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  • Metaphor and the Quality of Experience

    Aristotle

    The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

    Aristotle from the Poetics

    Abstract

    During a rare reunion, an old girlfriend tells me I have chronic foot pain because I’m going in the wrong direction, elevating figurative thought to the same plane as medical diagnosis.

    Durable truths are couched in myth and metaphor, not science.

    Eve’s so-called choice when she chooses to bite into the apple captures the paradoxical experience of free will and determinism better than anything in the thousands of years that have passed since that story was first told.

    So much of the language we use is metaphorical, it’s easy to forget by how much or how pervasive it is.

    Some of our most cherished beliefs are metaphorical (rebirth, the idea that in marriage which two organisms become one, a person with many gifts)

    The quality of the metaphors we use affects the quality of what we experience (life itself really).

    Metaphor and figurative speech are the go-to “tools” for poets and writers to broach transcendental topics including God.

    Text

    If ever I break up with a woman, I will call up my college sweetheart to ask her if she’s still dating that guy. When she says “yes” I am elated because Gene’s the one guy I wouldn’t dare trample over trying to get her back. Gene is her chosen one because he’s just that lucky and deserving.

    Leigh and I have had a face-to-face reunion once since we dated in college. It transpired in Chicago outside a favorite bar, the “Hideout”, where all the cool alternative music acts come to play. Robbie Fulks, a comically embittered singer/songwriter refugee from Nashville and a native of North Carolina, is my favorite. Neko Case used to tend bar there.

    Back then in the summer of 2013, I was vexed with chronic neuropathy and foot pain. That’s when Leigh made an out-of-the-box remark that it was a sign that I was going in the wrong direction. I was struck by the brilliance of elevating figurative thought to the same plane as medical diagnosis. Nobody had ever once suggested to me anything like it. The shame of it was I was already calling myself a writer.

    In the years following Leigh’s pronouncement, my awe for the figurative imagination has—let’s just say—blossomed. I have learned that the most durable truths are couched in myth and metaphor, not science. I have learned that gospel truth—the truth that emerges from gospel—has very little if anything to do with historic events and is instead rooted in stories that allude to transcendental themes.

    You will not acquire better insight into the nature of free will than you can by contemplating the image of Eve chomping down on that apple. I mean that whole thing in the garden and the serpent looks totally like a setup. How much of a choice did Eve really have when she “chose” to take the first bite? It’s a paradox, perfectly articulated, and nobody in the thousands of years since that story was first told, though many philosophers have tried, has advanced the debate on free will versus determinism.

    At the start of Cratylus, a dialogue written by Plato, which seeks to discover how words signify, i.e., accrue and acquire meaning, a thesis is presented that words are tools in the manner of awls and anvils. It is pleasant to think that just as awls and anvils are used to create halters and horseshoes, words create meaning.

    But it is also clear that Plato—feeling compelled to use metaphor to get at how words work and perform their magic —has flung us so to speak headlong into the thicket.

    r/oddlysatisfying - This Infinity Spiral Staircase That Goes Nowhere

    It doesn’t take us long to sidle up to the suspicion that we are trapped in metaphor and get queasy about feeling caught in a trap. It is a little too much like an Escherian staircase.

    Maybe already we’re starting to think that the quality of the metaphor colors the quality of experience. Or let’s just say, life itself.

    The prosaic, secularist way we describe a moment with profound transformative potential is a “midlife crisis”. But if words are tools and all we have to work with is this pallid phrase “midlife crisis”, woe-betide our forlorn souls. I mean, damn-it. How does that help a person to cope?

    The concept of liminal space gives us something slightly more useful than midlife crisis to reckon with. Moreover, it is faintly metaphoric.

    Dante’s dark forest (selva oscura) is the metaphor par excellence of a midlife crisis. We see the figure of Dante, the pilgrim, paralyzed by terror and fear in the very first canto as he is thrust back twice by allegorical beasts in his approach to the gate to hell until Virgil, his spiritual and poetic mentor, comes to his rescue. In the 1st canto, Dante already has us immersed in metaphor: sleep, hell, dark forests, mentors, and above all a “journey”, the metaphor supreme for spiritual growth.

    well, hi.

    Rebirth, replete with spiritual and religious connotation, trumps midlife crisis for utility. You can picture it. You can go to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and, on any given day, see unborn chicks under the plastic dome of a huge incubator trying to crack through their shells[1]. You can see with your own eyes the struggle to survive begin at the very instant of birth. The rebirth metaphor comes with pictures. It’s very easy to understand what it’s all about[2]. Try coming anywhere near as close with “midlife crisis”. Who invents such phrases? Milquetoast sociologists?

    A legend exists that the protean mind of Goethe was so vast and domineering that it sent many a would-be poet scurrying to seek refuge of as philosophers in the halls of academia. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, so saturated intellectual thought with doubt that, by the time Kant came along, it was fashionable to doubt the existence of God. When Kant promoted the distinction of the palpable world and a world beyond sense, which he designated the phenomena and noumena, it was hypothesized that the noumena was radically unknowable and by corollary God. Then for decades, guys who might have made decent poets dashed their brains out trying to invent a logic that could punch a hole through the invisible wall between the noumena from the phenomena just to rescue the idea of God and prove that He exists. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer built a career out of mocking these attempts, knocking them down like a Stanley Cup goalie knocks down pucks.

    But any half-baked, warmed-over Calvinist could tell you that we are too puny and insignificant to apprehend anything so luminous as God. And the poet William Carlos Williams would exude “No ideas but in things.”

    So, the only way to approach transcendent objects is with transcendent tools and the go-to transcendental tool of poets and writers is metaphor. This is why fundamentalists are so fundamentally frustrating because they insist on the historicity of things and nothing that the imagination can produce.

    From the Greek, the word metaphor breaks down into the components: “meta”, meaning near to and “phorein” meaning to carry.

    Iconic ampora cup

    The iconic New York City coffee cup, the amphora cup, is so named because it has a picture of an amphora on it, the Greek name for a two handled vase. In Greek an amphora means literally something that is carried with two hands. The “phor” suffix is the same as in metaphor. It too derives from the root “phorein” to carry.

    I like to imagine that metaphor is like an amphora, or James Bond’s briefcase, or the so-called football in which are carried the nuclear codes. Only the codes are all forgotten. What’s inside is unknowable (the noumena in Kant’s nomenclature) and the only evidence we have of it is by the case we carry it in (the phenomena). Whereas science constantly frustrates itself trying to get closer to the root of all things, poetry takes a different tack and says this is close as you can get. It is ironically far more practical when it comes to spiritual truth.

    A good metaphor is the airplane rule, the one where people remind you to put your mask on yourself first. How many lives have been improved by this metaphor? And what is it really other than an apt retelling of the old admonition to love your neighbor as you love yourself?

    When I went to the doctor for a checkup some months ago and we were discussing the obstinate nature of the injuries to my left foot, she turned to me and pointed, “this foot is a metaphor you know.” My doctor was schooled in the Western tradition and though she is less occidental by the day, I smiled. Inside though, I was laughing my head off.

    1. Watch Baby Chick Hatching at the Museum of Science and Industry ↑

    2. More daunting still is the New Testament imperative “Ye must be born again.” ↑

  • Carolyn Just Died and Now We’re Short 86 Billion Neurons

    Carolyn Poplett died on May 18, 2022. This is the eulogy I gave for her at First United Church in Oak Park on July 23rd, 2022.
    Carolyn giving her attention to grandniece, Robin

    Years ago, driving my parents out to O’Hare, suffering the critical presence of my father, who for some obnoxious reason had decided to sit in the back, positioned to keep an eye on the speedometer as I drove, a driver shot into traffic from an on-ramp and cut me off. I found the brake pedal just in time to avoid plowing into the back of his car.

    Preempting the unhelpful words that my father was bound to issue, Carolyn blurted out, “Why…why, he’s just contributing to world rage.” To my teenage ear, that sounded like crazy talk. It would take decades before it occurred to me that this incident, as much as any other, typified a person with a profound conviction in the interconnectedness of things.

    As far as people were concerned, my mother, your aunt, your friend, and your co-conspirator, was a connection machine. She made connections out of her abundant grace, reflexively, as it was utterly and thoroughly integral to her being. Going to the farmer’s market with mom felt like we were campaigning for an office she had already won. It very often went like this. “Oh, John, you remember so-and-so”. And I cringed. Of course, I didn’t. If Demosthenes knew all the names of all the citizens in the ancient city-state of Athens, Carolyn Poplett knew all the names of all the people living in Oak Park. It was just one of those things a connection machine does.

    Carolyn, as her beautician friend, Carol, can tell you, was “magnetic”, the perfect word for mom if ever there was. It was easy to imagine, how when they went together to Parker’s restaurant, a shared favorite, men would abandon their spouses to see Carolyn safely to her car.

    On her last visit to Ravinia, no doubt perfectly coiffed, lipstick carefully drawn, elegantly attired, nails painted a dark and alluring shade of red, Tony Bennett fell into a conversation with her that carried on so long his manager had to pry him loose. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how those two persons found each other even at a crowded, sprawling venue. Two magnetic people, their polarities lined up, a gentle, summer night, Sir Isaac Newton could have predicted it.

    The most spectacular results to come out of AI, feats such as malignant tumor detection and self-piloting helicopters, come from so-called artificial neural networks.

    How does a machine with a pittance of crude, imitation neurons so often outperform and outsmart human beings? Artificial neural networks don’t sleep, don’t get bored, don’t get distracted. They don’t take time off for meals or sex or watching Law and Order SVU. They don’t have attention deficit disorder. Above all they, never suffer trauma or its pernicious, crippling after-effects; they don’t have rage.

    Carolyn Poplett was engaged in the most interesting piece of that conundrum. If the average human brain has 86 billion neurons1Cherry, “How Many Neurons Are in the Brain?”, an almost infinite capacity for connectedness, why aren’t human beings more deeply connected to their humanity?

    I think she understood how trauma damages the soul and when persons damage each other emotionally or rob a person of their innocence, neurons are damaged. Our capacity for self-love, a healthy autonomy, self-actualization, our capacity to love others, is cut back, diminished, compromised. The human connections we need to thrive become more tenuous and fragile, unstable, more difficult to maintain.

    In Dante’s Paradiso, the poet postulates that it is God’s love which makes the world spin round and that love is the prime mover2Paradiso, Canto 27 106-111.:

    The nature of the universe, which holds
the center still and moves all else around it,
begins here as if from its turning-post.
This heaven has no other where than this: 
the mind of God, in which are kindled both
the love that turns it and the force it rains.

    Sometimes towards the end, I whimsically began to think of Carolyn as the prime mover. I mean, there she was, sitting in front of the television in her jammies, content to watch reruns of Gunsmoke or the cable series, Mountain Men, yet there was always a fantastic swirl of energy around her. And when Georga Parchem called, and Jim, Allison, Mary Ann, and Erin got involved with this year’s spring benefit at the 19th Century Club, where Carolyn would be the guest of honor, she barely moved but seemed to be the force of a great national convergence that brought friends, nieces and nephews, fellow club members, colleagues from Thrive, in brief, an adequate sample of all the people she had loved, together in a single ballroom.

    Fully three years after her husband died, Carolyn confided to me that she had decided to live. That revelation came as a total shock. I knew that she was grieving, I could not have guessed she had gone fully to a “to be or not to be” level of despair per the soliloquy. Well, now, finally it is obvious. The high cost of being a connection machine is that when you lose connections you cherish, the suffering is magnified by this cultivated knowledge of their value. And Carolyn I wager had plenty of her neurons, a healthy swath of her 86 billion neuron allotment, devoted to her husband, Ray, probably more than any other person.

    Human neurons do not observe the boundaries of the human skull or body. They are promiscuous. They interconnect with neurons in the minds and bodies of other people. That is a trick that artificial networks haven’t quite learned yet. The two flames merging into one metaphor, that charming trope of youthful weddings, actually happens at the level of synapses and neurons. So, the loss of a loved one, a significant other, is exactly the same as the sturdy chop of a cleaver slicing through a bundle of nerves. That is why it took Carolyn three years to decide she wanted to carry on. Half of her, it must have seemed, was gone.

    Yet we know that the human brain is plastic and that neurons can eagerly repurpose to new tasks. So, the only adequate answer to grief is to do as Carolyn would have us do. Maintain as many connections as diligence allows and whenever possible, form new ones.

    • 1
      Cherry, “How Many Neurons Are in the Brain?”
    • 2
      Paradiso, Canto 27 106-111.

  • Having a Cow: Carolyn Poplett and the Figurative Imagination

    Talmadge and Watson House #2 in Oak Park, Il. where John Poplett advised mother, Carolyn, not to have a cow.

    It was in the seventies. Bart Simpson was not yet a sparkle in Matt Groening’s creative eye. I was on a landing at the front of a large house, a landmark Prairie School architecture home in Oak Park, Illinois, restored by my parents, a few stair rungs below my mother who had come charging down the stairs from the second floor to engage me in an epic war of words.

    I was seething with rage, pimples, and hormones, a product of age (I was a teenager) and disposition. Whatever we were arguing about is long since forgotten.

    What I said in that instant, I will never forget. I said, “Mom, don’t have a cow.”

    It was the wrong thing to say to a mother who grew up in the country, on farms. Carolyn erupted. I only remember anger and fury so intense it felt like I had swung a steel door open on its hinges to stick my head in a furnace. I’m not even sure she was forming sentences. The white heat of anger was all I felt.

    Then, she calmed herself enough to explain the exact source of her anger. The mood was different. She was still seething but she wasn’t quite as much angry as she was appalled.

    “Why, John,” she said, jaw tense, “if I had a cow, it would split my sides open.”

    Which describes what happened next because, in about seven seconds, we were both doubled over in side-splitting laughter at the image of my mother birthing a cow, though, I suppose, in fairness to me, it would have more probably been a calf.

    The Clampetts truck, now on display in Branson, Mo., from the sixties television series, The Beverly Hillbillies, an embarrassing national image of Southern backwardness advanced by Yankees for the amusement of Yankees. It no doubt prejudiced a young son against the wit and intelligence of his mother.

    This was my introduction to the figurative mind of Carolyn Poplett, long before I had ever heard of Joseph Campbell and his demonstrations of the power of myth. This deeply figurative way of thinking was strange to me for most of my life.

    To a cocky Yankee lad, her hyperbolic flights of the imagination seemed like a deficiency of intellect, somehow tied to her Southern roots, as if my grandmother had weaned her from the breast with moonshine or she was a cousin of the Clampetts on The Beverly Hillbillies. Bless her heart.

    But mom’s way of thinking is commonplace to me now: the paradox that you must take metaphor, figurative language, as literally as you dare. I do not know how to emphasize how strange it is to look back on how I used to think, before having adopted Carolyn’s wisdom. All I know is that the urgency of plumbing metaphor to its absolute depth now daily confronts me.

    That’s not a bad frame of mind to work yourself into if you are a writer. But it is not a bad frame of mind to work yourself into if you wish to have a richly-rewarding, bountiful life no matter what you do.

    A couple Sundays ago I had a misadventure that beat-up both of my feet to the point that I had to put myself in a wheelchair. The trigger was honorable enough. I received a call early in the AM from a caregiver. Unbeknownst to us, Carolyn was having a gout attack. Even with the caregiver’s help, she couldn’t rise to get dressed. I came over to help lift her. Stayed to lift her later in the evening to get her into bed. There were so many unusual circumstances piling up, I didn’t guess I would wake up the next day in agony. A few days later, I visited a foot doctor to learn that a pernicious wound had re-opened on my left foot—it took six months to close it the first time—and the right foot though not broken was at risk of collapsing from a condition known as Charcot’s foot. Both feet threatened to take me down long torturous paths[1] with iffy chances for full or partial recovery. There was a chance that I’d have to have surgeries on my right foot as I had done on my left. There was and remains the fear hovering in the air that, having already given up playing basketball, riding a bicycle might come next.

    I was too emerging from a hypomanic episode, which, without correction, I suspect, can lead to bipolar disorder[2]. These are warnings to pull my life into order with maximum urgency. Yet, it is hilarious that the solution is to laze around and just be ridiculously kind to myself. How should that ever be a challenge? It is, but I am committed to reform.

    If you take your metaphors seriously, the world starts to make sense in uncommon ways.

    This was my frame of mind when I called mom two days ago. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t go over to see her unless I took an Uber. I tried that once but there was too much banging around getting in and out of a car on the to and fro. I no longer wanted to risk any effect the journey might have on my recovery.

    I called Carolyn instead. I didn’t know what to say to her. It occurred to me that we had never talked about religion. Not once. I do not recall seeing her upset or expressing her displeasure, when, as a boy, I was caught ditching Sunday school once out of the dozens of times when I didn’t get caught. Hey, I ditched bell ringing class too.

    Carolyn’s dementia often seems so well advanced that it fools you. I determined, as I often do, to engage her intellect. If it’s philosophical or deep, anything about man’s place in the universe, it will snap her mind into focus.

    On our phone call, I provided her with details of my physical and mental condition.

    I omitted relating to Carolyn an incident, which ended on the last day of February in this, a leap year. On that night, was awakened by the sensation of a hand on the back of my neck before I decided to crawl across my apartment from bed to kitchen sink for a glass of water. As I traversed the tile in my kitchen on my knees, I started speaking to God and laughing. That sounds like madness, which is why I demurred from relating this story to Carolyn. Prosaically, speaking it is certainly easy to cobble together an explanation that a recent increase in my medications triggered it. I have every reason to believe that it was a catalyst. But I was laughing for the figurative significance of it. That God, providence, the universe, or whatever else you might want to call it had somehow arranged for me to be in this fix. I knew that the word human stemmed from a Hebrew word for “ground” or that it was related to the Latin word “humus”, which also means earth, ground, or soil, and is also related to the words “humiliation” and “humble”. There was no doubt in my mind—psychotropic drugs notwithstanding—that I had been brought down to this posture by the Supreme Being or a supreme force, again, take your pick, and so I was laughing with God as if to say “touché”. There was just no way in heck I was going to try to explain all that to my mother[3].

    “You’ve really been through the mill,” she said. On cue, I thought about two millstones grinding grain into powder. “Not bad, mom,” I thought.

    “Mom, have you ever noticed the difference between secular and religious speech? I’m starting to find religious speech much more expressive than secular speech. In a funny way, it’s more accurate. Doesn’t the expression “midlife crisis” sound bland, so bureaucratic that it makes you want to cringe?”

    It was a softball question. Carolyn has the mind of a poet. She used to adore Emily Dickinson. I could sense her revulsion in the silence between words.

    “So, mom, I like to think that I’m going through a rebirth. It’s the only way I can make sense out of what is happening to me.

    Carolyn Poplett with her granddaughter, Allison, at a Bed and Breakfast in Santa Barbara, California.

     “We’ve been to a lot of Christian weddings. Most of them that I remember had the ritual where the newlywed couple takes two candles symbolizing their former lives as single people so when they merge the two flames to light a third candle, it symbolizes the effect they hope to achieve by marriage.

    “I always found that to be so charming, mom, but I must admit. I was charmed by it, I grasped it intellectually, but I didn’t really get it. I didn’t understand that marriage makes a couple symbolically a single item and that the symbolic unity runs way ahead of that ever coming to pass. I could never tell the difference between the starting gate and the finishing line. Marriage just makes it possible to become one and the goal of marriage is to make it so. It’s not given. You have to make it that way. And once you do, I believe, everything starts to make sense. Isn’t that how it was with you and dad?”

    “Well, we had to work through a lot,” she said.

    “So, in secular speech you have a “midlife crisis” but in religious speech you are “born again” with a lot of struggle along the way. Does that sound about right, mom? When I think about it, there is a gestation period, labor pains, the extreme life or death struggle of evicting the baby from the peaceful warmth of the womb. Only with a rebirth, there are contradictions. Who is the mother? Yourself?  Of course, it is. It must be so, but how is that possible? You are no longer innocent as you were the first time. But isn’t the promise of rebirth, the promise to recover your innocence with the full benefit of keeping every scrap of knowledge you learned losing your innocence the first time?

    “That’s what I think is going on with me, mom. Does that make sense?”

    “Yes,” she said. And as I was explaining this to Carolyn, as I had rehearsed these thoughts with a friend a week or so earlier, it struck me anew that it was mom who had given me this sensitivity to metaphor, language, and a zeal for figurative intelligence.

    Come to think of it, what could be more difficult in the undertaking than birthing oneself… unless it is “to have a cow”?

    Originally posted March 30, 2022. Last revised April 1, 2022.

    [1] We can decide later how easy it might be to follow both feet along two separate but equally torturous paths simultaneously.

    [2] Hey! I’m paranoid too.

    [3] For a fascinating description of truly profound religious experience, see the description of George Fox’s, the founder of the Quaker church, in William James’s The Variety of Religious Experience.

  • Grace, Gratitude, and a Wonderful Life

    Carolyn's Got Game!
    Still Got Game 02/17/2022

    I can take you over to Goldy’s, a neighborhood pub in Forest Park, which hasn’t changed since Mike took over the business in 1986, famous for its Goldyburger, where on Fridays they serve deep fried perch, and there introduce you to Una the handsome Irish barkeep with the handsome Irish lilt.

    I can show you the barstools where my brother Jim and I most often sit, where he is most prone to bust out an imitation of the banter of two stalwarts of Chicago sports, the late, legendary Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray, and his still-living color man, now announcing on the South Side for the White Sox, Steve Stone.

    The two provided running commentary from an open-air booth at Wrigley field to Cub fans over radio and television for fourteen years. My mimic brother does both parts, the slurred speech of Harry, masking a stroke that didn’t keep him out of the booth and Stone’s more nasally intonations.

    Certainly, they announced the game in 1983 on a day when the New York Mets came to town. Frank Howard was coach and the starting pitcher for the Mets, Walt Terrell, hit back-to-back home runs. It was a phenomenal feat, as any baseball aficionado can assure you, based on the stats alone. I was there with Arthur Russell to witness the whole thing. Ferguson Jenkins, starting pitcher for the Cubs, lost the game. Wait a minute, back up, Fergie Jenkins lost the game? His consolation for the loss was his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown eight years later in 1991.

    The point is my brother is an excellent mime, especially when he’s relaxed, among good people, and drinking Harps from a glass served by a handsome Irish lass. Under those circumstances, his pitch is perfect. The dial is set to ten.

    On Christmas Eve, Jim, our mother, Carolyn, my daughter, Allison, and mom’s caregiver, Mariya, crowded into the den to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.  I’ve heard Jim imitate Jimmy Stewart many times over many years. The way he enunciates George Bailey’s words in that line “You’re nothing but a scurvy spider, Mr. Potter” captures Stewart’s signature voice, which sounds like his jaw is still mending after somebody busted it open.

    If you know the movie, the person who almost busts George Bailey’s jaw open is the misanthropic bar owner, Gus, who appears in a dystopian Bedford Falls, a doppelganger for the happier-go-luckier bartender, Gus, who appears in the everyday “real” Bedford Falls, where George Bailey already has a wonderful life but is far too stubbornly willful and confused by a mind fogged up with vague “worldly” ambitions to see the wonderful life that God has already granted him.

    Instead, his awe-shucks boyish dreams can’t quite contain a cauldron of contempt from gushing from his pores. At great peril, he does not realize that the world of Bedford Falls is utterly complete. All George Bailey ever has to do is see it that way. It’s like Dorothy and her shoes.

    Like his Caray / Stone voices my brother’s Stewart can be pitch perfect. Only on this night, he did not settle for ten. He pushed it up that tiny little bit, all that’s required, to beam a masterful performance into the thick weeds of cornpone. He maxed out the dial all the way to eleven.

    Carolyn had the prime spot, seated in her wheelchair directly in front of the television. Jim was off to her right. She leaned to the left, with a comic’s instinct for breaking the fourth wall, to whisper to an imagined audience, “How’d I get mixed up with him?”

    I was on the left side of mom ideally situated to pick up her aside, ideally situated as her other son to think how ridiculous that sounded, the mother pretending she wasn’t on hand when Jim was just a twinkle in the eye or ever changed his diapers.

    It’s a Wonderful Life is my all-time favorite movie. I marvel how it folds in the mood and imagery of film noir into a perennial candidate for feel good movie of the year. I marvel at its durability. How it continues to teach me things. The premise that people routinely, tragically underestimate their influence on others, disparage or are blind to the good they dole out and that this failure might cause them to give up in one way or another has held me in its thrall for most of my life.

    Our capacity for blindness is immense. Here’s George Bailey itching to get out to see the world, his idea of heaven, when right around him, right under his nose, is all the world, all the heaven he can handle. It’s literally there at his feet. And he can’t see it. Who is sent to point this out to him? Clarence, a goofy second-class angel.

    Only George to the credit of his stubbornness doesn’t go down without a fight. He is brought down to his knees on that icy bridge where, on the brink of despair, he has returned to the scene where he tried to kill himself, for a second time.

    Carolyn bowling 02/17/2022

    As illustrated in this parable, unless you have a profound sense of your connectedness to others in your community, your life is literally hell. Hell on earth. You don’t have to wait for the afterlife. You can start that gig right away.

    As George prays on the bridge, a miracle happens. His prayer is answered. And the astonishing thing about this is that the miracle was always present in himself, his spirit, and his mind. It happens perhaps only when the human spirit intersects with divine will when divine will comes from within.

    This wondrously cheerful movie gleefully takes on the wondrously Quixotic chore of demonstrating to a theoretically very thick-headed audience exactly how thick in the head a human being can be. We’re all running around with logs in our eyes, it tries to tell us.

    No wonder I missed some of the other things that movie wants to convey. But for this viewing I was seated next to Carolyn, the woman who uses grace in its most simplistic form, the most commonplace, daily expression we use to express gratitude, the words “thank you”. With a zest for candor that comes from grace, Carolyn Poplett is weaponized for love. These days she delivers “thank yous” rapid-fire until you are riddled with them, powerless, forced to relent, and love her back.

    Jim and I choose caregivers for competence but mostly for how quickly they surrender to an infectious barrage of love bombs. This explains exactly why Mariya. Suzie, and Lyn have remained in her employ for so long. Carolyn and these amazing women love each other.

    If the good people of Bedford Falls were more like my mother (or Mariya or Lyn or Suzie), you wouldn’t have had time to finish your popcorn. If everybody in Bedford Falls had thanked George Bailey with a measure of her grace, George Bailey would not have gotten anywhere near that bridge and Clarence would have to go elsewhere to get his wings. Carolyn is a woman who at the age of ninety-two, a woman deep into her dotage, is still powerful, more powerful than a baby who can coax grandpa to play on the carpet, because her innocence is recovered innocence and brings with it a deep-seated wisdom that not even dementia can uproot.

    Well, something must have rubbed off. Before Carolyn got too far down that slippery slope, I started to ask her for advice. I figured that fierce instinct of maternal love would reel her back to a lucid state. With back-to-back failures in love and marriage, I wasn’t done with the old girl yet. I had plenty to talk with her about. I appealed to her for advice.

    That it could almost instantly yank her out of the fog was astonishing to behold despite my confidence in the theory. When I tried it again and witnessed her mind snap back a second time, this tapping into the bond of mother and son, astonished me more. It seemed we were tapping into something close to the center of life itself.

    This is the meaning of that Barbara Streisand lyric in the song “People” which asserts that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. I never understood that. Never. Not even when I started writing this article. I get it now. It only took me 57 viewings of that movie and 64 years of my mother’s sturdy example to reach this point. God spare us all if any of you out there are thicker than me.

    Acknowledging need of others is as simple as saying “thank you”. The rest you leave up to sincerity and intonation. Then, join the luckiest people.

    Now finally at long last I have a useful clue to my failures in marriage and love. I was unlucky. I was unlucky because I didn’t acknowledge how much I needed another person in my life. And a world class, George Bailey worthy stubbornness kept me from seeing how subtly the quality of independence shifts from a virtue to a corrosive, slow-acting poison. This slow-acting property makes it worse, crueler and more difficult to detect. It is insidious like neuropathy or diabetes. Only it attacks relationships instead of the body. I explained this all to my mother this evening. I called her by phone and gave her a condensed version of my theory on need and my failures in relationships.

    “That’s right,” she said.

    “So, I need to explain this to my friend,” I said. “Even if it doesn’t bring us close. For the sake of doing what’s right.”

    In my excitement, I exclaimed, “See, mom, I still need you as my mother? I just called because I had to tell you that,” I said.

    “Thank you. Thank you very much,” she said. Then she told me her body was exercising inside and that it was full of joy.

  • The Mystery of Carolyn’s Daring Escape from Incarceration

    Ray E., Patt Oppenheim, and Carolyn

    “This is my son, John. He’s the one who incarcerated me.”

    Imagine that the person making this introduction was your mother in an assisted-living home. Imagine you were standing next to her, and this is how she chose to introduce you to her fellow inmates—very cheerfully and void of foul intent, venom, rage, or any other more moderate form of ill-feeling. Just, you know, cheerful.

    Now imagine that her words, despite the hyperbole—a classic Southern trait—were almost entirely true. Well, not almost true. Actually true. In that moment, she introduced only me though she could have indicted David Strom, her attorney, had he been present. But David had the good sense not to be present.

    The truth is David Strom and I did put her in prison, then known as Holley-Court, an assisted-living high-rise here in Oak Park, Il., about two and a half blocks from her longtime townhome residence on Kenilworth Ave., the same street she lived on for 40 years, the same address I came home to from college on Christmas break, the same street upon which my father’s ashes are buried, etc. But David and I only did it because she had fallen several times and I was frightened and concerned that I might lose my mother and my fiercest ally and David was frightened and concerned that he might lose a client and one of his fiercest friends. How fierce? Ask my brother.

    Carolyn was and remains fierce, despite dementia, though she cloaks it in beguiling and innocent sounding expressions like “This is my son, John. He’s the one who incarcerated me.”

    The truth is I endured more than one of those withering introductions. And if you were in my shoes, like me, you would have wanted to crawl down into them. No! You would have wanted to collapse into them and vanish completely, as when a crew sends a spark to a sufficient charge of dynamite, placed at the foot of a vacant high-rise building, so that the explosion causes the building to implode and crash inward, down in on itself, and fall into a cloud of cinder and ash, its own pulver, its final violent state. This, I hope, affords a tiny sense of how that felt. Did I mention that Carolyn is fierce?

    So, the greater truth was that David and I together conspired to incarcerate Carolyn, guilty as charged, on the pretext of concern for her safety and well-being but the ugly truth is that decisions such as these are always a little self-serving. She had every right to call me out. How David emerged unscathed I cannot say.

    Somehow and to this day not all the details have come to light, for the guile of a Southern woman is as deep as it needs to be, she engineered her escape in the classic style of a flamboyant felon given to panache: entirely within the confines of her cell.  It’s a safe bet that she required only two ingredients, guile and smile, and mixed those together in the proportions required by alchemy and dark science.

    But the one other ingredient that has come to light was “girl power”. Carolyn wanted to bust loose, and she quickly conceived that men, her own son among them, were her enemies. She therefore rallied forces—the only forces she could trust—viz., other women.

    Somehow, with her private army and sleeper cells, she located a condominium, entirely situated on a single floor to remove the greatest dread, the consequences of a fall down a staircase, and ordered David to assist her in its purchase. She forthwith made David promise, fiercely I imagine, never to move her again, a promise that he, and I by proxy, have so far upheld.

    The condo she purchased was a rebuke to another totem of the patriarchy, this time her late husband, Ray E. Poplett, who fifty years ago had vetoed a chance to purchase a unit in the same building[1].

    Diana Ostreko combined forces with her and figured out a way to get every carpet, a baby grand piano, and precious curios out of a three-story townhouse and into her new home. The only complaint of her many doting nieces and nephews is that, in the transfer, the vinyl record of that Christmas classic, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, went missing.

    They outfitted it exactly to her wishes as a place for hospitality and where great parties were likely to erupt. I do not think it was entirely an accident that her new home became the birthplace for a new cocktail, the “Moonhattan”, which uses all the same ingredients as a conventional Manhattan, except that bourbon is tossed fittingly in favor of moonshine.

    The moral of this story is that two Yankee men can’t outwit a Southern woman. In fact, three can’t do it and, if you’re going to try, I advise you as a friend to start out with somebody other than my mother.

    [1] I am sure that if we could have him back, Carolyn would restore him his veto power, albeit with a few Ts and Cs freshly amended.