Researching the first name of his fifth
grade teacher to dedicate a book to her
memory, he came across his eighth grade
graduation bulletin and saw that he had
been the treasurer of the class. He thought
to himself, thank heaven they never en-
trusted the checkbook to him. He was the
assistant treasurer of his junior class
in high school and no checks were signed,
that being the responsibility of the
treasurer, who, apparently had a tight-
fisted grip on the checkbook. His senior
year he experienced a double whammy, being
elected both treasurer of the class and
the National Honor Society and because he
had the checkbooks, both accounts came up
short, much to the chagrin of the school
counselor. He pleaded innocent, which he
was, with a decided deficit in the command
of elementary math, which he had. As an
adult he always tried to keep more in the
checking account than was listed in the
book so he would never have an over-draft,
a bit of clever planning, he thought. He
married an accountant and turned over the
books with a sigh of gratitude, vowing never
to be treasurer again.

When the physician almost shouted
through the phone, in answer to
the man’s question, “How much will

my knee heal?”: “I can pretty well
guarantee about 60 %. I’m not God,”
it was the “I’m not God” part that

brought back a distant memory of a
veterinarian who tended a severely
dehydrated Siamese cat the man was

watching for a friend when the man
asked, “Will it live?” and the
veterinarian shouted back at him,

“I don’t know; I’m not God!” The
cat lived and only three months
after the revolutionary stem cell

treatment the man’s knee feels at
least 60% better and, better yet,
the man gets to keep his knee when

two orthopedic surgeons in two dif-
ferent states had said to the man
in solemn, oracular tones, “I’ll

give you shots and pills and when
you can’t stand the pain anymore,
I’ll come to your rescue and take

out your knee,” like this was the
final, fatal, predestined verdict
coming straight from the mouth of

God. No, the man’s physician and
the cat’s veterinarian aren’t God,
but they did a good job of assisting.

Around six a.m. he heard the cricket or
grasshopper rub its legs together or a
leg against a wing whatever one or the
other does. It’s December; was the bug
in a rug hiding from September to Dec-
ember, quietly biding its time until it
felt perfectly safe to chirp and jump
for joy? Might there be more than one —
a mate and then in mid-summer there
would be lots of little chirpers all over
the family room? But what about all the
vacuuming and surely the dog’s nose
would have sensed the bug’s presence?
These things ran through the man’s mind
while he lie in bed. It was very quiet; he
heard the rhythmic breathing of his wife
next to him and the quiet snore of the dog
on the floor, and then he heard it again.
It seemed very systematic. He counted
the time between chirps — a constant
thirty count. And then he knew; the smoke
alarm battery was dying. Oh, such mundane
things, which happen at inconvenient times,
he thought as he rose to extricate the
battery before the chirping woke his wife
and the snoring dog. He didn’t think he
had any more of those little rectangular
batteries, just lots of double A’s, triple
A’s, C’s and several D’s for the lamps
they use while camping.

“I think my husband
is flirting with me,”
she said just before she died at
eighty-eight. Her husband
lived on for three
more years before he died of a
broken heart at ninety-three,
wishing every day
that she was back
in his arms and he was
flirting her death away.

His parents’ heydays
were the late 30’s and 40’s —
a romantic song and
what went wrong.
He wondered about
their worlds.
He traveled the
same nostalgic roads,
the back roads,
here and there,
the abandoned
gas stations, converted
into pubs, the road
houses resurrected,
the Glenn Miller and
Tommy Dorsey bands.
The sadness gripped
his heart as he listened
to a romantic song
and wondered what
went wrong.

His college’s name is Hope and he always
felt a bit uncomfortable with it; it just
didn’t have the ring of Yale or Princeton
or Harvard or even Thornton Jr. College.

It sounded kind of corny and is the butt
of bad jokes like, “Do you hope to graduate
from Hope?” and “There’s no hope at Hope,”
and “All those who enter here, abandon Hope.”

Clever, huh? But then he thought about the
pioneers who named the school and the struggles
that they had and how bleak life could be in
the swamp lands along the shore of Black Lake

and through it all, they hoped. That was a
hundred-fifty-years ago and the school is still
going strong. As he thinks about the bleak
conditions of global warming, islands sinking

deep into the sea, wars and rumors of wars
and all the fear and animosity, a sensation-
alism loving media, fear mongering politicians,

downright ignorance and a heaping fork full of
malevolence and hate, he thinks that’s not such
a bad name after all — “Hope in God, our help
and our God,” and “God, our anchor of Hope.” I

guess if it was good enough for the Psalmist
and the Hebrews and those intrepid, Dutch
immigrants, it’s good enough for him especially
in this Bleak House we call our home.

The stand-up comics up
in the Catskills kept them

rolling through the summer.
Then someone suggested

films and TV and along
came the late 50’s and 60’s

and great one-liners and
then skits and movies

that kept them rolling,
rolling long enough to

cope, for a little while,
with thoughts of the 30’s

and 40’s and the real
springtime in Germany.

The good Rev. laid it on the line
when he wrote,
“The choice is not between violence
and nonviolence but between non-
violence and nonexistence.”
Well, I guess there is
nothing about which to opine.
He said it all in one succinct line
and we are running out of time.
As the scapegoat he ran out of time,
just like the saving Scapegoat
did for all time.
But we don’t see it that way
most of the time;
scapegoats we are hell bent to find
to blame for our mimetic climb,
some kind of authentic identity to find,
which we never find
because we look for love
in all the wrong places
not knowing that
in that Scapegoat
self-sacrificial love we do find
and all hearts do bind.

He felt his body begin to betray him,
as it were, a knuckle here, a knee there
and now not much hair as he holds his

hands together behind his head rubbing
back and forth from the hair-line to the
smoothness of his scalp with the sides

of his thumbs. He stares out the window
and wonders while his mind wanders.
He swallows hard, runs his tongue over

his crowns and sees a tiny bird off in the
distance, which he then realizes is but a
speck on his eye glasses, looks down

through his bifocals at the obituaries in
the paper and notes three people who
died at a younger age than he is now.

He ate too much white bread for Thanks-
giving and his stomach is bloated. As he
leans forward his stomach is squeezed

between his lap and his lungs. He straight-
ens up, draws a deep breath and sighs,
breathing the Yahweh prayer — In through

the nose Yah, out through the mouth Weh
— Yah in, Weh out, Yah, Weh, Yah, Weh,
Yahweh. Today, he will skip his waddle

formerly known as a jog for a nap. Not
bad for a two-hundred-fifty year old
man. Some days it just feels that way.

Having lived in the great
Commonwealth for seven-
teen years, he thought he
knew his old Kentucky
home pretty well but the
election of the bizarre be-
yond belief chief just left
him in limbo, a better place
by far than the Medicaid
recipients who were just
thrown off the bus and then
under the bus and then run
over for good measure all
in the name of less govern-
ment and let’s not forget
more cruelty, the new
Southern hospitality.