Flower Day

         Like men everywhere who make a beeline one day a year, generally at the last minute, to give their business to a retail opportunity generally ignored with great success the rest of the year, I made a stop at a florist yesterday.

            I was reminded of the day's significance at the hospital that morning, where I went for my monthly treatment and discovered that people were handing candy to one another in a sort of reverse trick-or-treating: the candy comes to you, you don't have to go out and beg for it.

            Candy is dandy on Feb. 14, but for most of us it's "say it with flowers."

            Most American household do not ordinarily have fresh flowers in the house in February; or, possibly, any other time. It's interesting, then, that almost without exception everyone knows the drill on the February folk holiday. The expression you use to warm the heart of that someone special on this one universally recognized occasion is the gift of blooming plant life.

            That notion of "someone special" came to me this morning also by way of that hospital visit from the person who was about to draw my blood. The phlebotomist decided that the act of accepting one of those "bite-size" candy bars from a smiling but silent man about half her size deserved some comment.

            "Happy Valentine's Day," she observed, smiling warmly as a gesture of characteristic benevolence. Youthful, though not necessarily young, the phlebotomist had one of those "big" personalities that seems naturally to connect with everyone she encountered.

            "Oh yeah," I replied. "I'd already forgotten."

            What I meant was I had thought about the approach of Valentine's Day the day before, and the day before that, and vowed to do something about it. But now here it was, the single day each year when you could be absolutely sure the florist would be crammed, and so far I had done absolutely nothing.

            "Sorry," she teased. Her demeanor showed she was not sorry. "I guess you have to do something now."

            She followed this teasing observation with the implied question, "...if you have someone special."

            There must be something special about a nearly universal custom that pleasures us or it doesn't persist. Yet how do you know if you're obliged to take part? Are you supposed to give flowers today to -- your spouse? your sweetheart? your lover? The friend of your heart? All of the above?... Someone more deeply connected to your own heart, it seems, than the connection suggested by the word "friend." 

            So the phrase "someone special" does the trick.

            I replied to her implicit question that I have been married to someone for "a good many years," one of my new favorite circumlocutions.

            "But she's still special," concluded the health care who was about to take my blood.

            [Could that substance be analyzed, I wondered, to determine qualities such as truthfulness?]

            [Yes, the technician said, looking up from a computer readout, you have been married a long time.]

            "Yes, she is," I said, agreeing with my care worker's assertion.
            She punctuates our happly little dialogue by sticking a needle in my arm.

            I bleed. In fact, I bleed flowers.

            The only reason I don't buy flowers at some ridiculous rate during the cold, dormant time of year is that I do buy them at a ridiculous rate during the warm, growing season, under the impression that I will able to keep them growing.

            If you live in the northern hemisphere and find yourself (once again) enduring a predictable but largely unpleasant period of time called February -- the longest shortest month of the year -- a custom that encourages you to acquire growing, flowering, colorful hunks of glorious nature is likely to have some momentum behind it.

            We all have someone special. (Or someones; children, parents?)

            If no one is currently occupying that role for you, buy some flowers for yourself.

Buddha on a Rope Bridge, New England in the Cold

News from opposite ends of the earth. Eastern world first:

            Our favorite globe-hopper Sonya (I'm prejudiced, she's our daughter) is crossing a footbridge made of rope and wood over a brown river in Laos. It's one of those bridges that sway and bounce whenever you take a step. Think Indiana Jones. The river isn't that wide at this point -- outside one of those French colonial cities that attract tourists -- so if the bridge collapsed and you fell in you could make your way to shore. And it's not filled with nasty creatures. Still, it's wide enough that it's a lot easier to cross over on a bridge than get soaked fording it.

            Crossing for the first time you quickly realize it's better to step on the wood rails rather than on the rope, to reduce the bouncy feedback. But still, if you're a tourist, you're new at this, so you walk cross carefully. Slowly.

            Sonya is halfway across when two Buddhist monks appear on the other side. Barefoot, saffron robes, shaven heads. 

            Courteous as all Laotians are, they wait patiently for the foreign visitor to cross before they begin their own transit.

            Sonya and her traveling companion have encountered the monks before in their week in Laos. Mostly young -- many Laotian men spend a couple of years as monks before transitioning into adulthood; it's Buddhist higher ed -- the monks rise before dawn and proceed at a ceremonial pace through town seeking alms. The Laotians wait patiently for them, sitting in front of their houses on woven mats with a beaker of rice. The monks announce their presence at the corner, then walk slowly down the street stopping to receive a pinch of rice before each household.

            Everyone is patient in Laos. No one ever shows anger. No one expresses strong words or emotions, even when Sonya tries to draw English speakers into conversation about the tragic years during the Vietnam War when Americans bombed their country and destabilized their government. Cluster bombs dropped by American planes still go off in the fields, decades later, causing injuries.

            "Those were unfortunate times," she says, digging for a reaction.

            "Yes," she is told. "That was unfortunate."

            No one ever expresses any interest in learning that a visitor is an American.

            She reaches the other side of the bridge, eventually. The monks bow. A few words are exchanged. One of the monks appears to desire to extend the chance counter a little longer rather than go on his way over the river. She waits for him to say something more.

            Finally:"You want cigarette?"

            Sonya's take in recounting this story: who knew monks smoked?

            Meanwhile (my favorite transition) in the Western world, things grow difficult when Nature delivers one of her timely reminders of the limits of human control over our man-made environment. The winter storm called Nemo was forecast with great accuracy, even in the timing. In Massachusetts motorists were sternly warned to stay off the roads, public transportation was shut down in Boston Friday afternoon, and workers were sent home early. With all this pre-storm wisdom afloat, I made my advance preparations for some serious indoor time: wine, DVDs, and pastries from our favorite bakery.

            But a funny thing happened Friday night during the third or fourth hour of thick snow and high winds: the power went out. We sat in the dark, waiting. It did not come back on.

            I was not in a patient, Buddhist frame of mind as Anne and I went to bed under three quilts. I could not imagine one good thing that would happen on the morrow in a house without heat or electricity.

            In the morning it was 15 degrees out doors and 45 indoors. When it's that cold indoors, it feels warmer outdoors because you're layered up like a mummy and, it almost goes without saying, you're shoveling snow. However, as one of our long-shoveling neighbors observed, you'd liked to go inside afterwards and have a nice cup of tea.

            That didn't happen, at least in our house, but other good things did. The neighbors who have a gas range invited us in and made us strong cups of coffee. Man does not live by bread alone; he needs coffee. They also warmed our spirits with a few rounds of a highly imaginative board game using picture cards apparently designed by a surrealist, presided over by their charming elementary school daughter.

            But things went downhill after that when, exhausted from shoveling, we went back indoors, used our working phone, and discovered that nothing was open in the city of Quincy: no restaurants, no motels. The sense of isolation was deepened by concern over the state of the roads, which you were not even allowed to use them until later that day. Cold food, cold house, cold bed?

            In the end we were rescued by an open-house invite from another neighboring couple who had heat in their house because of an old and arcane boiler no one could explain; and by simple good luck. While we were drinking wine and our friends were engaged in dinner preparations that included barbecuing steak and tuna on the deck, a little flicker of early evening brightness in the living room, as if a star had flown into the room, materialized into a light bulb. The power was back.

            It took another three hours for it to come back on our street, but that was still in time for us to begin heating the house before going to bed.

            Many, many others in Massachusetts, tens of thousands, were not so fortunate.

            In the end we suffered very little. The anticipation of being cold and going without power for an indefinite time -- for me, cold is the nemesis; if it were summer I could have sat outdoors under the stars, though my wife would have been cursing the mosquitoes -- was the worst of it. Some frigid hours on Saturday gave me a taste of it. With no alternative heat source, no fireplace, no wood stove, I found the helplessness paralyzing.

            But in the end the hardship was neither long-lasting nor terrible. No one was bombing our country. Our children were safely living their grown-up lives elsewhere. Sonya had crossed that footbridge to the other side of the river.

            A Buddhist perspective would no doubt serve me better during a time of discomfort and anxiety than my native Western self-centeredness. I'm not patient; I get upset too easily. Like most human beings of a certain age, I'm pretty good at controlling my outward behavior, but not so adept at mastering my inward thoughts and emotions.

            Human suffering, Buddhism teaches, is caused by attachment. If you're not "attached" to events or emotions, they can't bother you.

            But attachment is another word for "caring."

            Laos, while poor, is beautiful, clean and "very cheap" to live in, Sonya says. But she wouldn't want to live there. Too much of who she is was simply on ice there. It's life in neutral.

            We're Americans, born to the pursuit of happiness, to expressing ourselves, to standing up for our "natural rights." We care, sometimes very passionately, about what happens to us, and (hopefully) to others. We want to believe that our little, ordinary, transitory lives are meaningful. Our lives are a roller coaster; we go up and down. When bad things happen, as they inevitably sometimes do, we suffer.

            It comes with the territory. As does the detachment of the East.

Wicked, Wicked Way of Talking

Almost any occasion provides an opportunity for the good citizens of Massachusetts to celebrate the local lingo.

            I find the latest example both funny and curiously uplifting: The much-shared digital sign outside a small town grocery to warn everyone to get a head start on their panic buying in anticipation of the latest much-ballyhooed weather event. "Wicked Stawm Comin'".

            What's not to like about this way of screwing around with standard English to put a Massachusetts stamp on the fixation of the moment?

            First, and foremost, this cut-to-the-chase warning uses the regional intensifier of choice for anything important enough to merit our attention: "Wicked."

            We are speaking of a "wicked" bad storm here. If it were merely just another blizzard, why bother to pay attention?

            For example, the prospect of all those political ads for a third Senate election in the last three years? It's wicked annoying.

            In everywhere America, almost anything a speaker finds agreeable or even just OK earns the denomination "cool." In Massachusetts, if you mean it, it's "wicked cool."

            In mining the connotations of its w-word, the local vernacular struck linguistic gold. The word draws on the region's Puritan roots, when the word was a straight forward and oh so serious judgment of acts or personages influenced by the forces of evil. Think of the mindset behind the contemporary usage "evil doers." That's the solemn, black and white view of the universe that predominated when Puritan Massachusetts led the league in witch hangings.

            We still trade on that bygone celebrity by building a local industry around the "Salem witches." Only we don't think they're wicked any more. We think witches are wicked fun. They figure in dark-side entertainments like haunted houses and local color stories focusing on eccentric characters who worship nature.

            By the time Hollywood got around to recognizing the word's potential, as in "The Wicked Witch of the West," we were already skipping through poppy fields of high camp. As a character, or caricature, in the merry old land of Oz, the Wicked Witch was wicked fun.

            We still recall her campy nastiness in contributions to the Pop Hall of Fame Quotations like "I'll fix you and your little dog too!" Or, "What a world, what a world... Oh, my beautiful wickedness!"

            There's something wickedly cunning in Midwestern sci-fi wizard Ray Bradbury's title "Something Wicked This Way Comes," though of course that line is a borrowing from MacBeth. Shakespeare's own time, which birthed the Puritans, took "wicked" wicked serious too, burning witches and heretics, and disembowling traitors.

            But by the 20th century English speakers were so relaxed about the word that wicked increasingly became a sly reference to behavior that was a little naughty, perhaps even shocking, but in its naughty pursuit of pleasure appealingly "cool."

            As in "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," the title of the autobiography of actor Errol Flynn, wicked became a code word for thumbing one's nose at conventional moral standards. Sometimes it was simply  an in-word for an ironic point of view. It's hip or, again, cool, to have a member of the opposite sex say something on the order of "must you be so wicked, Reggie darling?"

            Hollywood icons, urbane bigshots, decadent aristocrats -- and almost any British speaker -- played at turning around ordinary meanings of value words to suggest superiority, detachment, boredom, dispassion, or weary superiority to the claims of conventional values and ordinary Joes.

            But nobody exploits the cool, ironic, knowing resources of the w-word like native Massachusetts speakers. Here the word has been totally democratized in the home of those who invented "wicked awesome" decades ago.

            The expression has since gone national, you hear all over in the entertainment media. Each new generation of college athletes make free with the nomenclature's heady potential as if they invented it. Along with, say, drinking and sex.

            To get back to this latest sign of our times, in the land of the constantly rising or falling barometer, the weather is a particularly apt subject for the "wicked" intensifier -- hot, cold, awful, and various banned adjectives I don't want to use here.

            That leads us to the sign's brilliant second term, "Stawm." Only Massachusetts could come up with anything quite so wicked smaht. It's a word that both gives a warning, references the region's history of snowy disasters, and yet puts the newcomer in its place. Once you're localized the monster "stawm," you're almost ready to pat it on the head and give it a bone.

            I know I couldn't have thought of that. Try as I might, when it comes to regional patois I'm still a New Yawka.


 

Listening By Half

            For a week or so I've only been half-hearing things. This is because one of my ears, the left one, periodically gets stopped up with earwax, and my efforts to unclog it invariably fail wetly.

            These efforts are not very aggressive because I fear like death the possibility of puncturing an eardrum with too pointed a clearing effort. So, following the instructions on the box, I squirt some water into my ear canal through a fat plastic hypodermic-like arrangement, a kind of squeegee in reverse, sucking up water into the tube and then pushing it into the canal, which for the above reasons I'm not even sure is a good idea.

            What if some of the water actually made it through the canal and flowed inward. Couldn't that lead to water on the brain? (Don't sailing or surfing or kayak enthusiasts, for instance, have "water on the brain"?)

            So not surprisingly, these efforts fail and I go about half-hearing the world. Does this make me vulnerable to one-sided arguments? Am I more polarized than usual? When I listen for the deeper song, am I missing half the notes? When I make certain that as we are walking down the sidewalk my wife walks on my right side so that I have some possibility of taking in her shrewd commentaries and apposite observations, am I assigning her "right-hand" status, a lordly prerogative (according to the Episcopal Nicean Creed I memorized as a child) that I doubt I am entitled to? Does this make her my right-hand woman?

            It is puzzling that the ear in which I am prone to losing my hearing, for hopefully brief periods, is always the left one. As anyone who knows me can attest, I am passionately attached to voices from the left. I cannot say for sure what tomorrow's issue will be, but I can already tell you I'll be listening to the left.

            Only I'll be hearing it from the right ear.

            One way to correct this imbalance,  I suppose, is to take a hard look at myself in the mirror. Matter will smartly re-arrange themselves there so that my left ear is on right -- a principle I know to be true but don't really understand. So if I spend half a day in front of a mirror, will that balance out my one-sided hearing? However, I have always suspected the mirrors are distorting the truth, or at least lying to us a little.

            So I resign myself to hearing only one half of what's going on out there. If I heard any more -- on, for instance, subjects like gun violence: if I were forced to take in all the sound and fury from those defending their god-given right to own machine guns -- I would probably want to shoot myself in the head. Then both ears would be equally useless.

            I can only take in so much. It's not really much of a relief, most of sound and fury does force itself into the one working ear, but sometimes it's a little more peaceful. I go into that slack-faced neutral state of mind you sometimes notice on people when they are "tuning you out." I tell myself I am compensating by "tuning in" to my inner life.

            But then we try to watch something British on TV and I find myself querying, annoyingly often, "What did he say?"

            And so, in the end, I take myself, as I must, to the great clearer of ears, that goddess of sound in the nurse practitioner's office who has remedied my halfway status in the past. When she pours the water, somehow it goes where it needs to and the waxy barriers inside my ear canal crumble. Last time we got together around the subject of my left ear, I recall, it took twenty-four dosings, a stunningly protracted siege, before victory was finally declared.

            This time -- what did I do to deserve such good fortune? -- only three.

            Then she says, "Now let's do the other. As I always say, you can't just change one headlight."

            So now I'm a car.

            Happily, the other "headlight" clears up after only a couple of dosings.

            Later, lying on my couch in "vacant or in pensive mood," I realize how lucky I am to be hearing, period. The wind blows. I hear it.

            After last week's single digit temperatures...,

            The roar of the wind sounds like... spring.


 

           

Can't Look Away

Somehow novelist Richard Ford, whose books I've read for years, manages to hold our attention when nothing much happens for scores of pages at a time while we wait for the disaster explicitly foretold on the first page of his latest novel, "Canada," to unfold. It's not that we can't look away from this train wreck; it's that we can't look away when we know that a train wreck's bound to happen somewhere down the line. In fact, it's like we're riding in that train along with the book's then 15-year-old narrator, named Dell, and the other three members of his ill-fated family. We could get off at any page, but our anxiety over the fate of the faux-naive narrator, his fraternal twin sister and mismatched parents is a kind of psychic glue. While we wait for the other shoe to drop after learning of the parents' absurd criminal plan, we share the narrator's agonizing tension.
And then, of course, as the narrator tells us in the same hopelessly understated tone, also at the novel's very start, "there were the murders."
The family is living in a small city in Montana after Dell's father quits the military over the discovery of his small-time scam. Without the old military-base connection, the family has no reason to be in this place; or perhaps any place. Dell's father is the family's central problem, his character flawed by by his inability to see that his friendly "Southern" personal charm will not by itself overcome his catastrophic failures of judgment, such as his belief that his small-time con games will have no ill consequences simply because he cannot see around his own ever hopeful, delusionary temperament to face the world clearly. Dell's mother, a committed loner and deluded in her own way, doesn't want her children to "assimilate" into the low-level culture around them.
The book's great accomplishment is telling this story from the point of view of a persuasively typical American boy of the late Fifties with no one to rely on but his ill-matched parents and his more perceptive, but cynical sister. Dell just wants everything to work out OK; the anticipation of starting high school is enough to keep him going. He's the kind of kid who studies chess books in the hope of making friends with the guys on the chess club. It hurts to see any part of yourself in any of these characters. His sister is the kind of unhappy adolescent girl who's already discovered the other town misfit and is planning to run away with him, even before her parents' absurdly ill-considered crime venture brings the roof down on top of them all.
Ford manages to spin his tale through Del's narration -- recollected in some tranquility decades later, while keeping the feel and tone of thoughtful but unsophisticated adolescent consciousness -- as the boy reconstructs what happened, what he was thinking then, what his parents must have or might have been thinking in a factual, reflective manner that keeps the reader waiting for what might appear to be an ordinary American family to hit a bridge abutment (metaphorically speaking) at 60 miles per hour.
And after it happens, Dell's life gets worse, and weirder. Then comes the "Canada" part of the book, and given the title you can't say you weren't warned. The still hopeful, still remarkably self-reliant Dell endures loneliness, material squalor and emotional privation, while landing, through circumstances bearing that same train-wreck anticipation of inevitability that carried us through the first part of the novel, in the clutches of a deranged Ivy League dropout whose self-delusions make his own father's inadequacies seem benign. His parents still in jail back in the States, and his sister off on her own weird trip, as Dell's new life begins in a Saskatchewan ghost town, any reason-loving reader such as my wife would be justified in throwing her hands up and complaining "this is a whole other story!"
But even as we know there's another disaster looming -- bearing down on us like a 10-ton truck on a lonesome Canadian prairie highway -- most of us are unable to tear our eyes away.
Like all really good works of fiction -- the best ones, maybe -- the subject of this novel is human existence. It remains an inexhaustible subject. "Canada" says what it says about what matters to us in a peculiar way that is all its own, because it has to.

Men of Yoga

How cold was it? I froze my toes in yoga class.
However cranky my toes, arches or other cramp-prone places in my feet can sometimes prove during what yoga teachers tend to call "your practice," it's a comfort these days to look around when I am bent over like a croquet hoop, bum in the air in the position known as "downward dog," and discover that a few of the other twisted sisters in the room are actually male.
That's a sea change in my own experience of the "relaxation technique," as a long-ago teacher termed it while leading a class in a high school gym of forty women and me. In those days I was worried about what to wear, and how to keep all of me inoffensively covered as the "practice" pulled parts of me this way and that; while keeping my eyes somewhat aslant from the enormously toned body parts of our white-haired, forever-young instructor, who occasionally reminded us she practiced at home in the evenings while watching TV.
In the world we live in now, where most everyone has a camera and video recorder no farther away than a pocketbook or, as we guys like to call them, a "man bag," image is everything, and body image is even more than that. So I've no desire to be the answer to the question that begins "one of these things is not like the others." I want to fit in. So I'm happy these days to see three or four or more (and always at least one) other male physiques in our group practice.
That wasn't the case something less than ten years ago when I went looking for a solution to my desire to sleep better, breathe deeply, rest fully, cleanse my mind from the ups and downs of the day, and quiet the endless round of too much thinking for too little effect in that busy little mind we all carry around with us -- in a word, life as we know it. And, yes, relax.
I found a weekly yoga class that somehow managed meet all these needs. It met in the early evening and often twilight would arrive while we breathed deeply and persuaded our bodies into some unconventional attitudes -- some of them the kind of thing that seems to shout "don't try this at home!" But it was perfectly safe to do these stretches, and stretch our limits, in the intimate salon a pair of teachers had molded from the insides an old New England house.
It was an environment in which it was impossible to make a mistake. We had incense, candles, sometimes chimes, and a teacher who read verses from the poet Rumi or other spiritually attuned source. The ambiance made you forget that in other circumstances you were made of cold toes, stiff ankles, little pockets of excess flesh here and there, bums and bellies, thickening limbs and too rigid backbones. In the Yoga Salon you were all right. No other possibility existed. You were always, in the words of our teacher, exactly where you were supposed to be.
"Don't look at your neighbor," she told us at one my first classes.
Good advice. I know what she meant was that since every "body" will do the postures differently no one else's position can tell you what yours should look like. But this universal advice mattered to me when everyone else was bound to look different by the mere fact of gender (and, btw, don't look at the guy and giggle because he's trying his best). Yoga class back then was me and the gals.
One season a younger guy showed up, arriving for class as if he had just flown out of the office in his chinos and sport shirt. Dress code, dude! Go home and get your sweats on. Make an effort, can't ya? Men stand out enough around here as it is.
I didn't miss his disappearance -- or, truth be told, long for the companionship of additional Men of Yoga -- in those days because there was something about the Yoga Salon's female ambiance that was intensely comforting. What was it about our sessions that seemed to restore the sensuality of childhood? The teacher's trained, gentle, soothing voice managed to sound maternal, cosmic, caring and -- well, seductive -- all at the same time. Like the Earth Mother you never had.
Combined with the positive reinforcement of that feminine leadership style. Nobody barks at you as they do in aerobics. You're told 'take a break when you need to.' And,'It should never hurt.'
"Wherever your body goes, ends up, how far down you get -- how much extended, stretched -- is the right amount for you. Whatever place you end up is the right place for you... Wherever you are is exactly where you're supposed to be."
Really? Is this principle generally applicable? Can I take it to the bank? Try it on my accountant?
Plus, there's all that time on the floor. How second childhood is that? When do grownups get down there? It's good for you, peeps! Remember, grownups are just oversized children on their way to wearing out.
And then at the end you get to lie down on your back for a good long collapse, a position called savasana. It's not a pose, a stretch, a balance, a flex, a rep. You just lie on your mat for whole minutes with your hands by your size. At the Yoga Salon, the teacher would come around with little natural-fiber blankies and ask if you wanted to be covered to stay warm. You generally did. When was the last time somebody offered to tuck you in?
That's how guys know we're in a different place. We can't remember ever being invited to a "slumber party." Is this how girls did it? Sometimes when you mumbled, "mmm, yes, great" to the blanket query, you'd get touched on the shoulder or arm. It was like Mom checking for a fever.
I would fall asleep during savasana. My mind would float on its little endorphin high after exercise. It was nap time for aging boomers.
But as I said at the start, things are different in my current yoga class, now that the Men of Yoga have arrived. My class is bigger, the space (a gym floor) is huge, and sometimes the turnout fills it. But the biggest change of all is looking around and seeing a half dozen hairy sons of Adam.
OK, guys, I don't blame you for horning in on a good thing. Just try not to louse it up.