Feeding a coyote

Sometimes fate arranges the perfect metaphor. If only I felt I could take advantage of it!

When I talked with Marie a week ago, she was solemn and worried and upset and frightened, all over the deportations that the Administration has recently started enforcing. Mind you, Marie is a natural-born citizen. Her parents were natural-born citizens. She looks White, though apparently if you go far enough back one ancestor was Chippewa. In other words, there is about as much chance that she'll be deported as there is for Melania Trump. But that doesn't stop her from worrying. I've mentioned before that Marie suffers from TDS somethin' terrible, so naturally she believes the very worst it is possible to believe.

What does Marie know about immigration? She is friends with two different families who both think they have to leave the United States proactively before they are deported. In one of these families, the husband in English and the wife is Canadian; their son is a natural-born American. In the other family, the husband is American and the wife is Mexican, though you wouldn't guess it unless she told you. In both families, all the paperwork is in order and has been for many years. Again, these people are not the targets of any deportation effort. But try telling them that.

So I spent our weekly call a week ago trying to talk Marie down from what seemed to be—figuratively or emotionally speaking—a very high cliff.

When we talked yesterday, she was in a much better mood. It seemed that she had forgotten her earlier worries. But buried in her chit-chat about what had gone on the previous week was the news that she had seen a hungry coyote.

Marie lives in the suburbs. This is not normally coyote country. There are wild areas within driving distance, to be sure. But for a coyote to wander all the way into Marie's neighborhood, it must be either desperately hungry or else really bad at directions.  

And Marie has been leaving out food! What's more, she has seen the food disappear. So while she can't be intellectually certain that it's the coyote who has eaten it all, nonetheless she is morally certain that she has saved the coyote from starvation!

I asked her how long she plans to keep leaving out food? She didn't give a date, but in general she wants to keep him alive until he learns to hunt for himself.

Really? How's that going to work?

Boxes of books

As usual—at least if you don't count when I spend the holiday with Marie and her family—I spent the Fourth of July with Mother, Brother, and SIL. (See also, e.g., here and here.)

The Fourth was on a Friday. I drove down in the late morning, and encountered pleasantly little traffic. 

Brother and SIL did all the cooking, and we started to eat in the very late afternoon, as the heat started to lift.

Brother and SIL have also been working their way through boxes of papers in Mother's garage, mostly papers left behind by Father when he died. They have been looking for things that might be worth saving, and trashing the rest. There has been a lot to trash. I don't know how carefully they are filtering them, but I do know that he left behind a lot of junk. That said, I did scan through a box of papers that they had marked "Trash" and found a draft copy of Mother's doctoral dissertation, along with a letter to her from her old faculty advisor. I hope this was an exception.

Meanwhile, Brother has asked me to go through the boxes of books in the garage. There are a lot of these. But I wonder if we are all agreed on what to toss?

When I began to tackle this task on the Fifth, I found—in boxes that had been sitting in the garage—books that I had given as gifts: at the very least there was one that I gave Mother after Father died, and one that I gave Father while he was still alive. Why were they in boxes in the garage, when they used to be on shelves in the house? Clearly someone had decided that they didn't deserve shelf-space. I don't credit Mother with that much energy or initiative these days, and I know it wasn't me. That leaves Brother and SIL. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I judged that both books belonged in the "Keep" pile. So now I wonder if I'll have a fight with Brother and SIL when they find out. (At the moment, I think they don't realize it yet.)

My first pass through the boxes generated three categories of books. 

Death by laughter

Chrysippus of Soli died from laughing.

Can you die from laughing? Today I learned that Chrysippus of Soli, the Stoic philosopher, was said to have died laughing at one of his own jokes.

I remember Father mentioned one time that he thought he was going to die of laughter. I was somewhere else for the event itself, possibly away at college. But it was one evening and he was sitting up late. I don't remember if Mother was sitting up with him, or if she had started getting ready for bed. Also, I don't remember what provoked his laughter—whether it was something he read (perhaps The Funniest Joke in the World), or just a funny idea that occurred to him. Probably it was something he read.

Anyway, he described that he started laughing and laughing, and then found that he couldn't stop. This "couldn't stop" experience wasn't frightening though—just very pleasant. Finally he laughed so much that he felt himself detach from his body. He said it felt like he could just float away and go somewhere else, and he thought about it for a while. Finally he decided, no, he would rather stay where he was. So he nestled back down into his body, stopped laughing, and let his life return to normal.

When he told me this story, Mother commented that she could hear him laughing (or, as I say, maybe she was still in the same room), and was worried if he would be OK because it went on so long. She did not say she was afraid he would die. And for his part, he didn't appear to regard the prospect of death with fear. The way he described it, it just sounded interesting. But no, he had responsibilities still in life, and people to attend to. So he decided not to move on just yet.

If I've remembered the approximate year correctly, that would have been before his grandsons were born ... possibly even before I married Wife. So he would have missed a lot.

When he finally did die, it wasn't from laughing. I hope it was as free of fear and as interesting to the inquiring mind as the time he almost laughed himself to death.

I guess there's no way to know.    

      

Blast from the past: Intentions

Hosea's log: Star date 1992-10-11 ... or it might have been 1992-11-10. It was well into the autumn of 1992, and right around the full moon—maybe plus or minus a day. No more than a day.

People who are comfortable with what might be called the woo-woo end of New Age spirituality sometimes talk about "releasing intentions into the Universe." It's not always clear how this differs either from prayer or from magic, but the language is vague enough to offer plausible deniability if one is challenged by a hard-core materialist. "Oh no, I wasn't doing anything supernatural. I was just focusing my attention on a certain goal for the sake of psychological clarity."

The thing is, sometimes it works. Debbie once told me that a few months before she and I met up again after twenty years, she found herself getting tired of living alone after her divorce, and released an intention into the Universe that she meet someone romantically. Then she met me.

Normally I'm not really organized enough to do the same thing, but I remember one time that I definitely did. It was a long-term intention; and while I didn't follow up scrupulously to check every bit of it against a schedule, in the long run it did more or less come true as well.

The time was 1992. I was working a contract job nearly 120 miles from home—by which I mean the apartment I shared with Wife, while she was in graduate school. I drove down on Monday morning and back on Friday evening. During the week I stayed with my parents, which was just a little over 40 miles away from my work. The traffic was terrible, and I wasn't making a lot: enough to pay our rent, but not enough to keep up with Wife's already-riotous spending. But it was what I could get, and all that driving didn't leave me a lot of time to look for a better job.

For some years I had still nursed fantasies of going back to graduate school myself. I had left abruptly (as I describe briefly here) and my faculty advisor was kind enough to hold open my space in my fellowship program for one year. Well, by this time it had been closer to six years, and I wasn't still in touch with him. But I still clung to the fantasy that maybe someday I could go back.

Then in the fall of 1992 I learned that my former faculty advisor had died. Of course there was no realistic way that I would ever have gone back, but this shattered my fantasy. I wept for him—by which of course I mean "for myself and my lost dreams"—harder than I have ever wept for a dead relative. And then, not long after, I found myself walking out to the parking lot after another long day, after sunset, with the stars twinkling, and the most enormous full moon hanging just over the horizon.

Parallel lives

As I listened to Schmidt talk about the Hired Hand this spring (as I discussed in my last post), I began to think about the unexpected parallels between Schmidt's life and mine.

Plutarch of Chaeronea, author of a more
famous set of "Parallel Lives."

___

Schmidt and I met in college. He was quiet and introverted; I was loud and seemingly more sociable, but my loudness and sociability were protective masks no different from Schmidt's quiet and introversion. "Talks loud, laughs louder, thinks silently." When we talked about things that we both knew, we found that we nearly always had the same take. We both had fathers who were loud and boisterous, and who not infrequently offended people; also mothers who were quieter and could get along with anyone.

___

College is when a lot of people start dating and fucking. But I didn't lose my virginity until my Senior year. Schmidt flunked out after the end of his Junior year, so he didn't have a Senior year. And I'm pretty sure he didn't fuck anyone while at school. Years later, Wife told me she had talked to Schmidt privately, and he had admitted that for a while he was interested in Flora. She had the right body-type to attract him: slim, trim, and athletic. But she was already fucking a couple of our other friends (R– and Mac), and Schmidt determined that "Everyone who fucks Flora goes crazy." He didn't want to go crazy, so he decided not to join the party. Also I suspect he didn't want a connection with Flora to drag him into any more intimate connection with R– or Mac.

___

After college, I went home. I didn't date anyone. It was only through a weird coincidence that I met Wife, and we started fucking a week later.

After college, Schmidt went home. He lived way out in the boonies, so the likelihood of a weird coincidence throwing him together with someone attractive was correspondingly a lot lower than it was for me.

___

Part of what attracted me about Wife was the powerful energy that accompanied the highs of her bipolar cycle, when the air around her crackled with her enthusiasm and nothing seemed impossible.

It seems like part of what attracted Schmidt to Hand was something similar. He said that he thought Hand was undiagnosed bipolar, and he agreed that the highs of bipolar people can be attractive. Also, remember that Hand lived his whole life in the shadow of colon cancer, and responded to it with a determination to enjoy his short term to the hilt. For someone as broodingly introspective as Schmidt, I think Hand's willingness to live thoughtlessly—taking no thought for the morrow, as Scripture would have it—must have felt profoundly liberating. Even if he couldn't do the same things himself (because he, personally, couldn't stop thinking about his actions), he must have found Hand thrilling to be around. (Why yes, I am interpreting him based on my own personal experience. Why do you ask?)

Schmidt and the Hired Hand

I have one more story left over from my time this spring at the Schmidts. I've got the notes right here, and I keep planning to just sit down and type them, but ... well ... you know.

The story is about a former friend of Schmidt's, now dead. Because he worked for the Schmidts for a while, I'll call him the Hired Hand (or Hand, for short). I think Schmidt showed me a photo of him, but I don't remember what he looked like. Big and gregarious. Beyond that, I forget.

I don't know if Schmidt remembers this, but I remember once, many years ago, getting a letter from Schmidt where he talked about Hand. He said that in Hand he had finally found someone he could settle down with for the rest of his life—except for the awkward fact that Hand was romantically interested only in girls, not guys. To be clear, Schmidt said nothing directly about his own preferences in "plumbing." Wife claimed that Schmidt told her he was gay, and once upon a time I believed her. (See, e.g., the brief reference here.) Now I'm not so sure.*

What did Schmidt find so enticing about Hand? When we talked during my most recent visit, Schmidt said that he thinks Hand was probably bipolar (though never diagnosed). When I remarked that Wife was probably bipolar, and that her highs could often be delightfully charming, Schmidt agreed with the principle.

Anyway, Schmidt says that Hand was probably an undiagnosed bipolar, who self-medicated with "alcohol, methamphetamine, and bimbos in heat." But then he went on to explain that Hand was diagnosed with pre-cancerous polyps in his colon when he was in his early twenties. All the treatment options were terrible, so Hand just decided to live with them as long as he could—and then die. Since he had no idea how long he had to live, Hand never worried about the long term. He lived for today: fucking and drinking and toking like there was no tomorrow, ... because there might not be. (He took this to the extent of driving drunk, and was incarcerated for it several times.) Schmidt says that he wouldn't have made the same decisions Hand made, but he can understand why Hand made them. In a quick formula, Hand was reckless but not crazy.

The other thing Schmidt said about Hand is that he should have been born as a Labrador retriever. Hand was very friendly, winning, charming, and cheerful—also a good builder and contractor. Except for the building and contracting, these are all virtues that make Labradors so adorable. Plus, Schmidt added with a half-smile, if Hand had been born as a Labrador, he would have been neutered at an early age. He went on to say that this would undoubtedly have made Hand's life more manageable. 

In a nutshell, then, Hand was friendly, winning, charming, and cheerful. He was totally incapable of managing his own life, or his addictions, or his libido. And I think Schmidt still misses him. 

Do breakups cause breakage?

So here I am, minding my own business, reading John Michael Greer's "Magic Monday" column, and someone writes in anonymously to say, "at the end of my marriage, everything started breaking, one thing after the other." Someone else replies, "The day [my partner] died my phone went haywire too."

And suddenly I remember. The first time I had Debbie as a guest in my new apartment, after I left Wife, I went to make us a pot of tea and the handle broke off the tea pot. (Interestingly, the tea pot had been a wedding present to Wife and me; I no longer remember who from, but since I ended up with it, it might have been from one of my friends.) Debbie suggested that this was a sign, and I should get rid of the teapot. But I kept it. Only now if I want to use it, I use hot pads so I can pick it up by the body to pour it.

And I remember the first time Marie came to visit me, a few years later. She broke a crystal butter dish that I had salvaged when Wife and I divided everything up. There was no way to keep using that, so yes, I discarded it into the trash.

So now I wonder: is this a repeatable phenomenon? Do breakups cause breakage?

Inquiring minds want to know ....