Category: Musings

By mid-August, I begin to sense the changes. Always have.

The sun, especially the afternoon sun, is ever so slightly more orange. Just enough to affect the corner of my eye, but it’s there.

Of course, the daylight getting shorter (we all say “the day is getting shorter,” but it’s still 24 hours) is noticeable, especially as the dusk’s earlier arrival accelerates toward the equinox, just over a week ago.

Three days ago, this was early morning in Long Branch, New Jersey:

And while I appreciate my Vermont friends’ appreciation of the changing seasons, a la the stand of Jersey trees pictured atop this post and the many IGs and FBs from New England …

I

Just

Ain’t

Ready.

I want the scene to be more Long Branch than Long Trail.

With a h/t to Al Sleet, tonight it’s gonna be dark, continuing mostly dark and seasonably 60-degrees-ish, but tomorrow (Oct. 2, 2019) the temperature and the Jersey Shore humidity are gunning for the record.

90°F, 32°C.

One more lick of the July lollipop before the 14-day forecast says 65°F high, 55°F low pretty much every day.

My friends in Great Falls, Montana, of course, get the Rocky Mountain roller-coaster ride of 75° one day, followed by a two-day blizzard and an indefinite cold snap. So what’s in reality a gradual change of seasons around here is no cause to whine.

But full disclosure: I get SAD — that’s seasonal affective disorder, not all caps for emphasis — and just as a parent can tell when a tot is about to go from a mild whimper to a full-belly howl, I can tell in August that my season is ending, once again too short. The September flurry of restarted activities — and no matter how long it’s been since you had kids in school, you must conform to the school-year schedule because the rest of the world does — the September flurry is but a minor distraction.

This year, it seems, the leaves are changing, peaking, browning and tumbling more quickly, more abruptly than in years past. I have no empirical evidence; I just sort of know.

Head up to the Northeast Kingdom, O leaf-peepers of 2019. Enjoy the late-arriving fall in Vermont, a place I love.

Nonetheless, I’ll cling to green in 2019 in the Garden State as long as I can.

It’s getting more and more difficult to be open-minded.

This may well be because of my advancing age or creeping senility, and I don’t totally dispute that.

I believe, however, it’s because of noise.

Let’s define terms.

These days, noise is more than audible.

There’s visual noise — extreme and/or subtle distractions, blinky-flashy-twinkly, electronic. 

(And we’ll save the whole topic of idiots reading their inane texts while driving for another post.)

There’s sensory noise, the vibrations triggered by raspy or rumbling exhaust pipes and bass kickers, the jostles from potholes absorbed by your butt and spine.

Then there’s emotional noise, the baggage that accompanies so, so much communication anymore. And that’s the noise that makes it almost impossible to keep an open mind.

To be clear, I believe certain thoughts and certain beliefs should swim in deep legitimate passion. Our nation’s Founders were no slouches in the “Give me liberty or give me death” department; likewise, Churchill rallied Great Britain to some of its greatest days with his emotional pleas.

But any attempt at a debate nowadays rapidly becomes a competition, a shouting match in which anger and even threats supersede logic and the 30,000-foot view.

Winner take all, and not give and take.

I am absolutely sure there are people whose observations and opinions I’d love to consider, because I’ve not lived everywhere, done every type of job, been African-American or female or anything except a white Euro-mongrel middle-class American male. They all have much to offer.

But I can’t see myself talking with a pickup driver whose rear window has stickers of “My Family”: from left, AK-47, AR-15, 20-gauge, Mac-10 and Glock 9mm. Or the person whose Malibu’s trunk is held together by stickers proclaiming MAGA, Lock Her Up, and It’s All Fake News.

Yes, I’d love to have a conversation. But if other people come to their figurative door with a drooling, snarling Doberman, I don’t think I can.

I’d be thrilled — and I’m sure many people would be, too — if the noise would stop, and we could start to open ourselves to many points of view.

It’s possible to cut through the noise. It has to be. I’m trying.

How about you?

I wore a sweater this morning. A black V-neck, of thin-ish Merino wool, the kind I add to my inventory each year when the moths get last year’s and the new ones go on sale at Costco for about $20. It’s a magic price point.

I wore a sweater this morning, Aug. 25, 2019, around 9 a.m. EDT, at the Jersey Shore. The Weather Channel app said it was 63 degrees and cloudy; the breeze from the northeast had kicked up a bit and the flags were fluttering while the cattails were swaying.

I wore a sweater this morning until about noon, when the sun worked some of its magic and warmed anybody in its rays. Some of its magic, because the air never got past 69, and because the gusts kept jamming fat clouds between the sun and me. And because the wind was — ugh! — chilly.

It’s not sweater season, not at the Jersey Shore, not yet, even though Labor Day Weekend — next weekend! — drops like a guillotine on what people consider the summer.

We had a spring this year; we had a nice stretch of warming days that coaxed the blooms. But then we had monsoons that vexed backyard gardeners and wreaked havoc on their tomatoes, the official fruit of New Jersey (at least, I think it is).

The flawless lawn burned out in July and the crabgrass and goose grass are the only verdant, succulent leaves reaching toward the sun.

Which was feeble today. So I wore a sweater.

The equinox is about a month away. We’re coming into peak hurricane season. The ocean is tepid at last.

Please, Mama Nature: Let me leave the sweater in the drawer with the mothballs a little longer.

I have some skin in this game.

On May 14, 2019, I celebrated the eighth anniversary of my ordination as a deacon for the Catholic Diocese of Trenton. In slang terms, I’m a collar.

As my bio states here and at dozens of other places, I’m also a husband, a father, a brother, a (forcibly retired) journalist, a photographer, and overall a lover of humanity.

God Bless Everywhere, indeed.

In some ways, that’s the simple answer to everything that’s wrong today, wrong with America, wrong with Britain, wrong with the EU, wrong with….

You know.

Wrong.

And especially, on this topic, what people perceive as wrong with clergy and religious institutions.

A cradle Catholic, with eight years of parochial school and four more of LaSallian day prep to shape me, I heard incessantly that the Church of Rome is the One True Religion™, and that believers in other religions — not “religious traditions” or “faiths” — were Damned. To. Hell.

The unquenchable fires of Gehenna.

Fire and brimstone and Cotton Mather.

But no sooner had I learned my altar boy Latin than, from an unlikely source — men in dresses with pointy hats — came the notion that the Big RC would start to acknowledge the deeply held faith of other believers. 

Infidels and apostates and Israelites, oh my.

So about a half-century ago, amid Vietnam and Freedom Riders and sit-ins and Woodstock, we went from OTR™ to throw open the windows.

Praise the 9 billion Names of God!

Maybe even Groucho Marx would want to join this club, if it’s big enough to welcome him and everyone else.

Somehow, though, the windows got stuck. JP2 and B16 were short on WD-40, and Swiss Guards started checking membership cards super-closely again.

More than one collar much higher in the food chain than I has said that a certain faction in the Church prefers a smaller gathering of purists, and that the empty pews suit them just fine.

Think like us, act like us, or you’re not one of us. And we don’t want you to be.

The Vatican is not alone, though the spotlight (and Spotlight) is on the top-heavy organization that Pope Francis is trying to tame.

But as in other top-heavy groups, e.g. political institutions (and heaven knows the major denominations are political!), the real life, the real everything, is local.

We hear all the time these days that people disgusted with news out of Washington or London or Beijing are turning off the news and unplugging from FB and IG and Twitter, and reconnecting with local friends and family to restore kindness locally.

I hope I’m not naive in believing that local churches — and by church I mean the people of faith, the people of God — that local churches can involve themselves in each others’ lives and make the institution meaningful again.

Trusted again.

Beloved again.

And that that local familial bond ripples across the world, like a butterfly sneeze, caressing all God’s children. Everywhere.

Who is your oldest friend?

That shouldn’t be a trick question, but it is a tricky one.

Is it someone who has known you the longest?

Is it someone who has known you continuously the longest?

Is it someone who has known you the most intensely?

Friends from childhood may rank as longest in years, but if there are any gaps in the relationship, those buds may have you confused with someone you used to be but no longer are. A persona frozen in time, or at least in memory.

Reconnecting with old-old friends oftentimes is akin to making friends all over again. Those folks are not strangers, but many times the things that brought you together in the first place are no longer common between you, among you.

Friends from college, especially if you went to a smallish school and doubly especially if it was a residential school, those friends are a step up from childhood friends. You likely were well on the way to who you’d be for the rest of your life at that point — you’d decided your career path, perhaps, or at least figured out what to do with your major; your likes and dislikes had matured; your personality jelled.

You and your crew shared the same kind of foxhole experiences, albeit in calculus or Morrison and Boyd, and not along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Those times are seared into your brain, and may haunt your dreams (mumble-mumble-mumble) years later. So you’ll always have that in common.

But just as friends from childhood can lock you into a time and place, so too your college friends.

Sigh.

Friends from work have a lot in common with you: a different foxhole, but an intense one; bosses to grumble about or occasionally praise; inadequate pay; similar personalities, which brought you to the company or institution originally.

But people change jobs, lose touch — they never want to — and though they’re less likely to freeze you in their memories than childhood or college pals, the W-2 folks no longer have the binding post of the workplace.

So the answer (thanks for playing all the way to Final Jeopardy) is a complex one.

Your oldest friend is the one who has an intense relationship with you: lives intertwined, room for personal growth, memories of where you singular and you plural have been, eyes pointed to a future in which you still are together. Separations because of time and distance are mere pauses in the conversation and not gaps in the ties that bind.

When any of us can identify such a person or — alleluia! — such people in our lives, we have the greatest gift.

And when we recognize the one other person who qualifies, when we see our own selves as the BFF we can rely on, then we start to be complete humans.

Welcome to Limbooooo

George Carlin, “Class Clown”

It’s been 47 years since George Carlin riffed on Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo in front of a crowd in Santa Monica, yet the puzzlement over the last of the four persists.

Perhaps because so many of us are there.

Maybe we’re hanging out with Didi and Gogo, in the vain hope we’ll see Godot one of these days.

Maybe it’s 2 a.m. and nobody told us the Metro stops running at midnight. Or that nobody actually took our order at the late-night Mickey D’s drive-thru, and those folks inside are mopping, not frying.

Maybe our Uber ranking is so low that nobody will pick us up.

Maybe we’re still applying for jobs we know we could do in our sleep.

Limmmmm.

Bohhhh!

Ugh.

Intriguingly, while somebody is in Limbo, they can be in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory simultaneously. Just ask any job-seeker.

Heaven plus Limbo is when you’ve gotten an offer but haven’t started yet and have that long-layoff fear that this isn’t really real.

Purgatory plus Limbo is the interview process, wherein you bare your soul, come clean, repent for possible sins and promise a forthright life ahead.

Hell plus Limbo is rejection, and the Ninth Circle of Hell plus Limbo is being rejected after a full battery of interviews and tests and and and. (Yes, Dante scholars: I know this makes the First and Ninth circles collide. Latitude, please.)

Of course, fans of the tropics are familiar with the notion of limbo as the “how low can you go” contortion game.

Second definition, second metaphor.

For job-seekers, this kind of limbo represents the cataloging of so-called transferable skills. It’s strenuous exercise, and it can stretch the imagination as much as any limbo dancer ever stretched hip flexors.

Backfield editor equals teacher. Copy editor equals proofreader. Reporter equals content creator equals creative writer equals sloganeer equals employee communications specialist.

Except, of course, when they don’t.

Even though, yeah, they do.

For most applicants, their résumés and cover letters are AI-scanned for keywords and buzz phrases the hiring company has specified for the specific position, and if those documents don’t achieve a pre-calculated score … pfffft! Electronic 86’d.

A human with vision can extrapolate and, perhaps, take a flier on a liberal arts grad with a parallel career who could easily change lanes without slowing down.

But no. The Terminator is the new HR gatekeeper.

“We’ll keep your résumé on file in case we have an opening more suited to your experience (or skills or qualifications or interests or bona fides).”

Yeah, that check is in the mail.

So: Limbo.

And: limbo.

How may I use my experience and skills to serve you?

There’s a “Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson in which some of his favorite subjects — cows — are sitting in the living room while a phone rings nearby.

They lament, “Well, there it goes again … and here we sit without opposable thumbs.”

Hey, cows:

Nyaa-nyaa!

The whole notion of human hands goes far beyond the biomechanical.

Hands figure heavily in relationships — holding hands, helping hands, hands that comfort, hands that caress, hands that clean up messes.

Hands given in marriage.

Hands that let go in death.

Recently, though, the act of Pontius Pilate washing his hands at the condemnation of Jesus, as retold leading up to Easter, made me think of how that looks.

We all know how to wash our hands, of course: one hand over, under, rubbing, soaping, fingers interlacing, squeezing, maybe making bubbles and definitely making suds.

So we may or may not go through the ritual at the sink when we wash our hands of something, but the action is there figuratively.

That same action, albeit usually without soap and water, is there when we wring our hands in frustration or helplessness. Ohmyohmyohmyohmy, what am I going to do? And often, if we’ve gotten to the hand-wringing stage, the answer is nothing, because we’re paralyzed by fear or insecurity or lack of belief in ourselves or the higher power’s ability to help us through.

Similar actions. Similar results.

All that’s different is the intentionality, and even that varies from one to the other only slightly.

Washing or wringing, our hands get us away from something annoying, something unpleasant, something difficult.

So why, then, do we need opposable thumbs? Or any of the other four fingers on each hand?

The index finger can point to the sunrise and the promise of a new day.

The ring finger can show the world we’ve bonded with a partner for life and continue to bare our souls in a way no one else can share.

The pinkie is a great place to tie a string as a reminder of something, even if we’re guaranteed to forget what it was. Hey, human, remember?

And that opposable thumb, which cooperates with the others so that we can get a grip? And heaven knows, we all need to get a grip.

On its own, the thumb is a perfect choice for blessing the forehead of people we meet, to remind them that whenever they want to wring or wash in times of trouble, they have a wellspring of Love to tap into.

For the 1963 automotive model year, the Ford Country Squire station wagon — resplendent with its fake wood paneling and fully functional roof rack — was offered in 26 colors, two of them specially blended for springtime.

For the 2019 model year, most manufacturers offer six, with minor variations: red, white, blue, black, gray, and silver.

Subaru has a burnt orange and there may be another quirky offering somewhere, but those are few and, well, quirky.

Of the limited palette, car buyers seem to further limit themselves to white, gray and silver. I know this because those are the folks who drive with their headlights off in dense fog and just before dusk, and those cars put Stealth jet fighters to shame.

You bought white because it hides the dirt better? Two words: WASH ME

From the 1950s into the early 1970s, motorists mostly ordered their cars, picking from a menu of options a Chinese restaurant would envy. They plunked down their down payment and waited a month to six weeks for the vehicle to arrive. Sometimes, if they had a friend at the dealership, they got updates on the progress of assembly and shipping.

People could order almost any combination of exterior and interior colors — some clashing pairs were verboten — and one favorite trick was to order blackwall tires on the passenger side but whitewalls on the driver’s side. That way, motorists got to show off the whitewalls, and it was no biggie if they scraped the blackwalls on the curb. Oh, yeah: curb feelers. Buyers even had their choice of rubber brand.

Then came the oil embargo and the shortages in the early 1970s that turned consumers’ heads toward smaller, fuel-saving cars, cars that came from Europe and the Far East, where fuel always had been expensive and in short supply. Those cars introduced the notions of trim levels and option packages and pre-selected exterior/interior combos. And, oh yeah, no more six shades of blue. You got VW Miami blue or dark blue, Datsun blue, Toyoda blue, with black or fawn leatherette or cloth interior.

The options packages did away with the odd combinations of power steering but manual brakes or vice versa; air conditioning and power door locks but manual windows; or power windows but a manual crank on the tailgate glass. Things that belonged together became standardized.

And for the most part, God was in Heaven and all was right with the world.

Soon, though, this sensible standardization turned in the Soylent Green direction. Food indistinguishable from its packaging. Overpackaging in itself.

I do not consider Ronald McDonald an adversary, but no matter how many ways Mickey D’s tweaks its burgers, nuggets, fries and, yes, salads, they are not serving haute cuisine. Neither is BK or Mom, er, Wendy’s.

Worldwide, the fare is fair, but it’s consistent. And that has advantages for travelers and fans of McMuffins.

Ditto for chain pizza restaurants. They cannot hold a candle to Jersey Shore pizza, New Jersey pizza, New York pizza, but they won’t totally leave you in the lurch, either, the way a Deep South “New York Style” place will.

Cheez Whiz and ketchup on a Ritz cracker. Jeez.

In other words, for consistency and predictability, we settle for the Gentleman’s C.

But that should be a matter of necessity, not a lifestyle choice.

Those Gentleman’s C’s — they’re not just food, or car colors, or our politics (… not gonna go there right now).

They’re on display in our crazed-consumer disposable-goods economy. We buy subpar crap that can’t be repaired when, not if, it breaks.

They pollute our educational system, which teaches kids absolutely everything they need to know to pass a test, and absolutely nothing they need to know to make a difference in a pluralistic society.

They stifle ourselves. We sell ourselves short and say “good enough” or “that’s far enough,” when the real finish line is just a little way farther.

Yes, it’s a challenge to live life to the fullest, and often it takes work, hard work, a lot of hard work. But none of us has the curse of Sisyphus. We can push the boulder over the top. We can nourish ourselves with a bit of excitement.

We can demand — and get — Sahara Rose enamel glistening in the sun.