The Importance of Being Ernesto

I went to Cuba in 2012 with a tour group. We were in the first wave of Americans to go to Cuba strictly as tourists, although we were cautioned that this wasn’t supposed to be typical tourist fun and frolic. Our tour director had to fill out reams of paperwork admitting us under the auspices of serious cultural exchange. We had to swear we were going for strictly educational purposes. So please - no laughing!

I had heard about the prevalence of old cars from the 40’s and 50’s on Cuba’s streets. So I wasn’t completely surprised to see Havana’s morning rush hour to be a re-creation of a busy street in America in 1950. But I was surprised to find that so much of Cuba as a whole was a frozen-in-time tableau of American circa 1959, when Castro came into power. This trip became an experience of time-travel even more than its intended “People-to-People” exchange.

                                  

When Castro took over, he ordered an end to most private enterprise, to most free market buying and selling. However he didn’t confiscate a lot of what ordinary citizens already had. So although Cuban citizens couldn’t buy new cars, machinery, or many large appliances in the ordinary way Americans are used to, they could still own the things that were in their possession as of 1959. Cubans have made an art and a science of keeping all those things repaired and running.

I was almost overcome with nostalgia when we were ushered through a print shop in Santa Clara. There was the printing business my parents had started in the 1940’s! There were the Linotype machines and the treadle flatbed presses. There was the manual cutting machine with the big bar-handle I used to hang on as a child to apply the weight needed to get the blade to lower and slice through the paper stack. Who says you can’t re-live your childhood – you can’t go home again? I found I was able to do both in Cuba.

 

Along with its evocation of a homesick melancholy, Castro’s ban on private ownership also had some humorous side effects. Cubans are allowed to own pigs and chickens – but they aren’t allowed to own cows. The cattle, which are mostly Brahmins, are government property. Farmers are only appointed as caretakers of the cow or two allotted to them. They are not allowed to slaughter or in any way personally use the products of the animals in their care. What little beef is available in Cuba is reserved for tourists.

But when Castro first put this edict against slaughtering and eating cattle into effect, many farmers found a sly way around the ruling. They would claim their cow had met with an unfortunate accident, or even that it had “committed suicide” by falling on a very sharp knife. Not wanting to see any meat go to waste, the farmer had claimed it his duty to eat the meat before it spoiled.

Castro soon put a stop to this risible evasion. Our guide read us the amended ruling that Castro had handed down. He now specified that farmers were not allowed to slaughter or consume any cow, no matter in what manner it met its demise. Any bovine death, whether by accident or by self-inflicted wound, had to be reported to government officials, who would then come and collect the carcass. Anyone caught eating the meat of such an animal was subject to a heavy fine and/or imprisonment. Anyone who saw someone eating such unauthorized meat and failed to report the crime, was similarly subject to heavy fine and/or imprisonment.

Apparently cows cheered up considerably after that more specific enactment. The suicide rate among Cuban ungulates has dropped to almost zero.

Another one of the dietary restrictions that has come about as the result of bans against private ownership was surprisingly – fish. As we tourists sat with the vast expanse of ocean in view out of our restaurant window, we were served mahi-mahi imported from Viet Nam. Of course! I suddenly realized what had been missing from all these scenic ocean views. Boats! There was beautiful Havana Harbor, with not a boat, not a dinghy, not a skiff, not a canoe in sight. I realized the problem. The average Cuban citizen is strictly forbidden from owning a boat or even so much as a plank of wood – for fear of more attempts to cross to Miami. So fishing is almost completely foreclosed as an occupation throughout most of Cuba. Even we tourists were reduced to eating fish imported from Viet Nam, or even something like Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks – imported from Canada.

But throughout all the beauty and melancholy and anachronism of Cuba – the primary message our tour guide was assigned to get across to us was the message of “The Revolution.” Everything begins and ends with the Revolution in Cuba. This is where we get down to Che (Ernesto) Guevara.

We saw Revolution Square; we saw the bullet holes that an early uprising had put in the Palace from which dictator Batista escaped through a secret door; we saw Granma, the boat which brought the Castro brothers and Che along with a ragtag band from Mexico to the Sierra Maestra region of Cuba to start their forward push to power; we saw the revolutionary car they’d used and the one plane they’d briefly had at their disposal. Those latter are in cordoned off areas of the Revolutionary Museum, guarded by functionaries with shrill whistles they’ll blow at you if you step off the designated walkway and get too close to one of these almost mythic artifacts of the Revolution. But mostly there was Che.

There weren’t any loudspeakers exhorting the citizenry to Revolutionary fervor in Cuba, as I heard there had been in Maoist China. Cuba is a quiet place, with no cell phones, no boom boxes, very little media noise of any kind. But there are posters and billboards everywhere, almost all of them containing a picture of Che and one of his classic quotes such as the somewhat ambiguous and grammatically skewed, “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (Until Victory Always”).

I asked our tour guide if Fidel Castro might feel a little left out. There are ten public invocations of Che for every one there is of Fidel. Our guide said oh, no. It was customary to honor the dead. That’s why Che’s image is writ large all over, while Fidel waits in the wings when it comes to mythic representation.

                                

I wonder though. If Che had been less handsome, would he be featured as prominently? If Alberto Korda’s photograph of him hadn’t become a world-wide rallying point for anyone with a discontent – would his images have so markedly outnumbered those of Fidel in Cuba? Even I have one of those iconic posters of him on my wall at home. Seeing it for the first time, an acquaintance said, “What? Are you a Communist?” I told her no. A former flower child I knew had just been down-sizing, and I was the recipient of a lot of the “stuff” she unloaded. Besides, I explained, everybody has a picture of Che. It doesn’t reflect anyone’s political philosophy. I fall into that insouciant category of people described by the Argentine saying, “Tengo una remera del Che, y no sé por qué” (I have a Che T-shirt, and I don’t know why).

But for whatever reason, Che is the order of the day in Cuba. I hadn’t known much about what he did after his and Fidel’s band took over Cuba. Some of the other people in my tour group were better informed though, and they filled me in on details our Cuban tour guide could not, or dare not, mention. I learned that Che had ordered the execution of scores of people he considered to be Batista “loyalists,” or people who had simply been too successful as businessmen and were therefore assumed to be right-wing supporters. I learned that he had also been brutal to many of his own men as they fought beside him when he carried the revolution on to the Congo and then into Bolivia. When a man who’d been fighting through the jungles alongside Che for a long time decided he wanted to quit and “fight no more” in these harum-scarum battles – Che summarily shot him in the head and snatched the watch off the wrist of the dying man.

By the time we were ushered up the steps of Che’s Memorial in Santa Clara, I was thinking it best I take his poster down when I got home, as meaningless as that pin-up had been to me in the first place. But there wasn’t much time to consider my altered opinion of Che then. We were hurried along into the Memorial. No cameras, umbrellas, purses, or bags, were allowed inside, so we loaded all these accessories onto our tour guide. He ended up looking incongruously like a roving peddler standing out there at the entrance to the Mausoleum, weighed and bulging with hot items for sale.

The interior of the Memorial was designed like a grotto. It was dimly lit. A fountain provided the soothing sound of trickling water. There was an eternal flame. The walls were of stone and brick and I immediately saw the names of many men inscribed on them – men who had fought alongside Che in one place or another. But where were the remains of Che himself? Our tour guide had told us to “look for the star.”

Finally I saw it, just as the guards were hurrying us along to make way for other admirers, or curiosity seekers. The star was a small light projected near the top of one column of names. It confused me at first. Then I realized Che’s full name was inscribed as it had been given to him when he was born in Argentina in 1928 – “Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.”

His bones had only been found relatively recently in Bolivia after what many say was a combined decision made by the CIA and Bolivian officials to shoot him after capture in 1969. His burial spot was left a secret, presumably to prevent just what has happened – to prevent his martyrdom.

From the grotto we went into an adjacent room that was a Museum of his artifacts. People were allowed to linger there. So I took my time puzzling over his early family photos, over the instruments he’d used as a medical student in Argentina, over the books he’d read as a youth. Tom Sawyer was the most prominent among these. How could such benign beginnings lead to such a cruel character? That’s the eternal question.

                                 

However, seeing him personalized this way made me waver in my decision to rip down his poster from my wall when I got home. In fact, he’s still there. But his persistence in my field of vision is more the result of my lethargy and indifference to all home decorating projects than it is the result of my having given him a reprieve for his crimes against humanity.

This trip was to offer up one more small spotlight of humor. It wasn’t quite the guffaw of cow suicides, but it has given me an occasional chuckle. I started to do some follow-up research on Cuba when I got home. I viewed U-Tube interviews with Castro that spanned the decades, starting with his fervent avowals to Mike Wallace shortly after he took power that he was NOT a Communist and would certainly NOT lead Cuba in the direction of Communism. There were also some video of Che himself.

But the YouTube interview that has given me pause to laugh along the way was one with actor Benecio del Toro. Del Toro played Che in a film meant to be an epic re-enactment of Che’s post Motorcycle Diaries struggles. In reality the picture struck me as being a sort of flat account of fighting, fighting, fighting… But Benecio del Toro had just come off the high of this movie’s release when he did the interview I saw.

The interview was in Spanish, intended for a Spanish language TV station. But I was able to make out enough of what was said. The show’s host was a young woman who went on the attack the moment del Toro sat down opposite her. She asked him how he could possibly have lent himself to such a project – validating, glamorizing such a ruthless dictator as Che Guevara. She asked how del Toro could live with himself after so roundly betraying the public’s trust in him as an international star by sympathetically portraying such a monster as Che.

Del Toro began to fidget in his chair, in obvious disbelief that he was being challenged this way. He began to roll his eyes around, likely trying to search out the person responsible for booking him into this ambush. I imagined that his agent was summarily fired as soon as the show went off the air. But del Toro soldiered on for a while, talking about how it’s an actor’s job to portray all kinds of people, not just those whom the actor agrees with or those who are likeable. However, it was obvious that del Toro was at least somewhat well disposed towards Che and his revolutionary ideals.

The interviewer wouldn’t let up though. She was not appeased by any of del Toro’s vague answers about the role of an actor. She kept pounding home her objections. However, before he unclipped his mike and walked off the set, del Toro got in the rejoinder that has stayed with me, a model of unintended humor. When the show’s host demanded once more to know how he could portray a murderer, he responded:

                           “Che was not a murderer. He was just pro-capital punishment.”

So there it was – a motto I could live by. The next time someone displeases me, I can eliminate him with impunity. When they try to convict me of murder, I will protest, “No, you can’t do that. I am not a murderer. I was just exercising my Constitutional right to be pro-capital punishment.”

One small victory of absurdity over absolutism; one small star-shine of humor in the melancholy of Cuba’s blues.

Feeling Superior - All Day, Every Day

TV psychologists and the counseling professions in general attribute a lot to feelings of inferiority. They lay both timidity and aggression at the door of an inferiority complex. Whether you punch or cringe or do anything in-between, it’s because, at heart, you are feeling inferior. Whether clients have arachnophobia, agoraphobia, or anorexia – or at the other end of the alphabet, xenophobia - doctors will blame the condition at least in part on the fact that these individuals were made to feel inferior.

But I wonder about that. In many respects, I think just the opposite is true. I think most of us, myself included, leapfrog through our days animated by one little jolt after another of our sense of superiority.

It’s not that we often stop and consider ourselves to be superior in an overall, global sense. It’s that we feel superior to others in all our little choices and conditions. We feel assured of our superiority in all the daily details of the way we lead our lives.

The person who goes to a gym feels superior to the couch potato, while the couch potato usually feels superior to that eager beaver who’s up and out there running every morning. Every time one of these runners would overtake us on the sidewalk, a portlier friend of mine would scoff, “He’s worshipping the Great God Jog.”

The man in the mansion feels superior to the homeless bum. The homeless man feels superior to that toff in the mansion. By comparison to the coddled wealthy man, the homeless man feels his life on the streets to be gritty and “real.” The man in the Ferrari feels superior to the man in the old Chevy. But the man in the old Chevy knows how much better he is for the ecology because he’s not gas-guzzling around the streets in a phallic status symbol.

Cat owners feel superior to dog owners, and vice versa. The sixth grader feels superior to the fifth grader; the senior feels superior to the freshman. The thin feel superior to the fat. The husky feel superior to the scrawny. The one who reads books on philosophy feels superior to the one who reads comic books – and vice versa. The one who has no TV or computer feels superior to those who are connected – and vice versa. Beatles fans feel superior to Shania Twain fans. Fans of Toby Keith feel superior to fans of The Pet Shop Boys. The fans of every sports team feel superior to the fans of all other teams. People who recycle feel superior to everyone.

The one who buys brown eggs feels superior to the one who buys the boringly standard white eggs. Anyone who has a Picasso print hanging on his wall feels superior to anyone who has pictures of dogs playing poker. People who relish their home thermostat set at a bracing 65 degrees feel superior to those hot house plants who need the thermostat set to 74 degrees.

Those who are awake feel superior to those who are asleep. Those who are well feel superior those who are sick. The young feel superior to the old, but the old know they know more. The living feel superior to the dead.

Most of all, the man who drinks his coffee black knows he’s superior to the man who’s pouring in the cream and sugar.

I Have No McGuffin

Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “McGuffin.” It’s the thing that sets the characters in a drama in motion. It’s the diamond that the thieves plan their heist in order to get. It’s the Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones risks everything to find. It can be a lost dog or the Holy Grail. It’s whatever the characters want that makes them pull together (or pull apart) and launches them off on their adventures.

The problem is – I have no McGuffin. I’m not sure that I ever had one. Well yes, come to think of it, I did have one once. When I was younger, my McGuffin was love. I went out and met the day in hopes that I would find love. I knew that there must be some golden thread out there somewhere, trailing along, spooled off from someone else’s seeking. In fact I thought there might be many such threads, all leading back to a matrix of love, a matrix from which all sorts of good and wondrous people sprung. I pictured this secret society of enchantment out there somewhere, and I followed every possible lead. Whenever someone would smile at me, or seem kindly disposed, I took that to be a thread. I’d pick it up and follow it a long way, through dark woods, along mean city streets. I’d follow it to meetings of old car clubs and to political rallies. I’d follow it to poetry readings and rugby games.

But none of those threads ever led to love. They led to people who had completely different McGuffins from mine. They led to people who wanted sex or money, action, excitement, or titillation. They led to people who just wanted to sell me insurance. They led to people who wanted me to cater to their partialities, or to merely tend them through some oncoming down time. They never led to anyone whole and effulgent and luminous with the capacity for love. Our McGuffins never matched.

So, after a long time, I stopped following threads. I stopped even looking for them. I found myself without any McGuffin at all. And that’s all right, I guess. Except life does seem a little listless without any McGuffin to get me up in the morning. It’s like perennial early retirement for someone with no hobbies. I hate to admit this, because it makes me something of a hypocrite. I’m the one who had been spouting the Vedanta philosophy, maintaining that wanting is what makes you miserable – that the ideal is to live a life without desire or wanting.

Well, although I’d often recited this philosophy to myself as if I thoroughly believed it, as if I “owned” it - I actually only got a chance to spout it once. I was on an excursion train that takes tourists from Thunder Bay, Canada, up into the Algoma woods, a wonderland of fall foliage that September. It was a long ride there and back, and the people in my car soon formed a sort of closed companionship with some tacit bond, almost like the people on Christie’s Orient Express. We started to exchange dangerous confidences. The husband of a couple seated across the aisle from me became especially expansive about the things that most intimately drove him.

This couple was apparently very well-to-do. The man crowed about the expensive, exotic trips they had taken, about his membership in the best golf club at the best country club, about his refusal to take any second-rate room in the nearly fully-booked town that weekend. He’d insisted on the Hotel’s best suite – or nothing at all, and he was proud that his adamancy had eventually gotten them accommodated in the luxurious Honeymoon Suite. He’d had to spread some money around to get this accommodation, but he was triumphant that his bankroll allowed him to hold sway that way, in one situation after another.

He said he found that was the only way to go in life – first-class Or really, maintaining an interest in life demanded that he seek a successions of first-classes. He said that once he’d gotten the best of something of one kind, he always liked to move on and aspire to getting the best of something else. Once he had the best car, he set out to get the best sailboat. Once he had the best possible house, he set out to furnish it with the best, the most expensive furnishings. And so on. He said that’s what kept him moving and alive. There was always something more he wanted, always something more for him to go after and get by one means or another. He believed that’s the way human beings in general are built. He said that in order to be happy, a person has to want something, has to be driven by a desire to acquire the next thing – and the next.

This was too much for me. I rarely join in group conversation, but I felt this man had left me too wide an opening to ignore. I jumped in with the fact that most of the major religions of the world take an opposite view. The Hindu and Buddhist philosophies advise that the way to be happy is to be without craving, without wanting of any kind. I pointed out that the starving man can’t really enjoy anything, especially the aspect of the cow in front of him. He’s single-mindedly driven by his desire to get that cow’s meat. So he’ll be blind to the intrinsic beauty of the cow, to the intrinsic beauty of all his surroundings and the joy that this beauty could bring him. His wanting will enslave him rather than liberate him into any happy state. His wanting will foreclose him from ever achieving the higher happiness of bliss. Yes, I think I might actually have gone so far as to invoke “bliss.”

In any case, my outburst stunned the wealthy man into silence. I’m not sure if he was quelled by the shear outrageousness of my viewpoint, or whether he was just startled into seeing a possible deficiency in what he’d previously regarded as his own self-evident philosophy. Either way, he made no come-back. However, a young East Indian woman, who had earlier been regaling us with her dating misadventures, leapt into the fray with affirmation. My comments had sparked her to take an interest in me. It was rare for anyone to take an interest in me, and the woman’s subsequent respectful attentions made our trip into and out of the deep woods of Algoma a kind of surreal experience.

After we disembarked past twilight onto the platform of Thunder Bay’s eccentric little middle-of-the-mall train depot, the woman persisted in wanting to get to know me further. We spent our remaining day in town tooling around, seeing the sights, but mostly reinforcing our mutual appreciation of Eastern philosophy. She said she had never before in her life met any North American who understood about not-wanting. I found that a little strange in light of Deepak Chopra’s persistent appearance on bestseller lists. But I was glad to accept her view of my uniqueness, to bask in her glow for a while.

She said those very ideas had been the cornerstone of her life. She told me how she herself often went back to India to help establish an ashram. Everyone there understood her attitude. But where on earth had I, an American, ever acquired such a philosophy?

I hardly knew what to say. I’ve often suspected my attitude is not the result of any enlightenment, but inborn, a product of a natural indolence, of an abiding reluctance to move or exercise myself in any way. But I didn’t want to say that. I told her, truthfully, that I had studied Vedanta at the Vivekananda Center in Chicago. We chatted merrily away, supporting and amplifying each other’s commitment to not-wanting as we chatted. But all the while, there was lurking the suspicion in me that I was flying under false colors, that maybe there were times, more and more now that all hope of love had flown, that I felt the need of need.

Now especially that the challenges and distractions of travel are over, now that I’m back in my comfort zone of Chicago – I can wallow in my un-wanting. I have all the necessities - plenty to read, plenty to read. But frankly, I don’t find that has enabled me to appreciate the cow more keenly. I haven’t achieved bliss or ecstasy. I want for nothing. But there’s kind of a nothingness about this state. Now, without my eagerness to look for those threads of communion, I have no engine of enterprise at all. I’m just here.

I find myself almost envying that man on the train, almost thinking he might have been at least a little right. He had the empowerment of purpose. His ambitions gave him the zest for life that I lack.

I have to admit it. I miss having something to miss. I miss my McGuffin.

The Little Things in Spain

I recently went on an excursion through Spain with a popular tour company. When I’d read the brochure, I’d liked the fact that this tour concentrated on just one Country. But it still turned out to be a little too much too quickly. Instead of “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium” – it was “If this is Tuesday, it must be Cordoba.”

Nevertheless, I’m glad I went. I learned a lot along the course of this almost military regimen of up-and-out at dawn and on to another city. But it isn’t the grand sights that I’ll probably best remember. It’s not the cathedrals, the palaces, the Prado, the Alhambra. It will probably be the little things that will stay with me - the caught conversations - the flow of a gypsy woman’s long chiffon skirt - the anguished look on the face of the aging flamenco dancer that exceeded even the proud pathos the dance calls for - the glimpse of a Valencia orange falling to the street and being kicked aside by a passerby.

The part of the planned itinerary that I enjoyed the most was our visit to an olive orchard where the yield was pressed into olive oil. Even though it was mid-November, the bougainvilleas were still in full bloom up the sides of several of the operation’s stucco buildings. As we walked through the orchard, one member of our group snapped an olive off a tree, chewed on it, and pronounced it awfully bitter. It seems a lot of processing has to take place to produce olives that are good to eat. As far as making olive oil, the workers have a narrow window of opportunity to pick the olives, when the drupaceous fruits are at their oiliest. When these are first pressed, virgin olive oil is the result. Subsequent pressings of the lees produce olive oil of lower grades.

The owner of the operation took us through the rooms of pressing equipment. He told us what to look for when buying olive oil back home. We should always get opaque glass containers, not the cheap transparent plastic containers that most grocery stores sell. We should store the olive oil in a cool place, so it wouldn’t turn rancid.

Then an unexpected treat. The owner said that in Spain, people put olive oil on EVERYTHING. He served each of us a dish of chocolate fudge nut ice cream with olive oil drizzled on top. The olive oil he used had been infused with orange essence. So maybe that was cheating a little, but either way - delicious!

Later, we took an off-schedule side trip to the home of a cave-dweller toward the north of Spain. Centuries before, caves had been carved out of the clay mountains in the region. Now the residences are by law passed down within families. It takes special dispensation to buy one of these dwellings.

We climbed a metal staircase and entered an earthy-smelling low vault of a room with white-washed walls. The friendly young family living in this cave had made a modest tourist attraction of their home, without in any way subverting their lives. We were conducted through the various rooms, including the children’s bedrooms, all branching off from that main vaulted dining room. Electricity was run in from the town’s main street and operated everything in the house. There was no need for heating or cooling. We were told the cave stayed at a nearly constant 69 degrees F. because clay is a wonderful insulator.

There was a second story to this cave residence. The family had made a museum out of those rooms, stocking them with artifacts showing how life was in their town in the 1800’s. But the main impression I walked away from this tour with was the overall sweet contentment of the family. They were independent illustrations of that sampler injunction to “Grow where you’re planted.” They were where their ancestors had been, but they had no sense of being stuck in place. They had added their own twist to the traditional lifestyle by allowing select tours through their home. And now they had it all – the old and the new – the inviting and the insular.

Having grown up in my family printing business, that select contentment with tradition is one of the aspects of European life that most touches me. I found that here again in Spain. Again when we went to Toledo, there were people carrying on the tradition of engraving the “best steel in the world” produced in the region. Our guide told us that no one has been able to pin down exactly what makes Toledo knives so keen, guaranteed for life. Many suspect it might be something secret in the waters of the Tagus River that lends itself to the annealing of the metal.

With all the exotic sights to absorb, it was however sometimes the conversations of my fellow travelers that informed me the most. It’s odd how different tour companies attract different clienteles. I’ve actually been on some tours where I was the most technologically advanced, where I could flummox other tour members by referring to “Googling.” However on this trip, I was the cave-dweller, in the old pejorative sense of the word. All my cohorts were on the cutting edge of technology, the Toledo steel cutting edge – the very sharpest of all. They had ultra-Smart phones, Internet access, a conjurer’s powers at their fingertips. Meanwhile, without even a cell phone with international access, I was pathetically incommunicado.

One couple demonstrated to me how, sitting there in Barcelona, they could control the thermostat in their master bedroom back in Tennessee by pressing a button on their phone. Everyone else was immediately emailing any interesting photos they’d snapped – to all their friends at home. One woman showed me how her SmartPhone had neatly labeled the location of every picture she took on it. There was the precise (and correct) label “West Wall of Alhambra Main Garden, Granada, Spain.” How did her phone know? “GPS,” the woman shrugged, as if her phone’s intelligence was a trifle. “I sometimes turn it off,” she elaborated. “I don’t like to be that closely tracked all the time.”

By contrast, my photos are in their usual merry mish-mash – with me often being in the dark even about what city they were taken in. Never mind exactly what wall is shown.

During some of our free time, one couple took the opportunity to tour a manufacturing plant that specialized in 3-D printing. They told me how they had seen a fully functional handgun “printed” right before their eyes. This was sort of old hat to them. They had known about this up-and-coming revolution in manufacturing for some time. When I got home and looked up likely investment opportunities, I indeed saw that that ship had already sailed. All the stocks that would give an investor some stake in 3-D printing action had already tripled in the course of the year.

But it isn’t generally so much what my fellow travelers could teach me about the technology of the world that has stuck with me. It’s the glimpses I got through the different windows they had onto the world and the snatches of their perceptions about life in general.

One man carried an elaborate ensemble of camera equipment with him, which led me to ask his advice on some aspects of picture-taking. Like most people asked to give their opinion when their superior knowledge is recognized, the man blossomed into his own 3-D Technicolor at my request. It turned out he was a professional photographer.  But he said he’d given up doing weddings. He couldn’t stand the “Bridzillas.” No, now he devoted himself exclusively to his true love – candidly photographing beautiful young women caught in the natural course of being themselves. He said he took his camera everywhere he went and approached likely subjects at every turn. After a few street shots, he’d hand them his card and invite them back to his studio to do nude sessions. He said as often as not, the women accepted his invitation.

Well, that suggestion of lechery the man revealed was a little concerning. I sensed the “nude sessions” probably went beyond innocent fun, perhaps all the way into some serious purveyance of pornography. How nude were these nude women? The long-suffering expression on the face of the man’s wife also hinted at an expected tendency for there to be “something going on” in that studio - something more than mere picture-taking.

After hearing this man expound on street photography techniques, I made a point of watching him in action as we traveled across Spain. Sure enough. He approached one lovely after another, the younger the better. Most of the women seemed flattered and were glad to lend themselves to his camera’s eye. Of course here in Spain there could be no after-hour sessions back at his studio. And since he was an older, unthreatening man, it could all be just innocent appreciation of beauty-in-passing.

The man approached one rather unlikely looking subject as she stood framed by architect Calatrava’s dramatic bridge/museum construct in Seville. I didn’t think this young woman would have been the man’s type. She sported spiky orange and pink hair and otherwise effected a rather Goth look. But the photographer did indeed solicit her to pose with Calatrava’s dramatic oceanic sweep as backdrop, and the girl was indeed amenable to being photographed. Although the photographer spoke almost no Spanish, and the girl spoke almost no English, they collaborated through what seems to be the almost universal medium of a desire to leave some record of oneself on this planet.

After this brief memorializing of the girl’s presence in front of the great whale-harp-arch of a building complex, the two parted ways forever and the man came over in gleeful satisfaction to show me the results of his shoot. As we peered together down at his camera viewfinder turned screen, he sighed in a sort of transport of appreciation, “Look, doesn’t she have beautiful green eyes?” I would never have noticed.

Perhaps this man’s activities weren’t always the most admirable, but he probably did more good than harm in the world. And truly, I envied him. His sexual impulse gave him ready access to a delight that would undoubtedly persist in him and sustain him. I once thought my own different sort of infatuation with the opposite sex would similarly be an eternal flame that would light my way out into the world. It impelled me to a hopeful outreach. Every bus I boarded, every corner I turned, held the possibility of that certain smile, that certain secret connection. But after decades of everyone else on all those busses being buried in their newspapers, then in their iPhones, with nary an answering eagerness or entente, that impulse died in me. Or maybe it wasn’t the lack of response. Maybe it was all just a matter of hormones. Whatever the cause, after having been warmed and lifted for so long by that prospect of my personal spark catching - the flame went out. It went out suddenly and no doubt permanently. Now I go through the motions of enthusiasm. But I sensed that photographer’s buoyancy, however questionable some of the explorations it might lead him to, was real and would carry him through to the end. And I wished I was him.

Actually, all the other group members seemed genuinely enthusiastic about taking in the sights. Although the day’s scheduled tour might have been grueling, most of our group members wanted to extend themselves to tour further on their own in the evenings. This unflagging determination resulted in the most memorable moment of the whole trip for me.

We had toured the Prado, where I learned a lot about El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya. I was especially surprised by the grotesque abstractions of the latter’s “black years.” But then after dinner, many people wanted to go on to the Queen Sofia Museum to see Picasso’s “Guernica” mural first-hand. But I’d been up for thirty-six hours by then, including all the hassle of the plane trip to Madrid. I declined the group sortie to Sofia. “Oh, but you’ll be dead for millions and millions of years,” reminded my fellow traveler. “You might never get here again. You have to do it all now.”

Somehow, the vastness of the void of death had never been brought home to me with such stark finality before. I felt myself standing on the precipice of that ultimate descent into blackness. Perhaps that was the same precipice that Goya had been standing on when he produced his macabre distortions. Perhaps that was the same precipice the anguished flamenco dancer had been standing on as she stomped out the last proud defiance that would collapse the earth out from under her.

Still, my laziness won out in the end, as it usually does. I skipped the Sofia and trudged back to the Hotel, where I fell into a profound sleep that lasted unbroken until our breakfast call the next morning. And so I added most of one more day to those unfathomable millions. I stretched my time of unconsciousness to eternity-plus-one.

 

Farewell To a Greasy Spoon

My favorite restaurant is closing. It was a greasy spoon where you could get a full dinner (including a big bowl of soup) for $4.95. In many ways besides the prices, it was a throw-back to the 1930’s-1940’s.

It had big booths with picture window outlooks onto a busy 3-street intersection in a Yuppie neighborhood. But the restaurant’s clientele ranged well beyond the Yuppie. There were seniors who reminiscing about the rides at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park. There were middle-aged people challenging each other to games of “Name That Star” – one of them throwing out the name of some classic movie for which the other then had to provide a roster of its lead players. “Was Kirk Douglas in that? I don’t think so!” I recently overheard a conversation between a young man and his parents. The young man was justifying his failure to settle on a career path. He told his disgruntled father that he wanted to “find himself” by taking a year off touring Europe before he seriously chose a college major. The father was overly stern against such slacking off – and the son was overly verbose about the advantages of such a “Wander Jahr” (a year of wandering as the Germans call it).

All this was woven through with the speculations of policemen and plumbing contractors who’d settle into adjoining booths for a while to “take a load off.”

There was almost always been an interesting conversation I could eavesdrop on at “The Golden Angel.” The low prices and informality of the place attracted this eclectic mix of customers who could relax into the unimportance of it all.

Of course, it really was sort of a greasy spoon. The soups were always good and homemade – with the minestrone being chock-full of vegetables. But then the entrees often showed the cut-rate nature of the place. The meatloaf was usually 90% filler, a fact disguised with heavy ladings of canned gravy. But I really didn’t mind. I don’t gravitate to the nouvelle cuisine with its wisps and curls and drizzles of exotic ingredients. And the fact that the meatloaf was mostly filler was actually a plus for me. I could feel I was adhering to something close to a vegetarian diet. No cows killed to make that meatloaf.

And when you ordered coffee, you truly got a bottomless cup – with the waitress attentively filling it every time your cup threatened to go below the half-way mark. So I usually came away from the place with a pleasant buzz of hopefulness about the world. I was filled with the echoes of all sorts of lively conversation, and I was percolating with plans about all sorts of things I could myself accomplish. All this was fueled by the thick, sometimes twice boiled, servings of caffeine that kept being poured my way.

It was the perfect place to retreat to when I’d come to the library across the way to work on my writing. I’d write a while in the library, then I’d “take a break” (which I needed about as much as that young man needed to tour Europe to find himself). But I’d indulge myself. I got to know the waitresses well enough that they would welcome me as a “regular,” but not so well that we would intrude on each other’s lives.

And now this is all going to be gone. I might be able to get in one more visit before I leave for Spain. But the place is closing on November 12, while I’ll be taking my own Wander-Wochen (weeks of wandering) in Europe. And with it will go that rag-time refuge for the homely and near homeless, for the aspiring and the expiring. With it will go the ideal place for grazing and gazing.

The site has been bought by Lou Malnati’s, a pizza chain. They are going to re-configure the place, expanding to make an out-door café in what is currently the parking lot. I checked online for the menus Malnati’s offers at other locations. No, this won’t be the old greasy spoon anymore. The new owners are going to be decidedly upscale. Their recipes feature arugula, and the main beverage they serve will be Dasani’s bottled water. No, this isn’t going to be the sort of place where you can relax over discussions of your triumphs dumpster diving.

I told the elderly Greek owner of The Golden Angel that I’d miss his restaurant. A tear welled up in one of his eyes, and he snuffled out his own regret, his own confession of how he’d miss doing what he had been doing for so many decades.

And so hail and farewell to the Golden Angel. All of us misfits and miscreants will miss you.

Simon & Garfunkel Commit Murder (Well, at least Manslaughter)

Mostly I’m not a stickler about using correct grammar. I enjoy English being limber and colloquial some of the time. That includes watching it flex itself on the parallel bars of mixed metaphors occasionally. What could be better than, “I’m drinking like a chimney; smoking like a fish.

But there is one mixed metaphor that makes me cringe every time I hear it. It’s the mixed metaphor that dominates Simon and Garfunkel’s popular song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” That song is meant to be comforting – a reassurance that there could be someone looking out for your best interests, someone ready to take your side and ease your way through troubled times. But really, the lyrics of that song assure just the opposite. They encourage their friend, their beloved, to sail ahead, oblivious to the fact that they are going to smash her to smithereens in just a few more lines.

This murderous onslaught happens as the result of a mixed metaphor. The singers’ friend is represented as being a sailboat – “Sail on, sail on silver girl.”

But alas, her “time will come” all too soon, and in a way that the song’s soothing tone doesn’t warn about. The singer/singers generally represent themselves as being a bridge, likely a drawbridge. (Although there’s confusion even on this point, because one stanza makes the singers themselves sailboats. “I’m sailing right behind.”) But the dominant image represents the singers as a bridge. When they get to the crux of the song, “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down,” I picture the two brackets of a drawbridge lowering onto the unsuspecting masts of the sailboat going underneath. I see the masts shattering, snapping to one side, weighing the whole boat askew. I see the boat capsizing, sinking like a mini Titanic. Instead of easing the way for their friend, Simon and Garfunkel smashed down on her head, throwing her overboard to drown.

Part of the reason I have such a vivid imagining of this disaster is that I live in Chicago, the city that features a series of famous bridges going over the Chicago River. Sailboats attempting to navigate the River have to line up and wait for topside vehicular traffic to be stopped at certain intervals, and for the bridges to be raised, one by one, to allow the boats passage. See the picture of one of Chicago’s trademark raisings.

A bridge would be a good thing to lay down if your friend were a pedestrian or if she were driving a car. Then making a crossing for her over troubled waters would be a good thing to do. But if she’s a sailboat – the results of laying down a bridge in her path are likely to be fatal. Smash, bang, whap! One girlfriend eliminated, leaving Simon and Garfunkel free to move onto the girl with “diamonds on the soles of her shoes.”

The Power of Preference

A Neighbor Makes a Power Play

A new tenant moved into the apartment building next door to me recently and a controversy soon developed - over my three cats. She believed they had been leaving droppings in the back yard included in her rental. We talked briefly about how to solve the problem, possibly by engaging a professional “pooper-scooper” service that I’d pay for. But then the woman became more encompassing in her complaint and stated flatly, (“plonkingly” as the British would say) that she didn’t like cats – period. She didn’t like to smell them, see them, or think that they were anywhere in the neighborhood.

Well, that was quite a challenging exclusion she was posing. I smiled at her in an indulgent, conciliatory fashion - and assured her I would do everything possible to keep the cats away from her territory.

But afterwards, I began to think about what had just happened there. Although the woman had staked out a wider claim against something than most people would have, her basic proclamation of an aversion was not at all an unusual conversational gambit. I thought of how often people introduce themselves with some sort of assertion of likes and dislikes. They wear these preferences for and against as identifying badges. “Hello, I’m Susan,” is, somehow, almost immediately followed with, “I hate spicy food.” Susan knows herself by the kinds of things she likes or dislikes, and she expects her listeners to similarly identify her, and to identify with her, according to such lists. What’s more, her remark floats the tacit expectation that people will dance to the tune of her preferences. That’s because, in addition to announcing preferences as a key to their identities, people also often make these announcements as power plays in their eternal game of one-upmanship.

To have a preference, especially in the form of a strong and definite dislike, is to shape the social environment around you. It makes others curve their behavior in accommodation. You become a strong magnet dropped onto a table of tiny iron filings. With the slightest nudge against the table, all those random little filings are compelled to start jostling into an arc around you, until a nice, neat little pattern of propitiation is achieved, with you at the center. That’s another reason Susan will make sure you know soon after meeting her that she hates spicy food Her assertion puts you on notice that she’ll require special treatment and will obligate you to make special arrangements on her behalf. “Oh, that’s right, Susan can’t stand hot peppers. I’ll make a separate batch of chili rellenos for her. That means I’ll have to go out and shop for mild bell peppers for her batch.” And so on and so forth. Thus, without firing a shot, Susan put herself in command. She achieved the ultimate in “passive-aggressive” conquest.

In the same way, my new neighbor put herself in command and achieved ascendency over me with her one utterance about cats. She thereby sent me into a scurry of deploying litter boxes and monitoring feline movements. She sent me into what could be a lifetime of watchfulness and worry.

Common Complaints

So it is with so many of the sensitivities and distastes that people are more and more proclaiming. With all their various thrusts of aversion, they leverage themselves into positions of control. Social gatherings become contests about who can pour the biggest speed bump into the flow of conversational traffic:

“I can’t stand cigarette smoke. So go outside and back off 50 feet!”
“I only drink Coke. Take away that Pepsi!”
“Yuck, I don’t know where that fork has been. Get it away from me!”
“I don’t like jazz. Can’t you play something else?”
“But we’ll have to do something about this green paint. I want a nice clean look. Let’s redecorate and paint everything white.”
“I have a headache. I can’t stand the noise. Can you talk more quietly?”
“Can you stop those kids from bouncing their ball? It’s driving me crazy!”

All these statements are like hand grenades lobbed into what might have been simple conviviality. Such statements of predilection refocus everyone else’s energies on the complainant, at least temporarily. Augustin Burroughs, who wrote some award-winning accounts of the domestic dysfunction he experienced growing up (Running with Scissors), wondered why it’s always the person with the dislike or the disability who must be accommodated. Why do the presumed needs of the person with the headache take precedence over the need that the healthy person has for ebullience? Why does the whine always trump the unfettered outburst of the wine?

Well, in cases of the most serious “handicaps,” that often doesn’t happen. Despite all the last decades’ worth of “Citizens with Disabilities Acts,” the world still is a difficult place for anyone in a wheelchair or with some other major nonconforming physical condition. When I made a trip downtown last week, I tried to do it from the viewpoint of someone in a wheelchair. I was stymied right away. The rapid transit station where I’d naturally board a downtown train had no elevator. The elevators at other stations were “Out of Order.” There were unleveled curbs and bumps on every block along my route.

However, when it comes to the peeves of house and garden, it’s the complainer who usually wins the day. The utterance, or the mere look, of a “Yuck!” marshals people to do the individual’s biding. “Are you getting a chill? I’ll close that window right away.”

Domination through Desire

However, statements of positive preferences can be just as powerful. By expressing her like of something, Susan can gain popularity. It gives others something to do on her behalf. “Oh, Susan collects souvenir mugs. I’ll have to remember to get her one when I’m in Madrid. I don’t think she has a Madrid one yet.” Whenever and wherever the traveler sees a mug, he will indeed think of Susan and assess the object in terms of suitability for her collection.

Having an enthusiasm, a positive preference, at first might seem a more benign a way of controlling people. Most people are downright happy to be given the knowledge of Susan’s love of souvenir mugs. It gives them a goal and a focus on their travels. What’s more, it gives them a handle on Susan. It makes Susan easier to relate to. Rather than being confronted by a sort of amorphous, ectoplasmic entity at social gatherings, people have a ready-made way of opening conversation with her. “Oh, you’re the Susan who collects souvenir mugs, aren’t you? I have one my father brought back from Morocco. I’ll bet you don’t have any from there. I’d be glad to give it to you for your collection.”

This is a feel-good transaction all the way around. On the one hand, Susan is going to add a pretty mug to her collection. On the other hand, Susan’s new acquaintance will be able to unload a cluttering tchotchke from her house, and at the same time get the feel-good rush of being a benefactor.

And yet, both Susan’s positive and negative preferences are tacit ways of exerting control over others. By her preferences, she activates people into service on her behalf. The statement of a preference can be a subtle controller, even a welcome one – and yet, it does fence off and limit the possibilities of each person’s ability to be in the world. It narrows the definition of who each person is and of what those around them are aimed at accomplishing. By definition, preferences are “partialities.” They turn a whole into a partial.

Give Me a Little Caesar

Maybe this is one reason the gangster has been such a popular anti-hero in the media. From Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” up to the more modern incarnations of mobsters in “The Sopranos” - the charm of such utterly anti-social characters is that they take what they want – fast and furious. They don’t slowly, insidiously deflect other people’s lives by wielding the pincushion of preference. The mobster dominates with the decisive move, with the threat of and the actuality of sudden execution. He doesn’t slowly drain the other person’s life away with the on-going necessity of having to accommodate his wishes in a million little ways. If a neighbor’s cat is bothering him, he shoots the cat – or the neighbor. And it’s done. He doesn’t make the neighbor scuttle around securing door latches, deploying litter boxes and baffles ad infinitum.

I’m certainly not advocating or condoning the shooting of cats or people. I’m just pointing out that as a fantasy, we enjoy being briefly reinvigorated by entering into the mobsters’ way of coup de grace. Mobsters represent escape from what’s likely become the tiring quality of most of our routine associations. We can forget about all the trivial, petty exclusions and inclusions that our co-workers impose. We can briefly step outside our marriage to Susan and the decades’ long abstention from pepper that has entailed. For the span of the movie, we can keep company with someone who doesn’t prefer over the long haul, but who demands in a flash.

Without George Foreman Grills, What Have I Got Left?

But readers might object here – if we exclude mention of preferences from our lives, what’s left? If we discourage Susan from stating or from even having preferences, how will we know what to buy her for her birthday? What’s more, aren’t preferences primary conversation enablers? What would we talk about with our neighbors, if not our preference for a George Foreman Grill over a XXX Hibachi? And doesn’t the jargon that arises from having a preferred hobby grease the wheels of conversation? When two model railway buffs get together, they can have the immediate mutuality of discussing gauges and voltages. What’s more, how could we ever post an ad in a “Singles Seeking” forum without reference to likes and dislikes? If not “SWM, likes skiing, snowboarding, absinthe, the Dave Matthews band, working out. Looking for same” – then what? How could we introduce ourselves, become solid to other people, and hope to find matching pieces of the puzzle?

The Eastern Alternative

It’s true. The kind of selflessness that follows from having no distinct preferences can pose a problem socially. It can actually alienate a person from this society, which is so geared towards fashioning and legitimating consumer likes and dislikes. True followers of many of the Eastern religions might find it difficult to meld into the mainstream of Western society’s emphasis on stated preferences. That’s because Eastern wisdom often encourages the opposite of identifying with any strict, prickly little set of preferences.

Rather than sporting armored plates of preference, Eastern sages try to model porousness. They encourage their disciples to let the world flow through them, to open themselves to the whole experience of life. They point out that the constant critic separates himself from the full experience of life. His bristling assessments separate him from the world. It prevents him from seeing the universal divine in all things and from realizing his oneness with that inspiration.

It’s difficult to imagine a devout group of monks standing around weighing the relative merits of Nikes over Addidas shoes. They simply wear the cast-off sandals that fall their way. But in a more general sense, it’s difficult to imagine anyone who sincerely espouses an Eastern philosophy ranking potential mates on a scale of 1 to 10, refusing to do some task because “it is beneath” him, or appraising every morsel of the world offered to him and then apprising all the rest of us of his predilection in the matter. The sage doesn’t stand outside every experience, giving it a thumb’s up/thumb’s down. He hopes to stay available to all experience, to stand before the world, awash in the pure experience of it. He hopes to know it as something in and of itself, not in relation to any personal reaction for or against it.

But indeed that’s where East doesn’t meet West. The West equates having strong preferences with being a properly ambitious, productive, interesting person. While Westerners might occasionally find statues of the “Laughing Buddha” cute, that kind of merry embrace of “the all of it” just isn’t a pose any right-thinking Westerner would seriously consider imitating as a way of life. In fact, most Westerners disdain a lack of self-assertion, an inability to dominate by making other people attend to your preferences.

Born Buddhist

I know because, through some fluke of biology, I believe I have been a disciple of Eastern philosophy born in a Western body. As a young person, I couldn’t at all get the hang of choosing or wanting to choose, especially when it came to the array of items offered by popular culture. I wouldn’t have known how to prefer Barbie over American Girl, 401’s over Calvin Kleins, Pepsi over Coke. There wasn’t anything at all I wanted for Christmas. For me, the Holidays loomed as a sort of devotee terrifying invitation to become a member of some frenzied cargo cult. While others eagerly waited to have specific dolls and dishes and little model cars delivered to them, I scrambled to my retreat behind the Christmas tree, hoping I could make myself invisible to the rain of distraction and clutter. I certainly wouldn’t have become the appealing subject of any classic tale such as Jean Shepherd’s “Christmas Story” about little Ralphie Parker’s fierce machinations to be the recipient of a BB gun as a Christmas present.

This failure to manifest the kind of desirousness that would make me a force to be reckoned with did make it difficult for people to know me or even to want to know me. People were handed no ready way of celebrating me. I carried that alienating aura of anomaly into adulthood. I had no recognizable story of trials and tribulations to tell others. I never spent nights pondering what college I wanted to go to and how I would manage to get in. I never gave much thought to whether I’d go to college at all. But when one was built down the street from me, I happily walked there and eventually got a degree. I attended just for the joy of learning, not with any career goals in mind. I never considered choosing a career. I just fell into step desultorily lending a hand in my parents’ printing business. And then after that waned, I got by on savings, which were sufficient, since I had never dissipated my meager income by buying stuff along the way. I never struggled with any form of addiction or had any other dramatic narrative of failure and triumph I could present to people.

My un-wanting personality did not endear me to anyone, and in fact tended to make me rather unwanted in the larger world. If I had in fact been an Eastern sage, I might have been attended to as someone who could impart wisdoms along the way. But I couldn’t claim any such official standing. So I was discounted. I was just seen as a weird teenager who came out of left field, not wanting to drive, not concerned with school or grades or with branding myself into a future distinguished business career that would generate a loyal group of consumers. Then later, I was a cheap date, a boringly undemanding person in place of the date my companion would have preferred - as stated in his singles profile, someone “sassy and self-assured.” I didn’t have the vividness or vivacity of lust. My lack of assertiveness was occasionally interpreted as a lack of self-esteem. My un-wanting was seen as a constricted inability to enjoy myself. Both conditions were seen as something to be corrected, for the few who even considered taking the time to correct them.

Meanwhile, I had just the opposite of the wishy-washy self-denying personality that most people characterized me as having, if they thought about me at all. In reality, I was always the secret hedonist, inwardly aglow with pleasure.

How To Be a Flicker in an Inferno

The sort of misperception and devaluation I suffered will likely be the fate of anyone who doesn’t concentrate on evincing definite preferences. It will leave you as a difficult person to pin down, and therefore as someone others might avoid. It will leave you without a power base in a world that relishes and respects the drive for power – either in the way the gangster seizes it, or in the way most others craftily leverage it with their partialities.

But I still maintain it’s worthwhile to at least consider limiting proclamations of preference. I don’t advocate adopting Eastern wisdoms as a placarded, T-shirted announcement of oneself, in the faddish way many of the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s did. That would be a subversion of Eastern wisdom from the start. And I don’t advocate becoming artificial and extreme in disclaiming all preferences. I recognize how having likes and dislikes are unavoidable, even necessary and positively admirable when it comes to standing up for truth and humanity. After all, a good percentage of this Blog has been, and will be, about advancing my opinion of what is the better way. This Blog is itself primarily aimed at commenting on and commemorating what I think is better, in terms of what I think is more interesting and has more heart.

If attempted in a temperate, innocent way though, a relatively open-ended, open-minded approach to life might not have that many disadvantages after all. You won’t be left as speechless, as featureless as you might at first suspect. You will still find things to talk about with other people. But instead of proclaiming your fervid dislike of some past or present movie stars, you might offer some interesting insight into some of their unsuspected talents. “Did you know that Hedy Lamarr, glamour girl of the 40’s, also had the brilliant insights of a physicist and mathematician? During World War II, she invented a way of preventing the jamming of radio signals – a method we use today in wireless communication.” Instead of skimming over each other by comparing trivial lists of likes and dislikes, we might get to the substrate of what others have experienced in life. “How did your grandfather survive the hardships of the Dust Bowl, having to start his farm over and over again like that? I know if I have a hangnail, I get discouraged. Where does a person get the fortitude to persevere in the face of such large adversity? Do you think you’ve inherited that survivalist spirit?”

The Path of TV Sitcoms

I’m reminded of an episode of the popular TV sitcom “King of Queens.” The starring couple of that series are reluctant to make a long-term financial commitment because they aren’t sure they will still be a couple in twenty or thirty years. They decide they’ll each privately make a list of favorite things. Then they’ll compare lists. If there isn’t at least one match on their lists, they’ll take it as a sign they might not be compatible for the long haul and they won’t take out that mortgage. As they compare their respective lists, they find a jarring disconnect – “wrestling vs green tea,” “sloppy Joes vs sunsets,” etc.

They call a halt to their comparison just short of the end of their lists. They float the fiction that that last item on their lists will be a match. Of course, we in the audience know that there’s no way that last item will match. And really, they know it too. But it doesn’t matter. For all the seasons of the show, Doug and Carrie have been a good couple. There’s been something satisfying about their togetherness that overrides their having so little in common in the way of trivial likes and dislikes, or even in the way of weightier elements of a common outlook on life. They simply have that X-factor that makes them so right together.

The ultimate importance of the X-factor is what defeats so many dating websites in their attempts to match people on the basis of checklists of mutual likes and dislikes. An ability to embrace each other, and the world in some special glimmering way, is, in the end, more important than sharing hobbies and hates. It’s more important even than that often cited “chemistry.” It is based on an ability to have an openness to each other that goes beyond assessment. It’s the ability to be light and delighted in love with what presents itself. It’s Edith Bunker and Archie; it’s the lilies of the field that “neither toil nor spin”; it’s yin and yang.

The Middle Way

So to get back to the point of this essay – I’d encourage people to place less emphasis on identifying themselves by what they label “cool” or “lame.” I’d encourage them to cast off those name tags that limit them as surely as they limit other people’s interactions with them. My advice would be to - step outside the box, stretch the envelope, go beyond those boundaries and be boundless.

What’s more, I’d encourage people to be willing to be relatively small and powerless at least some of the time – by wielding fewer preferences. I’m reminded of the mysticism of the closing lines of that classic cult movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. As Scott Carey dwindles down, down to a biologically impossible, but dramatically poignant speck – he reflects that by becoming infinitely small, he’s actually becoming infinitely large at-one with the universe.

That’s a sort of steep philosophy for everyday life. But in its exaggeration, it brings home my more accessible point. That point is: Don’t make a life out of pondering what you prefer and then seeking only that. Take a few breaks; take what’s given and appreciate the unique experience of whatever comes your way. Don’t be like Susan who, behind her sweet, seemingly apologetic smile - always has a discommoding chill, always hates peppers. Certainly forego that more extreme sort of bid for power that my neighbor made when she asserted her loathing of anything feline. That sort of tyranny will ultimately limit you as much as it limits the person you harry with all your provisos.

Besides, by voicing such dominating preferences - you’ll get me seriously mad. I can’t stand people who hate cats.

When We's Home

Some years ago, I rode the train from Chicago to Charleston, West Virginia. It was a long trip, calling for some over-night scrunching up among those of us who hadn’t bought sleeper car accommodations. Two grandmotherly women from the South Side of Chicago travelled the distance in my same car. Shortly after crossing the border from Ohio into West Virginia, we stopped in Huntington. Even though we were still over fifty miles from Charleston, it felt as if we were virtually at our destination at last. I heard those two fellow travelers exclaim in relief, “When we’s in Huntington, we’s home!”

It struck me that the point at which we feel we’re virtually home is relative to the total distance we’ve travelled.

I didn’t learn how to drive until I was well into my thirties. (I was the only teen-ager who DIDN’T want to drive.) So I would go shopping for my family on foot, pulling a 2-wheel shopping cart. I’d usually have quite a precariously balanced load to haul. The grocery store was four blocks away. But after I’d covered three blocks, I always breathed a sigh of relief. Only one more block to go! I knew at that point that whatever happened - if my shopping cart lost a wheel, if I sprained an ankle – somehow I could make it that extra block. I’d mentally celebrate, “I’m home.”

Then after I learned how to drive, I’d visit my brother in the suburbs. I was always nervous behind the wheel. It was such a relief when, on the return trip, I’d pass into Chicago’s City limits at Cumberland Avenue. Chicago busses start running at Cumberland, and I knew if I crashed or broke down, I could still make it the rest of the way by catching a bus. So as soon as I hit Cumberland, about 6 miles from my house, I’d feel, “I’m home.”

As I’ve forced myself to become a somewhat more adventurous driver, I’ve started visiting friends on the shores of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. That drive takes me along a nerve-racking route that includes expressways and the Ambassador Bridge. But on the return trip, as I pass through Benton Harbor, Michigan, and then certainly as I pass through Gary, Indiana, I feel a huge relief. That other side of Lake Michigan is only 30 or 40 miles from home – a mere hop, skip, and a jump. If anything bad happens to my car, I know that from those points I can take the Chicago Metro train into Chicago. When I’m in Gary, I’m as good as home.

When I’ve flown to various European cities, the pilot usually announces when we are over Newfoundland. Coming back, I can relax once I glimpse those icy edges of Newfoundland below. That means we have successfully navigated over the vast, treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll be flying over solid ground from there on in. It’s my continent, my accustomed territory. When I’m over Newfoundland, I’m home.

Now there’s increasing talk of sending manned spaceships to Mars and possibly to other points in the Solar System. I can imagine the astronauts’ relief when, on their return trip, they fly past the orbit of the Moon – the Moon, that safe and familiar luminescence that has presided over our Earth’s night skies for all the eons we’ve been around. Surely, the astronauts will feel the safety of that trail of light that the Moon casts over Earth’s waters as they propel through the circumference of our friendly satellite. They’ll glow with reassurances to each other, “When we’re past the Moon, we’re home.”

Scientists currently say it would be impossible for astronauts to go farther than our Solar System in a lifetime. But who knows? Some way might be found to beat the System, to navigate some loophole (or some wormhole) through Einstein’s rule against the possibility of traveling faster and farther than the speed of light can take us. Then our astronauts will feel the safety and assurance of being in familiar space when they shoot through the Oort Cloud of icy rocks and asteroids that‘s beyond Pluto. “Only 10 billion miles to go! We’re in our solar system. We’re almost there!”

And if somehow, we find a way to go even farther, to “break the surly bonds” of our galaxy and follow Carl Sagan’s unimaginable trail of zeroes out to other galaxies – the point at which we feel the relief of home-coming will be pushed outward farther yet. As the great, great grandchildren of our original astronauts make their way back from Andromeda, they will perhaps be like the monarch butterflies that migrate back to the place their forbears left, a place they’ve never personally been, but know just by instinct. Our astronauts will not only see by their dials, but will perhaps feel by some unique intersecting influence of light and gravity, that they are coming back into the vast womb where their kind was born, once they’ve burst over that rough edge of our Galaxy. It will only be another 20 thousand light years then. They will look at each other in triumph and beam, “When we’s in the Milky Way, we’s home!”

Wheeeeee!

Death of a Cat

I agreed to have my cat of 15 years euthanized the other day. This was the first time I’d ever had a pet euthanized. The other three long-term pets I had in my lifetime all died naturally by my side. They just slipped away asleep after periods of having gotten weaker and more lethargic. It seemed as if this cat was going the same way.

She had been diagnosed with a hyper-thyroid condition, apparently common in cats. Vets said if that condition couldn’t be corrected with the pills they prescribed, her various systems would just shut down.

That’s what eventually seemed to be happening. She just stopped eating. She wasn’t tempted by any of her favorite tidbits. With increasing feebleness, she would just get up to drink water and then go back to sleep. After the second day of this, I thought the end must be near. I’d go in quietly and check on her every couple of hours. But no, she was always still there. My checking in on her would rouse her to get up, go drink some more water, then retire again.

Into the fifth wrenching day of this, I felt that just perhaps I had been wrong about the inevitability of her demise. So I took her to an emergency clinic, thinking there might be something that could be done to turn her condition around.

But no. The vet there found my cat had some other compromising condition on top of her hyperthyroidism. She said that cats can live for amazingly long periods without eating. But that didn’t indicate there was any hope for real recovery. Correcting both of my cat’s conditions would have required more than heroic measures, and then would have resulted in a brief, sluggish life under medication. So we decided to euthanize.

My cat didn’t make that decision any easier in those last minutes though. As emaciated as she was, she rallied into kittenish animation. She thrived on the stimulation and attention the vets and their assistants were giving her. She played with the scale on the examining table. She explored the examining room with keen interest. She purred in sheer delight at all the patting and praise she was getting. However I knew if I took her home, the wasting would just continue apace. So we went ahead.

I didn’t think I would break down at the prospect of this ending. Frankly, Gammon had always been more of a duty for me than a chosen delight. I had first seen her as an apparently abandoned kitten cadging food in the bushes of the Post Office across the street from me. Every time I went out my front door, she would bounce out of the foliage and attempt to follow me back home. I resisted this forced adoption for some time. I then had an elderly dog whose last years didn’t seem likely to be made any easier by having a bumptious kitten around. But the cat’s persistence began to affect me. I started to worry about her.

I’d look often out the front window to see if I could glimpse her darting through the Post Office shrubbery. Was she still there? Was she alright? If I didn’t see her for a day, I worried she might have gotten run over. Once around midnight, my heart almost stopped in fear for her. I saw a group of 18-19-year-old boys who had all the earmarks of being members of Hell’s Angels sauntering down the street. Their jackets were emblazoned with skull and crossbones; one had a dragon tattoo fuming an inky coil of smoke around his neck; one had a length of heavy tow chain dangling from his belt. As they passed in front of the Post Office, the little cat darted out, stood square in front of them blocking their path, and meowed a plea that was at once both piteous and commandeering. Oh no! I almost wretched at what I thought would surely be the ensuing cruelty. I pictured the gang gleefully twisting the cat’s head off, sadistically pulling out a knife and cutting her legs off.

When the boys didn’t immediately do that, but instead stopped, sat down on the Post Office steps, and extended pinched fingers out to her while cooing and meowing a come hither encouragement, I was not immediately reassured. I thought they were probably playing cat and mouse with her, teasing her with the prospect of friendship – so that they could all the more cruelly surprise her with some horrible pain. But they didn’t do that.

They took turns gently stroking her, talking baby talk to her. Then one of them left the group. When he came back a few minutes later from the 7-Eleven a few doors down the street, he was carrying a can of cat food. He crouched back on the steps, popped the lid off the can, and set it down for the kitten. The boys looked on with good-deed grins of satisfaction as they watched her gobble up what was probably the only decent meal she’d had in days. So they weren’t going to hurt her, all their appearance of brutality to the contrary.

But then after a while, it was plain the boys were starting to get bored. They had meant this to be a one-night stand, no long-term commitment. They got up and started to walk away. The kitten followed them. They looked back, clearly worried that this demanding little creature might attach itself to them. They picked up their pace. The cat matched their speed. Soon she had them on the run! It was the climaxing chase scene you find in every proper action film. It was The French Connection all over again. Except this time, the hooligans being chased weren’t in a car – they were on foot. And their pursuer wasn’t a cop in a souped-up Fury, but a10-ounce kitten intent on finding a home.

The boys ran full tilt to the end of the block – checked and saw the cat was still coming on strong. They shot around the corner and fell silent. They were likely using every evasive tactic in the book. I could picture them cutting through the alley, down the pub’s gangway, then falling in hushed caution under Mr. Bandera’s back porch. “Shhhh! Don’t let her hear us. Maybe she’ll go right past!”

Whatever they did, they succeeded in eluding her, because in a little while, I saw her straggling back into the Post Office bushes - defeated, unadopted.

But not for long. A few nights later, as I coaxed my dog through the front door after our nightly perambulation, I thought I saw a gray flash of something shoot past us into the house. I dismissed it as some trick of my eyesight though – until I saw the kitten sitting in full proprietary possession of my computer desk. I had been in the middle of a computer backgammon game with myself when I’d taken my break to walk the dog. As I watched in amazement at the sheer assurance the kitten had of its right-of-way – she leaped onto my keyboard, brought the computer screen back to life, and made the decisive move that won the game for me. So I dubbed her “Gammon” - and that was that.

As I suspected it might, the cat’s presence in the house probably harried my elderly, failing dog to a somewhat earlier-than-otherwise grave. The dog took back seat to this new arrival’s needs, although Gammon was never very active or mischievous. She was fairly self-contained from the start.

Still, my caretaking of her tended to be done more from a sense of obligation than from the heart. When my dog died, I very much would have liked to have adopted another shelter dog. But the timing never seemed right. When I bestirred myself to do something about it, the potential adoptee’s biography mentioned that it should be an “only pet,” without any other animals in the house, especially without any cats. Then I procrastinated. Then I became the official guardian of a feral colony of cats who have stuck close to me in my back yard. It seemed it would be too much to try to introduce a dog into this reign of cats inside and out. And so fifteen years slipped away.

Because of what I thought was my partial detachment from the project of Gammon, I didn’t think I would cry when it came time to euthanize her. I had fulfilled my commitment to her – better than those Hell’s Angels had been prepared to do. I had given her a good life. So I was surprised when I started to sob uncontrollably in the vet’s examining room as we closed in on our conclusion.

But then the worst of this overwhelming sadness passed. After the decision had been made and it came to actually giving her the injection, I was even able to muster a calmer, scientific attitude towards the procedure. I chose to stay in the room while the vet administered the shots. They first inserted a catheter just above her paw first. Then two quick injections – one to anesthetize her, one to stop her heart. It seemed she was gone even as the first needle approached the port of the catheter.

In my newly becalmed (or benumbed?) state of scientific curiosity, I noted how absolutely painless this passing had been. By contrast, I remembered some of what I’d read about the occasional failure of lethal injections given to Death Row inmates. I’d read that there had been unseemly delayed reactions, and that even a few recipients of this form of capital punishment had had time to report excruciating burning sensations as the chemicals coursed through them. But none of that had happened here. I wondered, if animals can be so humanely dispatched – why can’t they always find the right chemicals and dosages to dispatch humans equally humanely?

By this time, with all the long worry about what to do about Gammon’s failing and when to do it behind me, I became almost inwardly jovial at elaborating the analogy I was making between euthanizing an animal and giving a prisoner a lethal injection. I patted Gammon on the head and silently speculated, “What did you do to have it come to this? Were you a little serial killer? Too bad, you couldn’t beat the rap.”

I guess none of us will beat the rap in the end.

The clinic had made an imprint of Gammon’s paw in a clay medallion – a token they gave me to take home and bake as a permanent remembrance.

I put it on the seat next to me in the car as I pulled out of the clinic’s parking lot. I’d driven a few yards before I realized that I was in the middle of a thick fog. This uncharacteristic daytime fog in Chicago, juxtaposed with that paw imprint medallion resting on the passenger seat - inevitably called to mind Carl Sandburg’s poem:

The fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
On silent haunches
And then moves on…..

Low Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem

Bullying has become a popular subject for media psychologists. When Dr. Phil addressed the subject the other day, he predictably ascribed the problem to a lack of self-esteem. Almost everything is attributed to a lack of self-esteem these days. This plague of low self-esteem is cited, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of the thousands and thousands of awkward, tone-deaf people who audition for “American Idol,” cocksure of their talent.

When it comes to bullying, both perpetrator and victim are assumed to be suffering from low self-esteem. The accepted interpretation is that the bully torments unpopular classmates because he/she actually feels inferior and needs someone to belittle. In turn, the victim of bullying is assumed to suffer because he/she is too ready to believe the cruel jibes of the bully. Dr. Phil’s recent guest was a woman who was carrying the pain of the verbal assaults she’d suffered in high school on into her adulthood. Dr. Phil assured her that the reason for her pain was low self-esteem. She’d internalized her tormenters’ remarks, become her own worst critic, and perpetuated the pain by repeating the insults to herself over and over, convinced of the truth of them.

Well, maybe. But I think there might be a more basic, yet a more unreachable reason for the actions and reactions behind bullying. The TV psychologists’ interpretation of low self-esteem is too much the standard jargon of 12-step programs. The problem of bullying might be beyond the reach of all those pat self-help dictums.

Maybe a bully’s behavior stems from the age-old, animal impulse to dominate, to conquer, to prevail through brutality. And maybe the victim’s pain stems from a more complex instinct. First, the victim might feel a need to protect herself physically from the kind of mob violence that often has its roots in “mere” playground bullying. But a victim’s more difficult, more diffuse need might be to avoid recognizing that cruelty in others in the first place. People long to feel that the world is a beautiful place worthy of their efforts to enter it and fully engage with it. They long to feel that there are others waiting in that larger world, capable and worthy of receiving their mature gifts - most importantly, their gift of love.

Many people, but perhaps young people and heartfelt young girls especially, long to be enamored, to have a hero who is worth the love they want to bestow. So when a victim meets with the bully’s sneers and sadism – she wants to avoid recognizing that behavior for what it is. She wants to twist the other’s innate cruelty around, to call it something else, to call it deserved. That way, the bully can still be perceived as a wonderful, worthy being. The victim only needs to correct her own faults. Then everything will be all right. That’s ultimately a more manageable project than trying to correct the evil in others. Such evil, if fully acknowledged, would make the world a grim, uninviting place.

We don’t want to see that our world is riddled with profoundly flawed, morally deformed people, people incapable of receiving the bounty of our affection. If we perceived this reality, we would lose all motive to reach out with effort and ebullience to such a world. Such a world would plainly have no room for the upwelling of love. And, as all the songs say, who are we if we have no one to love? Such a prospect is excruciating.

To make an analogy with more extreme cases, we might remind ourselves of the otherwise inexplicable persistence of battered wives and abused children. Why do the victims of such abuse so often refuse to leave their persecutors? Why do they so often refuse to blame them or name them when the police come to their doors, ready to help? Again, these victims’ problem is usually diagnosed as either fear of their bully’s retaliation, or else low self-esteem. But that doesn’t explain the victims’ frequent, ardent defense of their tormentors.

In most of these cases, self-blame is likely just the victims’ cover-story. Deep down, the victims probably don’t fully believe they are at fault. It’s all just a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion of the goodness of others.

I wasn’t bullied in school, but I lived in fear of being bullied. I wasn’t energetic enough to go to all the trouble of conforming to accepted standards. So in order to avoid becoming a target, I kept a very low profile. I made myself a ghost. My school life was built around avoidance. Again, that wasn’t primarily because I had low self-esteem. If I were to have become the target of bullies, I would not have thought any less of myself. I would have thought less of all my tormentors. My shadow existence was my way of protecting myself from the knowledge of others’ cruelty.

If I’d had this cruelty flung in my face, I’d no longer have been able to believe that most other people were deliciously, secretly primed to be my friends and lovers, if only circumstances would allow them to demonstrate their affection. By hiding from the reality of other people’s all too frequent prejudice and hatred, I could be like every Academy Award winner – gushing my thankfulness to my family, my co-stars, my producer – the whole wide, wonderful world. I would not have to face the fact that in actuality, my spouse was cheating on me, my co-stars had all been working to upstage me every step of the way, and that the director and producer hadn’t wanted me to star in the film in the first place because they had crudely declared to each other that “Her ass is too BIG!”

No, as long as I was careful not to elicit or overhear any negative reactions from others, I could still believe in their goodness and good will. I could remain enrapt by the possibility of them. That option, that imagining was left open. As long as I didn’t see the little boy pull the wings off the fly, I could dream him into an ideal friend. As long as I could aggressively deny anyone else’s testimony that the boy did in fact pull the wings off of flies and beat up weaker students on the playground – I was still able to count him among the many who could be loved. I could remain eager for each new day because it held him in it.

The constant struggle of avoidance and denial was exhausting. But I managed it until a relatively advanced age, largely because my family and I had the resources to build our own world and keep carefully inside of it much of the time. But perhaps others who have to be out in the “hood,” out in the “barrio,” out in the more subtle enforcements of condo associations and suburbia, without supportive parents to buffer them from all such ambient tyranny – perhaps they tend to succumb earlier to the hopelessness of there being no one to admire, no one to love.

The Irish say that “Sooner or later, the world will break your heart.” That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Maybe it doesn’t happen with quite that kind of melodramatic flourish. Perhaps the dying takes place more as a downtrodden resignation – more as a whimper than a bang.

I remember the low-key wisdom imparted by Mr. Adams, one of the many itinerant handymen my parents employed to help maintain our odd, echoing quarters. We had a new puppy then. The mutt followed Mr. Adams everywhere, yipping at his feet. We couldn’t corral or control it. It got out of our grip over and over, and before we knew it, was snapping for attention at Mr. Adams’ heels again. I thought its annoyances would soon have to provoke a really angry outburst from Mr. Adams, But no, Mr. Adams remained patient. He was one of the few people I’ve met who didn’t seem capable of rage. I doubt if he would even have yelled obscenities at someone who cut him off in traffic – if he’d ever had a car or ever driven (which was unlikely). But after a while, he did react to the incessant barking for attention. He leaned down forlornly and addressed the dog. “Hey there, little one. You’re not a newborn any more. You’ve got to think about being on your own. That’s what growing up is – learning how to be alone.”

That struck me at the time as being an indescribably sad piece of experience to pass along. I was just a teenager myself then, and didn’t want to contemplate that aging held such a fate. But I feared Mr. Adams might in fact be right.

Love probably won’t happen for most of us. It is rare to find anyone who was never a bully or who wouldn’t become one given the opportunity. It is rare to find someone who doesn’t honk and swear in traffic. And it’s rare for any of us to be so admirably devoid of petty self-interest and petty tyranny ourselves. All most of us can do is struggle along and try to maintain some illusion that we ourselves, but more urgently, that the partners who have come to be our lot in life, might still be worthy of the infinite love we haven’t completely forgotten is our reason for being. We have to hold onto that fiction.

And so we desperately try to get thin, get buff, get stylish, get rich, and generally improve ourselves. If we are in need of correction, if we are in the wrong - then the other person’s criticisms must be right, and therefore the other shines all the more brightly.

Dr. Phil says our desperation is low self-esteem. And we hang our heads dejectedly and agree. We play into the idea. Yes, our parents never really gave us the boost we needed; they never made us feel special; they never praised the artwork we brought home from school. All the while though, we know our struggle is much bigger than low self-esteem. Our struggle is not to feel better about ourselves, but to feel better about other people. We battle, not to be loved – but to love.