Neon Rainbow

I remember that it began to snow in the morning before the first bell rang. Every student rushed to the long cold window to watch the big soggy flakes fall past and flutter down to the grass at street level. It was early in the season, early in December, and the snowflakes were too wet to stick. They kissed the grass briefly, then dissolved, as suddenly as dreams upon waking fly away. Nonetheless, we had our hopes. Each of us had his and her hopes and watched together for that one vigorous, high-spirited, cold-hearted flake to take hold, to linger, to join with another of like-minded ideal and thus become the first weave of a thick white bell muffling traffic stopping school terminating carpet of snow.

But there was more than this. 

We had all just come in from the cold, ears nipped by the chill and still tingling, noses pink and probably running, tennis shoes squeaking and stocking caps steaming, and there seemed something newly minted about us, fresh-baked, an unusual glimmer, a glaze.  Someone had turned on a transistor radio, allowed before the sounding of the bell, and the song playing was Neon Rainbow, by the Box Tops. 

All the people going places
Smiling with electric faces
What they find the glow erases
What they lose the glow replaces, 
And life is love ... 

And moreover, and most of all, and most importantly there was the red-haired girl, singing along to that song, my favorite song--and Ah! Hers too! Surely we were meant for each other, surely we were meant to marry someday (but how to speak? How to say such a thing?) What flurry of snow, I wondered then, could match the flurry of freckles on her face? What greater future than to count them all?

I fell in love, for the first time, that very day.

And later it rained. 

But I've never forgotten what might have been. Through all the years that have drifted down and melted away, there remains that uniquely minted moment, frozen in time, honest, true, irreproachable. 

As pure as driven snow. 

The Beginning

Yesterday my wife said she does not love me anymore. Then later on she said she does. The reason she said she did not love me was that I had forgotten to do something. I have already forgotten what I forgot, but specifics don't seem important. To me, anyway.

Well, it's really not that I forgot to do one thing, but that I forget to do most everything. I guess the frustration builds up.

She says she is tired of dealing with MS. That makes two of us. But here again my own fatigue is beside the point.

I can't deal with this anymore, she says, I can't deal with raising two children. Sasha (our 9 year old) will grow up, but you just keep growing down!

What can I say? How true, how true.

What can I do other than identify with her frustration? What can I do other than to agree that she would be best off without me?

What does she mean by I don't love you anymore? Isn't she really just talking about the man she married as opposed to the stranger she is now stuck with?

It seems that women use words differently from men. In her mind, on her tongue, love and hate are somehow able to play at mutual inclusiveness, contradictions become concepts rather than absurdities. Expression is a matter belonging to the moment, not to eternity.

I feel, therefore I speak, she says.

And I think, therefore I am.

I remember walking one time in the park with my second wife. We had been married some 12 years at that point, and things had been going downhill. It was hard to get her out of the house, it was hard to get her to talk. It was hard to get her to do anything at all other than sit on the couch with her laptop, lost to our family in games and chat rooms.

As we came down the hill, our dogs trailing behind, she turned to me and said I don't think I'm in love with you anymore.

Deja vu, right?

What was she saying, really? She was saying she missed the romance, the newness. She was saying she missed the sparks and fireworks of courtship. She was saying she missed being young, missed being thin, missed the flirtations of men, missed having a choice. In cyberspace she gazed hours on end at the reflection of the world--a different world, a world of dreams and possibilities.

I knew all this, and comprehended according to the patterns of the world. And yet deep down it stuck with me, those words, after so many years, I don't think I'm in love with you . . . Deep down, where things are judged and discerned according to the most rudimentary laws of living, the words themselves nested and remained.

I think of that now as the true beginning of the end.

And Then My Heart Stood Still

Having gotten character assassination out of my system, I will now return to a more pleasant disposition, begging the reader's pardon in the meantime for what may appear to have been a less than kind attitude toward my father-in-law.

For there is this to be considered: Without Nico there would have been no Sant Louis, and without Sant Louis there would have been no life left to me for the duration of this ever contracting time in the world that remains.

To this I was resigned, back in the old year, 2005. Two marriages had turned hard, like bread left too long in the air, and finally crumbled. The hungry abundance of unearned comfort had swallowed itself, knowing not what else to do with pain, for the effort of love seemed unlikely to provide an equal satiety.

My life simply disappeared.

And I found myself in a two room apartment overlooking the transit center, leaning hard toward the tracks. I and my dog.

There was nothing in me, for it had all slipped away in the vacuum that had taken everything else, and I found myself profoundly displaced, in body, in heart, in soul, in time. Grasping for some kind of mnemonic, I returned to drinking vodka. It was at least familiar. Maybe that was me, for I remembered it. After ten years of exotic travel, and then shipwreck, here was something which at least had remembered me.

Sometimes I would walk to the Fred Meyer store. Sometimes I would take the train downtown. For dinner I ate Asian food that came dry in small packages, a meal in one box. I would rent movies. I remembered being scared after watching The Grudge, and holding the dog close all night long.

What is frightening in and of itself grows huge, unspeakably terrifying, on a diet of ghosts and silence, alienation, regret.

I drank instead--for alcohol is the only substance that is consumable by the soul.

And then all of a sudden she was there. Just there. I know now, of course, that she came from somewhere--it seems that everyone does--and yet that one night, that first night, she was simply there, just as if she had peeked out from my own inner emptiness, a single surviving smile, and winked at me.

I took one look at you,
that's all I meant to do,
and then my heart stood still!

So goes the old Rogers and Hart song. And so it was. I might have thought that my heart had already been standing still, and yet it had not been still at all. It was my life that had been still, or maybe my hope or my faith.

One enchanted evening.

Another song.

Why did she look at me in the first place? Why did she smile. What was it that activated the effort in her to cross the room in order to talk to me?

In any case, I was from that moment lost, and therefore found.

My feet could step and walk,
my lips could move and talk,
and yet my heart stood still!

And I love you, Louis. More than anything in the world.

Maybe Life Is a Haystack

Maybe life is a haystack, and each of us a needle.

Isn't that what we think?

A man searches the daunting multitude for the woman who will love him and be his wife. He searches, or maybe he simply waits and hopes to be found. A woman anticipates the advent of the one--and finds him over and over again. But no, he is still not the one.

Wait.

Is life a haystack, really; and each of us a needle?

How is it then that we seek something special, uncommon, called apart from the numb milieu as if it were the one gold among more common metal? If each be a needle, and if sprigs of hay are all alike, how is it that we imagine oneness?

Maybe each in and of itself is all.

Is our search in life one of discovery or of conquest?

We are all in this world bound to find what we desire, and yet desire itself ever continues to hunger.

One has to wonder why there is a haystack in the first place, and why are there needles. These must be very special things--these wheats of hay, these salted needles, altogether like bees within a hive.

Ought not our nectar be like love?

All I Want is a BMW, and a Star to Steer Her By

There really are people who think that money is the measure of a man's worth. There are people for whom brand names are badges of merit, and a car, a BMW, a Mercedes, is a statement of personal superiority.

This sort of thing is of course so familiar that it has become a cliche. The notions stated above will surprise no one. And yet I am just now, at this late stage in my life, coming to realize that it's the God's honest truth. There are people out there for whom love runs a distant second or third to riches. They will in fact discard love as something of no account in favor of the inanimate thing, the soulless buck, the empty mansion, the idiot hum of a Hummer.

And sometimes those people turn up being the ones who are as close as your own right shoulder.

Oh brave new world. But it is not new, is it. It is as old as humankind.

My Mama Done Told Me

Love is lovelier
the second time around;
Just as wonderful
with both feet on the ground . . .
--Sinatra (along with whoever wrote the song)

Aside from being lovelier the second time around, love has also a greater degree of sanity on repetition, which makes it not only better, but safer, especially from an MS point of view--for I am convinced that love (and divorce and sorrow and bitterness) made a significant, if not preeminent, contribution to the flash frying of my brain some three years ago.

I guess that's what happens when you play with fire . . . and there is a certain sort of love that burns just as surely, just as deeply, and scars just as permanently.

My mama done told me, when I wasn't knee high . . .

How much of love, what percentage of love, was actually lunacy, I cannot say. It was all mixed up together, a perfect tangle of passion and prudence, confidence and fear, tenderness and harshness.

My mama done told me, son . . .

I guess the simple way to say it, minus the music and lyrics, is that practice makes a difference, and experience pays out in wisdom (or at least patience, which is the next best thing). It pays also to seek a partner who has passed as well through the same sort of mill (sorry guys, no virgins here).

A woman will sweet talk, and give you the big eye, but when her sweet talkin's done . . .

At the same time, there are lovers in this world who continually seek the same sort of madness that killed things the first time around, mistaking passion for meaning, intensity for content. Tricked by love, they enter into the same uneven, unworkable contracts, Love becomes an opiate, a narcotic, a magic potion, promising a beanstalk to the heavens, yet delivering the same old bed of weeds in the end.

A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night . . .

In a world full of ironies, and with a disease which thrives on the same, I thank my lucky stars, once again, for the affliction that is too tired to tolerate trouble, too wise to mistake a cliff for a curbing, too experienced to imagine that the searing coals are merely colorful twinkle lights.

Love's more comfortable
the second time you fall . . .

And I suppose it's even better the third and the fourth . . . .

The Dead We Know

I wonder what happened to my Canadian friend. She used to visit me often here, and sometimes on my LJ as well, but I haven't seen her in a while now. Something I said? Busted computer? Just busted in general?

I miss people when they're not around anymore, and I take people for granted when they are. I miss my mom and my dad, though I did not miss them when they were here. But that's not quite right, honestly. I think I always missed my dad, from the time I was a little boy and unto this very day. I failed to take heed of the passing time, the opportunities which came and went along the way. So did he.

I miss my brother. Twenty-seven years gone now. I still dream of him. Those are good dreams. He seems most often to enter into the dream that is confused and troubling and somehow take command of it, defusing anxiety, dispersing the fog, leading to the path, the purpose, the light. I am glad I still dream of my brother.

I miss my children. My step-children. Ex-step children. All grown up now, scattered like so many marbles to the corners and under the tables. Only two or three years ago I would speak to them nearly every day.

Most of all I miss my son, abducted by schizophrenia so long ago, lost to me in lands of his own, which I can neither enter nor name. And yet my heart continues to search, day after day, remembering when we held hands on the way to school, remembering how he rode on my back, remembering the games we played, the places we went, the stories we told. My heart remembers the fierce love of its youth, the panic in thinking for a moment that we could lose him, the solemn and unbreakable promise of a parent to never leave, never forsake, and never let harm get past his guard.

So it happens that tears so readily come to my eyes. So it continues to happen for the first time, over and over and over again. My mother, my father, my brother, my son.

Hold tight to what you have, cherish and adore, for tomorrow keeps its secrets to itself, and takes no council in determining its course.

Living Water, III

This morning I got a phone call from my schizophrenic son. He wanted me to know that should he suddenly die, or otherwise simply disappear--not that this was likely, but just in case--I should make it a point of the most pressing urgency to visit his trailer home and retrieve every page and portion of the world shattering research he has been doing for the last few years. I am under no circumstances to let this fall into his mother's hands. I am to personally gather it, protect it with my life, and bring it to the waiting world.

Contained in these pages, or so he tells me, is material of the most profound nature, the secrets of both the earth and the heavens. If used in the proper manner, it can change the world.

Last night he experienced a moment of the purest sort of revelation. Life, he said, society, religion, politics, culture, the whole interweaving of systems, ideas, and resulting practices, is based on hate. Hate is the foundation, corrupting all from the bottom up, a sterile soil at the depth of the garden, an evil from which nothing good can grow.

We must be transformed, he said. By love.

Revelation indeed. Everlasting revelation.

Well, I'm thinking Deja vu, dude. So many of us seem to be on the same page. And though we may be as wrong as Wellington Boone, we shall nonetheless persist, because our particular wrong is right.

Where is the reward, where the treasure? It is where the heart is, needing nothing, completely sufficient in and of itself. What is accomplished resides in the doing, what is gained is that which is given.

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends.

In loving, therefore; in patience, in tolerance, in kindness, in forgiveness, we commit our hearts not to what is temporal, but to those things which eternally transform, one soul at a time. The reward is new life, day by day, and one could not ask for a better return.

Living Water, II

Wellington Boone was wrong. Or was he?

He had said, in the space of 200 pages or so, that if a man will go out of his way to serve others, then others will acknowledge the effort in like manner, i.e. the natural response to giving is to give in return.

Now, having afforded the theory a trial run of some 10 years' duration, I can say nothing other than that the results have consistently failed to support the hypothesis. Rather, extravagant giving would appear to create in others an extravagant appetite for receiving.

People do not see the force of will behind self-effacement. They simply conclude that you are weak. They do not see the strength in forbearance. They simply conclude that you are foolish. They do not understand that generosity is powered by love, nor that true love elevates the one who is loved above the common elements of personal recompense.

I have become, therefore, the proverbial doormat. Or so they will say, even as they continue to benefit by every property they have deemed foolish, weak, callow, obtuse.

What's up with that, Mr. Boone?

The answer, as it happens, is a bit beyond the mere ink that ended up on the page.

Living Water, I

If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.
--John 7:37-38

I once read a book by fellow named Wellington Boone, a Georgia preacher who had a lot of say about compassion, tolerance, self-effacement, and the sacrificial love of Christ. I have not recovered since. The fool thing has ruined my life.

Here's the trouble. Love in this fine old world is commonly pursued for reward. Yes, when we love, we fully expect to be loved in return (and most often with interest). We serve expecting to be served. Acts of unusual kindness and charity, rare things that they are, anticipate a lively acknowledgment at least, and preferably adoration.

It seems a simple enough equation, a foolproof sort of math. I cannot fault Mr. Boone for having made assumptions which must have seemed like no-brainers. I was right there with him, on the very same page, as it were.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

So said the Beatles. And what better authority could one desire?

Well, the Beatles were wrong. Wellington Boone was wrong. (Jim Baker was wrong too, but that's a different story).

Charity, love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness, are received not with thankfulness, but with avarice. He who gives freely from the goodness of his heart becomes to others a perpetual bank account, an eternal fountain of compassion from which more is drawn this visit to the next.

And yet no human soul flows eternal. Do they not see that the pool must shrink? Do they not see that what sustains must itself be sustained?

I am reminded of a bubbling cold spring in the mountains I used to go to. When I was young, no more than knee-high to a sapling, the water from the spring poured forth from the ground just as if from a sink faucet. You could cup your hands and draw out the purest sort of refreshment. And yet little by little, over the years, the flow has slackened, becoming finally a trickle, then a drip, and then nothing. I look now for where the water used to be. I tell the story to my children. But of course a story of water falls far short of the water itself.

Love Your Enemies

If ye love those loving you, what grace have ye? for also the sinful love those loving them; and if ye do good to those doing good to you, what grace have ye? for also the sinful do the same
--Luke 6:32-33, YLT

Here is the test so consistently failed. We prefer to do what is easy, and call ourselves accomplished nonetheless.

"Well sure, he can do that," people will say, "because he's Jesus, he's God, ya know?"

Yet Jesus answered them, then and now, thus:

"Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?"

But we cannot be so qualified, can we? Or perhaps we would simply prefer not to be.

Upon The Late Hour

Those with whom we would most desire to speak are those who for one reason or another we are unable to speak with. Such is the frustration of life, which finally must dangle in the air like an unfinished sentence. The heart longs for the completion that can only be had in perfect comprehension. There are some who cannot hear, having taken their ears to the grave. There are some who will not hear, having surrendered the love that comes from God to the arrogant pride that dwells in the flesh. There is nothing, nothing, more terrible than silence.

Mean Spirited Women

My wife is a mean spirited woman. I say it quite dispassionately. My former wives were mean spirited women too, so I’m not really singling her out.

While I was with my first wife, I was still a young man, and so was inclined to be rather mean spirited myself. Back then I fought fire with fire. Things ended up getting burned. Never build your house on a bed of coals.

By the time I married my second wife I had begun to develop a philosophy of compassion and self-sacrifice. It was a philosophy heavily influenced by Jesus Christ. I embraced the notion that love, if shown with patience and as far as possible without condition, would be sufficient to defeat all evils of all sorts. I was wrong. Or perhaps the love itself did succeed, and it was just the marriage that failed.

Two years into the third time around I simply admit to being at a loss. More and more I am persuaded that just getting out and cutting losses would be the most prudent course. But when has the course of love ever been given to taking the course of prudence?

One thing that has always left me dumbfounded is how the women I have known have seemed to believe that they could say the most outrageously unkind things, make the most damning, hateful statements, yet later be able to pretend that it never happened!

I think now of employing the same sort of harshness in a counterattack, and yet I cannot bear the thought, it makes me cringe to imagine it. Why would I want to willfully inflict pain, especially at the cost of my own integrity, and at the cost of our strength and trust together? I don’t know. Why would they? Why do they?

In the end I find myself alone on the battlefield, with only my own pride to face. And I know not what is best anymore—to bury pride, or to embrace it. I have, after all, already tried both, and neither has made so much as a dint in the woman’s steely armor.

I guess the good thing about being older, and having already gone through the mill a few times, is that this sort of stuff is not the end of the world, as it used to seem. It’s just another mile on the road, another day. You begin to see life as a process of a general failure to thrive. You are no longer surprised to find that love is not pure, or often even very loving. What is most precious, and what has been most coveted, even from the earliest day, was a dream all along—and that, at least, has not changed.

Perfection does not reflect itself perfectly, for a splash as occurred in consciousness, way, way back in the beginning. Now there are ripples, now the waters move and are dotted with rain or nudged by the wind. What is the answer but to look up as often as you can remember to, to avert your heart from a world that is in a constant wavering toward chaos, and fix again upon the dream that is eternal?

Love and Reformation

One thing I remember most about my brother is how alive he was just before he died. I know also that this was a conscious decision and effort on his part, applied with uncommon energy even in the throes of terminal cancer, in fact because of the cancer.

Facing the certainty of death, he underwent a dramatic shuffling and reordering of priorities. Relationship thrived at the core of his being. He reached out, to family, to friends, to enemies, to the otherwise anonymous human being.

My brother had this advantage. He knew with a certainty that he would soon be leaving this world. The knowledge freed him. He was able at last to devote himself to love, to forgiveness, to connection despite the barriers of the past which imprison.

I call this an advantage, and so I believe. There appears to be no better way to recapture the essential goodness that should always have been at the very heart of our being than to find oneself facing the absolute end of all of life’s hermit-like carefulness and conceit.

My friends, we are all about to die, we are all about to leave this world. We who have MS, or any other serious disease, bear within ourselves the workings of our own demise. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that MS is always fatal. It is, however, very often closely acquainted with whatever does prove fatal in the end.

We have, therefore, no time to waste. We have nothing to protect ourselves against other than the illusion that time is on our side. Reach out, love, mend, heal, encourage, reconnect—and if those in the world who are healthy and eternal will not receive the good will you offer, do not tire, but try yet again, and know that you were born to do so.