Month: July 2020

Cutting your own hair is easy. Except, of course, for a few challenges. First, you have to figure out how short it should be, and resist changing your mind mid-exercise. Then you have to sort out how to move the scissors in the mirror so that your hands are traveling one way when your eyes tell them to reverse course and go the other. Finally, if are fortunate to have hair roots evenly distributed across your scalp, you simply can’t see some sections of your head very well. For those parts, you need to work by feel, trusting the evidence you see in your fingers and in the sink after your handiwork regarding the accuracy of your aim.

It would be easier, you might be say, to have someone else do this, someone trained in such things, someone unencumbered by the obvious shortcomings of self-service hair styling. That would be the perspective, a wise one indeed, shared by my wife and daughters. Just because we live during the time of a pandemic, just because we have moved houses during that time, and just because I am nervous about finding a new hair stylist who is likely touching lots of hair on heads of people not always taking the pandemic seriously – those are not good reasons to abandon six decades of practicality and take the trimming of my own grey locks into my own sometimes unsteady hands. They are right. You are right. But I am stubborn. And I have a pair of scissors that used to belong to my mother. Those scissors could not let me down.

I suppose I have been stubborn my entire life. The descriptor, however, is not one that family have often used to describe me. “You are such a Gemini,” Mom used to say. “He’s a real Gemini alright,” my wife has oft echoed. The statements were always made with a mix of love and gentle jibing, as if the qualities of my personality, should they be tossed into a kitchen blender, might yield a semi-pleasing if not slightly bitter result.

All that changed last week when my youngest daughter announced that there are now thirteen signs of the zodiac. Apparently, scientists have known for years about the thirteenth constellation but only recently have elected to do anything with that knowledge. This is perhaps what happens when people are stranded in their houses during a pandemic and have too much time to themselves. After weeks behind closed doors, one or more have decided that the world, long accustomed to the calendar notion of twelve, needs to face the fact that it has been wrong about still something else, that the cultural desire for comfort in the customs and traditions of twelve should be exposed for what it was, is, and has always been: incorrect. So somewhere, somehow, somebody let the information leak about the not-so-new constellation. And just like that, I am no longer a Gemini.

“You are such a Taurus,” my wife and youngest daughter told me a few nights ago. “So stubborn.”

In my daughter’s defense, she acknowledged (with a wink) that some of the online descriptions about Taurus did not fit me. But others apparently did. Besides, both she and my wife enjoyed how the shifting zodiac calendar moved them to signs and constellations that seemed to better match their own self-images. “I knew I wasn’t a Leo,” one said. “I never felt like an Ares,” the other added.

Please don’t misunderstand: I am all for truth and the importance of change, despite the pain associated with such change. I am also not opposed to either astrology or to its application in our world and do not necessarily object to the addition of a new constellation or sign (Ophiuchus). And I realize that I am, not unsurprisingly, behind the times, the information of this emerging astronomic evidence having filtered down to me relatively late in the global news cycle. Still I will admit that I was a bit unsettled to learn that lots of people have known about this for some time. Beyond that, I was at least a touch offended to be told that I needed to relinquish my title as typical Gemini and accept, gracefully and without argument, the new moniker of Taurus. I like twins. I don’t like bulls. I’ve come to enjoy looking for advice about Geminis in horoscopes. I personally think the name Gemini is just pretty cool.

Nonetheless, the world tells me that I must adapt. Adapt then I shall. So this morning I boldly embodied my willingness to embrace change in my bathroom’s walk-up, no appointment necessary, hair salon. It was clear from the start that I was going to make a mess of things. A Gemini might have changed his mind. Not a Taurus. I cut. I cut some more. I turned fingers and hair to and fro in contorted maneuvers to clip and snip myself to a countertop covered with grey. I worked quickly, finishing the job before anyone could look where I was and talk me out of it. It feels good too, the product of my stubbornness, when I inspect it with my own hands. My fingers don’t get stuck in aging wires of uninspectable brittle white as I run them over the back of my scalp. Those fingers have lost the ability to judge distance accurately and I can’t help them with mirrors and eyeglasses. Absent any objective information to the contrary, they are therefore happy. And I guess so am I.

All that’s left is for me to now let someone else view the results. Perhaps the people who know me best, the ones who have forced me to accept that I was never who and what I thought I was, will take pity on me given that I’ve enveloped myself with the mantle of newfound and newly accepted Taurusness – and they will help me fix the uneven result I’ve made. That was, truth be told, my real goal all along. Please don’t tell them though, or at least wait until they’ve evened me out.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Mom is shaking her head and smiling. You can guess what she’s saying.

Timing is everything. That’s what they say, although who the “they” is that says it is anyone’s guess. Regardless, the phrase certainly applies to the morning events on Camelot Court. Here’s why: About the time that Bumpers was racing into the Wiley front yard, the robin chicks’ mother was flying into the screen window of Rachel’s screened-in porch (unlike Mrs. Benny Benini, the Wileys used screens). It is impossible to know why the chicks’ mother did this, except to say, as some astute biologists from the local university later observed, that bird mothers, like any mothers of offspring about to take flight, can get distracted, and, when they do, their actions get misunderstood. Mrs. James got distracted; now her family was engaged in midair calesthenics on Camelot Court and she was driving the family Chevrolet in hot pursuit. The chicks’ mother, perhaps excited about the morning launch of her babies, got distracted by the sight of Bumpers. The robin had been seen, on more than one occasion, hopping around the grass in the exact location that Bumpers had dashed. She had also been observed to leave said location, in the past, with worms in her beak. Rachel and Thinky have theorized that, on the morning in question, the robin flew towards the corner of the yard, thinking not about the worms but instead about her chicks’ upcoming flight. This was the day. All signs were a go. The chicks would need a good breakfast before things got underway. Musing on such considerations, Mrs. Robin, according to Rachel and Thinky, didn’t see Bumpers and his boomerang bounty until the last second, and so she had to veer, erratically, off her flight path, causing her to fhplump into the screen of the screened-in porch before she could come to a post-veer stop. Rachel and Thinky’s explanation is as good as any. It also explains why they woke up when they did.

“What was that?” Thinky said.

“Whtwaswhat?” Rachel mumbled.

Technically, Thinky had been asleep before the flphump. Her eyes were closed. But she wasn’t full asleep, as she liked to call it. She was only some asleep, the kind of asleep a thirteen year-old girl is when she is sleeping over in the screen-in porch at her best friend’s house and she has already heard the thump (not fphlump) sound of the screen door closing behind the escaping posterior of a beagle named Bumpers. 

Rachel was asleep. She was much less than full asleep when Thinky started listing the possibilities for why she had heard the flump. She was full awake when Thinky decided that the fphlump must have been caused by the robin staring at them from the Wiley front yard. She was on her feet and running when Thinky screamed that the fphlump was connected to the flump and that Bumpers had just taken off after the robin.

It was very lucky that the girls stayed up late the night before, stargazing from the steps of the screened-in porch. Otherwise, they might not have been so tired and they might have changed into their pajamas before they went to bed. But sleepover luck was in their favor: they had fallen asleep in not just their clothes but their sneakers as well. “Too much teenager talk,” Mrs. Wiley would later say. “Made us ready for teenager walk,” Thinky would reply.

They were ready for more than walking. Which was fortunate because Rachel, expecting, when she heard Thinky scream “taking off”, to see Bumpers bumbling around the yard in pursuit of a bird, instead saw her beagle friend bumping up the side of the trees, knocking leaves and who knows what else (Mrs. Benny Benini did) off their treetop perch. Rachel bolted out the door, jumped the family fence, and started down the street after the family dog. Thinky, however, hesitated. She saw what was above Bumpers. She saw what looked like Jeremy James suspended from the arms of a man who himself was suspended from the basket of a hot air balloon. She would not have believed it was Jeremy James except that Jeremy’s sister, Jocelyn, was looking over the edge of the balloon basket, waving. 

Jocelyn was friends with Thinky’s younger sister. Jocelyn was too nice to steal Rachel’s dog. But Jeremy…. 

What a brazen boy!Thinky thought. First, he hadn’t had the nerve to say hello yesterday and instead had looked like a thief when he’d passed in front of Rachel’s house. Now he had gone and hired a hot air balloon, and an acrobat, to help him steal Rachel’s beagle. Such behavior, Thinky decided, was inexcusable.That boy needed to be stopped.

Thinky was not the only one to watch Jeremy James soar above the trees on Camelot Court and decide that his behavior needed stopping. Mrs. James, driving the Chevrolet faster than her normally civic-minded intentions allowed, had managed to turn onto Camelot Court not long after Bonnie did. Having seen her family drift toward the east, she had gone out after them, perplexed by what she would describe as Mr. James’s sudden cleverness. Look who wanted to be pilot after all! She had suspected that Mr. James was somehow responsible for Jeremy’s obsession with flight. Jeremy had to inherit his flying-crazed gene from someone. Now, at the first opportunity, Mr. James had climbed into the cockpit of a balloon with Jeremy. Worse than that, he had brought along little Jocelyn.

Once she’d recovered from the shock of seeing the balloon drifting off with her family, Mrs. James had focused on the chase. It had been easy keeping up. Because there was only a single road leading from the McGillivibe’s field back toward Bobbing Apple, and because the balloon was going more up than it was away, Mrs. James had actually gotten ahead of it. She then tried to figure out which direction they would head. When she saw that direction was east, that made her wonder. Was this some kind of escape? Were her husband and children trying to move back east, to Mr. James’s family, and his prospects for a better job? If they did, she would be alone in Bobbing Apple. What would she do? Should she go back to school, maybe on the internet, and finish her degree? Only when she saw Jocelyn wave at her from Bonnie’s basket did Mrs. James sufficiently settle herself to realize what was really going on. This wasn’t an escape. This was a demonstration. This was part of Mr. James’s plan to show the people who were closing the factory that he was a man who could soar.

Mrs. James couldn’t really blame Mr. James for that. The factory boss was a sorry excuse for a boss. He was petty and he was unkind. He was not very forthcoming about what would happen to people like Mr. James when the factory closed later that summer. He also did not wear starched shirts and at least Mr. James always showed up for work in a clean and starched shirt. A supervisor, not matter what the level, needed to look respectable. He needed to show that he took his job seriously, even if the factory bosses and its owner did not listen to good ideas and were going to lay that supervisor and all his workers off.

Mrs. James scanned the sky, trying to spot Mr. James in the basket. When she saw him, facing the south, she knew that she was right. He was facing the factory, looking toward his future. He had put aside his fears and was standing up to his obstacles. A wave of pride helped Mrs. James’s foot find enough pressure to keep pace with the balloon. A series of turns helped the James’s Chevrolet hone its way back home. Mrs. James grinned. Mr. James was piloting the balloon over their house. This was his sign to Mrs. James that he knew where his home was, where his roots were, where his heart lay. She pictured Mr. James, one hand at his side, another extended in front, a figure of action and determination, a father and factory supervisor guiding the balloonist down Lancelot Lane and toward the factory. They would land on the lawn of the factory. The factory bosses and owner would have to take notice of a man who could land a hot air balloon on the lawn of a failing factory. They would have to listen to the ideas of a man who could help the factory and town become part of the future instead of a relic from the past.

Misplaced pride can get the better of the best of us. It can muddle our thinking and mess our plans. In Mrs. James’s case, it made her turn on Camelot Court, instead of Lancelot Lane. It caused her to look up rather than in front. It temporarily made her think that Jeremy and Mr. McGillivibe were rescuing a dog that had fallen out of the hot air balloon rather than one that had been removed from its yard by it. Most importantly, it blinded Mrs. James to the fact that Camelot Court was a cul-de-sac and hence resulted in a collision between the James Chevrolet Caprice and Mrs. Benny Benini’s brand new trashcans.

Today is a hot July 4th. I am not complaining; we moved to a lower altitude to escape the winter cold in environs closer to the sun. Still, even when the humidity is low, the afternoon of a rain-free July day can make most Arizonans feel like they might be on the evening’s dinner menu. I have spent my afternoon alternating between sitting outside, sheltered from direct sunlight by the alcove in front of our house, and lounging within, stretched atop the couch where I am a target for collaborative extension by our calico kitten. Her name is Petal and she knows that I used to be allergic to cats when I was a boy. I know she knows this because she seems magnetically attracted to me. On a day such as this one, when I am adjusting to the conditioned air of the house interior, I don’t have the energy to explain to our new family member that a distant version of myself used to experience eye itching and nasal congestion around her kind. So she dutifully settles first atop and then beside me, either dismissive of my medical history or supremely convinced that her own mix of protein and fur could never cause harm to another. Either way, I acquiesce to her confident affection.

Our world seems alit of late. If not actually from wild fires, which alternately rage and recede in the brush and the news, the pandemic and the all-too-public peddling of political pandemonium has everyone feeling overheated. The time doesn’t feel stable, safe, because, well, for the most part, the situation does not meet the criteria for such descriptors. And, even when we might individually manage to snag a snippet of respite from the smoldering upset that has taken hold of our land and psyche, the intemperance of a neighbor or fellow troubled traveler inserts itself, boldly and unapologetically, into that tiny bubble of solace. Just last night for example, while strolling comfortably atop the soft grass of a local golf course, sipping at the sensations of nightfall with my wife, daughter, and two friends, a steady shower of golfballs fell without warning from the sunless sky. It seems that some misguided but clearly intentioned soul had decided to leave the comfort of his porch and practice launching drives from a tee-box on the course some one hundred and fifty yards or so behind us. Although the lush grass nurtured by reclaimed water was capable of absorbing the return of each ball to earth without much fuss, we, not similarly designed or buffered, had to beat a hasty advance beyond the reach of this fellow’s aim. Which, I fear, was what he had in mind: we were walking where he fixed to give a golfball flight. It seemed little matter to him that one of his missives into the dusk could dent a human more than the earth. Part of me confesses that because we were wearing masks, out of respect for the pandemic and each other, he may have decided that we were fair game for his flailing free-for-all into the night. We left him, rather quickly, to his fuming, and we did so without fanfare. A man with a driver and a bad attitude is someone to be avoided.

A cursory review of the past could easily identify distinct periods of history when the human species has been gripped by existential fever and turmoil. Most often this state of frenzy has been self-induced. We are, almost as a matter of routine, susceptible to bouts of agitation for the sake of agitation itself. With regularity, we need an enemy, a cause, or a crisis, something to rail against, a pyrexia to which we might fall prey so that, by way of response, we can cool ourselves with some manufactured wind of change that sweeps, often at our own fanning, over the collective sweat on our brows. Perhaps because of boredom, or maybe just to generate some kind of attention, some acknowledgement that life and its hidden rulebook are frustratingly opaque and obtuse, we lash out, bubble over, erupt with a latent lava of misgiving that is, given our experience over the centuries, neither unexpected or unsurprising. The British tradition of afternoon tea typifies the physiologic yearn for catharsis, a small but palpable demonstration of the human need to ingest heat, deliberately and as a matter of routine, circulate it, and then let it release. Through doing so, our bodies, overheated to begin with, are duped by the evaporative cooling that accompanies the predictable yet satisfactory radiation, hence achieving a self-fabricated sense of comfort. Unfortunately, our species also acts, with regularity, as if it has an instinctive penchant for a similar social experience. We may study the phenomena of war and upheaval at school. We can read about it in books. But we still seem to need to intermittently launch ourselves at each other, through words, fists, or hurled objects. We remain prone to a regular fits of feistiness and fever.

This is not to say that all heat is created equal; there is unacceptable injustice in our land, unforgivable disparity, ugly structural inequity and inequality, and preventable trauma. Some sins in our history must not be neatly compartmentalized and ignored. Our collective tolerance for systemic bigotry and racial intolerance is a true disgrace, a shocking stain, egregious evidence of our communal moral failing to live up, with consistency and accountability, to our ideals, nay to our values, and admit, acknowledge, and subsequently address our historical and continuous missteps, transgressions, and shortcomings. The fount of this fever lies visible. Its treatment requires more than a polite social sweat. A proper defervescence is demanded, raw, honest and sustained, if “we the people” are to heal, to form a more “perfect union”, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Our path to true personal independence runs, naturally and as a matter of course, through the river of our mutual interdependence. My liberty relies on yours. Another’s suffering is and should be a veritable source of our individual discomfort – physical, existential, and spiritual. No one should live free from perspiration and disquiet while the fire of injustice burns among us.

And so, on the anniversary of our nation’s founding declaration, and during a time of great national discomfort and disillusionment, I pray that we learn to focus our latest ague on its sources, and target our anti-pyrexic measures with clear intent, historical honesty, and cool compassion. As a boy, I was drawn to this day, July 4th, much like my kitten Petal is to me: the notion that we are connected, are created equal, was and remains affirming, inspiring. It feels good to be part of something bigger than oneself, something intertwined. It is reassuring to believe that you and I are inextricably bound in something more than words, that your welfare – and its protection – is a reason for my actions, and vice versa. While I have not always aligned my daily decisions with such a higher aspiration, the heat of our current moment reminds me of what is possible. Common purpose, if we let it, can help us avoid both infection from novel virus and re-infection from destructive social virulence. We need each other. We need our planet. We need to embrace the true causes for this latest season of discontent.

A more “perfect union” remains possible. You and I are not simply citizens of a politically-organized nation with borders and boundaries. Yes, in the U.S., we are the lived embodiment of a pledge to our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. But we are also each other’s keeper. Let’s set our thermostat to that higher regulation.