I woke up one morning recently – barely awake, half in dreamland – certain that what I need to do now is ask forgiveness. Not for any specific or even general failings you might recognize, but for failing to become what I was capable of… and for realizing that this lack is the result of deliberate choice.
Overall, I’ve failed those who chose, from necessity (my family), or from perverse association (friends), to believe in me. But the person I’ve most failed is myself. I am not who I would be.
I’m sure many of you are already patting my verbal back and telling me that I’ve done my best or some such rubbishy thing. After all, I’m a Good Guy chock full of Good Intentions. But intentions are so much sludge when you know you had the wherewithal to see those intentions become reality… but chose not to.
Throughout the years I’ve been incompetent in dealing with the drudgery of daily-living. I’ve show little deep regard for most human beings, being concerned, in the end, only with myself. I have failed at some fundamental level of decency which I wanted to embrace but have never been able to define.
I’m distant by nature, as my father was distant with me. I not only didn’t know the words to explain this to my kids as they grew, but doubt I’d have felt the drive to speak them if I did. It’s taken years of slowly percolating comprehension to drag these lacunae into the limelight.
I know I’m a good enough writer to have developed a limited following beyond a few close friends – had I bothered to contact publishers or agents. But somehow the process has always left me with a sense of revulsion. Oh, perhaps I’ll be “discovered” after I’m dead, but somehow I’d like it to happen while I’m around to know it, rather than through pilgrimages to visit my corpse on the Body Farm.
My one exculpatory wheedle is that I take full responsibility for my life; I blame no one else for my lacks.
So, should I then blame myself?
That approach is generally claimed to be counter-productive, and I’ve accepted that claim in the past: Technically, I cannot blame myself, because, like everyone alive, I am an accident of evolutionary unfolding and circumstance, of DNA, of where I was born, of how and why I was raised, of the personalized anvil dropped on me from the leaden sky.
Of late I’ve come to feel that embracing self-blame could be a key part of liberation, of a clear-eyed look at… not external reality, but that internal monitor that oversees the ultimate unidentifiable: the self.
Yet accepting personal responsibility for what I could not have changed leaves me a partial cripple, with one malformed leg to stand on. So what it comes down to in the end is that I can ask forgiveness of no one. Definitely not of myself, who am far from offering it.
What I should do, instead, is try to mitigate my failure by spending these bumbling, humbling final years bringing intensity to how I meet and greet the ever-incomprehensible world, how I deal with my family, my friends – and those I don’t give a damn about.
* * * *
Hastings Ave.
While I worked at the Welcomat, my Austrian friend Goetz Mayer started bringing in articles he called “Suitcase Memories,” random, unconnected recollections from over five decades of travel, delivered as a convoluted heap. They and he taught me one way of presenting tidbits from life, unconcerned about outcome.
Here, as a tribute to Goetz, are a few higgledy-piggledy childhood recollections from 130 Hastings Ave., south Ardmore, PA.
Late fall, about age five, Brother Vic told me that Santa’s helpers roamed everywhere – they might be dressed in dungarees, could be walking down any street, evaluating the goodness or badness of us quivering urchins.
I believed in Santa. I believed in Vic. What might I do wrong in the coming days or weeks to foul up Christmas?
Our next door neighbor, Gus Geigus (sp?), had a pinball machine in his basement. I’ve never met another human being with a pinball machine in their basement. It ran on the insertion of a penny. Did I bring the penny each time I visited? Did he give/lend me one? Gus was a college football referee. Sometimes he also reffed professional games, possibly the Eagles.
As a radio operator in the Navy’s Pacific fleet during WWII, Brother Rod worked first on mine-sweeper destroyers, then on the battleship Missouri, where he witnessed the signing of the unconditional surrender of Japan. He and Mom would exchange letters that were censored – with bits considered militarily or otherwise sensitive eliminated with scissors.
According to Mom, she was worried that Rod would be assigned to handling munitions and so addressed him as “Dear Butterfingers.” Did she really do this? If so, would it have had any effect on a munitions officer reading over Rod’s shoulder?
During WWII, you took your excess bacon grease to the supermarket, to be incorporated into the making of munitions [don’t ask me me how – I’d think it would make them awfully slippery]. Dad kept lots of it at home for cooking – bacon grease was his universal frying medium.
At the end of the war, on VJ (victory over Japan) Day, everybody on our 3-block-long street dashed out to celebrate. We stood on the asphalt, yelled, cheered, and blew our horns along with the rest of the country.
Did I know that meant Rod would be coming home to stay? I must have.
The Hastings dogs, cats, and a mouse:
We had an orange bruiser tabby cat with torn, pustulating ears that never healed. He was an inveterate scrapper, though I don’t think I ever saw him in a fight. I seldom wanted to touch him because he was such an unappetizing mess.
We also had two dogs. Judy, a mid-size collie, was hardly friendly to strangers. One time Rod came home on Navy leave from Brooklyn. I don’t recall which ship he was serving on at the time. He went off to the woods with Judy, who unwisely disturbed a skunk. They both came home stinking like armageddon.
Rod slept in the hammock slung from our apple tree, and next morning Mom put him and Judy through a cleansing operation (tomato juice?). He came out OK by the time he was back on board his ship, though his watchstrap remained suspect.
The other dog was an Irish setter, Sheila, dumb as a concrete post – something I’ve often found with Irish setters. But she was determined. Dad would lock her in the back room when we went out. Over time, she chewed halfway through a solid oak door. Her tail was like a shillelagh. When she would stand by the stove looking for a handout, her madly wagging tail left dents in the metal trash can.
One night she tried to clear the wrought iron fence across the street but ended speared on one of its arrow-head points. Vic found her and pulled her off, and the vet sewed her up, leaving no physical repercussions. When she came home, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, systematically pounding little blocks with a wooden mallet through one of those mindless shape-fitting toys.
I looked up and said, “She looks fine, just fine.” I was four years old, and hearing myself utter this ridiculous adultism left me chagrined. I can still see that scene, hear those words, feel that shame.
Why do I retain such shit from a simple action at such an early age?
The lady next door, to the left, had an all-white cat named Squibby. Who the hell would name a cat Squibby? She (the owner) referred to all cats as “she,” all dogs as “he.” Our cat was male, both dogs female.
I was inordinately fond of a white lab mouse, probably a gift from Rod, now at UPenn in chem engineering, who would scamper up inside my jacket sleeve and hunker down in one of my pockets. I didn’t have it long.
A thick hedge enclosed a yard at the end of the block. When you walked by, a booming, menacing bark would reverberate behind it, a hell-hound on watch. It was a dachshund, blessed with a deep chest.
Rottweilers were not a feared, ferocious breed in those days. King lived one street over and two blocks down from us, a giant, quiet, magnificent beast. The neighborhood kids rode him like a horse. His owners tried to keep him confined with various restraints. They attached him to a clothesline. He broke it. They attached him to metal pole. He uprooted it. They attached him to the stone pillar of their front porch. He Samsoned it and wandered off in unconcern.
When he visited our yard, he would woof mildly at our inelegant dogs as they tried to keep him at bay while he nonchalantly uprooted half a raw of Mom’s Swiss chard with a sweep of his paw.
King was a living legend. I’ve never met his equal
* * * *
The latest announced proof of intelligent design:
“Male blue-lined octopuses inject females with venom during sex to avoid being eaten”
* * * *
When you piss upon a star,
The steam you raise will travel far.
When yo piss upon a star
It really stinks.
lickhaven 