Things We Gave Up That We Thought Didn't Matter

Making music in crowded bars, and attending such performances. It's too dangerous,now. We can always do it on Zoom.

The Old Men

 There is a little fraternity of old men who inhabit, or used to inhabit, the Starbucks on Main street in Evanston nearly every morning. You can't predict the time some will arrive, but some are (were) scheduled; there was a certain fellow who arrived at 7:30 on Sunday morning, so if I wanted to secure one of the comfortable chairs so I could enjoy my cup of coffee before church, I had to be on my toes. Often, if he had beat me to it, I would just come after church for my coffee. That comfortable chair was everything.

The old men do (did) certain things at the coffee shop that were anachronistic. They read newspapers. They would pair up, spontaneously because they had become acquainted with each other through the coffee shop, and talk politics or sports. One man had a little AM radio that he listened to with the one, single earphone that used to be enough for us when all the fidelity we demanded was being able to hear the voices clearly on a talk show. It seemed to me more than once, as I sat there on Sunday morning writing, paying bills, or whatever else I had to do, this is what coffee shops are for.

In "the age of COVID," as we are fond of saying in this little historical nanosecond, it has been deemed irrelevant. Church is closed for a plague that turned out to be exponentially less virulent than originally predicted in March. Coffee shops are closed too. As are restaurants. Sure, you might be able to buy carry out food somewhere that is still lucky enough not to have gone under, but that's not that point. The social aspect is gone, denied to us by our betters, who are doing their own socializing in Florida.

Today, as I drove by the Starbucks on main, I saw one of the old men, the guy who listens to the AM radio, sitting out on the patio in front of the store (because we are allowed to do that!), sipping a coffee. It was cold today and he didn't look comfortable sitting there in his heavy coat, gloves on, ear flaps pulled down on his hat, trying to pretend against all evidence to the contrary that there was some normalcy right now. As I waited to turn left from Main onto Chicago avenue I felt this little tearing at my heart. What will become of him? Does anyone know what the coffee shop means to him? Should I stop and talk to him? Probably I should have. But why are the powers that be so capricious with his fate? Are they ignorant, or cruel, or both? When will we know the answer?

It was a year when people told us we couldn't sing together, and we complied. They told us not to be outside without our faces covered, and many of us covered up. Needless to say, we certainly couldn't dine together --- unless were were members of the empowered, political class.

Lord, look after us and cure us from our madness. We seem unable and unwilling to cure ourselves. And please, look after that old man.

Half-Hearted Polemic

"The personal is political," as the bumper sticker saying goes, is the wrong formulation. What many people believe now is "the political is personal." They have turned to politics to fill some void. That way lies madness, sadness, emptiness. Politics provides a very convenient and intoxicating way to avoid the real questions we should be asking about our world and ourselves.

People, regardless of their beliefs or ideology, are seldom magnanimous in victory. Cruelty is easier.

When most people tell you about the sanctity of voting and urge you to vote, what they are really saying is, "Vote for the candidate I want you to vote for. If not, then stay home."

Social media, as Jerry Mander once said of television, is not neutral. It presents itself as a tool that we can use, but takes on a life of its own, and takes over us, if we are not careful. And most of us, myself included, are not careful.

Once we give up on the idea of absolute truth, we are ready to be wholly manipulated, and have no business complaining about "fake news."

The disapproval we experience when we go against prevailing opinion is a force to be reckoned with. Most of us cannot stand up against it. In the same way, the approval we experience when we join with a group of like-minded people is intoxicating, and can lead us to say and do things that we might not otherwise even consider.

There are many, many people out there who want to control not just what we do, but what we think. They are busily looking for ways to implement that power. They are real. They are the "omnipotent moral busybodies" CS Lewis spoke of.

Sometimes people reveal themselves for who they truly are. This is disappointing and discouraging and breeds cynicism. But it is clarifying. Put aside the cynicism, take whatever clarity you can get, digest it, and figure out how to use it to move forward.

The Buddhas of Bamyan

I remember when the Buddhas of Bamyan were destroyed. The news struck me in a way that I didn't expect. There was plenty to be upset about in the world, but I ended up being most disturbed by this. It occupied my mind then, and long afterward.

The wanton destruction seemed to me at the time, and it still does, to represent the deepest kind of intolerance: an intolerance that wants (futilely) to erase memory. An intolerance that will destroy wonders, things of beauty, because they offend ideology. An intolerance that will destroy something big, something that grasps at the transcendent, to defend something small and narrow and petty. An intolerance that wants to control not just how people behave, but how they think.

In Vaclav Havel's famous essay about the greengrocer in the Soviet Union, he talks about how ideology leads people to do things they might not otherwise do. The essay is, I think, ultimately about human nature, about the hubris, the vanity, of those who know they are Right and attempt to enforce their way of thinking on others. But it is also about those who acquiesce to them, simply as a way of getting through the day, a way of staying out of trouble. I have much more understanding for the latter than I do for the former. But how many beautiful and wonderful things are destroyed because of this? At what cost do we deceive ourselves, and hide our motivations? I wonder.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. -- Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless"

On Finding an Old Matchbook

I don’t know where those things go. We think they are lost, but then we find them on a sunny summer day, or a gray February dark with clouds and sleet. They’re in a musty old box in some forgotten corner of the house. We come upon them by mistake, unpack and handle them with the greatest care. (But why so careful? They are not fragile). They are reminders of things loved, or won, or lost. They are sorrow or joy, and sometimes both at once. They are material or immaterial. They could be keychains or matchbooks or photographs or old love notes. Then again, since they are tricky, they could be just a sound or a smell or a word or a dream. Their peculiar magic is that in them, the past for a moment is no longer the past. Or, sometimes, they make dream and reality collide. And why does this not inspire us to ask: what sort of world is this where such things can happen? Why do such things not make us more charitable, more humble? Where is our wonderment, our sense of humility that the veil into another world can so easily and suddenly be lifted? Do we forget about these things, or do we bury them in that musty old box in a forgotten corner of the house on purpose because we cannot bear them? I don’t know where these things go, but if we are trying to lose them we are doing a poor job of it, because we think they are lost, but they will be found.

A Lifetime of Sundays

Sunday morning during my childhood was a familiar routine: be woken up by my mom and complain about having to wake up on a weekend and go to church. Then, go to church, either First Presbyterian with my mother and grandfather and brother, or with my grandmother to Christ Church, the little Episcopal church a block from First Pres. I preferred the latter, as I liked the ritual of having to bow and to kneel, and puzzling over the mysterious wording of the liturgy (what did it mean, for instance, to "vouchsafe"?). I felt fed, in a way that I did not understand then and scarcely understand now, by the words that seemed to point to something mysterious and ineffable.

After church, the five of us (or six, if my Aunt Hadda was in town) would regroup, pile into my grandparents' mammoth Chrysler Imperial, and go out to lunch. It might be the Heritage House, or Howard Johnson's, or if my grandfather felt like driving we would take a trip outside of Springfield to New Salem, or maybe the Virginia Country Club.

After lunch, we dispersed, my mother and brother and I back to our house, my grandparents to theirs. Hopefully my friend and next-door neighbor Bill would be available and we could go out and play -- I honestly remember little about what we actually did; we just "played" -- or, if not, my brother and I might go with my mom over to her school at Douglas Avenue Methodist Church to help her get the room ready for class on Monday. That was the ostensible reason, at least ; more often than not we would help for a bit then go poking around the building that housed mom's school, which always had a distinct smell, very antiseptic. Even now if someone blindfolded me and took me into that building I would know where I was from the smell alone.

Sunday is not what it once was, but it still feels like a day set apart. During the many years I did not go to church I often noticed a melancholy about Sunday afternoons, a sense that it was a day without a foundation. The weekdays had school, and Saturday was a day for play, but Sunday without church could feel like a day cut loose from its moorings.

So these days I go and say the familiar words and seek and sometimes feel some communion with God, and communion with the giants of my past, my people, those sturdy presences who taught me, "this day is different, and it is different for a very particular reason." They invited and drew me in to a mystery, and through their words and their actions told me that it was a mystery that was at the heart of life and I would do well to draw closer to it. It is a credit not to my faith or intelligence, but to the persuasive power of their quiet example, that I finally listened to them.

Slumber on ...

One of the joys of my childhood was music, played by people who I knew, who were close to me. We'd go to my grandparent's house for dinner --- they lived just across town -- and as my beloved mom, and grandmother, and great aunt prepared dinner, my grandfather would turn on his Baldwin electric organ and play old songs. He had no music, just a list of several hundred songs that he knew by heart. He'd play the ones he liked best first, then turn the page and find one that maybe he hadn't played in awhile, and play that. No written music; just a list of songs. And the sounds in the background of my mom, grandmother, and great aunt talking as they cooked dinner. And the smell of dinner being cooked.

Sometimes, we'd invite them to our house for dinner, and the musical roles would be reversed. My grandpa would sit in the easy chair and smoke his pipe, and dear great aunt Hadda -- her name was Helen, but we knew her as Hadda, and who knows how that transition came about -- would play songs she remembered from her days in vaudeville. Like my grandpa, I don't remember her ever reading a note of music. She had just played so many years with Mr. Darnaby, playing shows across the Midwest, that she had to know these songs. And she remembered them to her dying day.

One of the songs she liked the best, written by Victor Herbert I think, was this sweet little tune, "Gypsy Sweetheart." "Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart." Here it's played, superlatively, by  Zoot Sims and Jimmy Rowles, but any time I hear it, in any incarnation, I am back in our old house, dinner is cooking, the windows are open, the smell of  pipe smoke is in the air, and music is being made. It is not a bad place to be.