If you’ve ever seen a photo finish
of a man or woman running, you know
for a measly fraction of a second
the man or woman runner is airborne.

That, for me, is the entire glory
of running, not that of winning races.
All those airborne fractions of a second
add up to endless hours of flight.

If you could put all those moments
together, how far, imagine how far
you might fly. Could you see yourself on the
moon, or some equally desolate spot?

Running always makes you fit, but running
can make you creature to a kind of flight,
defying gravity right before your
very eyes in one last photo finish.

—Richard Jespers

_ The Eclipse gum and Nature Valley wrappers always catch my eye on the store shelves.  What is this smooth, shiny Mylar (or look-alike material) made of?  Petroleum?  We see the Styrofoam Sonic cups everywhere, if not perched on someone’s desk at the office, then flattened in the street or skittering across our lawn (there’s a Sonic two blocks over, so the trip isn’t a long one).  The Udi Bread wrapper is the same as any bread wrapper.  It’s made of plastic.  It will get caught in your tree limbs; that’s why I always tie those things in a knot before putting them in the dumpster.  Regardless, it will still take thousands of years to decompose.  If ever.

_ I wrote my three congresspersons a letter each week for six weeks, and then I missed a week.  I haven’t written since.  My congressional rep. wrote back three times, if belatedly, but, of course, it was all the same party line stuff.  Nothing new.  He probably said the same thing about my letters.  I’ll write my three congresspersons again—there’s certainly plenty of fodder for letters—but for now I’m taking a break.  The holidays always do that to me.  Time to take a break, let the old body and mind rest up.

_ The following may be a matter of choice.  Maybe not.  Why would a sportscaster on ESPN say a quarterback is the “most steady player” instead of saying he’s the “steadiest player”?  It’s a trend I’ve noted for a long time.  When I taught elementary reading years ago, we conveyed (I hope) the principle that most adjectives are “regular” and that all you have to do is add “i-e-r” for comparing two and “i-e-s-t” for representing the superlative.  You only add “more” or “most” to irregular adjectives, say, like “beautiful”.  You wouldn’t say “beautifuler” or “beautifulest”.  Of course not; your ear tells you at a fairly young age that that construction is wrong.  More and more, however, I hear more and more people treating EVERY adjective as if it were irregular.  They say things like “more steady” or “more breezy” instead of “steadier” or “breezier”.  Can anyone explain this phenom to me?  Is it because elementary readers no longer teach the difference between regular or irregular adjectives, or is there something more sinister (sinisterer?) involved?  I’d love to know.

_ Below is an excerpt from the novel I just finished, tentatively called The Operatic Scale of Desire.  It is the blog post of character Dan Wallis, chaplain of a busy teaching hospital in Wichita.  He writes about an incident that took place when he was fourteen and philosophizes further on the meaning of a holiday that comes around as regularly as a winter cold.

Some time after reaching puberty, I intuit that there exist two Christmases.  One holiday seems to begin ardently after Thanksgiving: arias you hear on the Texaco-Metropolitan Opera radio affiliate, songs you chant in the school program, songs of sentimental cheer crooned by your favorite stars on TV and the movies (‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ makes me smile and cry).  Some time between the church pageant and Christmas Eve, the season’s feverish pitch falls to a hush: by now you have exchanged gifts at school, at church; you have presented offerings to your teachers, your neighbors; in the mail you long ago placed little packages that travel to Pop’s family on the coast.  You are witness to the shared anxiety in everyone’s faces, from the postman to the woman who sells tickets at the Orpheum.

If you can’t find your money, Son, will you step aside so that others might enjoy the season.  And when I do locate my cash, the toothy woman flashes me a practiced smile and says, Say, aren’t you the boy that played Amahl several seasons ago?

No.

Well, I’m sure you are, I never forget a face.

Fuck you, I mumble under my breath. 

Her smile falls away, and she shouts through the hole in the glass.  Get out of my sight, the world has no use for your kind.

What kind is that? I rant, giving her the finger.  I then see a reflection of myself looking like Ma when she’s hopping mad, and I jump back.

You know what you are, now get out of my window so I can help these good people standing in the cold, Sonny.

The other Christmas is a parallel and unequal world of ancient hymns, the story as it is told from the Big Book on the lectern at church.  Long ago a virgin mother gives birth to a very special baby (I haven’t yet learned paradox), a baby that will save all the wretches of the world (especially and including me).  Very wise men following a star in the sky travel a long distance to be present on this very chilly night that the baby Jesus is wrapped tightly and laid in a manger.  Ma—dressed in her Christmas nightgown through which you can see her breasts—explains that for all intents and purposes Jesus was born in a barn and that his manger was little more than a cattle trough.  As she holds me close to her sweet bosom, I think of my grandfather’s barn, a place that smells of dung and car grease, and wonder, That’s where our noble savior was born?

The saddest thing is that one Christmas wars against the other like a jealous sibling.  Yes, one is crass, the other wise.  One powerful, the other weak and self-deprecating.  One encourages inane consumption, the other generosity, the former eradicating one’s desire to practice the latter.  It is a war I relive each year—fretting over what to get for whom and how much to spend or not—a case of post traumatic stress that multiplies and folds over itself year after year.  It is a war that always ends in a truce, heathen burghers smiling smugly—even as a babe coos quietly in his manger. 

_ I continue my close readings of New Yorker stories from 2011.  Only two more to go until I write about the project. 

What kind of statistics will be interesting?  The number of male authors?  Female?  Number of stories about ethnic minorities?  Gays/lesbians?  Trannies?  Average age? 

How many stories are set in New York or on the eastern seaboard?  How many are set in the boondocks, a foreign country? 

Literary issues?  Who uses the third person close point of view?  Who writes in first person? 

After January first I begin my trek through these fifty or so stories to see what the magic is, the alchemy that is the New Yorker story.

I’ve written my three congresspersons a letter each week for three, almost four, weeks in a row now. I don’t know if my actions are doing any good (they may be infuriating their secretarial staff), but I’m having great satisfaction in expressing my opinions. [Actually, my congressman did write one letter politely setting me straight on a few things, and I answered him in kind.] And this is what we constituents should be doing, regardless of what we believe. Those people are in office at our behest. If we express our opinions in large enough numbers, should it happen that, hm, they might change their minds about a few things or find themselves out on the pavement? Acting collectively, our actions could become a very powerful thing.

I may have overdone it last time, the English teacher having become enraged by the onslaught of change overcoming our language. The truth is that English is at our disposal to be used in the way that we see fit. Grammar books usually are written with a nod toward long-time usage, finally giving in to what ordinary people have fashioned of it. One day there may be no “their” there; the word may be spelled only one way, and it will be up to the reader to figure out its meaning (like most teachers must do with regard to their students’ writing). One day “bust” may become a perfectly acceptable way (maybe we’re
. . . there, there) to express that something has broken or burst. One day “Me and my friends” may replace “My friends and I” (maybe we’re really there, damn the grammar books). After all, ain’t “me” more important than me friends? One day “If I were
. . .”—normally used to express a hypothetical situation (the subjunctive voice)—will become “If I was.” Why? B/c (texting for “because”) it’s simply easier to remember. Why must we have all these rules we have to remember for the rest of our lives? Isn’t the important thing to communicate and get our ideas across in the simplest form possible? Mayhaps.

A few years ago I began to use the pharmacy at one of the big discount stores. On the neck of each prescription bottle, the pharmacist attached a blue rubber ring (so as to separate your meds from your mate’s, which may be red or orange or green). Though I recycled the plastic bottles, I didn’t know what to do with the rubber rings. I couldn’t just  throw them away. I knew where they’d wind up. The same is true for those little plastic ties shaped like horseshoes that you find on a loaf of bread, many with a date on them, indicating when the loaf went to the shelf or when it should leave the shelf. Whatever. And what about those strips we glue to our noses at night so we can breathe? The truth is that none of these articles, as small as they are, currently recycle (at least not at our local centers). Too small to recycle? I don’t know. Millions of people must buy their pharmaceuticals from the same chain I do. Millions of people must buy bread each day, their nose strips. Just because we can’t “see” the space their (excuse me,  they’re) taking up, can’t “see” the thousands of years it will take for the earth to ingest these items doesn’t mean we should just let them go. Does it?

I continue to do close readings of all the New Yorker stories from 2011, so far more than thirty. Early impression? Our nation (and our world for NY includes a number of translations) is blessed with a large number of gifted writers of various ages, who represent nearly every ethnic and sexual (almost) group in America. Anyone trying to get a story published in the New Yorker has a great deal of talented competition.

One Saturday I watched Michael Moore the filmmaker speak for three hours on C-SPAN’s Book-TV (I recorded it). A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn was a book he mentioned as having had great influence over his thinking. I’m about half-way through The People’s History, and I’ve learned a lot, too. One, Christopher Columbus was a murderer, who, along with other Spaniards, over a period of several years, wiped out an entire tribe on the island of Hispaniola. Hard to believe?

What about this? “Through all that growth, the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political power. A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent—1 percent of the population—consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth” (49).

Or this? At the beginning of the 20th century, writer Charles Beard noted that four groups “were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, and men without property” (91). Beard concluded: “The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle–income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity” (99).

Today’s “buffers”—the unemployed middle-class, unemployed students, unemployed graduates, underemployed union members, the disenfranchised elderly, all ethnic groups—have taken to Wall Street to march against this very same greed that has haunted our country since its inception. Let’s give them a few bucks a month to help out.