Author: John David Duke Jr

My Dad and Me, Part 1

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

A Series in Several Parts

My wizened therapist leaned back in his chair with a mischievous smile, and in response to a complaint I was relating about my dad he said, “Yet your father’s siblings resented him,” which irritated me because I had wanted to tell him that.

“I never told you that!” I protested. “How did you know?”

“Of course you told me,” he contradicted me, very un-therapeutically. “You’ve also told me that an alcoholic is very close to you in your genealogy, if it is not you or your father; that I do not have the means to know.”

“My grandfather–my dad’s father!” I blurted out, powerless to resist this magician sitting across from me. “How did you know?” It seems I had asked again.

“Nothing to it,” he said. We shall call him Sausage, for that is what I want to call my therapist. His real name relates etymologically to the making of sausages, and I’m feeling rather uncharitable to the man who took the place of my father after my father died precipitously, and who has helped me immensely by introducing me to the concept of family systems theory. Sausage’s apparent strength is listening, but aren’t all good therapists good at listening? His real strength, which he hides until the time for striking is at hand, is a razor-sharp cutting tool, which resides in his mouth, which says things like, “So how does a son show mercy to a mother?”

April 2006 Tom Jack Deb

“Nothing to it,” he said. “Just about every family has an addict in its genealogy, and the whole family tree bends that direction. Its pull is strong on you…” and here it must be said again that, at the time, he was himself bending toward the autumn of his life, which he is now in, approaching the twilight of his days, a smiling, happy, content man who copes with his own filth in ways I only envy. He once called his sister after forty years of not speaking in order to make peace with her and to forge a new relationship which rides atop the forgery of blood.

“Roles,” he said. “An alcoholic system–a system centered on addiction–creates perverted roles, ironclad roles, because the essence of alcoholism and other addictions is perfectionism.”

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I can’t remember my father ever forgiving me.

When he died, my mother venerated him thus: “Daddy only thought of the Gospel. Every word out of his mouth was pure Gospel. Gospel Gospel Gospel Gospel. Daddy equals Gospel.”

I looked into my own heart and found no deposit of the gospel in there. None had been placed there. My father had raised all of us to be perfect, therefore without the need for forgiveness. Perfectionism, you see, is the anti-forgiveness.

The cobbler’s children have no shoes.

He forgave everyone everything, so long as they were not members of his own family. Yet I misspeak: his own brothers and sisters, who did him enormous wrong; his father, who beat him and abused him and them without mercy–these he forgave, in the Gospel sense, too, “Yet seventy times seven, Peter,” says his Lord. Yes, he did. His own offspring, and I think his own wife–these he never forgave. For the longest time we were perfect in every way, but at last, we rebelled, falling short, and we were the objects of his wrath.

“The alcoholic is near at hand,” Sausage says. “My grandfather,” I reply. “Of course,” Sausage says, mischief in his eye. “How did you know?” I ask. “You are bound to it,” Sausage says, chuckling, leaning back.

“Oh, come on, Sausage,” I said. “Can’t you fix it?” (We have that kind of relationship).

He laughed loud and long. He took his glasses off and wiped them clean, gaining control over his faculties in so doing, then he made yet another astounding declaration, as some sort of augur or prophet, a necromancer or spirit-medium: “Your grandfather was a messiah figure.”

Thunderstruck.

DukeFamily2009August 083

My grandfather died six years before I was born, yet he looms as a gigantic figure (I have a picture somewhere of him at the end of his life, struck already twice by blood clots, still physically dominating everyone else in the photograph), towering over my ancestry, as a kind of mythical gatekeeper, a monster who must be either tricked or defeated by force of divine martial prowess. Only then may I progress into my genealogy to learn about myself. The stories my father and all his brothers and sisters tell of their time together begin and end with “Daddy,” my grandfather (as opposed to the person my mother still calls my father).

“You should read Edwin Friedman’s book,” Sausage told me. “A Failure of Nerve. You’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

And so I did, a few years after he suggested it. In the meantime, however, I tackled my grandfather, bringing him down so that I could deal with him man-to-man, identifying just what he had accomplished, creating, by the power of alcohol, an emotional world in which everyone in his orbit moved only according to his will, even his parents. This system, as it were, works (had a habit of working and still does), and it works too well, functioning much better than a healthy family would, functioning, that is, until the system itself encounters that which cannot be brought into orbit. A single man, no matter how powerful (and my grandfather, as you shall see, was indeed powerful), encounters his own finitude, and those limits are, in all actuality, near at hand, usually found on the lips of someone who sees things and can put a name to what he sees. The battle to fight the illusion of grandiosity, that is, that the illusion is indeed an illusion–this is an important distinction:

The system itself–emitted by its central figure, i.e., the powerful alcoholic–is at violent pains to preserve its world as an actual world, complete with its own received wisdom, traditions, precepts, and reprobrationary structure. It is the perversion of creation and procreation, punching outward to create space against the incursions of an unwanted outside world, the world which causes the pain against which alcohol medicates. My grandfather experienced, for example, a terrible wound received in World War One, his wife’s divorcing him, and his accidentally killing a young black boy. With bottle in hand, the system fights against manufactured grandiosity (it is, after all, a grand system involving the care of many) being named as illusory.

When the system encounters its limits, the edge of illusion, it shatters, only to be reconstituted by its several members in the same way it began: with fear, a bottle, and new satellites. It reproduces, but it does not procreate.

That’s family systems theory as I have internalized it. Almost every family has that particular dynamic within it. That is to say: how far away are you from the alcoholic or addict in your genealogy?

All right then, how do you fix it?

You don’t.

In a way, there is no hope for coming to existence within a healthy family life. There is hope, on the other hand, for existing in a healthy way within the family. That’s just the thing: you are born into relationships. Mother, father, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents. And then, other relationships develop. Grandchildren, mothers-in-law, and so forth, a morass of tangled and tangling relationships within an arm’s reach, all influencing you, as influences in your childhood development, influences in your history, actually influencing you at this moment, each with their own gravitational pull. The unhealthy members are seeking to put you in orbit around them. The healthy ones are not. Simple, right?

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Spot the healthy members, if any, of this small section of a system.

In this series I intend to share a few observations, some of them formal, some of them anecdotal, about family, about how I came to use systems theory, how I find it useful in application to myself and to people I’m called upon to help–I think, most importantly, I’m going to be making the case that the general contours of family systems theory are a framework for best interpreting the world around you, not just in an analytical sense, but in a way to build, rebuild, and repair your relationships at hand. If you think about it, family systems theory might be considered a prime raison d’être of Embodiment and Exclusion.

Forthcoming Family Systems Posts On…

  • Institution-hopping
  • Anxiety
  • Addiction
  • Friedman’s Relationship Triangles
  • Family Systems in Literature
  • Perfectionism
  • Creation, Procreation, and Reproduction
  • Death and Dying as Healthy Institutions
  • Marriage

 

The Loud Thing Quiet

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

Unquiet has crept into the warp and woof of my daily sensibility. Disquiet, perhaps. Restlessness in conscience.

I have settled firmly into middle-age. It began five years ago, on my fortieth birthday, when, just as my elders predicted, my eyes began to shut down. Let me qualify that: I still have perfect vision, 20/20, clear as Burl Ives’s Lipton Tea, up until about four feet in front of me, and at that distance coming in, I emit high-pitched yelps to determine location and motion.

After a period of mourning, I made my way to the local apothecary, made visual contact with the proper aisle from the doorway, then, as I approached the reading glasses section, I slowed down, the weight of middle-age anchoring my every step. Youth stood somewhere outside, waiting for the next gust of wind to carry it away. My hand reached out, fumbling for a pair of reading glasses, any pair that I might hold up to my eyes so that I could read the advertised power of magnification on the various offerings of the entire inventory of reading glasses. I found a pair which suited me practically: very narrow rectangular glasses over which I might peer at recalcitrant students. I scowled in the mirror at the sight: reflected back at me was an adult version of myself. Then, without having to move my feet, I reached over to pick up a bottle of analgesic (heh: he said “anal”), and I began to read it.

For the first time in a considerable number of months, I felt joy, and it was the joy of relief, for I could read once more, and I could read without suffering. The lights in the building suddenly flickered, and as I looked up, I heard a sudden gust of wind, a short, fresh breeze, and then it was gone.

reading glasses rectangle

The preparation of youth to ride on the career arc is a preparation filled with anticipation, a sack of doubts enclosed each by a little plastic egg of knowledge–Knowledge–the ground upon which we tread in order to shuffle around on this groundless mortal coil. Indeed, youth does somehow blossom, as experience teaches us failure and success, more or less, for some more or less than others, the pink blossoming yielding to rich green, perhaps a little money in the bank, a spouse, a house, a bigger apartment on the way to a suburban home in which to continue growing and prospering. The early stages of prosperity is our obsession, and our minds are ever fixed upon it. The first whispers are heard but not heard.

It is all for nothing.

“I am rising in my field of expertise! See, I have established myself! Even failure is a learning experience, a temporary setback, a springboard from which to leap up and forward, wiser, craftier, warier.”

The birds of the air and varmints of the earth find the fruit of your vine to be very sweet indeed, and free. New York State grins, saying, “Thank you very much.” The Treasury Department of the United States scowls, saying, “You should be grateful we leave you anything at all.” You find yourself thinking forbidden conservative thoughts, but you comfort yourself, saying, “‘Tis libertarian, dammit, not conservative.” As soon as you think those thoughts, the institutions which preserve for you a modicum of happiness and comfort approach, hat in one hand, other hand outstretched, eyes low, “Please, sir, your children thus benefit.” And you put money in the outstretched hand, and a little more in the hat.

It seizes you, the loud thing, shouting when you try to sleep, “IT IS ALL ASHES!”

“No, no. It is sweet fruit of my labor. I taste a little bit of it; it tastes of prosperity, of longevity, of fortitude! See? I can see it! I have reading glasses now!”

ASH!

Breath quickens and labors, the fruit of which is open eyes, aching shoulders, crazed twilight fantasies of an arc which is pointed downward. What seemed a gentle grade yielding after a length of time to the end of it all has steepened dramatically, ending in a sucking maw.

“Father. Husband. Vocation. Avocation. Citizen. They’re going to take it all away. All of it.” These are mere offices, at that, without any inherent malice in and of themselves; they represent how we even awaken to the rising sun.

The coil of mortality tightens ever so. It is the loud thing, sending whispers over every single thing you propose to do.

The mediocrity I can live with; the general futility troubles me greatly. I thought I was pursuing him, but it is not so; he has only waited for me, and I am his. I thought I would advance some ideal, even in mediocrity, just pushing the thing forward infinitesimally, along with all my peers, in the right direction, but there is no pushing the thing. It is ephemeral, a cloud, a deception, not even a coherent dream. It is, indeed, an arc which ends in utter meaninglessness. Why do we percolate so?  Why do we puff ourselves up over accomplishment? Why do we think we can see what is right before us?

helenkeller

Helen Keller

Yet we say to ourselves: isn’t life so much better? See these graphs! Poverty is being eradicated the world over! But to what? Toward a sun which will wink out? To alleviate our suffering and the suffering of others to help endure the blink of an eye we appear? We are by far the most prosperous people in the history of the world, yet we are by far the most unhappy, contentious, childish wretches in the same measure. We are decidedly ungrateful, a spoiled lot of undisciplined toddlers, emotionally underdeveloped babies, despite all our self-praise through various international prizes and awards. How do we see ourselves in this way?

It is a malady of the human heart, I think, to know with absolute certainty that we are to make progress to a kind of permanent prosperity, but with equal certainty knowing that such permanence is fleeting. A notion of preserving something “for the children” is a noble one, but it is not anything at all. As Michael Jackson taught us, we are the children. What he never taught us was of whom we are the children. He did not because he could not. Not even he could see the object of our desire.

reading glasses 1

If I may speculate on the crisis which afflicts the middle-aged, we who eschew checking the clock in the middle of the night for the effort of finding one’s reading glasses, it is just this unanswered question: the days of being cared for are long gone; the days of caring for are waning quickly. And what then? I suppose one ceases avoiding the anxiety, standing to, representing in your body a piece of eternity, if there is such a thing, getting on with it because that’s what there is to do: get on with it.

As for me: it’s time for me to drive my kid to hockey practice.

Nihil Nisi Bonum

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

Death made an unexpected visitation upon one of our friends, and now he is excluded from our company, unless you happen to be of his faith, and then you are excluded from his company, for the time being, and, really, only by sight. As such, he has unfortunately embodied this website. Brock Cusick, requiescat in pace.

I was thinking about–can’t help but think about–our last conversation. It was…how shall we say…not one I wish was our last, but it stands as our last conversation, and it was unpleasant, so there you go. Until the great test of my faith shall come, it will remain standing as a monument to the ruin wrought by pettiness. How petty? How petty a conversation is it that mars the dignity of a perfectly innocent, genuine, kind, nihil nisi bonum fellow? He was giving me a hard time about my decision for my D&D character to roll initiative at disadvantage, and I was annoyed. That’s how petty.

I’m 45 years old with four children! He was 39 years old with three children! And all the responsibilities thereof, which we commonly consider of adulthood, requiring some measure of gravitas, sobriety, and maturity! It was so petty, so petty, but it was the last conversation I ever had with Brock. He private-messaged me, which annoyed me, but that was Brock. That was his way. And he was adorable that way, a wonderful teddy bear of a man, but I was so annoyed.

There was another important death in my life, one which I may or may not write about all the time, and I know without being told that his wife–the fellow who died importantly, his wife–I know she was in the room screaming at him about something, probably something important, and she walked away–he was standing while they argued, not at all ill, not visibly, accomplishing some chores around the house–she walked away, and when she returned a few moments later, he was dead on the floor.

And so we are excluded from each other. It is true.

Only in part, I think. A marriage of over thirty years, even a rocky one, has probably established some rather deep roots, giving life to life, a grandeur nourished to grow around a knot. Brock was kind to me, and I, to a lesser degree, was kind to him. In addition to the faith we share, we have nourishment in kindness which does not have to be overcome by the rot of pettiness. This petty conversation we had is no horrible disfigurement; it is a knot, character for the grand old living tree.

I was afraid to go to bed on Monday night, the day I learned Brock died. I was afraid in the realization that I could be so reaped by death, and excluded, leaving my wife and children excluded from me and all the roles I fulfill for them, along with friends, students, clients, and family. Unable to sleep, I wandered from room to room in the house, resolving to behave more gently, kindly, and, as it is with teenagers in the house, with long-suffering fortitude. I sincerely hope that I have been properly chastised, on the one hand, to act as fertile soil for the roots necessary for relationships to grow. I sincerely hope that I have been comforted, on the other hand, so that I can forgive myself for being so bloody annoyed at Brock.

I think it is childish and entirely selfish for me to have said, as I have been saying, “I never want to make another friend ever again.” For all the unnecessary hurt we dole out to each other, even by dying, kindness is far more nourishing towards growth, far more than withdrawal.

The Safety Razor

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

My friend Adam Gurri (who, if you didn’t know, adds excellent content to this blog on a regular basis) recommended, upon being asked, that I try a safety razor instead of a disposable razor. He recommended a particular style and brand, which I used as a basis to pick one for myself. When it came in the mail, I inserted the razor blade, tightened the nut, lathered up, and became grateful to Adam for the recommendation.

My father taught me how to shave, one of the greatest days of my life, that he should look at me and see that I need to shave, and that he should be the one to teach me. This was thirty years ago, I think, when I was 15 years old (I know without a doubt it was before I was 16). He demonstrated very clearly, using a not-inexpensive disposable razor. These were the days when a wet-shaving disposable razor had only two tiny blades embedded within.

“It’s your face,” my dad said. Now, we were not terribly poor, but neither were we rich. When he died, I discovered that he had basically kited credit card bills from that era unto the next one, which endured, say, fifteen years, just to float the family along in a lower-middle-class lifestyle. The four of us had the opportunity to go to college, in other words. Yet he was buying the expensive disposable razors.

“It’s your face, the first thing you present to people. You want to give them a well-groomed face, something pleasant to look at, not something pock-marked, scraped, and spoiled.” Then he showed me how to shave in the direction of my whiskers, even teaching me that it changes direction at certain spots on my neck. I must say, I had very few shaving-related blemishes throughout the remainder of my adolescence. On one occasion I sneezed and cut myself. I was late for school, bearing the cuts below my mouth, but that is all.

A year or two before he died, I discovered in the back of his station wagon (“Old Woodie” he called it) a sack full of the cheapest disposable razors available. I confronted him. He replied, “Aw, Dave, it’s just a face scrape. One scrape is as good as another.” He had just filed for bankruptcy after incurring some massive expenses due to the mental health issues of his adopted son–along with some other, er, irregularities that life had presented him, shall we say…

I did not believe him. As I have grown into middle-age, I have maintained his original philosophy of a well-groomed face as a presentation to the world. It is, first, love for self, which in turn becomes love for neighbor, and readily so. “Look,” I say when I present a groomed face, “I love myself, and I love you so much that I should care for myself to be in your company inoffensively, as inoffensively as I am lovingly able.”

In the meantime, disposable razors–or the industry thereof–has become risible. Not two blades! No, no longer two, but three! Three? No, four! Five! A million! And with comfort grooves here, flexion there, lubricating strips below! Were you just now comfortable with the last improvement? Now we shall reduce the quality suddenly and precipitously, in order to encourage you to move to the next, more expensive solution to face presentation.

But this is not necessary, is it? Men have been presenting their faces to the world, and in much more expectant societies than ours–for thousands of years! A proper razor is a piece of metal polished properly. That is all. The rest of the presentation is a little skill coupled with a little love.

Now for me, I am not brave enough to put a straight razor to my face, considering the fact that my father taught me with a disposable razor. I do wonder, however, how it is he abandoned the razor of his youth, the safety razor with its easy replaceable blade, a very cheap piece of properly polished metal, for the abomination that is known as the disposable razor. Was it the lure of the “space age”? The call of mid-Century ineluctable advance toward true technological utopia? Was it laziness? Was it loss of love?

I miss seeing his face, and talking to him. I’m grateful to him for teaching me to shave, but I’d like to ask him what it was that set him on a path, beginning with the disposable razor, leading to “one face scrape is as good as another.”

Whatever it was, he certainly traded away quality for it.

 

Everybody Knows Me Now

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

“Look up here. I’m in heaven.” When Bowie wrote it, he at least suspected he was going to die. Ostensibly, when he recorded the video, he knew he was going to die. “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen. I’ve got drama–can’t be stolen.” Going to heaven is an introvert’s worst nightmare.

Perhaps he wasn’t writing about his own death. Perhaps he was writing about Stephen Hawking’s impending doom. The brainiac Science-worshipers, the moral elites, the dispassionate purveyors of fact-based justice–they demonstrated their chops at the maudlin: “He’s zooming around the cosmos, now,” demonstrating that their maudlin sentimentality is at least on par with the unchurched Presbyterian daughter, whose father just died, and who says, “He’s looking down and smiling, now,” demonstrating their desire for something after a bitter end.

“I’m in heaven!” is greeted by a chorus of guitars tuned to the dirge. We know Stephen Hawking did not believe in heaven. Did Davie Bowie believe in heaven? “Well, David Bowie is looking down on us now, now, our celestial Major Tom.”

Ugh.

He’d built quite a catalogue. Perhaps the near-certain spike in sales would pierce into the heavens themselves, where we might achieve a near-certain nirvana, living in harmony. It was supposed to be here. It was supposed to be in New York, where ordinary men can live like kings, ruling the world with a mere scowl, a sardonic quip, and an encroaching horizon. The encroaching horizon was welcome. The cancer was not.

He’s dead, and now I’ve reviewed his catalogue, and with the wonders of YouTube, I’ve seen every televised or otherwise visually-recorded interview with David Bowie, of whom I am a fan on-again, off-again. I’ve analyzed every tic, probed every Straussian utterance, and scrutinized every single transformation as he sought Transfiguration.

I mean, that androgyny bit was just shtick, wasn’t it? It was shtick to conceal. He wanted us to know him, but he wanted us to know that it was all just a show, and the shtick enabled him to sell more records and more tickets.

I don’t believe that for one second, and that’s what he dreaded in dying. His work becomes static without him. He rots away, and his catalogue lies in state. We’re going to know him now.

We know he was a type, and he was a noble type, though tragic. As for me, I was off-again when he said some particularly nasty things about my God, but, then again, my fellow-Christians did some things to sully the name of my God, so why wouldn’t he say some particularly nasty things about my God? Was he looking for God, but when he saw him, he saw those things which sully? Who will wipe up all David’s filth? “Look up here! I’m in heaven!”

Heaven is no place to be when you are fond of hiding yourself behind a fortress of your own filth. “Oh, no, everybody knows me now.” With knowledge is judgment. With judgment, there is no love, only merit. And merit scratched only reveals the fortress of filth. We all know him now, but we all already knew him. We were hoping he’d find a way for us. Instead, he backed into a casket which embraced him with its doors.

The song is called “Lazarus.” Lazarus was raised from the dead. Lazarus was carried up by the angels to nestle in the bosom of Abraham. “Look up here” is a taunt. From where are we looking? For whom is the dirge? Does everybody know him now?

Templates Overlaying Expectations, and Futility

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

I was trained, I think, to have a lot of kids, a cache, as it were, for the world to consume, or, perhaps, to protect from the world, but who can do that when one is shielding his own face from the ceaseless blows? Maybe I wasn’t trained, but it was modeled for me. I liked the idea of having many children, but I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea of it. Nevertheless, when I met a girl who expressed a desire to have many children, a quiver full of arrows, as it were, with which to conquer the world, standing strong in the ceaseless battle, well, who can resist? So I married her.

We snapped into a template quite quickly, into career obligations (we thought they were obligations). The institutions of this present evil age foster themselves as protectors and guides, and they eject a newly married couple of individuals into the fray with promises of further protection and guidance, but when you look back at the fortresses of the institutions of your trust, you see that they are being assailed without cessation, and if you have the will to look closely, you see that the worst of the flames are being set from those whose charge is the maintenance and operation of the institutions. And so you are demoralized. They said “career,” and I with the wife of my youth said, “okay,” then chafed, then fell away, and we found ourselves abandoned. This is a template. It happens predictably to a subset of human beings (oh, how I hate that designation; what are we? Are we human beings? Aren’t we a communion, man and wife?) every single day. And the outcry goes up into outer space, swallowed by the beepings of exploring satellites and the wind of the sun. Will Jupiter turn his eye upon us in mercy? The bloated god will only flatulate and turn away.

We fell when we fell away. “Just desserts!” cried out the men. “You have become to us as rebels.”

“But we are your own flesh and blood!”

We had two children at the time, and circumstances convinced us that two was enough. Those two would help us limp along to the end, whence they, perhaps, according to hope, could bound away. This is also common.

But we were expected to have more children. By whom? Ghosts, I should think. Spirits and unseen powers, bidding us to resume that good work, as it is also enjoyable. Career had failed us (and we certainly failed it) and progress was in ruins, so why not flex ourselves, as man and wife, and shatter the template?

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An Asshole to the End

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

A few days after Peter died, I got a text from his pastor telling me Peter wanted me to read John 11 at his funeral. “That asshole!” was my reflexive response. The request was true to his character.

John 11, he knows, I cannot read at a funeral whose corpse I do not know, not without being overcome with the emotional force, so for him to make a dying request that I read over his was a coup de grâce upon our friendship, which death ended. That was it. It was over. The text made it plain: Peter is dead.

A thousand people moseyed over to the big Lutheran church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Of the thousand, I knew Angie, his wife. It’s possible some others from the early days of our friendship in the mid-90s were there, but I would only have recognized their faces and known nothing more about them. A thousand people, and never did I feel so alone, not even when my father died, for in that case I had my three sisters and my mother.

That one was also a rather large intrusion of claimants to the corpse. They had to have two separate funerals for my dad: one in southern Louisiana, where he died; another in northern Alabama, where he was raised. I skipped the first one because of the many claimants I would not have known. Besides, I had what they call a “complicated” relationship with my father, a deep and abiding love which was made white hot by long-standing patricidal notions borne of deep-seated philosophical disagreements, which were, at his death, which was sudden, then peppered with anger and guilt, as one would be when one hates how one was raised. I was a pastor’s kid. My dad was a Lutheran pastor. His many surviving brothers and sisters and their families and extended families, along with his childhood friends, were jammed into the Lutheran church in Hanceville, Alabama, where his mother was baptized by a Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee sometime in the 1940s, along with five of her children, including my father, who was five years old at the time. She was an American Indian. It was the Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee who broke down that racial barrier.

His corpse was in the narthex (the common area before you go into the sanctuary (the main room of the church where all the pews are)), a week old already, having sat in refrigeration during a particularly warm August, having been transported within the mysteries of the mortuary crafts from Louisiana to Alabama. We greeted family and friends, and they were seated. As it was, I had not seen the corpse, and I requested to see him with my sisters and mother. The mortician turned the appropriate latches, raised the lid, and there was my father, laid out in sacramental splendor, to be buried in his priestly garments, including a golden chasuble. When I reacted, every head in the sanctuary snapped back to stare. My mother comforted me. Peter was a pastor’s kid, too.

There is an expectation–at least, there was an expectation for a pastor’s kid, especially the pastor’s son, placing him on one of the two paths he can go by. He can either adopt a Pharisee’s mien, the faultless son of the Most High Pastor, who himself is the representative of the Son of God, and can make no error, neither his sons and daughters–a Pharisee’s mien, I say: a hard, cold, exacting, cruelty expected of a sniveling wretch who cloaks himself in an expertise of religiosity. Or he can unleash his anger in a destructive lifestyle, usually in a hedonism akin to that exhibited by the wonderful Sam Kinison. In either case, his identity is not his identity, but that of someone else. To craft an identity is exceedingly difficult, and much discouraged, both by Father and by his disciples.

It can be done, though, if he can navigate that Scylla and Charybdis. Indeed, forgiveness has been known to prevail upon those pastors’ kids who wreck their ships, and they can set sail again. I think Peter and I managed to escape, a pair of Odysseuses in our own right, but not without paying a heavy emotional toll. The tax is high, my friends, for those of us who wish to live free of those peculiar expectations. And, thus impoverished, Peter and I leaned on each other. We developed a shorthand with each other, much as twins do, and we leaned on each other.

Another lonely claimant was there, whose name escapes me. He was flown in from Ghana, where Peter served as a missionary over the course of over 20 years, both formally, and then later on as an emotional supporter of the burgeoning Lutheran Church in Ghana and throughout that stretch of Africa. That is to say, this second lonely claimant was another who had Peter as a close friend and confidant for over two decades, beginning together as young men with babies, enduring the travails of this ephemeral career in the visible futility of the Christian Faith, ending with teen-aged young-adult progeny. Ah! Death! You sting us! Where is your sting?

The funeral was horrible. It was just horrible. Peter wrote it. He wrote the structure of the service, picked the readings to be read, picked the hymns to be sung. Structure? There was no structure. It was a vile Sacramentarian Baptist service with Lutheran trappings. There was no Kyrie, no proclamation of the gifts of the sacrament of baptism, no declaration of the resurrection of the body because there was no Apostles’ Creed, only that godawful John 11, gaping before me like the grave itself. And he had me read it. He did it on purpose. He did the whole despicable thing on purpose because he knew I was the only son-of-a-bitch in that building who would weep while the confrontation of that text was being laid out before us. Do you understand me? He laid out a structure-free funeral service, departing from every form and norm known to our tradition in order that he might have my weakness for reading that particular text in public actually highlight that thing around which his hope revolved.

It’s not the part where Jesus weeps that gets me, nor the many indications of the upwelling of utter despair expressed by a despondent people. Those are, indeed, difficult to read, but where my throat constricts, where my chest heaves, where my mouth clamps into a quivering vise, is the question. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” At this comes the existential pause, where you stare into the abyss, and it stares back, tearing at your guts, shouting, “WHAT A LOAD OF STUFF AND NONSENSE! RUBBISH! THERE’S NOTHING HERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? NOTHING!”

Do you believe this? Peter’s corpse is within arm’s length. What an asshole. Truly, he was a brother. Peter Kelm, 1972-2017, RIP.

 

Utility, Again

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

George Will has a piece, reproduced today by National Review Online, comparing how American billionaires lived a hundred years ago to how Americans of all means live today. It’s a particularly weak piece, something that could have been written by the ordinary third-grade American after two, maybe three, google searches, and as such, it underscores a fundamental weakness with political and social thinking which seems to have come to prevail in Western institutions.

In the first place, this is a game that can be played forever, straight back to Adam and Eve, who had to sew clothing from fig leaves, until God showed them the advanced technology of sewing clothes from animal skins, complete with a pocket for their iPhones, so they could text each other after Cain killed Abel. “Now r u srry” “U 8 2.” Moreover, you can extend this forward into perpetuity, considering that technological progress has never been stopped (I can’t even think of an epoch where technological progress was slowed). In a hundred years, what marvels of progress would make George Soros, Bill Gates, and <insert other world business magnates whose names I couldn’t care less to remember> beneath the paupers of that age, for want?

In the second place, Will, as so many do, misses the point entirely. Let’s run the third-grade trope both directions: would you give up your iPhone for a billion dollars in 1916? Answer: never, because dentistry, health care, suffrage, civil rights, centralized heating and air-conditioning, electricity, and easily accessible Swedish Death Metal, all of which mark the ease of our lives in these present days.

Oh? Would you give up your iPhone and also your mediocrity for a Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking New York City, with the mayor of New York City a mere handmaiden, whose significance to you is his opening the door for you so that Presidents, Kings, Warlords, and every other kind of power might call upon you? Yes, a thousand times: yes, yes, I would.

That game also goes backwards into perpetuity. I’d give it all away to go back to the relative squalor of 16th Century England so that I could celebrate the beheading of my Queen, Anne Boleyn, that faithless daughter-producing, miscarrying witch, with a party and a wedding engagement. To be King Herod, who with a whisper, would avoid the embarrassment of reasoning with a mere girl in front of my important guests by bringing my friend’s head in as a gift for her on a platter, because her mother was some kind of lover. Or as Ghengis Khan, I would roll over the steppes to conquer and conquer and conquer some more. Sayonara, iPhone.

I’ll take a lot less, in fact: if I could be an important figure in the politics of the City of Tonawanda, with the ear of the mayor, and, with his ear, the possibility of my name on a plaque near the foot of a new bridge in town, and the attendant honor handed down as a legacy to my fine sons and their children–if so, then, again, yes, the squalor of squatting in an outhouse in exchange for all this mediocrity.

Yes, I get it, George: we, the mediocre, live better than kings of yesteryear. So it could have been said in 1917 of 1817. But what is it to live so comfortably? I’m so content I’m bored to depression! To have lives in my hands, numbers who look to me for livelihood and inspiration, sycophants vying to win my gracious eye: that is living! No billionaire, millionaire, or any other kind of power honorific -aire would ever trade his worth in the more squalid epochs of history for my unimaginably richly appointed bungalow on an undistinguished street in the City of Tonawanda, New York, USA.

But He Will Rule You

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

Mary Ellen was always pretty as a girl, and she knew it coming through grade school. She kept the boys enthralled with a wit that drew them close and kept them at bay, like Redbones on the scent without a command to hunt. “You might be tall, Hugh Johnson,” she told him, “so tall the Lord God couldn’t reach up to put any brains in your head.” When she blossomed, they howled. Right then she determined not to marry in her town because they knew her too well.

In the next town they ached for her. The other young ladies frowned severely, each trying to look through the back of her gentleman’s head, whose neck was twisted dangerously, too tight, you might say, if you understand what I mean by that frown. They puzzled, too, wondering how a girl without much in the way of physical attributes could twist every neck in town. Was it her dress? Her shoes? Her hair? Her money? All were the same as theirs. In fact, nothing about her stood out except her glow, and when she smiled: oh, my…

Was there a man in town made for her? In fact there was a man every young lady hoped she was made for. He was Jeremiah Fenton, Jeremiah, Jr., in fact, the son of Jeremiah, Sr., who was the owner of Fenton Construction, a contracting outfit interested in new home builds, garage builds, remodels, and general home repair. As for Jeremiah, Jr., he was a savvy businessman himself, right out of high school, having the good sense to listen to his father, who had built up that business before the war, during those dark times of the Great Depression, then holding on until the soldiers came home. The soldiers listened to him, and then to his son, whom he taught the business.

It didn’t hurt that Jeremiah, Jr. was the very definition of strapping, with shoulders broad and proud. Good humor tinged everything Jeremiah said and did, so that even when he made a mistake, a customer could point it out with equal good humor such that whatever was lacking was made right without much fuss for either party. “If I had used a bigger hammer,” Jeremiah said to Willy Gaithers, “I might have had to build you a new sun room on the back of your house.” Willy Gaithers laughed while Jeremiah’s crew plastered over the hole Jeremiah had made while putting some finishing nails in the trim Willy Gaithers wanted around his windows.

Jeremiah took the blame, but everyone knew (because Willy Gaithers told everyone) what really happened was Jeremiah discovered a leak in the roof which had rotted away one of the wall studs next to the window frame. He climbed up on the roof, found the problem, fixed it, figured out a way to replace the stud without taking out the whole wall, then patched the greater hole that had formed anyway. In other words, everyone knew that not only was Jeremiah an honest businessman, he was generous.

When he saw Mary Ellen out of the corner of his eye, his neck twisted so hard that he was forced to let go of Martha Johansenn’s hand and pursue Mary Ellen’s. “Aha!” he declared. “At last! I have a woman who is for me!” Mary Ellen thought that was nice, and she told her folks, and her folks met with his folks, and the two towns were, on the wedding day, brought together in the union of this man to this woman. It was a match made in heaven, and everyone treading that ground knew it, and they smiled under the blessings of God.

It wasn’t that Mary Ellen was dissatisfied with the money; she wanted the prestige. While the two towns waited for progeny to embody the union, Mary Ellen lay awake at night crafting a plan to attain an upper middle class lifestyle, and from there, to step into the elite class, replete with its invitations to invitations, invitations to socialize in air-conditioned buildings up off the ground and away from the people of the land.

She said, “You should think about commercial construction. There’s a building boom going on.”

“You mean business buildings?” Jeremiah, Jr. shared with Jeremiah Sr. his misgivings.

“Can’t get comfortable,” said Jeremiah Sr. “There ain’t no such thing, not in construction. You can grow the business out or you can grow it up.”

“I’m going to need a construction manager,” he said to himself. “And a loan.”

What made Mary Ellen leave her town to make a union in Jeremiah’s town made her make Jeremiah leave his deliberations and take out a loan. A tax accountant advised them to stay liable for the money instead of sheltering it in a corporation. Something about equipment depreciation. Jeremiah barely understood. Mary Ellen guided his hand onto the bottom line. “This is our house, too,” he said.

The money froze the marriage. Progeny were not possible.

Jeremiah doused his God-given natural desire by gulping down Tennessee Sippin’ Whiskey, a habit that made him a little unpleasant in the mornings, which made his hired hands a little displeased in doing their work, and they made mistakes. He roared at them, and they quit. While he was watching them leave, the bank tapped him on the shoulder, demanding to know just what in God’s name happened to those contracts to build additions, wings, wards, and extensions to hospitals, churches, department stores, and supermarket groceries.

The bankruptcy judge was perfunctory and cold. He didn’t even shake his head in disappointment. Mary Ellen was in the truck outside the courthouse, waiting for Jeremiah. He hopped in without a word. She was in tears. “We still have each other, don’t we?” she asked. He stared straight ahead, with his jaw clenched. Mary Ellen fixed her eyes upon her man, Jeremiah, Jr., waiting for a word from a him, that he might treat her as his bride. At a stoplight near their house, which now belonged to someone else, Jeremiah turned to his wife, and with all the strength he had in his broad shoulders to maintain his calm, he uttered, “This is all your fault.”

The light turned green and he turned his attention to the task of driving home.

Where was home?

Ploenipotentiary Representation

/ John David Duke Jr / 1 Comment

Or: In The Beginning Was The Chicken or The Egg

One of nature’s wonderful delights, for those of us who are easily amused, is a kitten chasing her tail. Is it an evolutionary impulse which causes the kitten to lie in a soft sunny place for the purposes of, after resting, training herself in the finer arts of feline pursuit? Perhaps it is, in the genius that is Evolution, a polyvalent delight, a telos achieved in the now for the kitten and also for the young mother who is nursing her child, bored out of her gourd, and a little tired, receiving peace and comfort from the kitten who is chasing her tail.

The kitten’s training exercises now complete, she wanders off into her patrols, seeking where she may to find a way out, but all the windows and doors are screened off, and every way out is simply another way in, but around the house she goes, patrolling. Young Mother rises, compelled by boredom to seek where she may to find a way out of her gourd, so, after tightening the bonds which secure her baby into her bosom on this fine spring day, she loosens the bonds which secure the screens closed against the kitten’s absconding.

It is a neighborhood into which Young Mother escapes, planted by city fathers in 1925, somewhere in-between the timber boom and the industrial boom. It is now 92 years later, enough time for a child to have been born, lived, married, produced children and careers, fought in wars, survived economic and marital hardship and change, grown weary, grown old, and perhaps has died or is about to die, given the mortality tables nowadays. It is not just a generation, but an entire lifespan which has waxed and waned.

There is womanly chattering nearby, a grandmother and a mother and Young Mother and a toddler or two, with the occasional automobile passing by, recognized or not. What is the conversation? It is of the weather, of politics, of family relations, of occupation, of career, of local government, of gardens, of school, of transportation, of–

Just what distinguishes 1925 from 2017?

–of hopes and dreams? I think not. Hopes and dreams are not for casual conversation out in the open, where there are no fences. –of hopes and dreams dashed? I think so.

“That worthless husband of mine…”

When Sheila’s man moved out, there was a ripple through the community, and the rest of us made adjustments, trying to be nice to her children while also warning our own children that there would be trouble, hoping to convince the children both of the particular kind of trouble, because who knows what kind of trouble comes from deep-seated emotional consuming fires which are kindled by divorce? And also that our children should be faithful to their friends in kindness and in deed, actual friends, not mere playmates. On the other hand, there was an envy, palpable, depending on who you talked to: Sheila had become free of her man, the asshole. I must admit, however, he was good to me, just tall and a little rough, and, I think, probably immature in certain ways. Maybe. I’m not sure.

Who said it? Who said, “That worthless husband of mine…”? Not Sheila. She never uttered an unkind word about her man. She rarely spoke of him at all, in fact, and her liberation from him was de jure, at least as far as we all could observe. The de jure declaration had more of an effect on us than the de facto reality she was living had on her. No, the others, namely, grandmothers, mothers, Young Mother, uttered those words, and regularly.

When the time of conversation comes to a close, Young Mother looks at Other Young Mother, knowing that an emotional bond has been forged, a strong bond, probably unbreakable (except by circumstance, which comes by chance and cannot be accounted for), but also knowing that Other Young Mother is about to go into her domicile to interact with her own man. It’s time for Young Mother to return to her own domicile, to make the life that she and her man agreed to make, an agreement forged in utter and absolute freedom, and witnessed, gazed upon by mother and father and mother and father. In these days, there are a few attachés via divorce and remarriage, and also illegitimacy, but the ties that bind are mother and father and mother and father, even if the ones who occupy those offices are destructive, and the attaché has no authority beyond helpful advice and good counsel, or unhelpful and bad.

“That worthless husband of mine…” An utterance she received from her mother many times. Young Mother thinks of her own utterances to the same effect. “By the power invested in me…” is the other utterance which engages, in fact which ended the engagement, putting to rest all anxieties with respect to legitimacy, and ushering in new anxieties, not just an utterance, but a declaration, with authority, “…I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Is it an evolutionary impulse which causes nearly every other house in the neighborhood to be occupied by those under authority? And by what authority to bind together those whose binding would be in various stages of decay?

Young Mother, closing the door to the neighborhood behind her, finds the kitten asleep, having finished for the time being her patrols for freedom. The infant awakens, hungry, and Young Mother returns to utter boredom, nourishing her offspring. And her husband’s.