Out of the clearing sky, an afterthought

Of water embarrasses me at the grill.

Too late I ask, what hath the Goddess wraught?

A sprinkle through a fine high-minded sieve

Lending the steak and salmon just a thrill,

Acid versus ammonia. Learn and live!

ALLENESQUE FOR TODAY

We're good at wasting time, aren't we Americans? The 20 oz. coffee is good,

Good for tramping around the bookstore, ogling all the spines we'll never crack,

Our kids deep in duck water every September, old guys on pond ice in December.

We slide away. A decade since our national Tisha b'Av,

And we defend our right to incandescent bulbs,

Don't wash our hands in the men's room any more

Or let that other schmuck enter our exit lane.

Spooked by strangers, magically safe around germs and cars.

Our F.D.N.Y. T-shirts and Roman sandals look good on us.

Memorials on the news look good to us.

We send our children to Sunday School, bagels and sugar water in book bags.

No wonder the country suffers failure of appetite.

And then what, on the radio? God bless Paul

Switching out "Bridge Over Troubled Water" for "Sounds of Silence"

By the falls of New York City water.

God bless the boy who gave to Somali famine relief.

God bless grownup children and children growing up.

I have not lived the life of Mulligan, and maybe nobody does. There have been, so far, no do-overs. Regret is sacred, as Robert Frost suggested. As for being male, Robert Bly suggested that grief is a better indicator than testosterone. Bitterness, though, is a taste of death. Since the game isn't over until you die, I had better keep my eye on the ball.

Literal minded people seem to think that in-laws ought to be in lawsuits. Pardon my guesswork Latin, but I'd like you to meet a new proposed maxim: de familiae non curat lex.

Just figured out that my daughter's pure praise of Beatles and Pink Floyd (without her knowing one iota of the context of that music) is like my admiration of certain creators of the Beat Generation. I can guess how thrilling the movie "Howl" will seem -- even though I've only seen the title sequence

If you have ever called an American soldier, or a physician, a "baby killer," you should have rethought your life by now.

"No family without the law." This pronouncement, which was used in a late '40s radio drama to describe the prosecutor's responsibility to pursue the widow's killer, comes from the [sociologist?] Emile Durkheim in the '20s, apparently, in defense of traditional marriage. It's an evocative statement.

[Draft of Song Lyric]

My father’s three sisters have gone to their rest

Not one of them getting an easy way out

And led there by loving and hard living men

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

My father’s three brothers all did their best

Trying to do well for better or worse

Survivors destroyed by salvation in wars

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

The father I knew has been long in the dust

And the snow that I knew that he never would leave

And my brother and I will follow in dreams

Returning at last to my grandmother’s breast

My children can’t live as we did in the West

My children won’t have any right of return

I ran from the love of the land and the blood,

Returning no more to my grandmother’s breast.

I want them to know that we did what we must,

Going back to the red clay and moss of the South

Reducing the wind and the sand to these words

Returning at last to my grandmother's breast

The numbing down of our everyday lives proceeds like a painless dentist.

Weird, when you have to retrieve your 15 year old boy who has without announcement skipped his sister's birthday dinner to have Shabbat dinner at the rabbi chaplain's table. You don't know the address, although you've been provided with a general description of the house. After dark, You can't count on finding a porch light on, so you have to squint for clues like a mezuzzah. You can't call him after dark, and the family doesn't know who you are or why you are there. A minute after starting to pound on the door, you're being shown into a brightly lit dining room and introduced to most of the dozen people at the table -- the rabbi's wife, three daughters, and son; a couple of chaplaincy students from the Army post. Three or four others are better known to you, schoolmates of your son's, and the son himself, in a Yemini-style kippah. You're supposed to extract him from a vegetarian Shabbos dinner in favor of Outback Steakhouse, but as he says, "This is the best challah I've ever tasted." I don't know how much of a diplomat my wife thinks I am, but if ever I needed to be, that was when.

DRAFT

I want to write a song of ourself, ourselves,

in which we see ourselves as mere spectators

of a game between this and that -- not them and us

and, God forbid, not good and evil,

and according to our disposition

betting or not betting on the outcome,

watching the clock or the inning expire,

agitated by the gross or subtle expression of the strong or the cagy

according to our disposition,

and participating just as much as the players do

that is, as most of us do, from a distance usually safe

from the fights and foul balls.

Finally, I pray, we will find the point

not to be strength or caginess, not to be deception or execution, but

endurance and energy over the passing of time.

We will see the actual drizzle and not the telephoto sheet of rain,

something that passes, as we do, ephemeral

as a desert creek at times yielding the delicate trout,

as we see and for a moment may be privileged to hear

the people on the lawn, the clay, the humble mat,

or if we insist the raked track or the blond hardwood floor,

released by what is not their work but their daily play

to say what makes them like ourselves,

as this song itself admits that itself is a version of something

well recalled from our grandfather's generation, and has a point.

I want to say our anxiety will burn off then and we will stand for the stretch

as a candlestick stands reflective (yes, and empty)

on the table of an everyday afternoon,

understanding and taking part in the clarity of light and air

where the terms of the contest are clear. That is enough.

I have been accused (and convicted) of throat-clearing in my writing, but there is plenty of space-time for it now, and the need for a clear throat has never been clearer. Sarah Palin's tweeting and now her TV show . . .

which I have not watched. So let me begin. Some of the words I would like to apply to this blog: "deliberate," so justly associated with Thoreau; "familiar," "conversational," and so forth; "allusive," but not so indirect as referenced, footnoted, and linked in the new style;

Moominpapa's Memoirs . . . what if I were to write the already written story? If it's not written about, it has no chance of having happened.

I had a feeling of 85% today. That is, I would fall short in every category, despite making a defensible effort. Then, I found the battery charger for the 10 year old Sony camera, one of my electronic friends. Watching its tiny icons darken on the LED screen as power flowed in, I learned once again that all is not lost, just misplaced.

Later,

As of 6:36 p.m., I have deactivated my Facebook account. I hardly like the word "deactivated," but I suppose it suggests that I may have defused a time bomb . . . that is, something which was going to blow up more of my time.

Like the Tea Partiers, I am getting belatedly interested in reading history. There is some comfort in knowing that the events, at least, are over, and we can't be held responsible for changing them. And there is an even greater challenge in knowing that these events have repercussions, ricochets, and rebound effects that are not over. Some things we might do better the more we know, or at least the more we think. "Heart of Darkness" leads back to "King Leopold's Ghost" and forward to "Apocalypse Now" and back to "Heart of Darkness," and so forth, and back. Unlike the Tea Partiers, I don't believe that the Europeans necessarily had better ideas than the people they overwhelmed.

It has taken two years and a series of recent events to make me quit Facebook. Ah, the humanity, illustrated by the dog and cat photos; oh, the futility, illustrated by the 2010 election commentary; ow, the microscopy, illustrated by my own short-sighted observations and the lack of energetic reaction to them; and certainly the reminder of mortality as my father-in-law died at NHC on Oct. 17 after living for more than a year as a stroke patient. He hadn't arranged for an obituary to be published or a memorial service to be conducted, so there couldn't be anything to say about it on Facebook. Here, there ought to be, and that is the sort of event which I hope to handle here.

I like books with footnotes. don't like searching for books, such as my son's two copies of "The Prince," in rooms I myself haven't maintained in order (either because I didn't do it myself, or because I didn't maintain order). I want to be able to get all my old stuff back and read it without the pain. And then I want to be able to burn it all myself. I wish I had written "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet." I am glad that things like punctuation and spacing still have meaning for me. I am glad that Dave Frishberg lyrics occur to me in connection with many of these things, but I know it is time to replace that with another set of occurrences. Maybe the one at Owl Creek Bridge would do for a start.

There is no end to the number of people who are hard at work every day to make other people's bodies work better. Today, on behalf of Rachel, we visited yet another physician's office and were referred to yet another prosthetics shop and physical therapist. Eleven days ago, such a move was not contemplated.

I don't know of any grief that can be flung at a man greater than a layoff. You can enter a job (and leave it, too, as Clark Kerr said 20 years ago) "fired with enthusiasm," but you will always be surprised by the indignity of being severed for no other reason than economic. What could be more natural than losing a job over your employer's money problems? And yet, for a young man at least, the last of your problems is the money. You can do even better elsewhere.

I woke up crying this morning from the memory of my October 1980 surprise. Actually, I only dreamed that I was crying; there were no tears upon awakening. It was a doozy of a dream, filled as usual with surrogates for the journalistic types I had rubbed shoulders with. This time, though, there was one character from real life, and I hope that naming the late Guy Richardson at this point will not seem fatuous. He wasn't wearing suspenders, but otherwise it was Guy.

And at this point in my posting, my four-year-old has woken up and shown up looking for me. I could keep writing with a dozing child in my lap, but my life has changed in the last 29 years and the point must be made by my stopping here.

For the second time in a day, I found myself using a simple tool (knife blade, tweezers) to reach inside an electronic gadget that the owner (father in law, daughter) could not fix alone. I was reminded once again of the anecdote in which Robert Benchley is on a movie set, suspended in a tangle of wires between two telephone poles. Waiting for the next shot to be set up, Benchley famously called down to his wife Gertrude, "Remember how good at Latin I was in school?" "Yes," she said. "Well," Benchley said, "Look where it got me."

I also was good in several high school subjects, and maybe being good enough in high school is good enough for marriage and parentage. I certainly hope so, because the gadgets keep on being made and purchased for the use of those who do not well understand them. If my aging relatives and my own children are not electrocuted, it will be because I am well enough trained in the humanities to take that risk myself.

The death of my late father's second oldest brother, at 93, ends the run of the John and Ada Crawford family. While my uncle left a daunting number of children (5), and grandchildren and great grandchildren in the dozens, it is the loss to his wife Vida that will be the most significant. They had been married almost 63 years. Ada, Vida: names from an American immigrant past.

His obituary in the Reno paper sports his nom de plume, Shorty Muldoon. This was not a name behind which he hid -- rather it was an alter ego, which I always assumed was intended to suggest a wiry Irish buckaroo. His literal genealogy, however, was Scots, as he always boasted.

What does it mean to choose an imaginary variant on the Celtic theme which I admire for its stubborn sameness through many travels? Maybe this meaning, in my uncle's case, will remain hidden. I will have to add to these thoughts, however, because I find that my own attraction to Celtic music has nothing to do with varieties. It all seems to stir my blood equally, for the same irrational reasons. There is an ur-Celt, if you will, which looms large and awkward behind some Americans in the unhealthful mists of time, some man whose destiny is burial in a bog.

My uncle's burial will be in the granular, alkaline earth of Nevada. May his memories be for a blessing, but may his passing be celebrated with an Irish wake.

There is no more fleeting pleasure than thinking that, at the moment or for the moment, my children return my love. It doesn't stand to reason, because love in general is unrequited, but children are so capable of affection that it is easy to skip to the conclusion that they are precocious at love. Love is a kind of skill, and while such a skill can be acquired in childhood, love tends to develop spasmodically and to decline with age. This is why the song "I Remember Loving You" seems as good to me now as when I first heard it 30 years ago, and it will probably seem as good 30 years from now when all love -- except for the love of my immediate family -- is just a memory.

When my father died before his 70th birthday, a friend of mine wrote me a note including the thought, Do events like these not remind us of the antechamber nature of this life?

I understood him then, 20 years ago, as referring to the Christian idea of heaven that so comforted him but would not have been shared by my father and was of no hope to me. Even though at the time I was in a limbo of my own making, I couldn't apply his idea to my life. Recently I have spent days and even weeks in comfortable rooms waiting for my latest daughter to be cleared to leave by several legal or medical authorities. In a different sense than Rob intended, I feel that I understand the antechamber nature of my life and of human life more generally.

Everything that is likely to be written here was written, or said, better by Samuel Johnson 250 years ago. If you come back again to this spot, the best that you will be able to say about it is that it came closer to being an imitation of what Dr. Johnson would have done today. If you don't come back, you can't be said to have had anything to say about it.