What about Tom?

Thomas Henry James rolled over for the last time while I was too young to remember him. My grandma’s cat was in her kitchen every morning while she flipped the breakfast pancakes. He knew she would make one small but tasty pancake for him. All he had to do was listen for her to say, “Thomas Henry James, roll over.” Then he rolled over, and Grandma flipped his pancake into his bowl.

            The first cat I remember was with us in Jamestown, NY, when we moved 104 miles away to Coudersport, PA. At age 4 I was younger than the cat. My mom had arranged his adoption by friends in Jamestown, but about a month later he appeared at our door in Coudersport. The saturation love of cats for humans, and vice versa, is a happy mystery, like the Trinity.

            Some may think it is a confirmation of my brain disease that I keep a polished wooden box of ashes in the room that’s stuffed with my computers and books, printers, pictures of upbeat memories, things like that. The ashes recall Abraham, my Titusville/Orlando cat for 16 years.

            Abe was succeeded in Orland Park, IL, by Thomas Henry James II, known to his friends as Tom. He arrived at my condo as a young adult cat and has stayed for more than 12 years. He’s never been outdoors and lives like a cheerful puppycat, although in cat years he may be close to my age, a few weeks short of 89.

            A couple of weeks ago he started acting the way Abe did in his last days, sneaking off to quiet corners, ignoring tuna treats, crying out in loud meows every now and then. After a lifetime of living with cats I chose not to expose my elderly housemate to treatment by well-meaning veterinarians. I thought he was dying.

            This coincided with a loving invitation from my daughter and son-in-law to leave the isolation of my condo and move into their large home one mile away. My five grandchildren who grew up there are sometimes home, but more often away at college or enterprises. The household includes one with a severe allergy to cats, and so any cat is, for good reason, felina non grata.

             My driving is limited to my power wheelchair and my four-wheel electric scooter. Standing up is an adventure. Winter weather keeps me from crossing the street to the mailbox. I wear a Rescue Alert button, but punching a number into a telephone or into a garage door opener can be a challenge.

            Marie and Mark are looking into the installation of a stair lift, because a head packed with dizziness and feet that dance jigs to their own tunes rule out the ordinary use of stairs. The reason for all this is called olivopontocerebellar atrophy/multiple system atrophy, a form of parkinsonism.

            While we’re getting organized for my move into the household of a grandpa’s dreams, I’m formidably anxious about Thomas Henry James II. What to do?

 

 

 

President Kennedy wasn't finished

Fifty years ago today the tolling of a bell momentarily paralyzed the news room. It was the bell on the wire service machine. It signaled a rare “Flash,” a designation reserved for the most urgent stories.

            The staff of The Honolulu Advertiser didn’t want to believe the report on the wire, that President John F. Kennedy had been fatally shot in Texas.

            Three years earlier both Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, had campaigned in the 50th state of Hawaii. The population was small, but statehood was new, and journalists from all over were happy to dateline their work from Waikiki or Kona. When the votes were counted, 50.03% went to Kennedy and 49.97% to Nixon.

During the campaign I interviewed both candidates when they visited the Big Island, where I was editor of the local daily newspaper. When that heartbreaking flash came on November 22, 1963 I was Sunday editor of the morning paper in Honolulu.

            Almost everybody took the assassination personally. Kennedy was a personal president, in the minds of countless Americans.

            President Kennedy was scheduled to move on from Dallas to Austin to address the Texas Democratic State Committee. I received the text of that address from the White House, framed it as a minor memento of that terrible time.

            The President was not finished. He had planned to speak that night about the linkage of Texas and the Democratic Party in “an indestructible alliance.”

            Alas, alliances come and go. Religions come and go, and so governments. But the mystery of human behavior hangs on.

Does God have pets?

 

           God as Father is at the center of worship for countless believers, even as fatherhood takes a few hits from sitcom laugh tracks, feminist affirmations and happy challenges to notions of centuries past that men held exclusive rights to vote, judge, own property, preach and preside.

            God is Father, fathers are male, it is said, and therefore God must be male.

            One drawback is that some of us picture Father according to the Gospel of Disney, the giver of things we ask for. We don’t usually ask for discipline, training, correction.

            Dads and moms try to steer their offspring from one learning experience to another, first encouraging them to crawl and then to stand up and walk. Along the way dads and moms press their kids to brush their teeth, pass the algebra exam, tell the truth, prepare to earn a living and to pass it on. Fathers and mothers are there when sickness strikes, jobs vanish and games are lost.

            Some fathers indulge aimless whims of their children, and that’s how candles get lit at both ends and children fill playrooms and garages with toys while their minds are on vacation.

            That’s the sort of Father who is expected to hear prayers for a lucky lottery ticket, passing an exam without studying for it, winning a race without training for it.

            But the Father sees each child, like the planet itself, evolve in understanding and competence. The Father’s love is not to affirm a child’s frailty and insecurity, but to provide the steps on a ladder to strength and confidence.

            The Bible, a book of conflicts, tragedy and hope, stirs emotions as no other. Hundreds of churches and denominations claim its authority. This book of the ages identifies God as Father. It is not asleep in the distant past it describes. Scripture, an inspiration for the American Constitution, is awake. Scripture is written in the present tense. It declares the Now. Its Father is always Love.

 

 

            After 88 years on the roller coaster, this I know:

I believe in God,

dweller in mystery,

provider of all that is known

and unknown,

timeless teacher

of uncounted Teacher’s pets.

The unforgettable Trayvon Martin

 

 

         Six citizens drafted into Florida jury duty have underscored the quirkiness of a justice system that counts among its resources executions at San Quentin and forced feeding at Guantanamo. As of 2011 there were more than 2.6 million adults incarcerated in this country, and another 4.8 million on probation or parole. The Florida jury has excused George Zimmerman from being one of them.

         It was right and proper, according to the jury, for Zimmerman to stalk and then kill a 17-year-old African-American boy on his way to the nearby home of his dad.

           The jury heard all of the testimony and reviewed all of the evidence in Zimmerman’s Sanford, Florida, trial. The jury’s good faith and hard work are taken for granted. That doesn’t mean the verdict is happily accepted by everyone.

           There will be some exploitation of it by anti-white individuals, some of whom are white, all pursuing a creeping fashion of social robotics. Others will recognize that Zimmerman was prosecuted by white attorneys, working within the system of government that enabled white soldiers to fight for emancipation, white presidents to broaden and enforce civil equality laws, white judges and legislators to support—if too slowly—the ongoing extermination of official racism.

         In a world populated by humans there will still be prejudice, bigotry, favoritism and political nuttiness. But every slip backward is accompanied by two or three steps forward.

          Much of the world will see the Zimmerman verdict as one of those slips backward.

         Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

         We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

          Know who spoke those two sentences? Martin Luther King. Everyone remembers him. Now, few will forget Trayvon Martin, who like those anonymous jurors has been drafted into history.   

 

           

Now it is Obamascare

 

 

 

Headlines remind us every day that DUI, driving under the influence, is dangerous. But writing under influence (WUI) risks a crash of the word processor, and that includes WUI of MSA. Multiple system atrophy is a new name for what used to be called OPCA, olivopontocerebellar atrophy. Whatever it is called, there’s still no known cure.

 

Maybe tomorrow. The cure may come at any time. Until then it is an unsolved mystery worthy of Lee Child, John Sandford or Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

Word processors are like typewriters the way pipe organs are like pianos. They can do more things, users can pull out more stops, and the keyboards of both are light on the fingers. My MSA fingers will no longer punch the keys on a manual typewriter, but they don’t have to in this age of electronic invention, a chip off the old writer’s block.  

 

One of these days, they say, writers won’t even have to type because what they’re thinking will be absorbed electronically into a word processor. Copies will go silently to the government spy bureaus, known as Obamascare.

 

The intention seems to be to store all the words written or spoken on electronic devices, a concept pioneered in the United States by Father Divine during the Great Depression. FBI records list him as “George Baker alias God.” He was an African American preacher and advocate for the poor who took the name Major Jealous Divine. He also claimed to be God. Stenographers accompanied him everywhere, recording every word he spoke.

 

I think it was about 65 years ago that I attended a couple of his banquets for the poor. As a newspaper reporter I qualified as poor, but I was there to explore one of the few opportunities for African Americans and other Americans to get to know each other, even a little bit, in the 1940s and 50s. That’s about when I first joined the NAACP, an organization that gained nothing from my membership and a painfully mixed blessing from the membership of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her endorsements were powerful, but limited in geographical, political and racial scope.

 

So, nobody has to be God to be taped by the government. And no, copyright won’t protect you. That is not, however, why I am not writing as much as I used to. This science fiction disease, which intercepts and mangles messages wired from the brain to the fingers, which intervenes in the breathing process like wind tunnel fans thrown into reverse, awaits cure. Maybe the government can take it over and use it against the enemy.

 

Fantasyland North of the 38th Parallel

            A boy with firearms fantasies kills little kids in their classroom, officials of one kind or another shake their heads and say they cannot understand how it happened because the lad had to know how terrible the consequences would be for himself..

            A mom buckles her children into the family car and drives into a lake, drowning them. Observers ask how can that be, because the mother surely knew she could easily have gotten professional help.

            An elected official held in highest regard is found to have embezzled government funds. Then his constituents ask themselves why a smart man anticipating a bright future would destroy his life so foolishly.

            The young and untested Asian leader takes a path perfected by Adolph Hitler and others, leading an army of a million men and women, perfecting his nuclear weapons and loudly declaring his intention to start a war. Then the policy professionals in Washington explain that this man is too rational to risk his own job in such a gamble. Their predecessors knew that Imperial Japan had no way to attack U.S. territories in 1941. When I was in my teens a popular slogan was “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

            President Obama said this week that he’ll put $100 million in the 2014 budget for brain research. This generation knows more about the universe than previous generations knew there was to know, but it does not know how the brain works. Obama’s research program can lead to healing of conflicts, diseases and defects. It can provide answers to those questions asked after every human disaster: How could a person who seems so ordinary do things so deadly and self-defeating?

            How can we be so slow to address this problem head-on? “I do not understand my own actions,” a famous writer said. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He wrote this about 1,960 years ago, and we don’t understand it any more than Paul did.

 

   

           

 

 

           

  

Give Us This Day Our Daily Crisis?

 

 

It only seems like it; there is no rule requiring newspaper headlines to include the word “crisis” whenever the Catholic Church is favored by a story. We journalists know about crisis, as more and more of our periodicals disappear into electronic sinkholes.

 

The church has a crisis of serious misconduct by clergy, and a crisis of too few priests, and a crisis of communication, among others. A lot of people really dislike the Catholic Church. Many who burn churches strike their matches in the name of their own religion. Public authorities stopped siccing lions on Christians a long time ago, but there are government officials who still forbid Catholic churches and arrest converts.

 

There are warnings in news reports that because Christian Evangelicals are gaining believers in huge numbers, the Catholic Church is in a – what’s the word? – crisis! Actually, the Catholic Church is in crisis whenever it is not challenged to pray more, shape its message more clearly and lead the world’s excitement about Jesus.

 

About Pope Francis--he's an easy person to love. Francis is almost everybody's favorite saint. In stone, carved wood or plastic he's in a few million gardens. A pope who thinks and acts like St. Francis will be welcome.

However, St. Francis did not begin a new ministry at age 76.

 

Nor did St. Peter.

 

In my attachment to Jesus I sometimes wonder what he would have taught, and exemplified, in growing old. He was and is always young.

 

There's a lot of beauty and satisfaction in becoming old. I'm on the way myself.

 

Everybody I know in my age group gets on well enough, but our conversation is less about last night's dance or next Saturday's softball game than about arthritis relocating to some new joints. There are lots of things we do well, but God did not design our machinery to run forever.

 

There are better bets than the elderly to take on one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs on Earth. Think of how many people depend on the leadership of the pope for spiritual guidance and prayerful assurance not just that gout is out, but that sin is not in.

 

Even so, I'm hopeful. Pope Francis appears to begin every action with prayer, offering an example that may be taken up by all Christians, whether lay, ordained or tentative. I read in the papers that there are two popes if you include Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus. Then there’s a pope called Jesus.

 

 

 

 

 

The S-word is out of the closet

 

 

 

When I was a kid in the 1920s and 30s I never heard any adult say the f-word or the s-word. The s-word was suicide, an unspoken word, kept at the back of the vocabulary. After I became a newspaper reporter I learned that it was seldom written about. I worked for one daily that reported the death of a prominent local official without mentioning he had shot himself in his hospital bed. I worked for another paper whose publisher suppressed the suicide of a family member.

 

Maybe that’s why I was so impressed by the candid talk about suicide on an Internet forum for folks who have MSA – multiple system atrophy – or who are their caregivers. How long, a newcomer asked, should a parent with the incurable disease be expected to last? Others spoke of deliberately departing if the last stages became too much, too much turmoil for the patient and too much distress for others.

 

Suicide in 2013 is still a touchy subject, just as it was in 1930, but the online discussions have been thoughtful, appropriately emotional, unapologetic and inquisitive. Disagreements, some based on religious convictions, are set out in friendly terms, often punched into a keyboard by disobedient fingers, one chosen or one unchosen letter at a time. This sharing of anxieties can be enormously beneficial to people who live far apart from each other, who may never be able to talk face to face with another MSA person. My guess is that it stimulates hope and builds faith in life.

 

I am not one of those who’s thinking about an early departure. In a few days I’ll turn 88, and I’m claiming that as a lucky number.  Whatever it is that made me nosy enough to become a journalist makes me want to know the rest of the story. Unjournalistically, I seldom leave home. I drink my hot coffee through a silicon straw and whip around my condo in my power chair and my skull is stuffed, I think, with jumping beans.

 

My family puts lots of smiles and satisfactions into my life with OPCA/MSA. Someday I hope to find out why Someone allows fear and pain to clutter up His universe . Or Hers. But I can wait.

Life is more than ashes

Death ends the chapter,

but Life is the name of the book

(A recollection on Ash Wednesday)

 

A. E. P. (Ed) Wall writes:

 To refuse to die would be more than a social

impertinence. It would throw off the scientific

rhythm of the universe. It would toss a monkey

wrench into the apparatus of the galaxies, and

challenge the very mind of the creator.

 

Death is designed as an inevitable consequence of birth,

providing needed closure for each of us. It is the kind

of closure that marks graduation from high school,

which is required before the graduate moves on to

higher education.

 

Death and eternity are mysterious, not mysteries

invented by Conan Doyle and not the

mysteries of gene and cell exposed in laboratories

like prisoners of undeclared wars. There’s the kind

of death that’s examined on an autopsy table, fixed

in time and place. There’s also an eternity that’s for

discoveries in space and hopes about time. Jesus

and Einstein speak a common language.

 

There could be no death without life. Life could reach

no conclusions without death. The system may be a mystery,

but it is part of the genius of creation. Suspense is necessary

to mystery, but fear is not. Nobody remembers being

born; nobody is told that birth is the leading cause

of death, inevitable rather than incurable, because

it is not a disease.

 

Life and death can be exciting. We are conditioned to

make the most of life and death, or to fear them.

Many never speak of death. Others deny death.

 

I was in my teens when I first heard someone deny

the permanence of life. An older woman said she hoped to

God — her phrasing —that there would be no life after

death. Her family, her education, her faith were all ad hoc,

she hoped,  and would vanish as she would vanish.

I wonder where she’s living now.

 

During my years in Hawaii I knew many

Buddhists, whose friendship included invitations to

speak at Buddhist celebrations and services. I

learned to appreciate Buddhist ideals and even

Buddhist controversies. Buddhism has its

denominations, even as Christianity and Islam and

Judaism have sects and denominations. Buddhist

concepts of life and death, of reincarnation and

transmigration, appeal to many. I’ve known

Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and other

Christians, including clergy, who believe in

reincarnation.

 

My belief in God, the Eternal, the Holy, the

Triune Creator, Love itself, gives meaning to life

and death. Not everyone who is offered this gift

has unwrapped it. Christ Jesus gives of himself. As

newspaper carriers used to call out when they had

an armload of Extras to sell: Read all about it.

Because of that gift I believe in the seen and

unseen. I believe in the human body, ocean waves

and printed words. I believe also in gravity, radio

waves, thought, love and eternity. I recognize a

desire for a good life and its companion desire for

a good death.

 

Jack Wall, my dad’s brother, was born in the

1890s with a form of paralysis that was to end his

life when he was in his early teens. My dad and

another of his brothers have each told me this: The

family was gathered in the garden of their

Liverpool home. Jack, cheerful and much loved by

everyone in the family, was on his father’s lap.

Suddenly he said, “Listen. Can you hear them?”

No one heard anything unusual as Jack said,

“Can’t you hear them singing? Listen to the music.

They’re coming; they’re coming for me.” He

slumped dead on his dad’s lap. Other families have

similar experiences.

 

Maybe it is because I’m a writer that I think

of life as prose and religion as poetry. The

holiness in holy scripture is poetic. That’s why

myopic literalists don’t notice God’s bigness while

they squint at scripture with watchmaker’s loupe

and tweezers, magnifying some words and

plucking at others, like links pried loose to

disconnect a chain.

 

Death clobbered me when I was 10 years old

and living in my grandparents’ house. I was called

home from school, no reason given, and was

barely off the streetcar when I spotted the hearse

parked in front of the house. The place was

swarming with people and I headed for the privacy

of the basement to try to sort it out. My beloved

grandma, I knew, had died while I was choosing

true or false for a history teacher. I was numb, but

not at a loss for words. A memorized poem was

there for me,” The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not

want…”

 

When I heard about William Cullen Bryant,

a newspaperman who wrote poems, I was already

primed for his “Thanatopsis.”

 

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, that moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of the couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

 

Thanks, Miss Rector, Mrs. Bracken, Mrs.

Humm, Miss Featherstone, Mrs. Routon, Mrs.

Peters and all you who taught restless teenagers

with smiles and a beat.

 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson grabbed me as a

teenager when one of those teachers opened the

book to “In Memoriam” and especially to “Crossing the Bar.”

 

Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea,

 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

  Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

  Turns again home.

 

Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

  When I embark;

 

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

  The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

  When I have crossed the bar.

 

And then there was (and is) Walt Whitman:

 

At the last, tenderly.

From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,

From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the

   keep of the well-closed doors,

Let me be wafted.

 

Let me glide noiselessly forth;

With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,

Set ope the doors O Soul.

 

Tenderly—be not impatient,

(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,

Strong is your hold O love.)

 

We who love life embrace it with enthusiasm.

We know that death is an element of life,

if not its fulfillment,.

 

Jesus died. Jesus lives. Way to go, Jesus!

 

 

Posted on Ash Wednesday 2013—

 reprinted from a 2005 edition of Wall’s Paper.

 Except for the quoted poetry, © A. E. P. (Ed) Wall.