin’ shoppin’ fix. But while that band from the Netherlands, and especially their diva out front, took a scary look into the abyss, the purveyors of Black Friday bring it, and bring it again, and bring it to the max. Those customers who are trampled to death and those who miss out on deeply discounted supplies of digital machines are portrayed as tragic casualties of so much friendly fire.

…

The first time I was swallowed by a mob, I was only six years old. It was the last day of school at Jim Cherry Elementary in Alanta, and as I stepped from my classroom with the dismissal bell, I became swept away by a stampede of now-freed children as they raced down the hallways and out of the building. These were the back streets of Pamplona and the bulls had just been released. Outside, there arose a great and hysterical noise as the whole student body raced from the building and shrieked a constant chorus of unbridled joy. And so I ran, and so I hollered, as that contagious ecstasy overcame me as well. The time had come to break those shackles, to ring in a summer of recess and of barefooting day after hot day down the red dusty road to our Georgia swimming hole.

 

That was in the late fifties, when the black kids across the road were segregated from our school, and when we regularly safety-drilled in case the Russians attacked with The Atom Bomb. One of the teachers at Jim Cherry configured his classroom desks in the shape of a Confederate flag, and the principal often used a belt on disrespectful boys. The next year, at seven years old, in broad daylight, I would sneak out of my classroom and run away from that school. No longer could I abide the terror wrought by my stone-faced and withered teacher, always clothed in black.

…

Several blue moons ago, some friends and I went to the Fourth of July fireworks in Traverse City, Michigan. To access the beachfront area where the best views were had, the crowd had to walk through a tunnel under Grandview Parkway. There was no pushing or shoving, but the going got very slow as hundreds of people had to funnel through the dimly lit corridor. When we started through, I felt, suddenly, herded like an animal. Because it seemed so fitting, I, of course, began to baa like a sheep. My friends, in kind, thought this was a pretty funny thing, and they, too, began to baa like sheep. The crowd around us then, as they beheld these eruptions, began to laugh, and also started to bleat. How odd it must have seemed to those people who had just exited the tunnel, that a distressed flock of sheep had just wandered into town behind them. And for a very long time afterwards, the humans who entered the tunnel caught the spirit and bleated like their predecessors before them. Now oriented to a barnyard sensibility, it was a cheerful audience that night that watched the rockets’ red glare, chewing, I imagined, on fresh-cut alfalfa.

 

Something there is that does not love a riotous mob, especially one that lifts you off your feet and takes your breath away. But when push comes to shove, and if the stakes aren’t too dear, the plaintive voice of a sheep, or perhaps a cow, can provide much needed perspective. But if the objective is freedom—pure, sunlit—allow the human stampede its full reward.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com







 

 

The ABCs of an Election Year

Published in Trop Magazine (tropmag.com)


A is for ambush. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex is a fairly large animal. Its trillion-ton head is Manhattan, its girth the million-square-miles of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; its claws extend through the Bering Strait. It plods at the pace of glaciers, swallows whole cultures in single gulps. In 2008, brazen and unregulated thieves detonated atomic bombs at its base and shocked and knocked the colossus to its side. Now, in horrible theater, the wizards of Washington proclaim villainy upon one another and peddle snake oils that promise to right the capsized beast.

B is for Bert and Ernie. Well, more Ernie than Bert. Remember Ernie in his shower cap as he sang among the bubbles: “Rubber duckie, you’re the one. You make bathtime lots of fun. Rubber duckie, I’m awfully fond of you… woh, woh, bee doh!” Or Kermit in the sweet ballad, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Outrageous! Pull the plug on the little shits!

C is for chameleon. These are lizards that are uniquely adapted to their environments; they can change their colors to match those that populate their surroundings, whether pink, blue, red, orange, turquoise, yellow, or green. Their stereoscopic eyes can focus on separate objects at the same time, making it impossible to know where they stand. Chameleons are native to tropical Asian locales, but have been introduced to the Republican Party, where one in particular has become their nominee.

D is for discombobulation. Barack Obama during the first debate seemed to stand there in utter discombobulation. Some of us would have preferred if he had exuded some combobulation, or, at minimum, an aura of bobulation. Al Gore famously suggested that the Prez might have been afflicted with altitude discombobulation. I can vouch for that. One time I climbed Mount Cartier in eastern Quebec. When I got to the top, I lapsed into uncontrollable giddiness and started bobulating my butt off. Believe me: At that altitude, I would have been in no shape to debate even the meekest Republican.

E is for Eleanor Roosevelt. She asked, “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”

F is for frijoles. I have discovered that my debate-watching enjoyment is greatly enhanced by eating Mexican food a few hours before the opening handshake. And the meal should include a double portion of frijoles. Once intestinally primed in this manner, the viewer should be able to release their consequent emissions at key moments in speeches to make clear the viewer’s editorial positions. Of course, the sound effects become more meaningful and memorable the larger the living room audience present. A TV viewing area with ceiling fan, needless to say, is recommended.

G is for getting a buzz.  When I was in high school, a bunch of us wrote an "underground newspaper" which we dubbed, RIPT.  The name was a nod to our underground readers that we were in solidarity with them: that we writers, too, loved to get high, to get "ript", as it were.  Back in his days of rebellion, Barry Obama also sat around with his boys, smoking joints, getting hungry, and getting ironic.  Anymore, this is standard initiation for American youth, although there is peril in not breaking from those seductive clutches (he said, speaking from personal experience).

H is for haiku.  These dizzying times beckon for a moment of poetic contemplation:

                            red states and blue states
                            our country is dipped in mud
                            we wear galoshes

I is for Icabod Ickwith.   Mr. Ickwith was an aspiring political candidate who was tarred and feathered and run out of his Rhode Island town in 1821 for making scurrilous stump speeches. Ickwith claimed, "Forty seven percent of the American populace are a bunch of lazy, freeloading, drunken turnip-eaters."  Ickwith was never heard from again, but many believed he wound up a beggar in Utah.

J is for jumpshot.  I've never seen Mitt Romney play basketball, but Obama sure has a smooth jumper.  I'm sure Barack would take the Mittster going one-on-one or in a friendly game of horse.  In a recent Sports Illustrated poll, 98 percent of unlikely voters would like to see the candidates go head to head in a variety of games.  A depressing 20 percent would like to see a "face-off" in "guillotine testing."  Another 20 percent would like to attend a match of medieval jousting, the best two of three.  Given Romney's exposure to the cavalry, swords, and dressage, he clearly would be the jousting favorite.  Romney would win on a horse, while Obama would win at a game of horse.

K is for Kenya.  That country, as we all know, is where Obama's father came from.  My roots go back to a German draft dodger who sailed for America to stay out of the army.  Our last name means "storage house for beans."  Maybe our ancestors were German bean farmers.  Or perhaps our last name was a euphemism, born in medieval times, for folks who were famous for their volumes of gas, or for the distinctive ways they cut the proverbial cheese.  "Oh that Gunter, he is such a storage house of beans."  There is no shame in this.   I have been known to "carry the family torch."  Just ask my wife.  If I had a choice, however, I think I would rather claim lineage from Kenya, the land of long distance runners, than from the land of bloated bean eaters.

L is for limerick.      

                              There was a young fellow named Ryan
                              Who came to our town a-cryin',
                              "When it comes to the budget
                               I can magically fudge it,"
                              And was tomatered in the face for lyin'.

M is for mouthpiece.  While we know that ventriloquists can't really throw their voices, some possess skills so uncanny as to appear almost alien.  I mean, when Mitt Romney stands before a microphone, you would swear that the sound masquerading as his own voice was emanating from his own lips.  Many people are deceived by this.  But if we follow the money before carefully pulling back the curtain, why, right there in their board rooms, in their leather-back chairs, we see the alien ventriloquists themselves.  There they are, counting their millions, creating political dummies, stuffing their shirts, and inserting mouthpieces!  Peek-a-boo, we see you.

N is for nitpicking.   I know a thing or two about head lice.  Back in my earlier social worker days, I spearheaded a project aimed at helping parents eradicate head lice from their children's heads.  (At the time, this seemed a just reward for going to graduate school.)  I am here to report that a louse has a spouse who out of love produce numerous nits that very quickly grow into more adult lovers of each other.  The only hope for lice-freedom, among other things, is to employ a zealous nitpicker.   Comb, comb, comb, pick.  Comb, comb, comb, pick.  But still, the little bastards almost always return.  Head lice, by extension, are the despicable lies spoken by politicians.  You shine a light on them, you comb, comb, comb, and pick, pick, pick them clean.  But in the end, they return to suck blood from the head, and contaminate the public's thoughts and beliefs.  (If you scratched your scalp while reading this, I totally understand.)

O is for Ohio.  Nothing like a little pressure, eh, our buckeyed brethren?  What's it like to become everybody's best friend for a few weeks every four years, only to be forgotten on a November Wedneday like the previous day's garbage?  We look to you Ohio, ol' buddy, ol' chum.  But hey, no pressure.

P is for protest.  In the spring of 1972, when I was a long-haired, anti-war student at Michigan State, I grabbed a bullhorn on the steps of the Administration Building and made an impassioned speech in front of 2,000 fellow students.  Richard Nixon a few days earlier had bombed Cambodia which spawned enraged turbulences across a hundred campuses.  After we shut down traffic on East Grand River Boulevard, we stormed the center of campus to shut down the university's brain center.   Vietnam was genocide.  America was burning children by the thousands.  And now, Cambodia!  Mitt Romney, meanwhile, had attended Stanford and also protested there.  He also heard a call to action.  Romney carried signs that supported the Vietnam War, and did all he could to renounce the anti-war movement.

Q is for quahog.  It is important to give credit where credit is due, and I hereby praise Governor Romney of Massachusetts for presiding over a state that produces such spectacular clams.  The quahog clam is of the hard-shell variety, stouter and chewier than its soft-shell cousins.  When I vacationed in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, in 1981, I frequently ate raw oysters and little-neck clams ("steamers") while overlooking a salt marsh and guzzling beer at Captain Jack's Tavern. "Quahog" also can come in handy for players of Scrabble.  If the Governor had aggressively touted his clam connection, the seafood kind, who knows?

R is for really, really, really rich people.  Rich as a hot vat of triple chocolate fudge.  Rich as owning a private jet, and a yacht, and big-ass bling, and seven bedrooms.   Ritzy rich, rich with blue blood, and rich with justifications for greed.  The finest leather, the oldest wine, that rich American shine.  Gated communities and feel-good fundraisers and looking down the nose.  Way more than rich enough to fill a refrigerator for every hungry child on the face of the earth.  Rich enough to fill those refrigerators a thousand times over. 

S is for stuck-out ears. Barack Obama and Paul Ryan both have ears that stick out, all four of them. And I'd wager that Obama's flaps, if tested, would displace more air and create more lift for flight than Ryan's. Not that there's anything noteworthy about that.  Most voters would probably call an ear contest a draw if the media were to draw attention to it.  For the record, I feel that Ryan's ears are the cuter pair.

T is for tourniquet.  One day a week I work at the courthouse in Bellaire, Michigan. Last winter, a woman slipped on the icy cement steps outside and fell on her forehead. She was assisted into the lobby area as blood streamed down her face from a nasty gash. A group of people came to her aid and, given her critical condition, they were about to call an ambulance. The woman in anguish cried out, "Please!  Don't call an ambulance!  I can't go to the hospital. I don't have any insurance!  I can't pay for it!  I'm begging you!  Please!  Don't call an ambulance!"  But her wound was deep and wide, and because a medic couldn't stop the bleeding, an ambulance was called. She sobbed the whole while as the EMTs prepared her to go, but not from the physical pain.

U is for undecided.  Three weeks before the election, it was announced that 12 percent of likely voters still remained undecided.  Twelve percent!  How could that be?  Are 12 percent of voters locked in their closets?  Is there a third set of wildly different values that neither man represents?  It's not like deciding between shades of beige paint for the family room.  It's not like deciding between french fries or curly fries.  The differences are stark.

V is for a very, very, very good used car salesman.  Mitt missed his calling.  Oh sure, he made a billion dollars by flipping vulnerable companies, but consider what he could have pocketed at Bubba's Used Car Acres.  Mitt could persuade people to buy the fuzz scraped from spoiled cottage cheese.  He could sell out tickets for a cruise ship bound for Des Moines.  And if it ever came to used cars, Mitt could sell out Bubba's inventory on a single Saturday morning in a blizzard.  That man coulda moved some cars!

W is for wedgies and swirlies.  That's right, members of the Congress, we're looking at you.  Until you start acting like grownups, and actually GET ALONG, you can expect your underpants straps up to your necks and your heads plunging the porcelain! 

X is for x-rays.  You have to admire the dental health of modern candidates.  Those perfectly crafted pearly whites must come from many weeks in the dentist's chair.  Ever notice in the portraits of presidents and famous people long-gone that you never see their teeth?  George Washington with his wooden dentures probably had the breath of a turkey vulture.   In the 1800s, even if your mouth was reduced to rotten nubs, your oratory could save the day.  Lincoln's nubs were right down to his gums.  Nowadays you're doomed if you can't flash a Pepsodent smile at every unsuspecting, undecided voter.  Mark these words:  If Obama wins this election by a hair, it will be because his toothy appeal pushed him ahead.  If Romney wins, give credit to his dentist.    

Y is for "Yer Darn Tootin'."  The brilliant "Yes We Can!" unified and brought energy in 2008. But Obama has desperately needed a replacement, and if the campaign had taken my advice, a new slogan would have given him momentum and a margin.  Imagine Obama in an arena packed with 10,000 frenzied fans.  He stands before them with loosened tie and rolled up sleeves:

       Obama:  This is our moment, America!  Are you with me, America?  Is it time to move forward?
       Throng:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       Obama:  Yer Darn Tootin'!  This is not a country of the few, but a country of the many!  Where we ask the most fortunate to do their fair share."
       Throng:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       Obama:  And where every American deserves state-of-the art, affordable health care!
       Throng:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       Obama:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       
Z is for zombies.  It's exhausting to feel polarized.  It's exhausting to resent.  I drive down my street every day and pass a yard sign that reads, "Take our country back!"  It has become exhausting to consider and then reconsider the posters of such signs, to take such umbrage against such a sea of flawed assumptions.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!   Bad, bad, bad!  Anymore, I feel like the walking dead.  It's exhausting to walk while you're dead.  Let's get a break.  Let's take five.  Even zombies need their rest.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com


              






 



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