Saturday of the First Week of Lent

Tonight we make the annoying switch over to Daylight Savings Time. I believe the time changing back and forth is both irrational and also a deliberate thing. Those who rule this world could easily enact a law to keep the time one way or the other, if the hours really do benefit mankind by their placement. but those people choose to do the silly back & forth. I think they do this so they can remind us that they believe themselves more powerful than God. They can speed time up or reverse it, depending on the season, and for no better reason than a bureaucratic whim.

Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of the beginning of the big Fauxvid-19 Freakoutathon. I only remember this because I had it marked on my calendar. Tomorrow, in addition to being the second Sunday in Lent, also marks two years since a certain spotted menace showed up at our farm and latched onto my ossified old heart. He and Bluebelle have been cavorting all day in the snow that fell during the night. We ended up with about four inches, and it’s still snowing lightly at the moment. I will forever be fascinated by the aggressive interest some dogs have in the snow. Bonnie used to love it, running outside and scooping it up on her nose, plowing around, barking, spinning, caught up in 151-proof canine joy. I remember the time she had a vole in her mouth and Mrs. Orr was trying to sweet-talk her into giving it up. Bonnie did some prancing and scampering, and while my wife was laughing (I was watching from the kitchen window), Bonnie tossed the vole into a snowbank with a deviously quick snap of her red head, hiding it for later. My wife didn’t know about it until she came back inside and found me convulsed with laughter.

Every time I see Jinx hightailing it through the white stuff, I think of the old Rush song “By-Tor and the Snow Dog,” with a young Geddy Lee’s voice at its dog-calling finest. I often call Jinx “By-Tor,” as in “Bite-Orr,” because he enjoys sneaking up behind me and seizing my sweater cuff or my trouser leg in  his teeth. It always startles me, and this always pleases him. Bite-Orr indeed.

***

The snow often prods me to think of Austria and Germany, a region to which I’ve never traveled and now will almost certainly never travel. I have a deep and as-yet unexplainable pull to those places, possessed of a love for the language, the literature, the food, the friendly and warlike people.

We used to watch Rick Steves’ travel shows and particularly enjoyed his episodes on European Christmas traditions, which featured Austria and Germany, along with the Scandinavian countries and the British Isles. But back when Donald Trump was elected to the Presidency, I heard an episode of an NPR show in which Mr. Steves spoke of his support for Hillary Rodham Clinton and his trembling certitude that Mr. Trump was going to cast America into a nuclear war. This angered me deeply, not because of a loyalty to the brawling billionaire, but rather because it was so cheesy and so transparently a typical “Please like me because I’m one of the good guys!” bit of leftist posturing.  I have never watched nor listened to anything by Steves since, with the exception of re-watching the above-mentioned Christmas special, since we had already seen it.

My faith informs me that I should wish the best for my neighbor, out of charity. And my heart is warmed at the thought that Rick Steves must be very happy indeed that Mr. Trump was not allowed to sit in the Oval Office for a second term. I’m sure that everything is right in Mr. Steves’ world, and that things have gone so well for him and his friends, his friends who seem to hate so strongly the things I love. And I do not mean Donald J. Trump.

***

I’ve mentioned before my lifelong love of what’s referred to as “easy listening music,” with notable examples being the arrangements and compositions of men like Henry Mancini, Montovani, Jackie Gleason, Acker Bilk, and others. I’ve endured a lot of kidding from friends because of my affection for this type of music, and this teasing has never really bothered me, being eclipsed as it has been by my enjoyment  of the art form. Easy listening music is playing in the background as I write these words, and it takes me back to lying on the floor on my belly in front of my aunt’s massive console record player/radio, and of how offices and department stores used to play such music on the speakers, and how, after learning a little music theory while in band & orchestra, I began to be able to appreciate how tonal patterns evolved. It became a game to me, music, and I would listen attentively to something like “My Cup Runneth Over” or “Love Is Blue” and try to anticipate the chord changes and try to imagine how I would have written it slightly differently. When I was fifteen and started teaching myself the guitar, I never stopped loving the slowpoke Lawrence Welk dentist office Muzak elevator music that I grew up with. Even standing in front of an amp dialed up loud enough to make the hair on my arms move (and lordy, I’m paying for those days now!), I clung to “The Girl From Ipanema” as if she were my prom date.

***

My wife and I, snowed in as we were, decided while drinking our morning coffee to watch a movie. The movie was “The Reader,” with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. We had never watched it before and never wanted to, having heard that it was semi-pornographic and nothing on which to waste one’s time. But a friend who is about as unsentimental as they come told me recently that he and his wife had watched it, and that he had been deeply moved. This is a man who embodies all the emotions of a piece of quartz, so I paid attention to his recommendation. “It’s very, very sad, man,” he said. “You’ll be affected.”

So we watched it. Yes, there were a handful of scenes where we averted our gaze and I had my thumb on the fast-forward button, but it was nothing of the sexfest we’d been led to believe. Both of us found it very — to use my friend’s word — affecting. Truth is, the movie troubled me and I have been thinking on it all day.  The themes of guilt and responsibility were the obvious takeaways, but my mind usually sees these things from a canted angle, and I was untouched by the obvious; there is no place inside me that can be touched by astonishment at what human beings are capable of. I myself keep thinking of the protagonist, “Michael Berg,” and wondering how one carries the burden inside one’s self that one could have saved a sad life simply by speaking up, and how one handles knowing that sanctimonious actions can still allow one to make really bad decisions.

***

I noted above that I am almost impervious to shock at what men can do to each other with their withered little hearts and noble words. What can shock me, however, what shocks me every day I am on this earth, is what God allows. Yes, I know, I know….every college freshman who’s taken a Philosophy 101 class would have all sorts of snappy answers for me, as would every devotee of St. Thomas Aquinas. My questions and my musings are hardly original or penetrating. But they are mine, and no man can shame me away from asking and pondering. His silence. Our sufferings. So easy to fire off a quick answer to these things. So easy to affect a wise mien and stroke the chin and offer a soft koan. But here, in the smoking battlefield that is me, that is my mind and soul and imagination, nothing is easy. Nothing leads me away from the patterns of thought and excruciating exploration to which I’ve been enslaved since I was a small boy.

Perhaps that’s why, in the love for the traditional Catholic faith that has grown within me over the past several years, I cling so tenaciously to my personal rituals and devotions and observances. Because these trifling elemental tangibles comfort me. Yes, they do. They comfort me and give me a compass with which I can shoot an azimuth to tomorrow and next week and all these closing days of mine and my wife’s.  I need this comfort.

I need this comfort because I forever carry certain images and certain tableau within me, within me now, within me since I wasn’t even hip-high. My interior fingers are locked to my rituals and grimy little private traditions because in those periods when my grip loosens, whether by weakness or a masochistic need to see what-if, my entire self is whisked away from my head bent over candles or kneeling before a crucifix with a missal before me, and I am once again on a tall white pedestal in a vast place, like a bowl over me with faraway stars painted on its curved surface, and I can hear far below me the murmurings of every person I’ve ever known, ever disappointed, ever hurt, ever helped, ever betrayed, ever guided, ever abandoned, ever taught…and those murmurings begin to fade as I realize that a Presence is drawing near, and that I am about to give account. A full account. Why? How could you? Why didn’t you? Explain yourself.

And I am alone up there on that pedestal, that pillar, and the wind is buffeting me, and I am crying out to the stars, afraid to directly address this looming Presence I feel, and I am hoping that just this one time, just this once, I won’t be told that I failed the test, missed the mark, that I didn’t survive the cut, that today’s just not the day. Because, Faustus-like, I’ve read the wrong books and asked the irreverent questions and didn’t make much of the time I had, and was too unserious and daydreamed so many things away, and all the while falling short, falling short, and never trusting the words of prefabricated guidance that smiling men with soft hands offered me.

I don’t trust Him, you see.

I’m not supposed to say that. I claim to have a Christian heart, a Catholic heart. But my own narrow glances at Him betray my real heart. I don’t trust Him because I’ve seen too many people — not strangers, but people I love dearly — beg Him for a crumb of comfort or even acknowledgment, and come away with the vacant and stunned look of one who realizes that it wasn’t a nightmare but is simply reality, reality today, reality here. The plainchant of my sins against Him, against all of you, in fact, is my easy hostility towards Him, moved as I am by what I see and have seen. I am told that covetousness and envy are great sins, and I envy those who casually dissect Him as a celestial teacher, with us as students in His cruel but benevolent school. Pity I was not formed with such a predisposition even possible in my chest and my skull. Liar that I am, I have spoken the words many times, but I have never been able to see Him as teacher or even as father, in truth. And my inability, my lack, is a megaphone by my ear, and the cold, lawyerly, syllogistic voice of John Calvin hisses at me: “You were predestined to be this way. And what does that tell you, hmmm?” I bat the megaphone aside, but now I am more than ever aware of the distant stars above me, and the slender stone structure on which I stand, and the voiced void beneath and beyond me.

And when I feel that void around me and that silent, unresponsive Presence at my shoulder, and when I hear those voices below me begin their restless sibilant litany again, I don’t leap from the tall pedestal to whatever awaits me down there. I leap up and then slam down as hard as I can with my heels into the cold white stone surface, and I drop to my knees with all the force I can, wanting it to hurt, needing the bruise-proof, and I bring those guilty, indolent hands up from the gritty surface and press their palms together, like a child, and I begin whispering as fast and as violently as I can the ancient words, the supplications, the prayers. And when at last I lift my head, I don’t look around to see if the sky is still black and mocking-starred; I move with care to a place where I can sit in front of a candle and hold a rosary in my hand and rake my eyes over a page. And I try to trust.

This trying is my life. It has been for a long time, and probably will be until I leave here and go and find out whether a tall white pedestal awaits me, or a wide-swinging gate of welcome, or a sulfurous crevasse hiding over there behind that snow-dusted ridge to the east, or a beef-and-beer-smelling Valhalla where no man’s hands are soft and no one tells me that hating my own people is a virtue, and that being effeminate is Christ’s paradigm, and that God’s silence is some sort of bizarre proof that He loves me so much. Me and the little children, all the children of the world.

~ S.K. Orr