Macey

Tonight, as I sit here typing on the computer, something is missing in our house. It’s not the sound of children bounding up and down the stairs or the constant blare of the television or You Tube on our computers. What’s missing is a panting mass of black hair and four stubby legs. A Darwinian creature that was bred to hunt for rabbits in holes and would eat anything that fell off the kitchen table.

It’s Macey, our twelve year-old Scottish Terrier. She died today. She was put down gently by our veterinarian in the sterile confines of her office while my wife, Julie, gently stroked her panting face and whispered goodbye. Despite the diagnosis of a stroke that left her walking around in circles and unable to lift her head for the last few days, Macey’s eyes never left Julie’s bereaved face as she took the needle without a whimper, and slipped quietly away.

Goodbye, Macey. Somewhere in the great beyond, may you find a squirrel around every corner and a comfortable place to rest.

You were loved…

The Naked Mourner

Steaming in the cold
morning air, my breath
rises slowly, crystallized
molecules mixing with the twisted
plumes of chimney smoke
that drift softly above
the wasting branches.

“Let all men’s dying hearts
cease today.”

The cobbled path is slick
with frost, hushing
the emerald moss
that flows over plundered
limestone, brittle and dispirited-
sloping desperately towards a sea
of trampled brown grasses.

“Let them lay down and
become one with my brethren.”

Staked hard through the corpses
of sodden leaves
and the unforgiving soil,
a grieving skeleton
swings softly in the dawn light,
mourning silently for one last touch
of the waning autumn sun.

“Let their final breath escape lips
pressed gently to my sobbing breast.“

Never Flip Off a Witch

We have been cursed. Wilhemina, the Wiccan Wonder Witch, has placed the mother of all b-movie curses on us. We are begging you, Wilhemina, please pull the voodoo pins out of our Kewpie Doll asses and throw us some good karma. I swear that wasn’t my middle finger that I extended when you cut me off in traffic by the IHOP. Please believe me. I would never flip off a fifty year-old woman with bad hair implants and eye brows that looked like Sharpie-drawn, upside down V’s. For the love of Agnes Moorhead, even Endora on Bewitched only screwed with Darren for thirty minutes a show.

Thanks to my stupidity in flipping off this woman or just plain bad luck, my family has been hit by the worst stretch of bad karma over the last six months. Here is just a small sample of what we’ve gone through since the day I flipped-off Wilhemina:

1. The icemaker on our refrigerator sprung a leak and dripped/poured into the basement. I don’t know what was worse, the annoying leak or pulling out the fridge from the wall and discovering Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction crammed behind the fan motor.

2. Our garage door hydraulic system broke and will have to be replaced. A cable apparently snapped and busted a pulley, which in turn cracked open a rusting spring the size of an Anaconda. After examining the amazing number of gadgets that made the door go up and down, we’re probably fortunate that when it broke our house wasn’t catapulted into outer space.

3. Our dishwasher broke. We now have gunked-up dishes that have biologically morphed into new life forms because we can’t seem to keep up with the onslaught of dirty dishes and glasses. My new bff is a moldy, caked-on piece of dried beef and gravy named “Chet.”

4. Some deviant little psychopath threw a rock and broke the outer pane of one of our living room windows. Come to find out- it’s really expensive. Think root canal bill and multiply times two. It’s also possible that Iran has developed and deployed a nuclear warhead, albeit a really shitty, small one.

5. The shower head in our kid’s bathroom stopped doing what it’s supposed to do, spray tiny droplets of water down on our munchkin’s taffy-tangled hair. A cheap fix, but I still haven’t gotten around to buying a new one despite my displeasure of finding that both of my kids use my towel after showering.

6. I fell and sprained a calf ligament while ice skating for the first time. If only I had remembered what a horrendous roller-skater I was in my youth, I would not have spent the entire month of January hobbling around like Ephialtes in the movie 300.

7. My wife fell down the steps and broke a bone in her foot. Now this might not have been Wilhemina’s fault, but I’m blaming it on her anyway. Julie was carrying a basketful of laundry down the steps when she missed the last step and fell, nearly ramming her head through a wall four feet away. Never a graceful ballerina, Julie moved one step closer to earning her master’s degree at the Chevy Chase/Gerald Ford School of Balance.

8. Two more bricks fell off our chimney for no apparent reason. Do you know how disconcerting it is to be taking the trash out on a cold January morning and have a brick fall out of the sky?

9. Our male tabby kitten escaped from the house one morning while Ethan was getting on the bus. Fortunately, after having multiple nightmares about it getting hit by a car or picked off by a marauding neighborhood hawk, we learned that it had been taken to the Humane Society by a neighbor and was later adopted out to a nice family who desperately wanted a kitten (at least that’s the story I told my bereaved daughter).

10. Last but not least, our furnace motor stopped working on the coldest night of the year (-19 degrees). Twelve hours later and eight hundred dollars poorer, we were finally able to un-layer our shivering bodies. Note to Wilhemina… Even while wearing three sweatshirts and two pair of pants, fifty-two degrees is pretty damn cold.

So in closing, I’m asking you, Wilhelmina, to call off your curse gods. Cut me a little slack after six months of torture and I promise to keep that middle finger wrapped around the steering wheel.

The God Question, Part 2

After twenty-five years as a true believer in God and the Bible, agnosticism began to creep into my life. It didn’t happen in a mad rush or because of some calamitous event in my personal life. Agnosticism reared its confusing head because religion is a strange mixture of blind faith and cultural theocracies. Cracks began to appear in my armor as I pondered the probabilities of anything (heaven or hell) lasting forever and the multitude of unanswered Biblical questions that began to eat at me when I looked at them in basic terms of black and white.

“and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

Truth be told, the words eternal and forever really started to freak me out. I had absolutely no concept of the terms and their relationship to time. I wasn’t going to live forever. My house was not going to stand forever. The earth was not going to last eternally. I loved to play with my kids and cuddle with my wife, but I wouldn’t want to do it forever. Of course, the alternative, post-life promise of an eternity in Dante’s Inferno- was even more disturbing. Instead of worrying about going to heaven or hell, I found myself worrying about going to either place, forever.

Another problem with my perception of God that nagged at me for years was the patriarchal designs of religion, especially in my professed faith of Catholicism. Like bread and water, men and women had to exist as biological equals for humankind to flourish. Put into a historical context, ancient societies were predominantly patriarchal, hence if God’s existence was fictional, one would expect a religious epiphany or hysteria to be witnessed and scribed in primarily masculine terms. One of the main reasons for my skepticism in Catholicism was the fact that this branch of Christianity had a gruesome history of not only marginalizing women, but burning them at the stakes as heretics.

It was also during this time of incertitude that I became more aware of what the people around me were saying about God. Now that I had tuned out the clergy, I found myself having revealing conversations with friends and neighbors about their religious beliefs. What I discovered was that if I asked twenty people about their concept of Christianity, no two answers were ever completely alike (even between spouses). The only spiritual theme I heard on a consistent basis was the term: “God has a plan for all of us.” This really bothered me because these true believers suggested that human beings were nothing more than pawns on an earth-sized version of the Game of Life. What was the purpose of existence without free will? Why bother to live, love and laugh if a great puppet master was out there pulling our strings?

Johnny didn’t die in the car accident because God had planned the where and why of his death from the moment of conception. Johnny died in the car accident because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was nothing more than nonsensical, bad luck. To believe otherwise was pure and unadulterated simplicity, a mythical dogma fobbed about our theocracy because people were afraid of the truth. Afraid perhaps that we were all alone- and that God didn't really exist...

The God Question, Part One

Plucked from my mother’s womb, I was thrust into a world of religious ceremony and true belief. From an early age, I witnessed the solemnity of Sunday services, rosary beads on bedroom dressers, and wooden crosses on barren walls. I believed in God because the Bible said he had created the heavens and the earth. I believed in God because my parents told me he was watching down on me from the heavens. I believed in God because I didn’t want to get a movie-of-the week disease and die at the age of seven. I believed in God’s higher power because men who stood behind wooden pulpits told me in stern voices that indifference would be followed by an eternity in a fiery hell.

My God lived in the fluffy cumulus clouds that filled the atmosphere on humid July days. My God had a Disneyland in the sky for deceased children and a floating park filled with flowers and hungry ducks for the elderly. My God had the resonant voice of James Earl Jones and the handsome, bearded face of Charlton Heston. My God hated the Viet Cong because they were blood-thirsty Communists and loved America because it was a Christian democracy. My God cured me when I was sick and made me suffer when I misbehaved. My God granted me small miracles from time to time (like not letting my parents divorce when I was eleven) and punished me with sleepless nights of remorseful fear for the salvation of my mortal soul.

When I entered my teens, my belief in God forced me to lie about who I was and what was ruminating in my adolescent mind. This was the Catholic phase of my life and I believed that priests were walking, talking, human versions of the Holy Creator. My limited understanding of the Bible led me to believe that nearly everything short of breathing and prayer was a sin. God had more rules and bylaws than the Boy Scouts and the United States Senate, combined. Sitting in the darkened confessional box, palms sweating, as I tried so very hard to remember the exact script, I felt lost because I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the priest all of my true sins. Instead of feeling relieved after reciting my contrition, my young mind was often filled with agony over the eternal ramifications of not being honest with God’s chosen proxy.

After high school and into my college years, organized religion and God ceased to be a reflective part of my every day life. I stopped going to church, primarily because I realized that I had quit listening to the priests and ministers years ago, and also because my Sundays had devolved into a day for sleeping in, watching football, and thinking about how much I hated Mondays. But despite my slippery decline from daily devotions and sometime’s worship, I had still not shaken my fear of eternal damnation. It was too hard, too ingrained in my DNA. I had been packaged out of the womb as a God-loving, jaundiced newborn, because this was America. Believing in God was like taking your medicine. You either faithfully took the pill three times a day or your body withered and died. Because of my indoctrination, I still prayed every night without fail, rationalizing that a quick rendition of Our Father and the 23rd Psalm would somehow save me when and if I reached the pearly gates of heaven.

God was out there, wasn’t he?

Thoughts on the Inauguration

A supporter waves as US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle walk along Pennsylvania Ave during a parade following Obama's inauguration as the 44th US president in Washington, DC. With tears and cheers and hope for a better future, more than two million people filled the streets of Washington in a joyous celebration of the inauguration(AFP/Robyn Beck)

Wow! What an incredible day for America. The first racially inclusive presidential inauguration in history was a grand sight to behold. President Barack Obama delivered a stellar address to the crowds gathered on the mall and promised that he would make us proud to be Americans again. The guy just exudes coolness and competency. After eight years of George Bush, it was refreshing to see that we finally have a leader with the intelligence, communication skills and human decency, to get the country back on track.

On NPR, several African-Americans were interviewed who had made long journeys to experience first-hand the joy of this homogeneous occasion. Traveling by car, bus or plane, these individuals, many of them elderly men and women who had experienced the hardships and horrors of segregation and the civil rights movement, treated this event as if it were almost biblical in nature. It was extraordinary to hear the enthusiasm and hope in their weathered voices as they were witnessing this glorious event, something most of them never expected to see in their lifetimes.

With the ascendance of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land, we stopped being a melting pot, and on one cold January day in 2009, became a brilliant rainbow of colors that include all the many tones of flesh that walk this nation. With much gratitude- here’s to you, Mr. President.

Don't Wish Your Life Away

Seven years ago, I used to work with an older woman named Penny, who was our office coordinator at the manufactured housing community where I still hang my sales shingle to this day. She was quiet and somewhat reserved. We worked together for almost two years and maintained a friendly, but somewhat aloof relationship. She reminded me of a librarian or a school teacher, someone who gave their all at work, but kept their personal life very close to their vest (or blouse).

Often, in the course of our polite conversations at midweek, I would tell her in a fit of excitement that I was tired of work, and couldn’t wait for the weekend or some other event in the not-so-distant future. Leaning in closely, as if we were dining in a noisy restaurant and not sitting in an empty office, a solemn look would overcome her bespectacled face. In a soft, measured voice, she would smile back at me and say the same thing every time.

“Don’t wish your life away.”

This went on for almost two years. At first I thought her admonishments were just a silly way of reminding me of our differences in age, but as our days passed and the seasons came and went, I began to realize that she was right. Penny was telling me a simple truth. I needed to appreciate the preciousness of time and how very quickly we grow old and die. Life is not an infinite journey. My children were growing up right before my eyes and changing every single day. The bitter truth was that everything and everyone that I loved- could be gone tomorrow.

The simplicity and wisdom of Penny’s words have reverberated in my mind nearly every single day since she left the company. The times of our lives are not the holidays, weddings or vacations that fill our scrapbooks and photo albums, it is in the here and now. If we all had a fast-forward button and could zoom past the doldrums of work and the boredom of living, what would we have left? Bits and pieces of laughter, love, and good times… a sixty-second commercial.

Wisdom can be gleaned from anyone at anytime, and thanks to Penny, I’ve stopped wishing my life away.