Finding Oz

When I was 17, I went to Europe to find myself.  It worked.  I found myself lying in a gutter outside the Hofbrau Haus in Munich.  After draining three liters of beer, I had tried to smuggle out one of those world famous beer steins, and upon my escape, got busted by burly bar bouncers who launched me into the street like a bag of dirty laundry.

That marked the beginning, more or less, of a twenty year quest to find myself at the bottom of a beer bottle or the end of a joint.  I was disgusted with the self I found there:  jittery and sick, remorseful and afraid, and pushing relationships to the brink.  It's impossible to find yourself when the road you're on is the wrong road, a dark one-way tunnel with no exit, with the days passing with ever increasing momentum and dry-mouthed cravings for more.  As they say, I had self-will run riot.

When the whole mess finally came crashing down, the other self, my real self, surrendered to higher powers the abused and abusing impostor who had hijacked my life.  No more blackouts, no more puddles of vomit next to my bed.  No more public humiliations.  No more bouncing off the cobblestones of a foreign street.  One evening in my early recovery, I explained to my six-year-old son that I was going to meetings so that I wouldn't drink beer any more.  To which he responded, "Oh, back when you were mean to us?"  Yes, that's right, son.  No more.

That was twenty five years ago.  And, by the grace of the Source, there has been no more.  

Years ago also, the great spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, landed at his bottom.  A spiraling depression left him believing there was no escape -- he was about to commit suicide.  Eckhart said aloud to no one:  "I can't live with myself."  But this statement resonated within his true self, and proved to be revelation and his salvation.  The dualism in those words could not be denied:  Who was the "I" and who was the "myself"?  They were different selves.  He saw that his "I" could no longer co-exist with his false "self", his ego, that great fabricator of pride and emotional pain.  From that day forward, Eckhart let dissolve the slings and arrows of the false self by immersing his true self into the present moment and thus the flowering of consciousness.

About twenty years ago on an afternoon like any other, I was driving down the highway after doing some errands, alone and lost in thought as always.  Everything was quite ordinary when something quite extraordinary happened.  All thoughts in my mental churn ceased and all worries and concerns dissolved.  I landed like a feather into a state of simple observation.  No more expectancy, no more rehashing, no more grind.  As each moment unfolded I became a serene passenger in that unfolding, instead of bouncing mentally between future and past as I always had.  I felt as Dorothy must have felt when opening her door into the wonder of Oz.  I had long stopped using mind-altering chemicals, this was not a flashback, and without any external stimulus, and without even trying, I lived in the golden present for what must have been a full two hours.  I did not resist but moved through this enchanted time with calm intention.  I felt loved and loving.   My false self must have gotten locked in a closet with a sock in its mouth.  The ego, after all, abhors the present moment.

It doesn't really matter why or how this happened.  All I know is that my life of quiet desperation was given a brief reprieve from the voice in my head, the voice that insists I have serious things to worry about or harsh judgements to make.  Thoreau's famous line should be amended to:  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation because they can't stop talking to themselves."

There were thousands of moments in my drinking and drugging years when The Buzz opened me to a golden place like Oz.  Moments free of fear, regret, and confusion.  Just me and The Buzz in a kind of holy matrimony.   This is the promise and, simultaneously, the great deception of addiction:  that it would render harmless and null the pain of the false self.  With a few drinks I became Somebody, ten feet tall and confident, a smooth dancer, a lover, a man among men.

But golden moments only lasted for precious minutes, of course, and withered to expose the fraud.  I couldn't live with my sober self, so would try to drink and drug my way back to that Oz of precious golden moments.  Snared in the addict's trap, I drank and drugged to erase the suffering caused by my drinking and drugging.

But here's the thing: sobriety by itself doesn't bring peace, although it now makes peace possible.  Whether I was high as a kite in my former life, or stone-cold sober in the present one, my mind becomes lost in thought and quick to judge.  Like every other person, there's a true me and a phony me.  The sin of the true me is the failure to make the distinction, of being blind to the fact that the highs and lows of fortune and misfortune are creations of ego.  The first step is to expose the impostor which comes with simple awareness.  And there are short stretches when I feel I'm in that Oz-like place, not lost in thought, but where each moment reveals itself in a kind of beholding.  

Sometimes I look back at that drunk teenager licking cobblestones and licking his wounds in Munich, and am grateful for the road he was about to take.  He was a thief for one blurry night, but also became a victim of his own robbery for more than twenty years.  And now, twenty five years since that last drink, I am no longer trying to find myself in all the wrong places.  You can’t find by searching.  You find by freeing.






  

Three Stones for Darla

We buried Darla, our devoted dog, at the back of our yard where the trail into the woods begins.  Daily our dog started an adventure there after spinning in excited circles at the question, "Go for a walk?" There are three stones that comprise the gravesite, three small slabs of flagstone which my daughter Betsy, home from Austin, and her best friend, Sarah, painted to commemorate our dog's life.   

Darla was the sweetest animal I have ever known.  She lived solely to be with us, partly, I suppose, because we let her lick our after-dinner plates.  My wife Sue remarked that this loss has hit her the hardest of the losses of our hounds.  I think it's because Darla became human, became one of us -- we understood her, and she understood us.  She is locked forever in our hearts where she found a home on Day One.

Day One occurred twelve years ago in Onekema when my wife Sue, 17 year-old Betsy, and I followed an ad for Labrador retriever puppies.  When we arrived, there was only one pup, eight weeks old, the last of eleven left unclaimed: a big-bellied yellow playing under the owner's mobile home.  She was the offspring of the owner's constant companion, a black female, and the father who was in a pen across the yard.  He was a muscular and intense fox-red Labrador (also referred to as a yellow), and when I walked up to his small pen, his eyes became crazed, his muscles twitched, and he sprang repeatedly straight up in the air, his paws four feet above the ground, like a canine pogo stick.  Our little prospect, meanwhile, was playing with a nearby litter of week-old beagles, chomping them at their necks and tossing them into the air like flipped pancakes. 

With her protruded belly, I worried that the little Lab had worms, but the owner assured us that she had just eaten a robust lunch.  After negotiating twenty five dollars off the asking price, we headed home to Beulah, when the owner's claim held true.  En route, little Darla let fly a massive eruption of mashed corn and, just like that, she lost half her weight and became streamlined.

A squirrel is painted on the top stone of Darla's gravesite.  Like most dogs and
all Labradors, she was an avid anti-squirrelist whose mission it was to eradicate said rodents from our yard and the world at large.  As we live in Michigan woods with succulent acorns, and dangle bird feeders from our deck, Darla was on constant alert.  I kept track of her squirrel conquests over the years as she would bolt out of the back door many times a day in hot pursuit.  According to my records, the final tally between the pursued and the pursuer is:  Squirrels - 4,361.5, Dog - 0.5.  Darla never conquered her adversary.  It was only once that I witnessed her catch a squirrel and hold it her mouth.  But she seemed so dumbfounded by this actual success that in a second she released the squirrel to its fellows.  This explains the .5 credited to each side.  These days, squirrels freely run amock in our back yard and seem to carry with them a new-found cockiness.  And a new population of skittering chipmunks has suddenly emerged across the yard and under the deck.

The bottom stone renders a landscape painting of the Empire Bluff as viewed from the Lake Michigan beach at the outlet of Otter Creek.  Darla loved going there, or to any body of water for that matter.  A retriever through and through, she would leap into the water to fetch a thrown stick or a tennis ball that bobbed twenty or thirty yards out.  She followed the standard drill of fetching, swimming it back to me, dropping the prize at my feet, and shaking out her coat before waiting for the next launch.  She could go on for hours like this. One summer afternoon there, a strong westerly wind drove great breakers into the shore.  Darla's game of fetch then became an acrobatic thing.  I will always treasure the mental video of this intrepid canine as she crashed through a tsunami and dog paddled through the froth, driven by a mysterious instinct and full devotion to recapture a stick.

During winter walks down our country road, Darla always wanted to play stick on the trek home.  She explored the low branches of pine trees, selected an impossibly long branch, and would yank and yank and yank the limb until it gave way.  She would then drag the thing over snowbanks, through drifts, and out into the street where she would prance the branch over to me.  I would then crack the limb over my knee several times until it was short enough to throw.

The middle stone is painted with the multicolored letters D-A-R-L-A, done up in psychedelic style for a one-of-a-kind personality.  Sometimes when getting home from work, Darla would blow her enthusiasm gasket and race in manic circles around the yard like a dog possessed.  When anyone came through the door, she would greet them with great squirms of hospitality, then ease between their legs so that they might provide a scratch above the tail.  This routine became known as the "butt dance", for as the scratcher scrubbed the butt of the scratchee, Darla would jump in rhythm from foot to foot, twitching and groaning in ecstasy.  When I sat in the living room, Darla would sit at my feet and face me, still as the Sphinx, patient as a predator.  We provided everything, of course, and she just stood there, for fifteen minutes if need be, waiting and waiting for the next thing to happen, whatever it might be.  It was hard to relax under that penetrating stare.

How did dogs become so sweet-natured and affectionate over the millennia of domestication?  Of course, there are owners who don't give a dog lick whether their animals love them, so long as they tear the flesh of intruders.  But most of us engender and cherish our reciprocal affections so that eye-to-eye and fur-to-skin moments matter most.  There was nothing unique about Darla in her canine ways or shenanigans among the masses of people-loving dogs.  Like most Labs, Darla, all seventy pounds of her, would gently climb aboard a couch that already seated three large humans, and somehow find a space to rest her head on a shoulder.  She was always welcomed because she was so irresistibly sweet.

In August, Betsy planned a visit from Texas, but when she learned that Darla only had days to live, she came early.  Darla's lung cancer had depleted her physically and she had no energy for squirrels or long walks.  She lost her appetite. But when long-lost Betsy walked through the door, Darla's love adrenalin kicked in, and she spun in excited circles, saturated Betsy's face with her tongue, and went through Betsy's legs for a sustained butt dance, groaning with ecstasy. Betsy was amazed and wondered if our dog was sick at all.

But in a week, Darla met her last day listless and panting.  Dog owners know when the time has come -- we just know.  At the vet's office, the techs shaved a front lower leg and inserted an IV port for inserting an overdose of anesthetics that would take her life.  The three of us -- Sue, Betsy, and I -- were given time alone with Darla in her last minutes.  She rested on a large pillow on a deck in a small courtyard outside.  We stroked her and rubbed our cheeks on her muzzle wet with our tears.  After a long while, the kind veterinarian arrived with the syringe. But in spite of her suffering, lying among our arms and as her final act, Darla gave this stranger a weak wag of her tail.






  



   

More Self Golfulation

I've had it.  I'm throwing in my golf towel.  This time, it's for good.   In the end, both my selves will be grateful.   My real self, actually, is thanking itself right now.   My false self is trying to regroup.

I had been a pretty good golfer.  I could launch straight and nicely arching drives from the tee box.  I could hit crisp and consistent irons that took toupee-sized divots.  I could pitch and chip short shots that mostly wound up near the hole.  And I was a great putter.  I could almost close my eyes.

But in golf, thine opponent is thyself.

Of course, there are the external challenges that lurk: the bunkers, the swamps, the woods, the ponds, the grasses, the humps, the dips, the mud, the rocks, the winds, the rains, the heat, the cold, the sun, the bugs, the crappy lies that befall unfairly.  Even alligators.  In Turkey, I had to watch out for wild dogs.

And there are two major man-made challenges.  The first is money.  It costs an arm to play and a leg to equip oneself.   Golfers fall, hook, line, and bank account, for the conspiracy that shiny new clubs and forty-five-dollars-a-dozen golf balls make some sort of difference.  They don't really.  The second is other human non-beings.  Not actual human beings, but golf-induced non-beings such as me.

At first, it can be hard to distinguish between human and non-human golfers.  I first saw the non-human variety in the form of my older brother when he was about 16 and I was 12.  I tagged along with him and my father on Saturday mornings at the Purdue University North Course.   My brother would become so enraged with his constant chunking and topping the ball, that with all his might, he would boomerang his golf club down the fairway.  One time after a lousy tee shot, he pounded the ground so hard with his driver that the shaft broke in half.

I know a guy we'll call Morton, who once couldn't get out of a bunker.  He kept chunking his ball about a foot in the air before it would roll back gently by his sand-immersed feet  After his last failed attempt, Morton hurled his sand wedge into a nearby pond.  This, of course, forever enshrined him in the local Golf Hall of Infamy.  A month later, a full four weeks later, someone in the pro shop teased Morton by asking him which brand of sand wedge he would recommend.  Morton recoiled like a shotgun, screamed a shrill expletive, and stormed out.

You can hear laughter on a golf course when regular people play the game.  They cheer at the flukish par and howl at the absurdities.  When an errant shot careens off a tree and plops back into water, they are overjoyed.  But I, like my non-human ilk, just simmer and stew below the boiling point.  I can't laugh at myself, the stubbed chip, the bladed wedge, or the fat iron shot that splashes like a breeching whale into a water hazard.  I may chuckle to dampen my embarrassment, but inside, and I hate to admit this, I whimper.

I know what you're thinking:  Dude, it's just a game.  Oh, how I wish this were true.  Those whose raucous belly laughs echo among the fairways surely feel the gameishness of it all.  Those who are enchanted by the carved landscapes, the lush greens, and the intermixing of waters and forests beneath blue skies can appreciate it as a man-made treasure in nature.  But as I've said:  In golf, at least in ego-driven golf, thine opponent is thyself.

One game, two selves.  There is that rare experience known as The Zone.  In that magical place, an effortless swing, without thought or expectation, finds the core of harmony.  The results speak on the scorecard in par after par after par.  In The Zone, the golfer finds himself in golf god gardens.  But enter into the mind a solitary judgement, for instance, "I am pretty darn good," and the synchronized love between club and ball becomes suddenly a strained thing.  The zen of golf is finding that freedom from the mind's golfishness.  If my mind is a simple and subservient tool, I'm golden.  When my mind takes over, I am a lost cause, and the result is bogey after double bogey after double bogey.

The final blow to ego arrived over the last few weeks on that biggest stage of golf masculinity:  the tee box.  When a man establishes himself as the longest driver, he owns virile superiority, becomes the big dog in the locker room.  While my foursome opponents continued to pound long and majestic drives down the fairway, I began to hook the ball:  low, left, and short.  I compensated by aiming to the right which caused the ball to stay to the right:  high, right, and in the swamp.  I began to strangle the grip when I swung which caused a worsening hook:  very low, very left, and very short.  I hit soft liners to third base.

I consulted the Internet, I scoured golf magazines, I sought the advice of friends, I went to the driving range.  Nothing made a difference.  My scores only ballooned.  As one friend diagnosed, I suffer from LOFT:  Lack Of Fucking Talent.  I could not think my way out.  Think, think, think, fail.  I think, therefore, I am not.

A black cloud infiltrated my world.   I became, inwardly at least, the locker room laughingstock.

The cure for my golf game, I'm afraid, is not to play it.  I must cease this ceaseless self-infliction of golf wounds.  I must snap at last this yoyo string of ego.   I must shrivel instead into the spaciousness of selflessness.  I must bury my golf clubs next to the septic tank.

Well, maybe not my driver.  My white-headed driver.  Call it Moby Duckhook.

 

Six Suggestions for the Traverse City Film Festival

Now that the Traverse City Film Festival has passed the 11-year mark, it's the right time for an astute onlooker to properly analyze what the festival has become and and properly surmise what the future may hold.  I, unfortunately, am not that person.  I don't do "proper" anything.   But after standing in line for about 60 hours over the past 10 years, I feel entitled to offer some recommendations.

1.   Distribute Bathing Caps.  At amusement parks, a person must be at least 54 inches tall to ride an R-rated roller coaster.  A ticket taker stands next to a measuring post to prohibit short people.   Similarly, at the Film Festival there should be a limit to how much space a person can occupy above their skull.  (It's no accident that film festivals began to appear only after the Afro lost its popularity.)  I happen to be a very short person, and many is the time I've been seated behind some big-headed person who eclipses my view.  I've had to imagine what's happening on the screen from the dialogue or swelling sound tracks.  As such, restrictions should apply. The first step: prohibit hats and sunglasses propped on top of heads.  Secondly, a humorless volunteer, a Hair Nazi if you will, should pace along the waiting line and single out any person whose hair might extend beyond a vertical limit, say, two and a quarter inches.  The volunteer would be equipped with a ruler to measure scalps, and if the ticket holder offends, he or she would be provided a mandatory bathing cap for the duration of the Festival.

2.  Purchase Wuerfel Park.  Let's face it: the Festival has grown too big for its britches.  Most movies sell out before the general public even gets a chance.  Poor, poor general public.  Michael Moore has a ton of money and could make an excellent offer for the venue and the Traverse City Beach Bums, the professional baseball team that plays there.   The players must be exhausted from working for minimum wages with lousy health insurance, and as such, they might want to campaign for Democratic candidates.   The new venue could be christened Sicko Stadium, and near the entrance a larger-than-life bronze statue of Michael could be erected, poised there in his State baseball cap, flinging free prescription pills to the masses like our very own Johnny Appleseed.  With Sicko Stadium's large seating capacity, it should be easy for the general public to get in, although tickets will go like lightning  for films such as Bulgarian documentaries about despair.

3.   Resurrect Drive-ins.  No reason to stop at free movies in the Open Space.  The Festival could arrange for giant inflatable screens at various parking lots across town like Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Meijer, and the Grand Traverse Mall. At sunset, motorists with pre-purchased headsets would park their cars for a night of, say, The Best of Steven Seagal or Shorts of the Greatest Movie Explosions Ever.  This expansion would bring a much-needed counterbalance to the Subaru-driving, bottled-water drinking, fanny-packers downtown.

4.  Bring On Personal Assistants.  Festival goers have witnessed over the years a steady increase in volunteers.  And these aren't your hardened criminal types.  These are genuine Traverse City folk whose mission apparently is to play out their codependency fantasies.  True, we love them for it.  There are so many helpers that the majority get stationed at ten yard intervals whose sole purpose is to exude warmth and hospitality.  (This year a volunteer noticed that my sneaker was untied, promptly knelt down and fixed it.)  In a few short years, the number of volunteers will exceed the number of ticket holders.  At that time, why not assign a volunteer to every movie goer so that valet services, in-line massages, and individualized tours of cherry packing plants or local wineries become part of the package?  

5.  Do the Conga Line.  Competition for good theater seats has grown to a fevered pitch, and ticket holders now realize that the only way to get the best view is to show up very, very early.  In this spirit, I arrived at the State Theater this year an hour before my show, and still wound up a half mile back.  Later, I was in need of chiropractic intervention from the constant neck-craning from my rotten seat.  Instead, let's provide some loud and snappy conga music for the serpentine line outside, and allow a dance to run a course down the sidewalks and alleys of Traverse City.  Once the doors open, the conga line, dancing to the beat, would snake and shimmy into the theater, and fill the rows, front to back, with appropriate Spanish exclamations erupting.  It would be unthinkable for dancers to break the chain as the collective Latin merriment would overwhelm any notions of cutting away.  Besides that, the bathing cappers in this rhythmic milieu would feel much less embarrassed about their attire.

6.  Sleeping Bear Cinema.  This summer, the Traverse City event added a new twist to film festival extremes:  Movies on a Boat.  Audiences of 60 were packed onto the deck chairs of the catamaran, Nauti Cat which was equipped with a projector and screen.  While spinnakers billowed above and carp slept below, a movie was shown with barf bags available.  The overall response was so enthusiastic that it now makes sense to expand the nautical theme to even greater heights.  Let's project a film onto the world's most natural and spectacular movie screen… the white face of the Sleeping Bear Dunes on Lake Michigan.  Just imagine the spectacle.  A massive projector aboard a Coast Guard cutter from the Port of Frankfort transmits the incredible visuals against all 400 vertical feet of the great sand dune.  For sound, enormous speakers will face the Manitou Islands with a sound track audible all the way to Green Bay.  And the audience, a historically massive flotilla of yachts, runabouts, and fishing vessels -- hundreds! nay, thousands! -- from harbors near and far, gather off Sleeping Bear Point to, well, watch a movie.  In keeping with the watery terrain, the inaugural film of Sleeping Bear Cinema could be that great American classic featuring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, "Beach Blanket Bingo."

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.

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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