The good, old, guilt-ridden,
shame-faced, white, Baptist
boys (Forgive me, Jesus; my
wife is in the bedroom.)
down South love the Donald
because he can get away
with what the boys can only
dream of but feel guilty
about and ashamed of as they
spend all that time online sur-
veying what the net is purvey-
ing – the sights of forbidden,
brown sugar and chocolate
mousse, carnal delight each
night. They stand with O’Reilly
for the same reason, for Bill
is a serial letch getting some-
thing the boys couldn’t catch
with an oversize mitt as they
switch from Fox to the foxes
and back again. (Forgive me,
Jesus. I just can’t help my-
self. I’ll be right there,
honey. This should only take
a minute. I’m not doin’ nothin’,
honey. Oh, nothin’, nothin’
at all. Lord, have mercy!)

He walks through the open
doorway and closes the door

behind him. He enters into
nothingness, no ego, no

vanity, no mixed motives,
nothing and there in the

black hole of existence is
the essence of his existence,

in the black hole of his
core — nothing and then

everything — a tiny spark,
a glimmer of light, the

eternal essence, the only
thing that matters, the

love of God and in that
tiny beam of light he sees

who he is and all the love
that surrounds him coming

back at him from all those
who have been touched by

his life and love and in
that nothingness he finds

everything.

*idea from a meditation by Frederick Buechner

On their third day out from the
condo in Phoenix
to their home along the shores of Lake Michigan,
he considered the boredom to fix,
so he decided to entertain his wife
with old skits
from Saturday Night Live.
He chose a Bill Murray skit
where Bill played a night club, crooner twit.
He launched into song
imitating Bill’s vowels
that lasted so languorously long,
but the howls
of his dog and the growls
of his wife
helped him decide
to keep quiet and
head to bed for the night.

The unruly, drunken gent
uttered a plangent
which those at the bar
thought was so sad
and anything
but heaven-sent.
The loudness harshly
struck their ears
even after several beers
and they all together
rose up in mass
to toss the
unruly, drunken gent
on his ass —
the very guy
who uttered the
ear-shattering, horrendous,
bell-ringing and oh, so
sad, plangent.

*an idea from a tweet by Tom Eggebeen

He’s a guy who likes punctuation
in prose. He wanted to critique

Faulkner but he was only a college
freshman and wondered who he

was to say something negative
about a Nobel Prize winner. When

he tried, his professor wondered
about that, too. When it comes to

poetry, he likes stanzas and line
breaks. He can live without rhyme

and meter but he likes them, too.
What he doesn’t like is prose

trying to be poetry but is really
prose except there isn’t much

punctuation and the sentences
tend to run on and on into huge

paragraphs which should be
several paragraphs with really

good punctuation and, therefore,
decent prose. Some poetry

actually has good punctuation,
hopefully, like what you are

reading right now, but be-
cause it is poetry, it doesn’t

really need it as you might
know if you have read e.e.

cummings. At least Faulkner,
with all his lousy punctuation

and lack of paragraphing, wasn’t
calling it prose poetry.

A few days ago, he watched
a movie about the late
Sixties and early Seventies
and it won’t leave him alone;
it haunts him along with this
from the score: “Symphony
No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74,
Pathetique: Allegro con grazia”
composed by Tchaikovsky;
he has dreamed a dream of
sickness in his stomach over
the very same horrible things
happening in his life because
to one degree or another horrible
things happen to everyone. In
this case, an almost perfect family
is blown apart like bombs burst-
ing in Vietnam and burning up
like napalm sprayed over villages,
in part, because of horrendous
political decisions revealing that
the consequences weren’t just
“over there,” because “over there”
is here and everywhere blowing
us away like bombs bursting,
burning us up like napalm and
eating away our soul.

After twelve hours on the road
home, they stopped at a dog
friendly motel. Walking his

dog, he encountered a retired
couple and their very, little,
yappy dog who reminded him of

all the yappy dogs at their
association. He said his choco-
late lab liked little dogs but

he would just go around. Walk-
ing his dog back he saw that
the man, still sitting in the

SUV, had parked over the white
line. Thinking that another
driver might want the next spot

and that the man would appreciate
the help, he suggested that the
man move the vehicle to the other

side of the line and left. He saw
them later entering their room and
gave a hearty hello to which the

old guy let fly a string of explet-
ives concluding that he was actual-
ly the exit place of the descending

colon and that he, the man, could
park any damn way he wished and
that the parking lot was empty

anyway, which it wasn’t by a long
shot, he thought but didn’t say.
Then the man challenged him to a

fight out in the parking lot.
Then, by the grace of God, the
man’s wife leaned into the hallway

and called, “Roger, get in here.”
As he walked past the man’s wife,
she said that Roger had a bad day.

He thought Roger may have fathered
the yippy, yippy, yappy, yappy some-
thing-a-little-less-than-a-real dog.

“And goodnight to you, too, Roger.
You might want to get off the
road a little sooner tomorrow,”

whispered the man as he headed
to the ice machine.

His introverted six-year-
old grandchild, after much
practice, told him, “Thank

you, Grandpa,” for prepar-
ing a plate of cheese and
ripe avocados with butter

and lemon. “Oh, Zoe,
what wonderful words to
fall upon my ears and a

wonderful gift given to
my heart. You have made
me very happy.” He want-

ed to scoop her up into his
arms and tell her about all
the harm that may come her

way, but for all that, grace
still wins, love still wins,
Zoe (life) still wins, but he

left it at that knowing, what
a favorite teacher told him
so many years before the

cheese and avocados that
when the student is ready,
the teacher will be there, so

he simply prayed a silent
prayer, shed a tear and left
it there.

He viewed a wonderful interpretation
of the one and only novel of a wonderful
nineteenth-century novelist as a classical

representation of the dangers of “passion”
allowed into life, but as he watched with
twenty-first century eyes and caught up

with college English through summaries of
the plot at Great English Literature Classics
online, he, in light of so much of his own

observations and education and, therefore,
in light of the obvious bias, prejudice and
racism which has reared its ugly head to-

day, had, in that classic nineteenth century,
English novel, reared its ugly head not in
the life of the bizarrely “passionate”

dark-skinned, orphan from the back alleys
of Liverpool, but in the completely
innocent, young head of the parson’s

child whose fantasies carried her re-
pressed thoughts away from the parsonage
into a classically, well-written

“passionate” death.

My mother used to say on occasion
that my father’s “get up and go, got

up and left.” I didn’t get it at the
time. Thinking back, I contemplated

the very slim chance that I actually
was around to hear but not understand

about what my mother was complaining.
Thousands of swimming sperm and one

little egg and bingo, I was the one
in a thousand. Then I gave thanks

that at that moment in time my father’s
“get up and go hadn’t got up and left”

— just yet, even though its kind of
embarrassing to consider — my parents?