Indiana Oh Indiana

When I was in the fourth grade, there was a student named Kenneth Kirstel in my class. It was a time of “no talking” in that room (unless called upon to do so) or in lines for fire drills or cafeteria lunches. Like little soldiers, we followed directions and regimentation, mostly to avoid the crack on our knuckles from the pointer stick wielded by our teacher, Mrs. Crumbly (Trust me when I tell you how much fun we had with that name). Kenneth was an anomaly in that little world of strict rules that often made us resemble army ants on a mission, the purpose of which generally escaped most of us.

 Having been taught “mannerly behavior” by my parents and schoolteachers, I saw Kenny’s bad conduct as an exciting introduction to actual rebellion. When he pulled the ponytail of hair on the girl sitting in front of him, tripped someone walking past his desk, or made belching sounds during a slide presentation, I was captivated by what I saw as a kind of freedom and temporary escape from the very tight regimen of our otherwise rather robotic behavior.

Our former President, Donald trump, has shown himself to be the Kenneth Kirstel of my adult life over the past few years, only on a much larger scale, where Trump’s deliberately bad manners make Kenneth Kirstel resemble some kind of hallowed saint. Trump’s admirers are like clueless sheep, who from afar, admire and even worship his bad manners, greed, and vulgar attitudes of absolute superiority. His fourth-grade vocabulary doesn’t hurt either in creating that bad boy image that so many chumps seem to admire. Such bravado allows him to say or do anything he wishes, like using silly, childish names, for those with whom he disagrees or who have criticized him in any way or exaggerating the gaffs of others to boost his own, frail little ego, an ego that needs a tire pump to puff it up to his fake Trumpian standards of egomaniacal proportions.

I sometimes wonder what Kenneth Kirstel is doing now and imagine the great appeal he would have to Trumpsters everywhere, who would probably welcome him to the deceptive, unethical world of politics that they have created for their idol.  JB

The legal accusations against Trump are staggering, but what worries me most is the casual acceptance of his lawless self-confidence and smug attitude about his current trials, about which he refuses to admit any wrongdoing, not to mention the support of his blind, gullible worshipers. The Christian right is particularly willing to turn a blind eye to the man’s continuing evil behavior.  His fakery is staggering. I’m sick to death of his ranting outside the hearings and claiming that the courts are rigged in favor of Democrats.  I’m beginning to hate the color orange!

Our nation is more a cesspool of ignorance than I ever imagined with that terrifying willingness to crown Trump emperor of the United States. And, Republicans have relinquished every shred of their identity and dignity in their worship of the Golden Calf that Trump represents. It’s terrifying that he could become President again and be protected against all the just and necessary judgments against him. On the world stage we’re losing every last shred of dignity we may have had before.

JB

Each year requires a bit more energy to blow out the candles on one’s birthday cake. Though I don’t yet require an oxygen tank for that task, I do feel the increasing effort to accomplish physical tasks (no matter how small) about which I used to think almost nothing at all. Around the next birthday corner for me lurks my seventy-eighth year. The number has, for me at least, more immediate power than the word itself.

In fact, as I approach the monumentally powerful threshold we call “eighty,” the more I envy those who are perhaps on edge about turning forty or fifty, ages to which we attribute revelation and sharp awareness, based often upon a combination of courage and revelation about what it means to be “still hanging around.”

I’ve known people personally, who, even just turning a mere thirty, couldn’t cope with what they too often perceived as being a step nearer the cemetery. What I believe most strongly about in facing those birthday cakes after age thirty, is that we all need things which we can look forward to. Any plan to accomplish something, even if it’s just to paint the kitchen, widens our view and produces a sense of purpose and meaning.

Also, no one must age alone. Everyone among family and friends who is still living has something to look forward to, even if only dinner with a friend. There is no living person who is not growing older. We’re all aging, and the older a person is, the more he or she can (and should) appreciate every hour of every day as a gift or extension of life and the mysterious power it endows upon every breath each of us takes, until that final “rest” comes to pay its last visit.   JB

I wonder sometimes how history will look back upon the era in which we’re now living. The lies and corruption may require hundreds of pages for Trump, whom future citizens may see (I hope) for who he really was without all the Republican glitter that has blinded so many to the horrors of his crimes against the nation.  Mindless, mob worship of him always reminds me of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and Fascist Italy under Mussolini of the same period. I do believe that, eventually, truth will have to prevail, as many folks try to hide their former adoration of Trump, who has shown himself to be a criminally insane egomaniac whose hatred so many have found entertaining or comforting on some impossible level of blindness. JB

Love and need are related on some level. I’m not certain if or where there is a division between them except that we like to think of “pure” love as having little if any connection to necessity or expectation of gratitude. I suppose that “pure” love (if there is such a thing) asks for no payment (Don’t confuse sex and love here). The differences may be too obvious to require pondering. When a baby is fed by its mother, a bond of need is formed physically by an expectation of nourishment. No words are necessary. The division between the stomach’s requirements and those intangible ones of the heart (in its metaphysical form, not in its bodily, blood-pumping one) are metaphysical or immaterial.

There is a difference between the material (physical) significance of love and need. If there is such a thing as “pure” love, I doubt that it has any physical requirements, although need can certainly be physical or emotional, or both. “Pure” love, has no expectation of being “paid back” in any way. Though gratitude is an abstract emotion, it can have a physical effect upon the heart when an old friend or lover is missed over time. The yearning can hurt both physically and emotionally.

Love and need can also merge so that any division becomes at some point immaterial. I suppose that blend is a great gift and epiphany when a man and woman stand over a cake celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary, or when two dear friends celebrate the years they have known each other through a bond of affection of the good times and also the bad times from which each has rescued the other.

Human relationships are complex gifts that pave life’s difficult and bumpy roads with the multi-faceted connections we can simply call “love.”   JB

I was brought up (raised) by parents who believed in God through weekly church attendance and Sunday school. For my eighth birthday I was given a pocket version of the Christian Bible by my maternal grandparents and, from my parents, a J.C Higgins bicycle. I think that the bike brought me closer to God (twice in heavy traffic) than the Bible did, but I continued attending church and Sunday school almost through my senior year in high school, enjoying it in almost the same way I enjoyed science fiction. I kept under wraps all my questions and misgivings about religion so as not to reveal that, in reality, I was a heathen within a family whose religious devotion seemed authentic and where saying “I don’t really believe in all this God stuff” would have created in our home at least two cases of cardiac arrest.

When I was in high school (sophomore year), I finally confessed to not being able to believe literally (as my parents did) in the Bible as anything more than a long and wordy guide to not being a bad boy. The panic this caused my dear parents was cosmic, to say the least. Every Thursday evening for several weeks, I was driven by Dad to the office of our pastor (also my uncle), where I expressed all my doubts with unanswerable questions that could have won me an automobile on any game show run by other non-believers. My uncle’s retorts and explanations to all my questions still have the ring of “Once Upon a Time” in their very remote connections to what I saw as the “real” world. The experience took me back to earlier times when my parents would read us fairy tales at bedtime, except that in those stories, I never actually thought I was going to be punished by the giants and big bad wolves that kept the stories popping.

I still attend church (a much more liberal one) for the glorious music and the simple message to love one another. If there are pearly gates after my death, I’m not certain what the ID card will be to get in. I’m counting on the angels having kept careful records of my best self.

For years afterward I attended more liberal churches than those of my parents. It was eloquent, broad-minded messages of hope and beauty that kept me going back. I have no more idea than anyone else of what lies beyond the grave. No one else does either, really. That’s what faith is. The only message that always rings true to me in all the clutter of religious threats is, “Love one another.”  JB

As a “gay” man, I have watched for many years (since I came out at age twenty) the willing self-exposure of more and more men (and women) about who they really are in terms of their sexuality. There should be no shame in being “gay” or “straight,” even though straight folks are certainly in the majority, regarding their sexual inclinations. Though the differences between straight and gay men are fundamental public judgments upon both, there is an age-old religious element responsible for the social and political persecution of homosexuals (and anyone else who is “too” different).

The only “condemnation” in the Christian Bible appears in the Old Testament book of Leviticus in which the judgment of men “loving” men is the same as that for eating shellfish. Thousands of years have evolved such judgments and funneled them down to condemning anyone who is “different” in that way. Modernity has gradually changed that optical lens.

Christianity’s track record on anyone who is too different isn’t exactly compassionate or forgiving in a stellar way. Living together despite our differences is certainly possible but not made any easier by religious zealots who need somehow to separate instead of to unite human beings as members of the same “family.”

I do understand the off-putting shock for some “straight” people seeing a pride parade with floats of scoffing and outrageously clad men, who sometimes seem to reduce the meaning of being gay to an in-your-face drag show intended to shock more than to promote any level of unity or compassion. That drag show element perhaps screams out against centuries of hateful abuse and cruel judgment, almost as a kind of revenge. I sometimes wonder if our cause is based simply upon the desire (need) to be accepted on our own terms as equals in an uncompassionate “straight” world. That subliminal rage from many centuries of cruel persecution is expressed by parading our most outrageous selves as the only way to share our sentiments with a world that is still judging us as bizarre extraterrestrials.

Time has certainly made a difference for the better, but this has occurred more from the ways we are alike than from our differences. Those differences are surely important, but stressing likenesses is also essential to mutual understanding. Love is love, no matter how it talks, dresses, or chooses its partners. Drawing people together on these issues is not easy, but it is more and more important in an arduous journey that continues.

My partner, Jim, and I have been together now for almost twenty years. He was married twice to women and has three grown children as well as many grandchildren and even great grandchildren. He can do plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work. He is most certainly not the typical gay image. My traits are not all stereotypical either, though compared to Jim, I should probably be wearing a ballet tutu (insert laugh here, please). However, this is America, where people are supposed to be “free” if they don’t harm others. I believe it is possible, even necessary that we all live together in peace and harmony. God bless America.   JB

Whenever I see myself as unlucky or depressed and just feeling sorry for myself, I think about the summer of 1968, when I worked at Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana. I have to say that the money I earned there was better than anything I could have earned at Macdonald’s, Walgreens, or the Hammond Public Library, but I thoroughly earned every cent for which I labored that summer. My worst day during my thirty-five years as a high school teacher was a joyful party compared to even my best day at the steel mill, which made Dante’s Inferno look like a lovely, paid vacation.

Our usual foreman was named Ernie, a twisted, sadistic brute of a guy, who seemed to enjoy torturing the three of us that summer who were college students, working there for only June. July, and August.

I recall vividly that first day of intense heat, ear-shattering noise, the heavy physical labor, and Ernie’s demonic voice. There were nine of us on the work crew on the “cold strip” that summer, and there were three of us who were college students, who would carry the burden of Ernie’s angst until we cartwheeled out of there in early September.

“First,” said Ernie, “I want the college guys to step forward.” Carl, Tom, and I stepped out of the line as Ernie said with intense sarcasm dripping from his lips, “I have a special job for you three knuckleheads. Step this way.” Then he led us to what he called “the grease pit,” which also contained some kind of hydraulic lift. He continued, “I want you three college clowns to remove the grease from this hole. There are some buckets and shovels down there. One of you can operate the lift control up here and then take turns at that control while the other two work on the oil and grease.” There was on his face at that moment a smile the size of the Florida Pan Handle. “Now get to it!”

Of course, the heat was oppressive, though not as intense as it would have been in the open hearth, where there were more furnaces. At that point, I wouldn’t have known the difference anyway. As it was, there were huge machines rumbling in the background every minute, so that lip-reading became a true asset in the place. The “cold strip” (What a misnomer!) made me appreciate ever after the epic poem “Dante’s Inferno” about a man’s journey through hell. After a couple of hours of heart-stopping heat and foul air, I began picturing Mom and Dad planning my funeral for which I would choose a closed casket, since I thought the grease and oil stains on my face and hands probably couldn’t be removed until I reached the age of at least forty.

This maltreatment continued through most of the rest of my time there until late August, when I needed to get things together for my trip back to the campus in Muncie, Indiana, which would seem, in contrast to the steel mill, an ascension into heaven.

By the way, before Carl, Tom and I returned to our campuses, we went to a bar to celebrate our escaping Inland Steel with our lives and bruised egos. We got deservedly smashed before calling a cab that got us home.  JB

The value of true friendships is probably inestimable. Lasting friendships anchor us in a world that is changing ever faster each year. Those friendships give us a shared history of experiences from good and bad times, because friends have seen each other at their best and at their worst. They know each other’s strengths and weaknesses but are able to extol those strengths over the weaknesses, so that forgiveness always triumphs over any possible grudges. Our hair may whiten with the years, as Microsoft programs come and go, and gas prices continue to rise higher than those we used to pay for fine jewelry, but our good friends are able to keep a sense of continuity and meaning in our lives. Whenever we ask, “Do you remember?” about something or someone from forty or fifty years before, the smile of recollection on the friend’s face as he answers, “Yes, I remember” means we are not alone.

We have something together that no amount of money can buy, because we are connected by reminiscences, even when they become the only ones left to stave off the slow approach of dementia or the oblivion of Alzheimer’s. As the years roll by, the number of friends with whom we share remembrances shrinks, like the old clothes from college that no longer fit us and have been tossed into the attic. Our perspectives shrink too, until there is no one remaining who remembers what we remember. The old friend with whom I took the wrong train and ended up in Cleveland when we were in high school together may be the last to laugh at that private recollection.

As someone who has moved across the country twice during the past six years, I know the enormous significance of dear friends I have left behind, even though we are still in regular contact by phone, computer, and occasional visits. Our dearest friends cannot be replaced by a better climate, a lovelier home, or increased financial opportunities. Friends are the “family” we choose. They are our mainstay, our stability, our safeguard in a world that is spinning faster year by year toward ever more impersonal, electronic communication, and mere “virtual” relationships as disposable as plastic water bottles. If we do nothing else of importance during our golden years, it should be to value and nurture those friendships that are the best ones, often the oldest, along with all the shared laughter and tears that they provide. JB

Thelma wore a shawl and rocked

On the two crescent moons of her chair

While the cat sprawled out

Like an old fur piece at the screen door

Henry lay on the back porch swing

Reading a tabloid from the Piggly-Wiggly:

Woman Mistake Gluestick for Deordorant-

Can’t Take Off Dress For Ten Days…

The photo said it all.

Billy stayed upstairs

With a mayonnaise jar of fireflies from Sunday night,

Their uninspired habitat having drained their batteries,

And on the wall next to the open window,

Hung a picture of the family together in the snow one Christmas,

The gray and icy river behind them contradicting

The present, passionate buzz of cicadas outside.

John Bolinger