His aunt wrote poetry for the neighborhood
newspaper. Her sister, his mother, used to
memorize poetry in school as they did back
in that day, but the poetry she quoted at
home, much to his dad’s chagrin, was not
from what she learned in school, but maybe
the playground of the 108th Street Christian
school. To wit: “Here I sit broken-hearted,
came to shit…but only farted.” “Jeanette,
knock it off. It’s not good for the boy’s
ears.” “Sonny boy, I have another one.”
“Okay, mom.” “No, Jeanette!” “I’ll tell you
after school before your father comes home.”
Guess what Sonny boy remembers from his youth?
Yes, the great, school yard poetry quoted by
Jeanette. “Oy!” said Sonny, the goy boy. His
mother would have said, “Nice rhyme, kid, but
you have to spice it up a bit,” and his dad
would have shouted, “Jeanette! Enough already.”

They drove the back roads home
from Chicago, memories, history —
the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s.
He loves the Red Arrow,
the Blue Star and 12 and 20 —
memories a plenty.
Mom and dad and a stop at
the House of David baseball game,
it’s all gone but behind the wheel,
right there just the same.
He thought old Route 66 was fine
but there is nothing like
the memories on the roads
along the South Shore Line.

The motel was trashed.
The Hispanic head of
maintenance whispered,
“All the blacks. The
police were called this
morning.” Oh, great,
the man thought to him-
self as he entered his
room. He said to the
maintenance man,
“Sure doesn’t help
the cause, does it?”
The maintenance
man didn’t under-
stand. And then the
man thought, this
lends itself so easily
to judgment, as in,
why can’t you help
me here? I’ve been
an advocate since I
was a kid, and then
he thought, who has
to meet whose expect-
ations? What about
all those white power
people — CEO’s,
Chairs of the Boards,
legislators who don’t
trash motels but trash
millions with the
tilted scales of justice?
Don’t worry about
your middle-class
values, bub, he thought
to himself, just be
thankful the room
is clean, which is
a kind of middle-
class value.

The first day dawned dark, damp,
gray, icy cold. Someone asked,

“Can you see the barren trees,
the crusted snow on the yard,

the dirty slush on the street?”
“Yes.” “Then the sun is shining.”

A poet wrote about the
Spanish Influenza pandemic
of 1918-19 and how it
affected lives in a small,
southern town. He thought
about how it affected his
life in a big, northern
city. His grandfather
succumbed to the dread
disease when his father
was thirteen, leaving his
father an immigrant orphan;
his father succumbed to the
dreaded death of suicide
when he, his son, was seven-
teen; he, the grandson and
son, almost succumbed to
the same dreaded death when
his wife succumbed at age
forty-nine, but didn’t…
and the long, ugly arm of
tragic, premature succumb-
ing, which had reached down
through the generations,
finally retreated back into
its big, dark, deadly sleeve
for awhile.

To a disbelieving, scoffing
soul, he simply states that it
starts small, tiny even, im-
perceptible, the desire. He
thinks of the story of the
little girl sitting in a circle
of little girls on the side-
walk playing a game when
she spies the doll of another
girl and wants it, wants it
more than anything else
on the face of the earth
and grabs the doll from
the other girl’s arms and
twists off the doll’s head
and throws the pieces back,
shouting, “Here’s your
pretty, little doll. It’s
not so pretty any more.”
He thinks that it was a good
thing that the little girl
wasn’t attractive and pro-
bably couldn’t command
an audience when she grew
up and that the world at
the time had to contend
with a despot in Germany
or the little girl could
have grown up to be a female
Hitler. Yes, my unbelieving
friend, it starts in a dark,
hidden, empty place in the
heart in a not so hidden
place of economic inequality,
despair and desperation, or
maybe just a place of want,
want, want and grows expon-
entially into conflagrations
too horrible to imagine.
Denial, deception, callousness,
projection: it really is their
fault is the phrase to be re-
peated over and over and over
until the lie is truth and
the rest is horrible history.
Hitler was a little kid at
one time, too.

His obsessive/compulsive,
A-type, anal neighbors
shovel their driveways
at the first sign of
a snowflake clean enough
to eat off of. He only
expends sufficient energy
to clear the way for one
car to make it out of
the garage. Smugly, he
ruminates, anything more
than that is an inefficient
use of time, talent and
calories. But later as
the sun sets and things
freeze over, he has to
go to the mailbox and
the driveway is icy,
slippery and it takes
way too much energy to
navigate the treacher-
ous terrain. As much
as he hates to admit it,
maybe his neighbors
were on to something.
At least they can get
their mail; but then in
light of the predicted
next day’s thaw, he
muses, no news is
good news as he pours
himself a bourbon from
the middle shelf and
settles in for a long
winter’s nap and thinks
to himself, Van Winkle
was on to something.

“We cannot attain the presence of God
because we’re already in the presence of God.
What’s absent is awareness.” — Richard Rohr

To attain, perchance to gain.
To be aware, perchance to repair,
all the brokenheartedness that came
with trying, trying, trying to attain.

To be aware, perchance to repair
what came with striving for fame,
of just wanting someone to care
hoping for a multitude of eyes to stare.

To attain, perchance to gain
What? A respectable aire,
whose noxious gases cause such pain?
This way there is nothing to gain.

To be aware, perchance to forswear
the ambition of worldly fame
and looking within to dare.
The reward? God abiding there.

He thought about the
beautiful, black sister
in the faith and a faith-
ful teacher and follower
of Yahweh seen through
the eyes of Jesus who put
on a hijab to say to the
world that she is in solid-
arity with sisters and
brothers who follow Allah
and she got in trouble
at her predominantly
white, evangelical college.
Luther’s White Satan smiles.

He thought of another beauti-
ful, black sister in the
faith and a faithful teacher
and follower of Yahweh seen
through the eyes of Jesus
who stood in solidarity with
the beautiful, black sister
who got into trouble and
she called out those white
Christians at that evangel-
ical school. To paraphrase,
she said something about
white “evangelicalism” not
being “good news.” Luther’s
White Satan smiles.

While Yahweh and Allah have
the same roots in words and
the rich, black, brown, and
red semitic soil, apparently
some white Christians see only
white roots and a white Jesus
and a six-thousand year old
white world and a lily-white
heaven and maybe they ought
to be seeing a white-hot hell
of their own making for them-
selves and all their brown
and black and red and yellow
brothers and sisters in Yahweh,
Allah and all this in the name
of Jesus. And they call that
evangelicalism? Luther’s
White Satan smiles.

And then he wondered to him-
self, don’t we all come out
of Africa?

Joseph doesn’t get his due,
and he never will —
the forgotten father
but that’s understandable;
you can’t very well
relegate mother to the
dust bin of history;
after all, it’s mom.
Dad’s do and don’t;
Joseph did; apparently,
Jesus knew and
Mary never complained.
There is something to
be said for not drawing
attention to one’s self —
Joseph as Gary Cooper
who once was a very
quiet actor in Hollywood.