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  • No Peacock Feather Required: the Luminance of “He”, a short story by Katherine Anne Porter

    Katherine Anne Porter

    The story “He” is one peacock feather shy of a Flannery O’Connor story. Only it is a Katherine Anne Potter story and has its own luminance, not O’Connor’s sardonic delight in the grotesque.

    Nonetheless, in her story, Porter puts in play more than a smattering of religious artifacts and allusions. She refers to the “simple-minded one” with upper-cased pronouns, in other words, not actually pronouns but nouns in the convention used to address deities or a supreme being.

    In this story, He, if it isn’t referring to the simple-minded one, most naturally refers to Jesus Christ. He is sounded out the same as the pronoun—if only in one’s mind—but one cannot fail to notice that on paper it is visually distinct. It creates an aural / visual dissonance, which Porter begs us over and over again to consider and endure. We sound out “him” but we see “Him”.

    The prominence of “neighbors” in this story is also extraordinary. Neighbors are a brooding presence from the beginning to the end. The word appears six times in the story, in the first paragraph, and in the last.

    A “neighbor” is more than a prominent word in the New Testament. It is the word chosen by Christ to represent an “other” in the supreme rule of “to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself”. Here supreme is meant in its utter literal sense. It is wildly significant in the context of the jumble of incongruous rules and laws and Good Housekeeping advice that make up the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, when then and now we tend to accord the laws a common weight, relative merit notwithstanding.

    How curious to love a neighbor when they seem (more on that later) as unlovable as the ones who appear in “He”, those who whisper behind the Whipples’s backs:

    A Lord’s pure mercy if He should die.

    It’s hard to imagine loving such a snarling brood as the Whipple’s neighbors. It puts a whole new spin on the task. It is closer to the paradoxical entreaty to “love one’s enemy”, which of course also comes from Him, now apparently the other “Him” in this story.

    The innuendoes pile up. What now is the engagement between Him and Him? How do They relate?

    At the very beginning, the story informs us:

    Mrs. Whipple loved her second son, the simple-minded one, better than she loved the other two children put together. She was forever saying so.

    We come to suspect that she is forever saying so because she is forever herself either unsure or incapable of this love she proclaims. We don’t know the nature of this love though we’re dropped a clue.

    When Mrs. Whipple says to Mr. Whipple that “it’s natural for a mother to have feelings about Him,” the narrative invites the reader to think of unconditional love.

    The simple-minded one, having few if any ways to reward his parents, in the form of report cards, witticisms, good looks, pleasing gestures, puts the unconditional love challenge to the test. Since such feelings are allegedly natural for a mother, how awkward for her when she doesn’t have them? And what if the neighbor’s find out!?

    When we ask, what does Mrs. Whipple love about Him? The question starts to make more sense in its full ambiguity, i.e. as Him AND Him.

    Now this is not the same as saying that Mrs. Whipple loves her second son. Mrs. Whipple is so utterly consumed by concern for what the neighbors think that we are forced to reckon with the other part of the dictum. Does Mrs. Whipple even love herself?

    Porter has got love of self, love of others, and love of Him all knotted-up as if she planned it that way.

    It also has a lot of “seeming” in it.

    A plank blew off the chicken house and struck Him on the head and He never seemed to know it.

    So in bad weather they gave her the extra blanket off His cot. He never seemed to mind the cold.

    Porter wrings a lot out of this innocuous word. Most of the seeming comes from Mrs. Whipple. For her “seems” ties back to what others might think. She has no internal source of confirmation. Her whole idea of reality is tied up with how her neighbors might perceive things, perceive her. Hence, how things “seem”.

    She has no perspective then on anything, most significantly on Him (the simple-minded one) or presumably Him (her savior).

    With scant notice, Mrs. Whipple’s brother invites himself and his family over for a big Sunday dinner (he dares her to “put the big pot in the little one”). There is nothing to suggest that the brother is not every bit as poor as the Whipples or likely trolling for a good meal. Who better than a sibling to know your witnesses.

    Mrs. Whipple, who is desperate not to look as poor as she desperately is, convinces her husband of the necessity to slaughter a pig for the meal over his objections.

    “I’d hate for his wife to go back to say there wasn’t a thing in the house to eat,” she says.

    The simple-minded one gets the job of snatching the pig from its mother sow’s teat and escaping “with the sow raging at His heels.”

    Mrs. Whipple, who loves Him unconditionally, we’re supposed to believe, puts His life in mortal danger just to cover up for the “sin” of poverty.

    The pickled peach in the roasted pig crackling in the middle of the table comes from Him. He (He) is the only one who scrambles among the branches of fhe family peach tree. He gets in trouble chasing a possum or hunting for eggs as if the second son understands fully the abysmal state of their larder. He gets it, it “seems”.

    One suspects Mrs. Whipple doesn’t get the first thing about Him, her son. She makes a fuss out of serving Him first but is inwardly relieved that he keeps to Himself in the kitchen when He demurs and doesn’t join the rest of the family, his aunt, and uncle, and cousins in the dining room.

    The meal is briefly a success. Later after company has parted, she frets that “her own brother will be saying around that we made Him eat in the kitchen!”

    In a bleak winter, they borrow warm clothes from Him for His siblings who have to walk to school in the chill. For His outdoor chores, they arrange the loan of a coat from His father until he gets sick.

    In the spring, after he’s recovered, they send him to fetch a bull from a neighbor for breeding, a modest attempt at better living through husbandry. The simple-minded one succeeds on his mission with perfect calm.

    Whereas Mrs. Whipple sets him off on the mission with short-lived nonchalance. She goes from little caring to high-speed fretting in 3.9 seconds. Before He returns, she is in a self-inflicted lather that finally seems to expose her real concern: what people might say if He got hurt. It’s an incredible episode that is all whipped up in her head utterly divorced from the fact that the boy got back calmly without a murmur of incident.

    As their fortunes sink lower, Mrs. Whipple fears “they’ll be calling us white trash next.” These “they” are a powerful lot. By coincidence, the “they” are a prominent concept in Heidegger’s philosophy, who likely would conclude that Mrs. Whipple is living “inauthentically”.

    Their kids have seen enough. As soon as they can, they bolt from the farm.

    Effectively, they’re getting away from their poor white trash parents. The irony is that the only discernable detail that makes them poor white trash parents is Mrs. Whipple’s state of mind.

    The simple-minded son endures on the farm. Slips and falls on the ice. He has something like a stroke or a seizure. Appropriate healthcare: transferring Him expeditiously to a hospital by ambulance is frustrated and delayed. Instead, he goes in a “neighbors” ample wagon.

    On a tortured ride to the hospital, the boy is crying in the cold. He is not seeming to cry, but crying. Her last thought in the story

    Oh, what a mortal pity He was ever born.

    Porter with a “neighbor”, fellow Texas author, William Goyen

    This is extraordinary. The word “pity” bookends the story. In the beginning, Mrs. Whipple’s devout wish is not to be pitied by the “they”, the neighbors.

    In the end, pity means a regrettable circumstance. It echoes what the neighbor’s supposedly said all along “a Lord’s pure mercy if He should die.”

    At the very end, the reason the neighbor is “driving very fast, not daring to look behind him” is out of real pity. Mrs. Whipple’s love for Him was not what she claimed it to be. She did not love Him more than His two siblings put together. She did not love Him unconditionally, with “feelings more natural for a mother.”

    Her condition, we profoundly suspect, accords equally to her simple-minded second son and her savoir. She is utterly cut-off, isolated, and impossibly tragic.

    The neighbor cannot bear to bear witness.

    Special thanks to George Saunders and fellow members of his Story Club for calling my attention to this story.

     

  • 4.83 Million Undecided Voters Bashed by Dante Alighieri

    4.83 Million Undecided Voters Bashed by Dante Alighieri

    Now in 2024, a nail-biting U.S. Presidential election year, what does Dante Alighieri have to tell us about today’s 4.83 million[mfn]3% of today’s 161 million registered voters[/mfn] undecided voters?

    After the Oct 1st vice-presidential debate, an ABC news journalist, huddling with a tiny sample of the evening’s 39 million[mfn]Rick Porter, “TV Ratings: VP Debate Falls 25 Percent vs. 2020,” The Hollywood Reporter (blog), October 2, 2024, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/vance-walz-vp-debate-tv-ratings-1236022692/.[/mfn] viewers, kept circling back to one wishy-washy “undecided”, hoping against hope that on a successive round this person would suddenly form an opinion.

    “How,” I wondered, “could anyone be that insipid? More maddening still is that these undecideds have amassed clout that is grossly out of proportion to their numbers, as if it is their apathy that makes them powerful. And what if we, the audience, were equally pathetic for lavishing the undecideds with so much attention?”

    As I struggled to find voice to the nausea which this spectacle inspired in me, I remembered the 13th century Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, and his concept of the “neutrals”:

    …melancholy souls of those
    Who lived without infamy or praise.

    Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
    Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
    Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.

    The neutrals are either angels who cannot choose between God and the devil or plain folk who make so little impact on the world that they inspire neither infamy nor praise. They are cowards. They are selfish. They make no mark on history.

    It was Dante who seized upon the genre of the epic poem, in particular Virgil’s Aeneid, and mutated it into a Christian allegory. Whereas the Aeneid ties the foundation of Rome to its hero, the Trojan warrior, Aeneas, the Divine Comedy makes a hero out of an everyday pilgrim, a commoner, on a fearsome quest to seek salvation. Dante audaciously elevates the courage it takes to find one’s path to eternal glory to the same height as the courage it takes to found a nation.

    By reimagining the epic, Dante shows that any person, who embarks on a quest to achieve redemption—however noiselessly, however bereft of fanfare—is a hero.

    Except for the neutrals. What about them?

    But because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth. ~ The Book of Revelation 3:16

    These words from the Book of Revelation prefigure the extraordinary contempt Dante held for people who refused to take sides, sat on the fence, or found other ways to be wishy-washy, apathetic, uncommitted, or unconcerned, couch potatoes before the invention of television.

    Dante scorns the neutrals so completely that he doesn’t grant them a place anywhere in his masterpiece. Their place is fittingly a non-place. The putative “vestibule”[mfn]Barolini, Teodolinda. “Crossing and Commitments.” In Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-3/. In her commentary, Professor Barolini’s observes that “This space, the ground of transition, is not named by Dante; in the commentary tradition it is frequently called Ante-Hell or vestibule.” This is just one of a number of insights Professor Teodolinda provides in her comments on Canto 3.[/mfn] where we find the neutrals is an anteroom just outside the entrance to hell. They are such utter non-entities that Dante refuses to give them names, or a location in time or space. More than refuse, more than contempt and disgust, poetic logic defies him to recognize them at all[mfn]No way was Dante going to permit the neutrals to mar the symmetry of his masterwork, which he divides into the proportional realms of hell (the Inferno), purgatory, and heaven (Paradiso), each consisting of thirty-three cantos, a very particular number in deference to Jesus Christ, the savior’s, time on earth.[/mfn].

    Dante banishes the neutrals from his masterpiece to mirror how Dante himself, the real-life Dante, was exiled from his beloved city-state of Florence. The causes for exile between Dante and the neutrals could not be more distinct. The neutrals, those who steadfastly refused to enter the fray, perfectly oppose the temperament of Dante, who engaged in Florentine politics with a knife between his teeth. How did Dante get banished from his hometown? For a cause, astonishingly relevant today. Long before our nation was formed and its constitution written, Dante, it turns out, fought for the separation of church and state!

    At first, it is bizarre and difficult to absorb logically how Dante despised apathetic people more than the persons in hell, a holding tank for murderers, rapists, frauds, and traitors, which today would include the prison guards at Auschwitz and, from the most recent headlines, the Frenchman who night-after-night drugged his wife and invited other men to rape her in her own home while she was helplessly unconscious[mfn]“French Village of Mazan Torn Apart by Horror of Mass Rape Trial.” Accessed September 16, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvpd7zyprdo.
    [/mfn].

    Dante puts the neutrals just outside the entrance to the Inferno, at the very beginning of the Divine Comedy itself, at the opposite extreme from Paradiso where Beatrice makes a pronouncement on the majesty of free will:

    “The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most attuned to His own goodness, and that which He esteems the most, was the freedom of the will.”

    Paradiso, Canto V, lines 19–22,

    The neutrals by “doing nothing” most obscenely scorn God’s greatest gift to mankind. By spiting God’s supreme gift, free will, they spite God Himself and all of His creation.

    In the introduction to his political treatise, On Monarchy, Dante gives the motivation for writing it as “lest I should someday be found guilty of the charge of the buried talent”, an unmistakable allusion to The Parable of the Talents. In that tale, a master entrusts a single talent to his least resourceful, let us say, oafish, servant, who fearfully buries it in the ground. In so doing, the servant forfeits his chance to preserve his master’s trust.  The master, infuriated upon learning that the servant has squandered the talent entrusted to him, gives the servant a humiliating tongue-lashing. The master’s furor is greater knowing that his other servants made wise investments which earned him handsome rewards. The master takes the talent back from the servant in disgust.

    For Dante, the parable itself is a gift[mfn]This is an uncanny feature of the parable. Once you recognize the parable itself as a gift, watch out![/mfn] he dares not ignore. In his genius, the poet takes this figurative threat literally. And so, in the introduction to his treatise, he makes it loud and clear—in case God is watching—that he is heaven-bent on heeding its intent.

    Dante also makes it clear that God has given him and him alone the supreme qualities required to write On Monarchy. It is a delicious fusion of humility and supreme confidence.

    This is why Virgil in Canto 3 explains to Dante, the pilgrim, that the neutrals forego “the good of the intellect”.  The supreme cost for not exercising their God-given free will, not using their minds, is to lose them.

    By abjuring the privilege to take a stand, the neutrals don’t make an initial decision. Stymied from the first decision, they’ll never make farther decisions, those which would naturally follow from the first. The whole process of being human is cut-off before it gets started.

    Early copy of Grosseteste’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics

    By 1247, a medieval scholastic, Robert Grosseteste, had translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from Greek into Latin[mfn]Jean Dunbabin, “ROBERT GROSSETESTE AS TRANSLATOR, TRANSMITTER, AND COMMENTATOR: THE ‘NICOMACHEAN ETHICS,’” Traditio 28 (1972): 460–72.[/mfn]. By the time Dante was born in 1265, the Peripatetic doctrine of “habitus” was already familiar to Dante’s influences, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas.

    Habitus derives from the translation of hexis (ἕξις), “state” or “disposition” as found in Aristotle’s Ethics. Habitus is a stable condition of the soul that is achieved through deliberate and purposeful action. It is only obliquely related to the modern meaning of habit. Rather it can be said that a constant regimen of good habits leads to a good habitus. A person trains her soul just as athletes train their bodies. In this way, repeated acts of charities slowly, methodically develop a charitable disposition or “habitus”. Habitus is “secondary nature”. Habitus is the result of protracted willful purpose.

    Eric Auerbach, 20th century German philologist and author of Dante, Poet of the Secular World, provides this definition of habitus:

    It is the residuum in man’s soul of his soul’s history[mfn]Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World (New York: New York Review Books, 2007).[/mfn].

    Persons are not born with habitus but accrue it over a lifetime. Until then we are ill-formed and unfulfilled.

    In his book, Auerbach, shows the vital significance of the doctrine of habitus in the Divine Comedy. Dante’s sketches of persons inhabiting the inferno are crisp, tangible, and singular because they represent the final form of a person’s habitus, a lifelong accretion of willful acts that ultimately and precisely define the person.

    He speaks of Dante’s “power to portray a man in the attitude and gesture which most fully sum up and most clearly manifest the totality of his habitus.”

    Habitus justifies and explains the effectiveness of Dante’s go-to device in the Inferno, the counter-punishment (“contrapasso”), which matches in form the sinner’s transgression.  By the time a transgressor reaches hell, his/her habitus has attained its perfect definition so that the transgressor’s contrapasso, his fate, is all but predetermined. All Dante has to do is draw a picture for the reader.  It’s like matching a paint chip at the hardware store.

    Gustave Doré, Canto XXVIII

    In the case of Dante’s contemporary, Bertran de Born, who was accused of creating a schism between a son, a prince, and his father, the king, i.e. heads of state, Dante finds the baron holding his severed head by its hair, swinging from his hand like a nightwatchman’s lantern, his decapitation, a gruesome if not apt example of poetic justice.

    In Canto 28 of the Inferno, Bertran de Born recognizes the aptness of his punishment, “the law of counter-penalty”:

    The doctrine of habitus greatly refines the notion of good and evil. It makes it possible to understand how a good person can do a bad thing and vice versa. If you have a corrupt habitus and do a good deed, that is an accident. Habitus is the imprint that develops from willful actions over time. While it is mutable, it is also extremely stable. It is like character (ἔθος) with less starch.

    Habitus thus is extremely useful for a moralizing poet like Dante. Anybody who leads a purposeful, deliberate life can be a hero. And those who do will bear its imprint in their habitus.

    But what does this have to do with our neutrals? We have seen that the neutrals are locked out of Dante’s moral universe. Not by Dante but simply by not being. It is ever so slightly worse than dying in obscurity. They are the undead on a technicality. Never having lived, they cannot die. Never dying, they get no tombstone. They cannot be remembered.

    In Canto 3, Dante describes an infinite train of neutrals futilely chasing a wordless banner in hell’s antechamber:

    And I, looking more closely, saw a banner
    that, as it wheeled about, raced on—so quick
    that any respite seemed unsuited to it.

    Behind that banner trailed so long a file
    of people—I should never have believed
    that death could have unmade so many souls.

    Not only are the neutral’s obscure, but so is their number. But Dante leads us to believe that the number of neutrals encompasses the bulk of humanity. It eerily hearkens to the Parable of the Wedding Banquet[mfn]“Bible Gateway Passage: Matthew 22 – New International Version,” Bible Gateway, accessed October 5, 2024, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022&version=NIV.[/mfn] where the persons invited to the king’s wedding respond with staggering indifference even after multiple invitations. Those that do show up are inappropriately attired and unprepared. This is the parable that ends with the ominous conclusion that “many are called and few are chosen”.

    The parable critiques those who abuse their free-will with a sloth-like intellect prone to poor or pointless decisions.

    Finally, we begin to appreciate Dante’s contempt for the neutrals and by proxy undecided voters. It starts to make sense. It is no longer outré. Neutrals are not even “good” enough to get into hell. The parallels of the neutral to today’s undecideds is also sufficiently clear that we see how Dante’s contempt transfers to them.

    But let’s not get too smug. Dante begs caution. If the neutrals are vastly in the majority of humankind, how do we know we don’t number among them? Probabilistically, the odds are too great.

    Among us, neutrals are not just undecided voters. Most of us are neutrals despite how much we’d like to think otherwise. We follow wordless banners, e.g. party slogans and the cant of political parties, latching onto the thoughts of others not our own. Without a habitus to guide our instincts, we behave like sheep or cattle, as members of a herd. If you asked us why we’re following a blank banner, at best we can parrot back a slogan. We value positions over fellowship. We mistake rage for passion, causes for a desire to dominate and control, fall victim to vanity with public displays of “righteousness”.

    If we are neutrals, there is little chance that we would know it or admit it to ourselves. Ironically, we pride ourselves on our individuality. Who writes eulogies for milquetoasts?

    Dante provides clues to this predicament. The path through the dark forest (selva oscura) is unknown and hence only discovered step by step in frightening solitude. It is not visible on a map or GPS system. It is unadvertised. It zigs and it zags. It brings on trials of characters. It defies avoidant behavior. As Joseph Campbell once said, “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

    Are we born neutrals or do we become neutrals? Do we—to borrow from an old joke[mfn]https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/103-be-not-afraid-of-greatness-some-are-born-great-some[/mfn]—have neutrality thrust upon us?

    We’ll get into that in Part II. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I point you to Pope Francis’s apostolic letter, Splendour of Light Eternal[mfn]“Lettera Apostolica Candor Lucis Aeternae Del Santo Padre Francesco Nel VII Centenario Della Morte Di Dante Alighieri.” Accessed October 11, 2024. https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2021/03/25/0181/00393.html#ing.[/mfn], written on the 7th centenary of Dante’s death, in which he beautifully argues for the enduring significance of Dante to a spiritual life.

    Footnotes

    [mfn_list/]

  • En Plein Air: Tommy’s Story

    En Plein Air: Tommy’s Story

    On Atma’s maiden voyage, I parked the van in Santa Margarita, California to survey rock piles upon which artists had scratched, scrawled, and painted pictographs en plein air over 4,000 years ago[mfn]Way before the 19th century, when the French took a notion to escape the studio and paint en plein air[/mfn]; I parked the van in southern New Mexico on a lot next to Carlsbad Caverns, found the gaping opening that spiraled down in sweeping circles to the cold pit of an enormous cave. It had stalagmites, it had stalactites, its walls wept with a milk white substance like the glaze on Krispy Kreme doughnuts. It had elevators to haul people back up to the top. It had bats. It was a cave’s cave. And it was undeniably cavernous. The long twisting descent made it was easy to imagine Dante’s journey through the fiery rings of the Inferno. All the Caverns lacked was a Virgil and tortured souls[mfn]Where was Dick Cheney, when you needed him?[/mfn].

    A Painted Rock at the National Monument in Santa Margarita

    I parked the van in Arizona among Saguaro[mfn]A Youtube guide to pronouncing this word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThfqfKu790I[/mfn] cacti and the arid splendor of the Sonoran Desert.

    Saguaro Cacti in the Sonoran Desert

    I parked the van outside of Austin, Texas on a side-trip to the Longhorn Cavern State Park before turning toward my final destination in Houston. As I approached the park, I noticed a turn-out to a scenic view and vowed to check it out on the return.

    The entrance to the cave itself was shrine-like and spectacular, a nature-made atrium of boulders weathered smooth over an impossibly vast period of time. I shrank from the chance to explore the cave on the excuse that I would come back and bring a friend. Or maybe I just knew, though I was in Texas, there was no way this cave was going to match up with Carlsbad Caverns.

    I drove back to the turn-out that promised a scenic view. The best spot to access the view was in the fat center of an elliptical loop at the end of a short drive, past a stand of brush and trees. It was desolate with an air of abandonment and neglect, a place where you could shoot holes in a can setting on a stump and no one would care. On the return side of the loop was a car pulled completely off the road into rough grass. I thought whoever came along with that car was up to no good. The view stretched out over a valley to distant hills with an easy, self-satisfied bucolic splendor. Hill country.

    I fiddled around getting Atma parked off of the road so the sliding door on the passenger side would open up over the vista. As I circled around the van to get to a steel garbage can and its chained lid, a disembodied voice rose out from the vicinity of that car. It was a man’s voice, and he was saying that he couldn’t move and needed help.

    I decided immediately that there was a fifty percent chance that this guy really needed help and the other fifty percent was that this was a setup and the guy or a few of his buddies lurking nearby were armed with guns. Still, it seemed like bad form to refuse a person help when he asked for it so plainly. I decided to circle around his car so I would come up on him from behind and get a look inside on my approach.

    “I’ve got a bad back and I need my paints from the back seat,” he said, flicking his head in that direction. It was a four door. He sat with his legs flung out from the driver’s seat. I was going to have to open the door behind him to fetch him his paints. I felt uneasy still. I wasn’t yet sure what I might find.

    Tommy, the painter, in car

    “I’m Tommy. I come up here every day. I drove all the way out here from Myrtle Beach, Florida to be with my husband. He’s the only man I trust. It’s a long way to go in a condition like this. See that tree over there. I come up here every day to paint that tree. I talk to that tree. And you know what? The tree talks back. I know I’m crazy. Don’t let me scare you because I’m crazy. I’m a painter. I paint signs and sometimes take along a helper to carry my supplies.”

    Tommy’s Tree

    I seized on the idea that Tommy painted signs, maybe houses too, to fund his artistic study of this tree. I didn’t know exactly what kind of painter Tommy thought himself just that he came out to paint this one particular tree. It wasn’t a mighty oak or a redwood. Its trunk splayed out at its base into three separate trunks, each as big as a big man’s thigh. It stood in among a stand of others. Its tripartite trunk must have caught Tommy’s eye. Whatever the reason, it was the tree that spoke to Tommy.

    Then he showed me his current rendition of it, stretched in a frame on a long, skinny canvas. It was a lot like a Van Gogh with the shape of the tree described in vertical lines made luminescent and wavy by a mysterious internal source of electricity.

    Next he got me to pull out a photo album from the passenger footwell in the back of his car. It was his portfolio and contained plastic-sleeved photographs of paintings and murals which beatified everyday people and gave most of them angel wings apparently to enjoy the Southwestern grace of a non-denominational Spanish mission and hover about its stony well.

    “One time a man come up to me outside a little place I had where I kept my supplies and hit me over the head with a pipe,” he said. 

    “That’s the reason I’m all bent up like this. He destroyed the nerves. It’s why I can barely walk. It took a lot of surgeries to put me back together. And you know what? I knew that man. It was a fellow who used to come help me out. A long time after I got out of the hospital, I remembered his face and knew who he was.”

    “Did you confront your attacker?” I asked him. I felt like I already knew Tommy well enough to guess the answer.

    “Yes, I did. I asked him why he did it. And you know what he told me? He said he needed $500 to pay a gambling debt. And I said, ’man, you should have told me. You know, I would have given you that $500. You didn’t have to do that. He said he was sorry.”

    I marveled at Tommy for having no hint of resentment in his story, neither in the words he chose or the timbre of his voice, even though the guy who attacked him had left him unconscious and crippled for life. Tommy could still walk but just barely. It was vital but also a courageous feat for him to stand-up from time-to-time so he could walk a few paces to keep from getting stiff.

    Then, I asked him if he had forgiven the man who had crippled him. I felt like I knew the answer to that too.

    “Yes, I did,” he said.

    For Tommy, I think it is fair to say that, wherever he is now, life’s been good. Out of sheer force of a kind spirit, life’s been good. And if life’s been good for Tommy, I reckon the chances are life’s been pretty good for us too[mfn]An earlier version of this story appeared in Ode to the Adventure Prone[/mfn].

    Footnotes

    [mfn_list/]

  • Half-naked Man on Campus

    Campus security detail confronts author while sunbathing on the quad of a Christian university campus in Texas.

    Maureen Muldoon texted me a few days before a Voicebox planned evening of storytelling, asking me if I could fill in for a scratched performer. The theme song for the month, appropriately was “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire. I said yes before knowing what I might possibly contribute. I thought Maureen might bite on a story about sunbathing since one could make a tenuous connection between the end of summer and the end of sunbathing. Lo and behold, she agreed!

  • The Unsettling Adventure of a Good Times Roller

    Author telling a story about a bicycle ride on stage at Fitzgerald’s

    Maureen Muldoon of Voice Box Stories will invite you to present live on stage at the monthly storytelling series she co-hosts with Cathy Richardson if you can pitch a story molded to the theme of a designated song. If you get the gig and go on to present, Cathy will climb the stage after you and improvise a musical response to the story you just told. The first time, after I told a story about writing and rejection, Cathy came up to sing after me “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles. Whatever she comes up with, it’s always a kick in the pants.

    When the theme song was “Let the Good TImes Roll” by the Cars, it took me an embarrassing number of hours to think of a story I might tell based on that theme.

    How embarrassing? I’m a hardcore bike rider, have raced bikes in velodromes over ten years, have completed any number of “century” rides, gone on many multi-day “credit card camping” bike tours most of them solo, a few for charity, all of them adventures.

    How was it possible that I couldn’t have a story to tell on the theme of letting the good times roll? Isn’t that exactly what I’ve been doing for decades?

    And I had a story to tell about a good deed gone bad for a worthy and inspired cause, West Town Bikes – Youth on Bikes.

    This is what I came up with. I hope you like it. The full tale is told here at biketoenddivison.org.

    Cathy and Maureen, as the co-conspirators behind Voice Box, a storyteller’s series which combines an intoxicating mix of “live” story-telling and music, have been “putting themselves out there” for ten years! Kudos to them.