Home for the Holidays

"You again?" he scowled. "What am I supposed to do with you?"

"Isn't there a story about this? They come home. Prodigal sons. And then you kill the fatted calf." I stood there with my hands in my pockets.

He sighed. "Huh. I think you're supposed to bring a contrite heart with you. You got one?"

"Well, I've got a beat-up one."

"Sure, sure, big surprise, bucko. I don't think that's quite the same thing."

"No. No, it's not."

I looked off to the familiar line of the Coburg Hills, with their radio towers. "But I'm stuck, Dad. My heart's not contrite. I'd do it all again. Hell, I am doing it all again."

"Yah. You think this is news to me?"

"No, I guess not. But what am I supposed to do?"

"What, you're asking me? How would I know? I gave you the plain road. You go off the map, you gotta find your own way."

"Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense."

"You bet it makes sense. You know, sometimes I think the stupidest thing I ever did was give you a gift for words. You don't just talk yourself into ridiculous things, you talk other people into them too. Plausible, lad. Glib and plausible. And the less you know the prettier you talk."

"Oh, come on. You gave me the gift. It's not like I try to misuse it."

"No. No, I'll give you that. I don't know, bucko, so far you're one of my big failures. I keep trying to make you come out right, but I made a mistake somewhere along the line. There's always something a little skewed, something a little out of true. Tell you the truth, I can't figure it out."

"Oh, great. So much for the All-Knowing."

He made a rude noise. "Not a claim I ever made. I didn't ask for this job. It's like Larkin said. We don't mean to but we do."

"Hmph. You know, this whole thing was a little easier back when it was all a little more formal. Awe and dread, you know. Fear and trembling."

"Piffle. What could ever scare you? You been pig-headed since day one. You always know better than everyone else, oh yes, no telling you anything. You think it was any different back in the days of the tents? Young men, they always know everything."

"Well, I'm not young anymore. And I don't know a damn thing."

"And you'd think" -- he jabbed a finger into his palm -- "you'd think that would make you less pig-headed. But glory, no! If anything, you're worse."

"Look, I didn't come here for insults --"

"Sure you did. That's exactly what you came here for."

I stopped a moment and looked at him. "What do you mean?"

Suddenly he looked very tired and very old. "I think it's time for you to ask someone else. I'm played out, bucko. I've done my best. It's time to move on. My stories won't help any more."

"What do you mean, move on?"

"You come back to me because you know I got nothing more. You come back because I'm familiar. You're scared, you're lonesome, you think: I'll go home and get me some insults. Then I'll feel better. But you're not going to feel better. I got the insults, all right, but they don't work like they used to. You can't nail something to sand."

I stared at him. "So no fatted calf."

"What did the calf ever do to you? Let the poor thing grow up. There's been enough suffering on your account."

"And where do I go?"

He scowled, and then grinned. "Over the hills and far away. That's how her stories always go, don't they?"

I smiled back ruefully. "Yeah. Yeah, except I'm supposed to be a handsome young man."

"Well, don't waste time then. What are you waiting for?"

"I wondered -- I mean, I know it doesn't make sense, but --"

He laughed, then, and shook his head. "I get you. God, what a piece of work you are. Go on, kneel down. Bless you. Now get the hell out of here."

Voyage to Dulcarnon

I am, til God me bettre minde sende
At dulcarnon, right at my wittis ende.

--Troilus and Creseide

Mr Tate, in a parlous state,
Sailed away one day;
And we who dwell by the Longest Sea
Have never been able to say
Why a man in the prime of his milking time
Should suddenly up and say:
"I must sail away from the Longest shore
And the waters of Longest Bay;
For the sight of my socks, confuddled in flocks
Of blue and black and gray
Is a sight that has become, to me,
More grievous than I can say.

"I have studied the knees of philosophy
And many legs of lamb,
And watched the distant spires of smoke
Rise from the learned ham;
But the knotted locks of my twisted socks
And a softly whispered 'damn!'
Have poisoned the lees of my breakfast cup
Down to the dreariest dram,
Have unraveled the sleeve of all I believe
And tainted my morning jam,
Have shivered the snores of my slumber at dawn
With the dread that perhaps I am

"A laughingstock to the gapes and gawks
In the land of Dulcarnon."
The mermaids, singing for Mr Tate
Hastened his ship along,
Spurring his crew to all they could do
With snatches of amorous song,
And combing the seaweed out of their hair
With a slender ebony prong.
The eventual fate of Mr Tate
Was debated for long and long
By we who dwell by the Longest Sea
Far from Dulcarnon:

For some men say that Tate was fey
And now he will never grow old,
And the fishery women note that for swimming
The waters are deathly cold;
But some contend that the gods will defend
A man who has been so bold,
And they say an ungartered spirit
Will never be bought or sold,
And the moral of the Longest story
Will never cease to be told:
There was a man who stood for socks no more
And now will never grow old.

In Review

I held her shoulder in my left hand, and reached across for the anterior superior iliac spine on the other side -- what I suppose the uninitiated might call the hip-bone -- with my right hand. Supposedly the left hand is negative, drawing energy, and the right hand is positive, giving it. Whatever. That's polarity talk. If I were talking shiatsu, I'd call the left hand the mother hand and the right hand the son hand. The mother hand just rested. With the son hand I rocked her back and forth. In shiatsu, it's the mother hand, the hand that doesn't move, that you pay attention to. It's the listening hand.

Polarity arouses all my skepticism. It's American. It's modern. It's eclectic. It stands to older forms of massage as Mormonism stands to older religions: I can't get over the conviction that someone just like me made this up; it can't be worth anything.

Nevertheless, the little we've learned has infiltrated everything I do on the table. The holding, the rocking, the way I listen with my hands.

---

"You radiate warmth, care, kindness, and good humor... your presence de-escalates stress and upset, and contributes to an overall sense of happiness and interest here."

I cared about this performance review. I mean, I always care about performance reviews, since they're about a topic of such absorbing interest, i.e., me. But I cared about this one especially. For one thing, I admire Faith more than anyone I've ever worked for. Her good opinion is important to me. For another, I feel like I've let myself be seen, at the Foundation, as I have never let myself be seen in my high-tech jobs: this review was about me, not about a manufactured persona.

Probably I've never been as good at manufacturing a persona as I have fondly imagined. But the point of course is not whether I fooled anybody: the point is whether I intended to.

My reviews in cubicle-land mentioned the same sort of thing. They described me as cheerful and easygoing, a good team member, diplomatic; someone people like to work with. So what was so different about this?

How much it mattered, I guess. It was, really, the central point of the review: that I was kind. What matters most to me, about me, is what matters most to Faith too. It would be hard to exagerate the difference that makes in how I feel about working for her.

---

This strange, bittersweet year is nearing its close -- to me, always, the end of September, harvest-time, is the real end of the year.

The earth element's season is harvest; its weather is damp, its taste is sweet, its sense-organ is the mouth, its emotion is worry, its body component is the muscles, its sound is singing.

I'm grieving, under the sky. The long shadows and the closing door.

---

Multnomah County Library has, against all probability, a Kelmscott Chaucer in its collection. I'm going to go spend some time in its company, soon.

Befell that in that season, on a day
In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay
Ready to wend on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, with full devout courage
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty, in a company
Of sundry folk, by adventure fallen
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all.

(I have, by the way, great sympathy for that voice-in-the-wilderness scholar who keeps calling for the use of modernized-spelling editions of Chaucer -- who points out that Chaucer's spelling and Shakespeare's spelling are very similar, and that if we're willing to make Shakespeare accessible by changing it, why not Chaucer? That, above, is word-for-word Chaucer, just spelled as in modern English. The rhythm is ruined, because you can't see some of the syllables that should be pronounced -- but you can read it just as easily as you can read Shakespeare. Why not? We have no compunction, after all, about mangling Shakespeare's rhythm in the same way, if on a smaller scale. So what if someone mistakes Middle English "corage" -- meaning "heart," and pronounced ko-RAH-juh -- for the modern word, restricted to a particular subset of associated virtues? It's mistakes like that that make reading old poetry such a resonant, disorienting, and beautiful experience -- we're always being asked to open our courage a little.)

I am going on my own pilgrimage, in a couple of weeks. To Brooklyn, with full devout courage.