Indiana Oh Indiana

Science and religion are like two different countries that one can visit separately but not both at the same time. My thoughts today on religion would probably have had me burned at the stake in former times and today as well if that practice were still legal, which some folks in our nation would cheer if it did return.

I was raised by two loving parents who attended rather a fundamentalist church in Indiana, a church that was all white with doctrines so narrow and specific that they defined and demanded absolutely precise rules be obeyed regarding baptism, communion, tithing, and scriptural interpretation by the pastor only, which gave the congregants a comfortable, if questionable, sense of direction. I attended that church through high school, battling with my parents and the minister over their literal views on the Bible, the Old Testament of which was, to me, a wonderland of violence, egomania, intense cruelty, and blind obedience that made me gasp in bewilderment at the reverence people showed it.

When I escaped to college, I discovered a wider view of religious experience through friends who were Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Jewish, Muslim, Lutheran, and Buddhist. A door was opened to let in fresh air about what faith could mean through more sensitive, thoughtful, and tolerant views of whatever God might signify. It wasn’t that we all agreed, but we agreed to disagree and to find whatever tenets could be shared in the most universal ways. I no longer felt like a recalcitrant child being sent to his room for defying the powers that be.

My best experience with “formal” religion was with The Disciples of Christ, a much more liberal protestant faith begun in Scotland by Thomas Campbell in the early 19^th Century. I joined the congregation near our college campus in 1964 and stayed with other Disciples congregations until I moved to Colorado in early January of 2008. I was an active member, serving on countless committees, being moderator (church board chair), deacon, and elder, as well as chair of the Pulpit Committee and Pastoral Relations Committee. I even wrote and gave sermons from time to time when the pastors were away. I felt at home with those people of faith, who allowed and encouraged a more analytical approach to religion (Is that an oxymoron?) and the search for individual views of faith, which for me became at once broader, yet more personal.

As I approach my 70^th year in this world, my views have become more and more general, based upon common sense, science, and history itself, including my own history. I honestly don’t know if there was a resurrection or if there will be a Rapture, as many Christians believe so literally and staunchly. Such considerations to me are more in the realm of magic than practical thought. I’m actually the same person with or without them. I’m concerned with my time in this world and using that time to be the best person I can be, without the promise of a reward of some pie in the sky. I have not observed that religions of the world have made us treat each other any better. In fact, I have noticed that the history of world religion and its influences have scarred humanity with intolerance, hideous violence, and divisiveness on a scale without all of which we might have done a bit better, but certainly no worse.

The intolerance, exclusivity, and actual meanness of spirit I observe in so much religious fervor today make it too easy for me to question its value, except for creating groups that huddle together perhaps in delusional pockets of US against THEM factions that seem finally not to have brought us any closer to world peace and brotherhood. Arguments over religious dogma seem such a horrific waste of time and energy, not to mention the barriers turning self-righteous groups to hatred, fear, and weapons of mass destruction, too often in the names of their gods. I will certainly never understand the ardor and even ire with which so many human beings insist upon “saving” others through conversion. Saving them from what?

Maybe I’m too rational and will have to call myself an agnostic, since I am apparently no longer capable of declaring  belief in things of which I’m not at all sure anymore. No one has come back from the grave (except in legend or religious doctrine) to speak of another life after death. I simply don’t know, but I don’t believe not knowing should be considered a crime either. Believing and wanting to believe are not the same thing any more than wondering and knowing are the same thing. My morality is based upon how I treat my fellow beings and the planet which I inhabit. Those are realities I can observe and influence daily. They are not speculative but are physical realities. Postponed rewards are abstractions to me that some religions dangle before us, sometimes based more upon pointless suffering and personal denial than upon actual good deeds and practical help given to our fellow creatures. I do believe in the important immediacy of charitable acts encouraged by some religions, but I don’t expect a halo or wings after I die as rewards for my kindness. Good will is its own reward. Jumping through doctrinal hoops won’t enhance that reward or be a substitute for it. We are in this world together. All of us. Our purpose includes taking care of each other and nurturing the planet itself. Too much religion today has forgotten these things in favor of some kind of glory in being “right.”

Despite my being a doubting Thomas, I still believe in a very broad vision of God. I cannot and do not wish to nail his image (no pun intended) or to specify what or where He is. I don’t know how or why creation was accomplished, but I can put a name to it by calling it God. Scientists know much more than I do about origins of solar systems and life, but I would wager that when it comes to God or life after death, theologians don’t know any more than I or anyone else does, for all their dazzling verbal acumen and millions of pages written about what is perhaps only a collective hunch, as Lily Tomlin might express it. My comfort zone should fit some level of reality itself (whatever that turns out to be), not reality and doctrine made to fit my comfort zone, which is what I see so often by people who cherry pick or choose, cafeteria-style what they want or need from their religious beliefs.

Strangely enough, I still pray for all those who are suffering and also for the healing of our planet. There may be a power we don’t yet understand but that exists in a large network kind of way among all human beings through some cosmic energy. I don’t know, but I call it God in any case. I don’t think prayers are like text messages to some awesome deity, but I do believe in some way that the universe and its physical laws are basically user-friendly, involving some level of karma, which is no stranger than believing about water being turned into wine, walking upon water, or the reality and significance of the empty tomb. As human beings, we must deal with supposition when it comes to the “maybe” of religion.

I know that I’m not alone in being skeptical about so much formal doctrine that so many other people seem to accept blithely and without question or doubt. My heart (not a very scientific source for much except pumping blood) tells me that the only sin in this world is deliberately hurting ourselves or others. This should be no less valid than a friend’s heart telling him that there is a holy trinity or a Rapture on its way. I suppose if I lived my life based just upon what I can know factually, there would be no literature, poetry, music, or art that would mean much to me. There might be only books of chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Then we would be automatons and not concern ourselves with the mystery of remote and essentially unknowable things, the last of which perhaps really is God.   JB

It is so difficult to live in the moment. More and more we seem to be bombarded by conflicting stimuli that are unwarranted and often not wanted. All around us are the distractions of traffic when we are driving, drug commercials when we watch television, the interruptions of phone calls and text messages, and extraneous noise so constant that we become almost numb to its presence.

Of course, some people are so accustomed to constant “noise” that they cannot do without it, as though it were some kind of heartbeat without which life would lose all meaning. The illusion of being “connected” to other people via cellphones and texting constantly is a symptom of our growing addiction to ever more stimulation resulting in a terrible unexpressed fear of quiet moments of seeming inactivity, when perhaps we may feel entombed and alone. Also, because we are assaulted as never before by frequent images on television of slaughter or its aftermath from terrorist attacks and occurrences of domestic killing, we cannot always bear the silence of looking inward to process such horrors. Ultimately we are afraid of death itself, the final silence that comes to us all.

Many of us are healed by those moments in nature when we feel part of creation itself. There is something about the special silence in nature, in sounds of breaking ocean waves, the buzzing of bees, the whisper of a breeze, the flutter of birds’ wings, the music of their songs, the crunch underfoot of autumn leaves, or the color and fragrance of flowers that gives us humans a different perspective on our place in the grander scheme of things, a scheme of which we are only a small part.

Because so many of us live in a world that is both loud and intrusive in so many ways and getting louder all the time, we need as individuals and in groups too those quiet times away from the hustle bustle of modern life. Retreat through meditation, communing with nature, expression of gratitude through prayer, and escape occasionally from electronics that can otherwise turn us into unfeeling automatons can, I believe, heal wounds of which we are not always even aware.

The “something else” which we have forgotten in contemporary life, because it does not have a button to push or knob to turn in order to activate it, is already inside us. It is a something that can be turned on only by, at least once in a while, turning off the machine-ridden world around us.   JB

America’s fascination with celebrity for its own sake has become, in recent years, not only something of a preoccupation but also what many may call an obsession.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s my paternal grandmother read with great zeal the tabloids, like The National Enquirer, which Grandma knew was only a gossip sheet filled with outrageous stories like, “Elvis Is Living in My Basement.” Other features included bizarre snippets like, “Woman Mistakes Glue stick for Deodorant: Can’t Take off Dress for Ten Days.” I’m not sure that many readers believed the stories were real “news,” but the entertainment value was not unlike that from Mad Magazine or Cracked for us kids. No one expected such reading to be on a level of The New York Times or The Washington Post.

Today’s entertainment industry and news about famous people seem to have merged into one massive and somewhat frightening glob of silliness that many people take seriously. There is an endless number of fan magazines, as well as television programs about people like the Kardashians, who are famous mostly for being famous. Fame for its own sake has become enough in our culture to merit not only attention but also some cultish form of adoration. In addition to more fan magazines and television programs with all their gossipy tidbits and ads, we now have Twitter, Facebook, and electronic social networks through cellphones and computers spreading tittle-tattle that would have given our great grandparents cardiac arrest.

At the gym yesterday, while on a treadmill, I was a captive audience watching on a large television screen a program called The Wendy Williams Show, which besides giving advice on such matters as dating, focuses on “news” about celebrities from television, sports, and film in the show’s segment called “Celebrity Fan Out.” Ms. Williams, a sumptuous diva with breasts the size of beach balls, sits, as though upon a throne, dispensing the latest tidings about the rich and famous, as the audience sits enraptured by often mundane details about what the celebs are up to. Cameras zoom in on faces in the crowd, faces that nod knowingly about the smallest trivia of the rich and powerful, even about the new way someone is parting his hair or how high a movie star’s heels are.

All this, at least for me, creates an almost creepy form of fake and unwarranted intimacy that leads one to believe that there are people who live vicariously through celebrities they have never even met and that knowing what kind of face soap a well-known (or infamous) national or international personality uses somehow elevates the fan’s life to a new level of quality or glamor. This is, of course, the basis for using celebrities to endorse almost everything the rest of us buy, from cars to toothpaste. In fact, I don’t really give a damn what kind of cough drops a famous quarterback uses or the brand of life insurance purchased by a celebrated singer, but the power of such advertising is often subliminal. It has nothing whatever to do with rational thinking. It is where fantasy and reality merge as they do for children, who demand a certain brand of breakfast cereal recommended by a favorite cartoon character. In that respect, most celebrities are part fantasy anyway, manufactured by publicity experts, the media, and by fans themselves. That fine line between what is real and what is imagined is hopelessly blurred for many gullible worshipers.

I sometimes wonder what, if any, repercussions there are for people whose thoughts hover almost incessantly over the remote, sometimes fantastic or mythical creatures of Hollywood and sports whom they will never even meet, while relationships with friends and family come second. It is unlikely that any real epiphany is in sight for those folks mesmerized by celebrity, mainly because, however impersonal and distant the artificially constructed influence of the rich and famous, that influence is big business.

JB

During any political campaign, especially one for the Presidency of the United States, there will inevitably be the need to reduce candidates to their bare essentials, that is to caricatures of their personalities with particular focus upon their weaknesses. The number of such drawings for each candidate at this time for the next elections is staggering, and I continue to be fascinated by each artist’s renderings in depictions that are distilled down to non-verbal likenesses of those in competition for the highest office in the land. I’ve been collecting such caricatures and will share my favorite ten here, in alphabetical order. I included two for Donald Trump, because I couldn’t decide which of the top two was my favorite. The reader may draw his or her own conclusions about which ones work best.   JB (That’s John Bolinger, not Jeb Bush)

Jeb Bush

Ben Carson

Chris Christie

Hillary Clinton

Ted Cruz

Rand Paul

Marco Rubio

Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump 1

Donald Trump 2 (Dairy Queen Donald)

There you have them, folks…the candidates for President of our country. Caricatures are made generally for the most prominent people in the news, people of huge importance for one reason or another. No one here was favored,  just exposed through the humor and occasional pathos of visual art.   JB

District of Columbia, United States of America.

I’ve never been particularly political, though in high school I did campaign for Louise Bryk with posters that beamed, “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise for president of the senior class.” She lost the election.

I have found people to be generally more emotional than rational regarding sports and politics. There is something purely tribal about exclusive devotion to one team for baseball, basketball, football, soccer, or ice hockey or to someone as a candidate for President of the United States. I have friends whose loyalty to a particular team is so rabid that it becomes almost comic, at least to me, who doesn’t know one player from another as they compete for points in activities that are so remote and impersonal that it is like watching predatory behavior in some documentary about life at the bottom of the sea. I realize too that this makes me very abnormal, but I don’t know any of their names, and they don’t know or care about mine either. The phenomenon remains a mystery to me, but as I am entering the 70^th year of my life, it seems highly unlikely that any revelation is imminent.

I do experience increased levels of adrenalin from time to time over politics, mainly because there seems to be almost nothing rational about the political arena these days. Personal attacks and skewed information exchanged between candidates and political parties often have nothing to do with social issues or my own life. Listening to insults about a hairstyle or who stayed in the restroom too long serve only to distance me still further from the backbiting tactics of those vying for public office. I’ve discovered that as someone born and perpetually residing in the middle of our nation’s social fabric and despite my having voted in national and municipal elections since 1968, my individual life has not been much changed by any election in memory.

It has been said that it is our civic duty as citizens to vote in order to maintain a satisfactory status quo or to modify it. If an idiot is elected (and I can think of several state governors in this category), he or she will be ousted when a conscientious public bands together with enough common sense and outrage. Otherwise (and I know this is a jaded question), how much difference does it make nowadays who is elected to any office? The answer is that the more we become collectively complacent, the more ground will be gained, inch by inch, by the already enormously wealthy puppeteers, who pull many strings in government and in society at large and for whom greed for its own sake seems to be a sport in itself. Bernie Sanders, a man for whom issues are paramount, has helped me to realize this truth, despite wrangling by other candidates who have turned politics into a puerile shooting range of insults unworthy even of seventh graders. Those insults and personal attacks are meant to distract voters with the absurd, partly subliminal machismo with which Americans have been enamored in both sports and politics for generations.

We need to think carefully about the differences (if any) between our favorite teams winning football games and our political favorites winning  elections. Neither win is really personal for me, but the latter may have consequences well beyond a scoreboard or the rhetoric and other verbal shenanigans that are such annoying adjuncts of elections, especially on the national level.

Many voters have become enraged by the duplicity and sloth of Congress to the extent that those voters want nothing more than to distance themselves from anything even suggesting traditional politics and are more in favor of apolitical figures, who gain notice and popularity by thumbing their noses at the Washington establishment and anything related to our all too familiar political landscape of the past fifty years. My concern on that subject is that whoever becomes our next president will need to have a strong grasp of national politics and government with all the complexities of the Washington scene, for better or worse. That grasp can be accomplished by experience and razor-sharp intelligence, but the logic of electing someone who eschews political experience and knows little or nothing about the extremely complex machinations of government is flawed at best. The same “logic” might suggest that someone who has had a bad experience with a plumber, electrician, or carpenter should hire someone disconnected from such backgrounds and skills. Frankly, if my kitchen sink is leaking into the basement, I want someone who has specific experience to make repairs. In Washington I want a President who knows the ins and outs, along with the trickery and lies of politics in all its subtle chicanery, to lead my country, someone who will bring together a nation that has fragmented into too many personal agendas.

Several kinds of specific expertise and experience are necessary for this most difficult and thankless job on the planet. Avoiding those attributes in favor of a sentimental but honest greenhorn is the same level of thinking that would vote in someone who simply has an honest face and isn’t cagey enough to pull anything over on the nation. In that case why not elect Homer Simpson as President of the United States? His being a cartoon doesn’t seem to make him less qualified or more unreal than several of the current candidates.

I don’t want a puppet. I want a president. There must be a middle ground, where we find some level of cold, hard sanity instead of the flood of political snippets, half-information, innuendos, and ridiculous posturing that have become the shaky bulwark of this carnival of a presidential campaign.    JB

This morning I was thinking about blogging and why I or anyone else would continue to post information, ideas, hopes, and dreams into what the writer Armistead Maupin called “the void, into the grey ether of faceless strangers.”  I suppose that one reason I continue to blog is that it is an incentive to organize and express my thoughts almost on a daily basis. Maybe it’s my way of postponing Alzheimer’s. My friends are always in mind when I’m writing, though I don’t express my views based upon their comfort zones, or anyone else’s.  People send prayers based upon faith that those prayers will land somewhere and be heard and in hope that they will be answered in time.  In a way blogging for me is like that.  Each day I imagine someone reading what I write and either agreeing or being stimulated to disagree.  Sometimes I envision people reading what I’ve written and saying things like, “Ah yes, he’s right on the money about that,” or perhaps, “This guy is completely nuts!”  Either way, I am heard.

Ego certainly has a hand in my writing and probably in that of most other writers.  As I never had children, there is usually an unspoken desire that I leave something behind to be considered after I’m gone.  Though not a consistently conscious reflection, it is, I believe, often just under the surface of my efforts to leave behind something well written.  In that respect, the six books of mine that have been published bring me comfort on some level, and working on the next two books gives me a continuing creative purpose. In the Middle Ages, even monks had the desire to leave some of their own thoughts behind in writing.  Though monks were often scribes copying sacred texts in breathtaking illuminated manuscripts, many also wrote little notes in the margins about their personal views on earth and heaven.  In 1953 the American composer, Samuel Barber (1910-1981) compiled ten such improvisational texts by Irish monks from the 8th to the 13th Century in translation and created a song cycle from them.  One is about a monk and his cat, each pursuing his purpose, one immersed in study, the other preoccupied with catching mice.  In another, called “The Heavenly Banquet,” the monk scribbled in the manuscript margin that he hoped to see in heaven the Virgin Mary and the Holy Family ‘round a great lake of beer.  I’m not sure that he ever really expected to be read and remembered for that verbal image, but he felt a compulsion to express it on paper, nonetheless.  That “compulsion” goes back even further to those who carved messages in stone or pressed them into clay tablets.  Maybe they too were “blogging.”  Those who tell their stories to bartenders or to grandchildren are perhaps satisfying the same need to share their experiences and views.

People who feel the need to text daily, to e-mail, to create graffiti, are all “bloggers” of different sorts.  Again, it all goes back to the need to communicate, which is a very human pursuit.  For perhaps the first time in history, we are all able to share our thoughts with hundreds or even thousands of others at once without having to be on the radio or on television.  There is, therefore, all the more reason for us to refine or distill our thoughts in writing in order to express something in the best ways we can, whether for sheer entertainment or enlightenment, which often overlap anyway.   JB

The domino effect of racism from even before the American Civil War has intensified once again, filtered only through the national media, since the Trayvon Martin case just three years ago. Though blacks in poor, gang-ridden neighborhoods seem to be killing each other in far more staggering numbers in recent years, it is the case of blacks being gunned down by white police officers that has become the ugly fat rising to the surface of this dreadful vat of toxic soup called racism in our country.

The most recent example is that of the teenager gunned down in Chicago and shot sixteen times after his defiance of a white policeman. The shameful cover-up of the details for over a year has left Chicago politicians and law enforcement personnel standing around with some of that ugly fat covering their upper lips. Though the kid wasn’t exactly a National Merit finalist or someone to be trusted with anyone’s car keys, he didn’t deserve to be killed in cold blood. OK, I wasn’t there, but sixteen gunshots in his body in just a few seconds, while the kid was armed only with a knife, speaks of an irrational, uncontrollable rage on the part of that cop.

Of course, my white middle class experience about such conflicts usually makes me believe that if somebody, no matter what color, isn’t committing a crime, he probably won’t be bothered by the police, but I’ve been told that my attitude about avoiding crime in the first place is naïve in the face of the oppression, poverty, and disenfranchisement endured by so many more blacks than by whites. The bottom line, however, is that had the same crime been committed by a white kid, the chances of his being shot sixteen times would certainly have been reduced or eliminated. About that I have little doubt. We are still one of the most racist nations on earth, but we see it in laser focus only in these instances of slaughter, especially in the church shooting in Alabama last summer by the racist lunatic, who like many other poor, uneducated whites, sees black pride and anger as “uppity.” This has helped me to understand better the true meaning of “Black lives matter” and the insanity of those very bad losers who are still angry that they lost the war 150 years ago.

The aftershock continues in other parts of society too. This past week protestors at Princeton University demonstrated against any honors recognized by the school for Woodrow Wilson (a former college president there and President of the United States during WWI) whom the complainers have now labeled a racist who allowed his presidential cabinet to be composed entirely of white men a century ago.

If I were black, perhaps I could better comprehend such outrage along with the anger felt against those who still cling to the American confederate flag as a symbol of God knows what in the year 2015. I agree that people in our history should be criticized for their mistakes but praised for the good they did. History books need to include unpleasant facts, whether they offend or not. Such things are parts of our past as a country and we must see them for what they were in the context of when they occurred. Shall we erase or revile, for example, those American Presidents who owned slaves while in office? They would include Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Taylor, Polk, and Tyler. At some point it becomes necessary for us to see the past for what it was when it was happening.  One would think that at Princeton a gold statue had been erected to honor someone like Governor George Wallace.

If we begin giving carte blanche to everyone who is offended by the timely and unintentional weaknesses of characters who also did great things, our history books will become tomes of blank pages. As a nation we have grown  and continue to do so, even while we’re making new mistakes, but we need to remember that the world a century ago, two or three centuries ago was a different place with leaders who did good along with bad done at times through sheer ignorance shared by the usual majority of each era. Criticize the wrong that is rampant now. Staging witch hunts for the dead who once had heavy worlds upon their shoulders isn’t as enlightening as it is bitter, angry, and misplaced.   JB

What is there about extreme religious fanaticism that brings out the basest, most savage behavior in human beings, who otherwise at least seem like peaceful, productive individuals? The weapons used by modern religious fanatics are still, despite guns and bombs, the same old methods of persecution through the dark, evil motives in deeds as old as history, going back to rituals of sacrifice and shedding blood for beliefs that have absolutely no material presence or confirmation in this world. The basic tenet of this “thinking” is, “Because you don’t believe exactly what I believe, I’m going to kill you, or make your life as miserable as I can in the name of my god.” The Allah of ISIS is certainly not the Allah for the rest of Islam. After their murderous sprees, the members if ISIS always shout, “God is great,” but one can’t help but wonder to what kind of cruel, insensitive, primitive deity they pray. Apparently this “god” is a figment of their own dark, broken imaginations and lusts for power, a power which they see only in terms of destruction and death.

The actual motives are based often upon fear, need for complete control over other people, and an awful terror that others might be living pleasant, meaningful, independent lives under different sets of “rules” that may contradict the persecutors’ rigid, oppressive, or even impossible laws of human behavior. In fact, such irrational, barbaric reactions to the happiness of others has nothing at all to do with a god of any name or type of devotion to anything but a severely stunted view, so narrow that it excludes any life outside its vacuum of hate, terror, and a twisted fear that someone might be experiencing some sensory comfort or other moment of joy. This has always been true of the dogmatic, confined convictions of any fundamentalist religious sect. It is still true, to some extent, even in our own country,  minus the bombs. A wag once wrote that the Puritans were a group of religious people who lived in fear that somewhere someone might be having a good time. That mentality led to the Salem witch trials of 1692, but modern fanatics like those associated with ISIS use guns and body bombs instead of Bibles to persecute, murder, or maim those who don’t fit into the thimble-sized, airless world of slaughtering one’s way to paradise, a concept so foreign to most people that it must be labeled “psychotic,” not “religious.” The events in Paris last January and this week have demonstrated the treachery and cowardice of hatred disguised as religious faithfulness or devotion, a treachery for which human life means less than nothing. If there is any good news regarding such unbridled madness, it is that such dictatorial and inhuman behavior will burn itself out, because it has nothing to offer but invisible pie in the sky rewards at the cost of all joy and compassion in this world. People are not lab rats that can be forced into inane beliefs that deny the freedom the human spirit craves as much as oxygen itself. The self-appointed lunatics who see themselves as enforcers of such ugly lies upon the human soul are fighting a losing battle. Their beliefs have nothing to do with real Islam or any other religious doctrine. Their entire existence is a desperate sham.

The world will not bow to such colossal stupidity that offers nothing but the guarantee of a crushed spirit and unspeakable misery. No, there will never be multitudes of people flocking to join the ranks under such a monstrous lie, devoid of hope, meaning, or beauty. Those few who do follow such a blind, hateful creed will be only the few who have an abiding hatred of humanity and the world itself, and even for themselves in their quest for some kind of identity, and who find some terrible appeal in pain and destruction for everyone around them. The distinctions between religious fervor and mindless, wanton cruelty have blurred in their own minds but have become crystal clear once again to the rest of the world, a world now uniting as never before to fight against this senseless evil to make sure that civilization and love itself are strengthened and protected, not in the name of some horrible abstraction but in the name of healing the real world for all its people.   JB

My old Friend Charlotte Kooistra wrote something about why rescue animals are so important in our lives. I was so deeply moved by it that I’ve decided to share the letter with the world-at-large. (with Charlotte’s permission)    JB

True Companions Who Have My Back

My oldest nephew Scott, once very allergic to pets, asked me why I had pets, currently a very sick one, when they brought some joy but also so much heartache and grief. This was my response:
Eighty-seven animals…a perpetual kennel with revolving doors….yes that used to be US. Now we have one elderly dog with whom I share age related pains, loss of hearing, and excess weight. And we have one elderly cancer ridden cat who is on her way out with the door closing very slowly behind her….a door stop there for now keeping it open as long as possible. I think you have missed the joy of companion animal ownership though your life has been enriched in so many other ways.

There are no regrets when they pass. You can only grieve in proportion to how much you love them which is why I fall apart upon a death in our sentient creature family. They are my adopted kids, the ones I never had. But they love me no matter what. I could have really messed with the life of a human baby. These just drool and stare at you with wonder and unconditional love. Unlike tactless conversations with humans I regret, judgments that I fight when someone wrongs me or another loved one, these critters just really don’t give a flying crap (pun intended) no matter what I say, do, or think. And they are in touch with my feelings. Say that about all my human contacts….. They choose us as their owners or rather they own us…we rent them for a period of time on their terms…they come into our lives to teach us things and at times have been the only connection I have had to the outside world, joy, compassion, laughter, and healing.

When I was depressed and anxious, they sensed my anguish. During my darkest days donned in my chenille robe with bed hair I have arisen only to feed one of them which then got me to the shower, to eat a good meal, and to venture out to get the mail. Tales wag as I reentered the house because my dog greeted me like I’ve been gone forever. He is so happy to see me, he squeals.

We have a contract with them and they may know the start and end dates before we do. When we have learned enough from them, they pass on only with the promise that we will bring in another rookie dog or cat and save a life. In fact I think they tweak that process too because as they get closer to their passing, I find myself looking more at animal rescue sites or photos of kittens or aged dogs…subliminal or obvious messages sent by those who sleep on or at the foot of our bed. That’s also when they leave. To give more room to the fledgling, the underdogs or under-cats who need us, the young ones from an overabundant breeding year or an old one who stays with us as hospice care and gets a 10” thick pillow for a bed and homemade grass fed hamburger.   Now I ask you who has sat on your bed and worshiped you lately?  Char

All through school I was someone who didn’t look forward to gym class. Competing with other boys at physical games, in races, and on tumbling mats was something for which I occasionally even faked illness to avoid.

The ego-defeating experience in middle school of doing laps around the gym and hearing Coach Blint’s sarcastic dictum of “Come on, Fluffy, this ain’t no ballet!” has never left me, even in college, when I played tennis under the sneering instruction of Coach Barnes, who made us play outdoors in December snow wearing only our tennis shorts and polo shirts in order to “toughen” us up and mold us into “real men.” That last phrase, simplistic and primitive as it is, has always intimidated me to the point of often, in groups of other men, making me feel I’m attending a party to which I wasn’t really invited, and this is not in any way based upon other men trying to lower my self-esteem. There’s never anything deliberately inflicted that should make me feel subordinate. The feeling of inferiority is already inside me, where it cowers at talk about football and golf scores, both sports of which I would happily give up in favor of a root canal or mild case of melanoma.

For these reasons I have generally gravitated socially toward groups of what society calls “men of academia,” that safe stratum of manhood where conversation hovers around the twists and turns of verbal communication more than around what I see as distant, impersonal, abstract talk about sports teams, not one of whose players I know by name or who knows me either. And that isn’t to say that an egghead can’t be an avid sports fan or a superb athlete can’t be intellectually gifted. Stereotypes work only part of the time, but somehow our society perpetuates a value system of people based too much upon black and white, overly conventionalized portraits of the way it believes men and women, respectively, are supposed to think and behave. No wonder there have been several feminist movements over the past century!

That brings me to the real reason for my writing this little essay. Though I’m not really much overweight, I’ve joined a gym, where I work out three mornings a week in order to tone up a body that, if left to its own devices, would eventually resemble a large potato. I’ve been working hard on the treadmill and on machines that provide resistance exercises targeting various muscles for this body, which will turn seventy this winter. The many men and women who work out there represent every possible age group and body type.

Everywhere are posted signs that read, “No Judgment,” a message upon which I hope everyone there focuses from time to time. The locker room and showers are where the unadorned truth is most evident about the degrees of sculpted beauty achieved by the many participants with bodies resembling everyone from Frodo Baggins in The Hobbit to Adonis from classical Greek mythology.

I remain somewhere between those two images and must leave it to the reader’s imagination to summon whatever appearance he can. Maybe by next spring my confidence will be sufficiently improved that even the insults of my old coaches can no longer prove a menace to me.   JB