Home In High Summer

We went down into town this morning for an outing, but we almost didn’t go. Mrs. Orr has been battling a sinus thing that has migrated down into her chest and she’s been very weak from all the coughing. But she wanted to get out of the house and so we did. We ended up forgetting to buy the one thing we really went for, but that was all right. There’s an oriental market (yes, I’m aware that I’m supposed to say “Asian,” but that’s just too bad, innit?) where we sometimes shop for staples like Japanese matcha green tea, soba noodles, miso paste, and the odd vegetable like immaculate little cucumbers. Prowling the aisles today, I came up with a can of something that rooted me to the spot. Yes, yes. Silkworm pupa. I keep trying to imagine stirring a can of those things into a pot and thinking, “Boy, howdy, this is gonna taste sooooooo good…”

Not a real friendly bunch, those folks in that oriental store. But I get a kick out of reading the labels. Electable Exact Noodles, that sort of thing. When I lived in Japan, I loved reading the English slogans on things that made no sense. And now here we are in AD 2022, when nothing spewing from any media source makes any sense. They just make stuff up. Occidental bizarre.

***

I talked to a really interesting fellow on the phone yesterday. He possessed a very distinctive and familiar accent, and I asked him if he was from South Boston. He was pleased that I recognized the narrow geographical lilt of his speech, and we got into a nice, long discussion. The chat was helped along by my telling him that some of the finest Marines with whom I served were old Southies from his area, tough, smart, loyal, fierce young men with a raucous sense of humor and the quick fists of natural warriors. He liked that, and it led to a couple of stories. Then he asked, “You ever hear of Whitey Bulger?”

I allowed that I had indeed heard of the infamous mobster, and that I had read a couple of books about him and seen the DiCaprio/Damon/Nicholson movie loosely based on his life. The gentleman with whom I was speaking said, “Well, I’ll tell you a secret. My grandfather was a pretty big deal in the Irish Mob in the old days. Look him up sometime. Name of Howie Winter. He was a tough man. No nonsense. But he loved me. Gave me my start in my business. Not in the mob. I was legit, all my life. And Whitey Bulger? He was scum. Much worse than even the books and movies make him look. And he was a rat. Worst thing a man can be.”

I promised the man that I would indeed look Howie Winter up, and I did. Fascinating stuff. I’m glad I got to talk to the gent who was raised in Hell’s Kitchen. Every day brings the opportunity to meet a truly interesting person. Look around today. The little grandpa-looking fellow tottering along in the produce aisle may have destroyed a Japanese bunker on Tarawa. The tired-looking woman in the health & beauty aisle may have raised several children in grinding poverty with no help from anyone but God and Sanka. The duffer making his way across the Walmart parking lot on a walker with tennis balls may once have tracked down and exacted vengeance on a lowlife who molested his daughter, never to be suspected or caught by the law. No one had a boring life. Every swinging Richard among us has been on a path of adventure and surprise and wonder. Sometimes we forget this, though. Sometimes I forget, anyway.

***

People in the region where we live, especially the women, seem to be afflicted with some odd hybrid variant of Munchausen By Proxy syndrome. They seem, as one fellow put it, to covet diagnoses, especially for their children, but also for themselves. My wife and I both know women whose eyes positively gleamed when their grandsons were diagnoses as autistic, women who glow when told that they or their family members have this sort of cancer or that sort of syndrome or this disability or that disease. At my former job, I worked with a woman who at lunchtime would bring out a Vera Bradley bag containing all her prescriptions medications (there were about twenty of them) and take them out one by one, and line them up on the table, and lovingly ponder each one. She would pop the bottles open and take the pills, and she seemed as happy as a mountaineer sharpening his favorite blade, or a musician wiping the finger smudges from his instrument. It was a perverse ritual. Mr. Mojo Rising was right: people are strange.

***

I was happy to learn of a recent commemoration. Father James Conner, a Trappist monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Bardstown, Kentucky, and the closest thing to a spiritual advisor I’ve ever had, celebrated his 65th year as a priest at the beginning of this month. Father James is a delight, a compact, elfin little man with penetrating eyes that seem to look right into your heart, a soft-spoken shepherd, a hidden friend of the celebrated Thomas Merton, a wise and perceptive man whose only vice is Ricola Cough Drops, which he’s never without. Congratulations and blessings to you, Father James. Damn few like you anymore.

***

When we were returning home today after our errands, I decided to do something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I pulled over and took a photo.

The photo is of a house that is at the turnoff to our gravel road. It started out as a little singlewide trailer, and the owners eventually built a house around the trailer, and the folks still live in it. There’s something so organic and so charming about the house, I smile and nod every single time I turn there and look up the hill at the dwelling. It reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s writing about blue collar Southerners who dug basements in the Carolina dirt and erected poles to hold tarps over the raw holes, working evenings and weekends to build houses literally from the ground up, exhausted though they were from laboring in plants and factories during the week. Many of those homes still stand. The house also reminds me of Alan Jackson’s song about how his granddaddy built his home from a toolshed he rolled out on two logs. The desire for a home, to improve a home, to make holy a home…noble ambitions, these.

I hope each of you is safe and content at home right now. Insulate yourselves from the ugliness of this crumbling world that we were set down in. Remember what it once was. Remember where you are going. And look up…home is just over the other side of morning.

~ S.K. Orr