coasting down the winding road

Autumn is a new school year and a new bevy of highly specific, relatively inconsequential [in the grand scheme of life and crap] research interests. Today I am collecting women's advice columns, circa 1896-1900, published in Southern newspapers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The illustrations!!:

Top Five Childhood Memories: The King of Pop edition

because it really is the end of an era.


1. Taping Moonwalker off of TV [remember those days, eh] and watching the VHS at least once a week, for at least a year:




2. Appreciating every time he pulled off another successful "feature length music video" [and in part inspiring my love of all things epic and over-the-top in pop music/culture]:




3. Watching the Thriller video and watching Lauren be terrified of the "cat cweature" at the end, every time [and eventually accepting that I would never be coordinated enough to teach myself the dance]:




4. Kindling my lifelong sentimentalism for all things stop-motion animated [and all things Elephant Man-related?]:




5. Seeing Captain EO [a film that falls into the inexplicable and oft-neglected "space opera" genre] in 3D at Epcot and trying to catch Fuzzball every time he totally three-dimensionalized in front of my! seat:

let light perpetual shine upon him

How selfish we are, we humans—by definition, almost, willfully self-centered. When people leave our lives, it is like they have stopped living at all. Left to exist in the margins of the narrative where we are still the central character, conjured in an occasional memory perhaps, but not contemplated in the way they were when they were still part of the story. It’s biological, perhaps: an instinct. Maybe we all have a quota, a benchmark of attributes or impact, and when someone has moved out of our sphere, wandering of his own will away from our influence or perhaps pushed out by continual heaps of bigger, more defined concerns, he recedes. Not forgotten, not willfully ignored, but a narrative arc that has become blurrier as it fades away from the foreground.

So when that person takes his life, you realize how much has been unaccounted for. That a concurrent narrative has been there, all along. It is as if you flip back pages and pages in an instant, returning to place he last appeared, and you find an ellipsis. . . an ellipsis you have to replace, you know, with a period, and you already suspect that it’s a sentence you will never sufficiently complete.

When someone ends his own life, you think about it differently than when someone’s life has been ended. An active verb, versus a passive one. When someone is killed—by a disease, an accident, an age—you think about the narrative that has ended and the unfinished stories from which he or she has been plucked. You ask, “Why this person, God? Why now?” When it’s the other way, though, the active verb, you think more about the person.

It’s easier, I suppose, than filling in a thousand margins of hurt and hurting, desperation and despair.

I remember the kindest, softest voice in a brassy chorus of trumpet shouts and laughter. Unmistakable love in his glance and pride in his voice when his children or wife moved through a scene. The vulnerability I found so unnerving, a lack of that flinty façade the rest of us polished to a sheen, betraying frustration and disappointment, always with his self. The baseless hope that a smile meant he was doing better. The loving person that was and the life that could have been, if there hadn’t also been addiction.

Have compassion on those who suffer from any grief or trouble;
That they may be delivered from their distress.

Give to the departed eternal rest.
Let light perpetual shine upon them.

The Prayers of the People are a call and response, a collective appeal before we receive the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, before we are filled. Let light perpetual shine upon them, we ask, for those who have passed out of the realm we think we understand into the one we know we cannot. Lord, let Your light fill in these cracks and shadowy spaces. It is so easy to think we can understand, and so hard to resist trying. Trying to craft excuses or judgments—because some people do triumph over addiction, they do return from the margins happier, stronger, at peace. Trying to understand the Ifs, and what they change: If he hadn’t given in. If he could have not given in. If it had been us. If we would do the same thing.

God, are the departed always delivered from their distress? Can we ask, now, for the peace that passes understanding? Can we ask for light perpetual? A light to hit his surfaces, his many surfaces, his surfaces that are uneven because he gave up polishing that veneer, a light to fill in the shadowy places instead of glancing off a shiny façade, a light all the more brilliant for its dips and swerves and scintillations? Oh, Lord, have compassion on those who suffer from grief or trouble; Lord, give to the departed eternal rest.

That we may be delivered from our distress.

Let light perpetual shine upon him.

A Wii bit uncomfortable?

Most weekdays, I supplement my cardiovascular routines by working on my Wii Fit-ness. As many of my associates can attest, I am a strong advocate of this venue of electronic exercise. There are some days when the longest, most personal conversations I have are with the Wii Fit Balance Board. Good morning! Do you feel rested today? Some times it can take days or weeks for the results of your hard work to show, but keep at it! You’re doing great! Thanks, the Wii Fit.

ANYWAY.

On Wednesday mornings, the trash guys [Sorry, third wave feminism: the trash “individuals”] come to our house. For the past three weeks, I haven’t remembered this fact until I am exactly in the middle of my Wii Fit Super Hula Hoop session. When I look out the series of windows that are adjacent to the TV, stretching across the front of the house. And look at the trash guys, who are looking at me, looking like an idiot wiggling around with a pretend hula hoop. It is important to note here that from outside, you can’t see the TV OR the Wii Balance Board. And for three weeks, I haven’t been able to decide if it’s weirder to STOP hula hooping when we inevitably make eye contact, because there are dudes outside watching me try to perfect large, neat hip circles — or to KEEP hula hooping because, like a Nike commercial, nothing should get between me and my workout.

So far I have kept hooping.