Frank is Emptiness

April 6th, 2020

Karin and I watched the Palm Sunday Mass on Sunday, as it flowed online from the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Milwaukee. It was for me an odd experience. I sat on the couch and watched the show only because it meant so much for Karin. It really was a “show”. I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense. It is just that Karin and I were, for the most part, simply spectators, as opposed to active participants in the Mass. As Catholics, we are supposed to be engaged participants, but it was impossible for us to do that.

If a person lives long enough, they remember things. I am not going to argue whether or not these memories are in any way accurate. I’m just saying that current events often trigger thoughts of long ago. Sunday’s Mass online brought up a number of memories for me. I remembered my grandma.

When I was young (I’m not even sure when it was), my Grandma Pestotnik lived in a tiny apartment near the corner of 76th Street and Beloit in West Allis. She cared for my grandfather who dying of Parkinson’s disease. Both Grandma and Grandpa were Slavs. Grandma came from a Polish farm family, and Grandpa was a Slovene. Grandpa wasn’t terribly religious, but Grandma was. She was an old school, pre-Vatican II Catholic. Her home was chock full of holy pictures, statues of the Blessed Virgin, rosaries, and crucifixes. Oddly enough, our house looks like that too. The only real difference is that we also have a statue of the Buddha.

Grandma couldn’t go to church, because she needed to be home with her husband. So, on Sundays she would watch the liturgy on television, “The Mass for Shut-ins”. Now, Karin and I are doing the same thing, albeit for different reasons. The only difference that I notice is that, when Grandma watched the program, the church service being filmed was in a room that was packed with people. The service that Karin and I watched was celebrated by only a few people. There was a bishop or two, a priest, a lector, and a cantor. The laity was conspicuously absent. During the liturgy on Sunday, I could hear the words of the archbishop echoing in a nearly empty cathedral. It was eerie, like listening to somebody speak in a mausoleum.

In my grandmother’s day, before Vatican II, it was accepted that the laity played no active role in the Mass. Part of the reason for that was that the Mass was entirely celebrated in Latin, and most Catholics had only a minimal understanding of the language. This being the case, parishioners sometimes sat in their pews, and prayed their private devotions or said their beads. An acolyte would ring bells during the Eucharistic Prayer to alert a distracted congregation to wake up and pay attention. Catholics were (and are) required by Church law to attend Mass, at least physically. Mentally and spiritually, they were (and are) often somewhere else.

All that changed after 1965. Suddenly, Catholics were supposed be an integral part of the liturgy. The Mass was said in the vernacular, with only a minimum of residual Latin in the prayers. Changes take time. Often an entire generation has to die off before new rituals are accepted (think about the forty years that the Israelites spent in the desert). The laity became part of the liturgy, and the laity expected to be active in the process. Catholics do not worship like they did fifty years ago. The change was not just some tinkering with the ritual. The change involved a whole new perspective of it means to be Catholic.

I don’t know this, but I suspect that it was easier for my grandmother to watch the Mass on television than it is for me to do so. She was used to being part of an audience. She was used to being an observer of sacred events. I am not. I am used to being part of the action, so it is hard for me to a religious couch potato.

Here is another memory. I remember going to Mass the Sunday after 9/11. The building was packed; standing room only. It was a time of deep fear and uncertainty, so people came together for solace and comfort. They took refuge in the sangha, or the shul, or the mosque, or the church.

Now we can’t do that.

 

April 5th, 2020

“I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now, who see things as they really are.” – Thomas Merton

In many ways I am a Luddite. I embrace technology with extreme reluctance. It’s not that I am averse to learning new things; it is that sometimes I don’t see the point in doing so. I am often comfortable with old ways (e.g. I like to write snail mail letters). I have never used Twitter or Instagram. I used to be on Facebook, but then I gave that up because I got tired of reading stupid political commentary and looking at pictures of cute puppies. I generally restrict my self to emails, online news articles, and this blog.

Yesterday I was wrenched into our Brave New World, and I participated in a Zoom meeting. Since nobody on the planet wants to get any closer than six feet to anyone else, Zoom is how we have to gather together. I had been a member of a Zoom conference a few months ago. I was underwhelmed by the experience. I think that part of the problem then was that most people were unfamiliar with the system. Some folks were too loud, some too quiet. Some were hard to see because they were far away, others had their faces right up in the camera. The meeting eventually degenerated into frustration and angry chaos. Some of the confusion can be blamed on the actual subject matter of the meeting. Some of the unpleasantness was due to the group’s inexperience with operating Zoom.

Yesterday I was part of a virtual Zen practice. For those of you who do not know what Zen practice is, let me try to explain. There are different schools of Zen, each of which has its own quirky kind of meditation practice. I am only familiar with the Kwan Um School, which comes from Korea. Typical, in the Kwan Um practice, we chant together for maybe twenty minutes (in Korean/Chinese, mostly). Then we sit on a cushion, and stare at a fucking wall in silence for half an hour. After that, the dharma teacher reads a passage from a book about and/or by the founding Zen Master, Seung San.

Now, one might think that this sort of meeting would be perfect for Zoom. Um, kinda. There were some issues that came up.

Apparently, there is a momentary delay in transmission when somebody speaks (or chants). This means that when a group of people attempt to chant together, the system goes crazy rather quickly. What happened at our practice was that one person in the group, Jorge, tapped the moktak (wooden percussion instrument) and chanted “kwan seum bosal”, while everyone else was placed on mute. So, actually only Jorge was chanting to the group, while the rest of us were chanting privately.

Zen puts a huge emphasis on “together action”. As the phrase implies, we need to do things together, like chanting. Were we chanting together at yesterday’s meeting? Not so much.

We sat silently and meditated after that. That was weird. I could see the picture gallery at the top of my screen, and I noticed everybody else sitting at home with their eyes closed. We were trying to meditate together separately. Does that make any sense? Maybe. It might have been better to just stop the meeting for twenty minutes, let everyone meditate privately, and then regroup. The truth is that, when we sit silently in the same room, we are united. It is hard to explain, but when I sit on the cushion and face the wall during a normal practice, I still feel the presence of the others who meditate with me. We are one. There is an energy when we are physically together that does not exist in cyberspace.

After meditation, Peter, our dharma teacher and Zoom host, read a story about a Zen Master who gained enlightenment after walking through a village that had been decimated by a cholera epidemic. That seemed appropriate. I don’t think that Peter pick that passage by chance. We discussed the reading, as we usually do. That was a bit awkward. Once again, I think that was a result of us being new to Zoom. Fortunately, the eight of us took turns speaking. There is a tendendacy with Zoom for people to talk over each other, and that gets messy. Everybody in our group was courteous and polite. so the conversation went well.

Peter said, “This can’t substitute for an actual meeting.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, it’s going have to substitute for an actual meeting.”

He’s right. Zoom will have to substitute. It’s all we got, but somehow it makes me feel more lonely.

Zen practice is there to help a person to see the world clearly. During meditation, something should be learned.

I learned that I miss my friends.

 

 

 

April 2nd, 2020

“Hope is beauty,
Personified.
At her feet, the world,
Hypnotized.

A million flashes,
A million smiles.
And on the catwalk,
She flaunts her style a long mile.

An angry sign of darkness,
Our hope lies lost and torn.
All flame like love is fleeting,
When there’s no hope anymore.

Pain and glory,
Hand in hand,
A sacrifice,
The highest price.

Like the poison in her heart,
Like a whisper she was gone,
Like when angels fall.

And on this side of darkness,
Our hope lies on the floor.
All love like flame is fleeting,
When there’s no hope anymore.

Like the poison in her heart,
Like a whisper, she was gone,
Like an angel, angels fall.”

“Hope” by the heavy metal cello quartet, Apocalyptica

4:00 on a dark, rainy morning is probably not the best time to write about hope.

It might be a good time to write about fear.

The rest of the house is still asleep. I go to bed quite early. Karin and the girl we love go to bed quite late. When I try to fall asleep, I still hear the rumble of confused life in the background. When I awake, it is quiet, except for the patter of raindrops on the skylight and the steady breath of Karin lying next to me. I don’t often go near to the room of the girl we love. She might be wrestlng with her demons in the night. Or, I fear, she might not be wrestling with them at all. She may have given up.

I did the modern thing, and looked for quotations about ‘hope” online, thinking I could one in this essay. I looked for Bible quotes because, despite all evidence to the contrary, there is still hope in the Bible. I was disappointed. The only quotes I could find were on sites that were Christian versions of Pravda. It was all propaganda, and it wasn’t even good propaganda. Why can’t some religious websites even try to be real?

The girl went yesterday afternoon to get her broken teeth fixed. I drove her to the dentist, and I waited in the parking lot. As I waited, I sat and listened to the song from Apocalyptica over and over. My OCD kicks in when I am bored. The young woman didn’t get what she needed. Because of the Coronanvirus, the dentist office is shutting down. Instead of getting her implants, she got a temporary partial denture. The denture is probably good enough for now, but it isn’t what she really needs. Actually, a dentist can’t give this woman what she really needs. He or she can only help with her teeth. There is a lot more involved.

Back in 2009, my younger brother, Chuck, died. He died from alcoholism, mental illness, and the crushing weight of the world. I remember the sleepless nights I spent worrying about him. I remember the sudden trips to the ER when it looked like he was about ready to leave us. I remember abandoning him because I was too scared to help him.

Sometimes, things feel the same with the girl that we love. I could not save my brother. I cannot save this young woman.

I hope that she will heal. I fear that she will die.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 1st, 2020

“You saw courageous Caesar next
You know what he became
They deified him in his life
Then had him murdered just the same
And as they raised the fatal knife
How loud he cried “you too my son!”
The world, however, did not wait
But soon observed what followed on
It’s courage that had brought him to that state
How fortunate the man with none”

from the song “How Fortunate the Man With None” by Dead Can Dance, based on the poem 1928 “Die Ballade von den Prominenten” from Bertolt Brecht.

 

One time, when I was sitting with Hans, he told,

“You know, Dad, we Iraqi War vets will probably be forgotten. People won’t remember what we did when we were over there.”

Hans said that with some sadness in his voice. I don’t think that he wanted any kind of huge recognition for fighting in Iraq. He wasn’t looking for a parade. I think that he just wanted somebody to think occasionally about him and his comrades-in-arms.

Now that I have a great deal of additional free time, I have been doing more reading. Actually, I have been re-reading books that I own. Some of them have been patiently sitting on the shelves for decades, waiting for this moment.

I grabbed a copy of “August 1914” by Solzhenitsyn. It is the story of the Battle of Tannenberg at the beginning of the First World War. Since the book is a Russian novel, it is impossible to keep track of all the characters. However, it is a good narrative and I find it to be deeply moving.

One of things that strikes me is how distant the events described in the book are from us. How many people, besides military history buffs, know anything about the Battle of Tannenberg? For that matter, how many people know anything about World War I? All the people involved with the battle are dead, and their bravery and folly is no longer of any interest to the world.

Who will remember Hans’ war? Nobody. It is already forgotten by most people. Only those who have been directly affected by the Iraq War will remember. Hans remembers. I remember because I love Hans, and I have seen the damage done to him.

Yesterday, Hans’ wife, Gabby, sent us pictures of Hans trying on his old Army uniform. He joked that he was going to wear it and demand that people turn over their toilet paper to him. I’m not sure that’s why he put it on. I think that, maybe, it was to remind himself that what happened a few years ago was real.

When I graduated from West Point forty years ago, I had a class ring. Every graduate of the military academy has one. I kept mine for many years. I never wore it, but I kept it hidden and safe, kind of like Gollum did with his ring. It was a talisman. It was a physical reminder of a part of my life that was gone forever. I eventually gave the ring to Hans. I have no idea what he did with it. It doesn’t matter. It’s not mine any more.

Hans does not have many physical reminders from his time in Iraq. Most everything was destroyed in a house fire at the end of 2015. It was a fire that killed Hans’ friend, Tom, and that killed Hans’ dog, Fritz. Nearly all of Hans’ possessions burned in that house. Almost all of his past burned there too.

It might be best if Hans could forget about Iraq, but that can’t happen. That experience is an integral part of him. It will always be with him. Always.

 

 

 

March 29th, 2020

“O God, if I worship you in fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I worship you in hope of paradise, shut me out from paradise. But if I worship you for your own sake, do not withhold from me your everlasting beauty.” —Rábi‘a (717–801), Islamic mystic and poet

Every morning I wake and I wonder if a certain young woman is still alive.

I go to her bedroom and peek in the door. I try to be silent. I look to see if she moves. I feel bad about invading her privacy, and don’t want to wake her, but I want to know that she is breathing. Once I see any motion, I leave her to continue her sleep. I relax just a little bit.

The young woman had a drug relapse on Friday, and I’m not quite over it. Neither is she. She’s had relapses before, and they are always traumatic. The episode itself is intense and loaded with adrenalin. The days afterward are like emotional hangovers. This latest event has long term consequences, including physical injury. This hangover will not go away any time soon.

For years and years, Karin and I belonged to a Bible study group. Almost everyone else in the group was some flavor of Baptist. They were all wonderful, loving people who espoused a truly wretched type of theology. Everything good that happened in life was a gift from God. Anything bad was entirely due to human sin. Really?

Carl Jung wrote a book, “Answer to Job”, where he tried to tackle the issue of human suffering. He noted that we often pray to God to save us from God. Some Christians blame all the evil in the world on Satan. Okay, why not? But who created the devil? If a person follows the trail of suffering far enough they will find that it always leads back to God. Then the question becomes: why is He doing this? Maybe the question should be: why is He allowing this? No faith tradition has a good enough answer to that question. The catechism of the Catholic Church has a long essay regarding suffering in the world, and eventually, after much verbiage, concludes that it is all a mystery. The Church could have said that in one sentence. It’s not hard to say, “We don’t know.”

We are now in the season of Lent. For Catholics and many other Christians this time period is all about suffering, sin, and repentence. It is a time to meditate on paradox. It is a time to accept things that are perhaps unacceptable. It really is a time of mystery.

Some of our Evangelical friends would go into default mode by shaking their heads sadly and sighing, “It’s a fallen world.” That means absolutely nothing, but somehow it explained everything to their satisfaction. “Fallen world” basically implies that our entire universe is screwed up due to the first sin of our primordial ancestors. That idea is unjust. It is also irrational. Every time I consider that notion, my mind screams, “WTF?”

I fall back on Zen at times like this. Buddhism is at least honest enough to shrug its collective shoulders and say, “Don’t know.” Zen encourages people to see the world as it is, and then just deal with it. I find that to be difficult path, but still acceptable.

Is the young woman going to die in our house some day? Maybe. Don’t know. The idea terrifies me, but it could easily happen.

All we can do is accept the possibility and love her as best we can, while we can.

 

 

 

 

 

March 28th, 2020

Karin and I came home this morning after making a trip to the grocery store. We had also stopped at Walmart to pick up an espresso maker. The young woman and Karin were excited about being able to make espresso and cappuccino at home. When we got into the house, I called to the girl to let her know that we were back.

No answer.

I went into her bedroom. She was lying on the floor, drooling and moaning. She had a can a keyboard cleaner in her right hand. I pulled the can out of her hand. It was frosted over. That happens when a person sprays it for too long.

I walked into the kitchen. Karin was putting groceries away. She looked at me. I showed her the can. I told Karin,

“She was huffing again.”

Karin asked, “Is she okay?”

I started to say, “I think so…”

Then I heard a strangled cry from the girl’s bedroom. When she huffs, her voice comes out in a distorted and uncanny way. The sound is very disturbing, and easily recognizable.

I rushed back into the bedroom. The girl was on the floor again, unconsious. She had a another can. I took that one away.

I got the phone. I told Karin,

“I’m calling 911.”

The dispatcher answered my call.

“Where is your emergency?”

I gave the dispatcher our address.

“What is the problem?”

“A young woman is unconscious in her bedroom.”

“Is she breathing?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“The girl was huffing keyboard cleaner. I think she is starting to come around.”

“Do you want us to send somebody over?”

“Yes.”

“Is anyone there coughing or having difficulty breathing?”

“No.”

“We’ll get somebody there.”

The paramedics arrived shortly. They were all wearing face masks.

They went back to the girl’s bedroom. They checked her vital signs.

I heard them talking to her, but I couldn’t hear all of her responses.

One of them told her, “You were huffing this cleaner. You know that’s an asphixiant? Your brain isn’t getting enough oxygen when you do that. You understand that, right? Do you want to come with us to the hospital for help?

She said no.

They asked her questions to find out how coherent she was. They asked her again if she wanted to go to the hospital.

She declined to do so.

They left. She went to take a shower. I called her parole officer.

I told the PO what was happening. I explained that things were out of control, and I had no idea what to do. He said that he would call the young woman.

After a while, the young woman went into the basement to wash some clothes. Karin and I were sitting at the kitchen table. Then we heard that awful wail.

We both went into the basement. The girl was curled up in a corner, clutching a can and moaning. I took that one away from her too. Then I called 911 again. I needed those guys back here.

The girl staggered upstairs to change clothes. Then she went back into the basement looking for her phone. She couldn’t find it. She freaked out. Karin and I went upstairs to see if the phone was in her room. We couldn’t find it, so I went back in the basement to check on the girl.

She was standing next to the water heater, a fourth can of keyboard cleaner in her hand. Her eyes were closed and she was swaying. Then she toppled over like a dead tree in a windstorm. She hit the concrete floor face first.

I turned her over to see if she was still breathing. She was. The young woman was bleeding from her mouth. The was blood on the cement.

I yelled up to Karin for her to watch for the paramedics, and send them downstairs. I tried to keep the girl from moving around. She pushed me away.

The paramedics showed up. One of them looked at her and asked,

“You want to come with us to the hospital this time?”

She nodded. Then she put her hand to her mouth and screamed.

“MY TOOTH! MY TOOTH!”

She had completely broken off one of her upper teeth. There was an ugly gap.

The paramedics took her upstairs while she was howling about her tooth.

One of them took the can from me. He said,

“Maybe I’ll take a picture of this, or I’ll just take it along. Then they know what chemicals are in this.”

I nodded to him. He left.

I followed the paramedic upstairs. The cops had arrived. I called the PO again. He wanted to talk with the policeman. I hooked them up. The ambulance took the girl to the ER.

I went down into the basement and washed up the blood.

I found her tooth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 26th, 2020

Yesterday was a beautiful day. It certainly one was in a meteorological sense. Wisconsin is much like Siberia, ot at least a bit like eastern Europe. We don’t really have a spring. We have a brief gap between the horrors of an endless winter and the intensity of a brutal summer. There is no easing into it. It is like falling off a cliff.

A young woman lives with us. The “us” refers to Karin and myself. In normal times (whatever “normal” means), this young woman is busy with therapy sessions, 12-step meetings, and part time work as a barista. In normal times, this young woman would be slinging coffee, and giving some philistines a necessary class about painting and art. But these are not normal times, and this young woman is stuck in our house, watching Netflix, staring at her phone, and possibly losing her mind.

This young woman is not alone in losing her mind. I am actively doing the same thing. What is happening is that the current activities of our society are destructive, not just disruptive. Keeping people physcially apart makes sense in a way. I understand that. However, it makes people a bit crazy. It makes me a bit crazy.

This young woman decided to walk a couple miles from our home to Bender Park. There she could view the movements of the waters of  Lake Michigan. Her actions freaked me out. She was gone for a couple hours. The young woman did not answer her phone. She did not ask for any help.

I walked Shocky, the young woman’s pet. I walked the dog, over and over again.

I came home. The girl was lying in bed. She was wounded. Her head was bruised and bleeding.

She had fallen off the edge of the bluffs near the lake. She fell off a cliff.

The girl is still alive.

So am I.

 

 

 

March 24th, 2020

I had been awake for a couple hours before Karin got up. I tend to rise early. Karin likes to sleep in, especially now, when there really is no hurry to get out of bed. I knew she was up when I heard the toilet flush. That’s an unofficial announcement that she is starting her day.

I walked into the bedroom and said, “Hi.”

Karin looked up from her phone and eyed me warily. Then she asked,

“How are you this morning?”

I mumbled, “Okay.”

She kept looking at me, and she remarked,

“Last night was pretty bad, huh? That was probably the worst one ever.”

I replied, “Yeah.”

Karin turned and looked our bed. In particular, she was looking at my side of the bed.

Without turning back toward me, she said,

“Usually, I can wake you up by only calling to you once. Last night I had to shout your name over and over.”

“Yeah.”

She faced me and went on, “You were yelling so loud, and you were punching into the air, and kicking like crazy. You were really fighting something.”

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

I really don’t know.

I get night terrors. They are described thus:

“Night terrors are a form of sleep disorder in which a person partially awakens from sleep in a state of terror. A sufferer of night terrors experiences an activation of his or her fight-or-flight system.”

That is a very understated definition. Night terrors are incredibly intense. Karin generally wakes me up before I do any damage. I remember very little after I am conscious. All I know is that my heart is pounding and my throat hurts from screaming so loud.

Karin often ask me about the dreams. I find them difficult to explain. There is a pattern to them. I am always in a dark place, and I am threatened by someone or something that is even darker than my surroundings. I never know if this thing is human. All I know is that it is malevolent, and that it wants to hurt me. I don’t feel scared as much as I feel angry. The thing flits around and attacks me from all sides, and I strike back at it. Karin sometimes first becomes aware that I am dreaming when she hears me shriek,

“C’MON MOTHERFUCKER!”

That is a clear indication that I am deep into it.

I don’t know what triggers the dreams. I don’t think that they necessarily have much to do with events in the outside world. I have had them for years, at least since I was in the Army. My demons come whenever they feel like it.

But it makes me wonder. I dream about a threat that I can’t see or understand. In the dream I don’t know what I am fighting. All I know is that something is out to get me.

That sounds a bit like the situation in the waking world.

 

 

 

March 23rd, 2020

Peter is the abbot of the Great Lake Zen Center. After meditation practice, he sometimes gives a brief dharma talk. When discussing why we spend time silently sitting on cushions, he often says that we do it in order to answer the following question: “How can I help?”

A person needs a clear mind to know how best to help somebody else. In theory, meditation clears the mind. Then the individual can see what really is, and act accordingly. There are times when it is difficult to see through the chaos.

Now is one of those times.

The whole world is scared and suffering at this moment. Maybe it is always scared and suffering, and it is just more obvious now. At present, the problems surrounding us seem overwhelming. What should we do? Where should we start?

The Catholic Church has something called “The Corporal Acts of Mercy”. It is a list of seven ways to help others. The list seems simple and straight forward. Maybe it is. However, right now, I find it hard to put some of these actions into practice. I need to think about it.

This list is as follows:

1. To feed the hungry.
2. To give drink to the thirsty.
3. To clothe the naked.
4. To shelter the homeless.
5. To visit the imprisoned.
6. To visit the sick.
7. To bury the dead.

 

Since the guidance of our government is for citizens to avoid being in groups larger than ten people, some of the actions on the list are difficult, if not impossible, to do in traditional ways. For instance, “feeding the hungry” has often meant me helping at a meal program (soup kitchen). A meal program that is run by a church or other charitable organization requires the efforts of dozens of participants. People need to get together to cook and to serve meals to potentially hundreds of poor and homeless persons. It is obvious to me that a typical soup kitchen cannot function like that now. So, how does it operate? The poor and outcast are still hungry. Where do thesse people go now? How are they fed?

I don’t know, and I’m not sure who to even ask. The organizations that typically run these operations can’t get together, at least not physically. The new rules are only a week old. Has anybody even had time to brainstorm ideas? Can food pantries hand out free bag lunches? What happens now?

The coronavirus crisis has forced us to exist as isolated pockets of humanity. Okay, let’s work with that. In our case, Karin and I are providing food, drink, shelter, and transportation/health support to a young woman who we love dearly. This person was in prison just two months ago. By assisting her, we are covering some of the items on list, and doing it up close and personal. Maybe that is our calling for the present time. Maybe we are most needed here, as opposed to some place else. We have to do what we can, where and when we can.

Paradoxically, it is often more difficult to help somebody close than it is to help somebody at a distance. I mean this both in geographical terms and in an emotional sense. It is sometimes easier to serve a meal to a stranger far from home than it is to help somebody who lives in the same house. I can ladle out spaghetti for a couple hours at a St. Vincent de Paul meal site, and then walk away from it. Love is tested in close proximity, where a person can’t just run away from problems. Helping sometimes involves open-ended commitment.

A friend of mine, years ago, defined love as being sacrifice. I think that is an accurate description. Love means giving up the things I want in order to provide the things that someone else needs. That’s a bitch.

Maybe this current crisis will teach me how to love.

 

 

 

 

March 22nd, 2020

Hans called.

Right away he said, “I saw something today that I thought I would never see.”

I mentally braced myself and asked, “So, what did you see?”

Hans seldom gets directly to the point. He always has to set the stage before he tells me a story. Maybe it’s a southern thing. A friend of ours from Texas, Delphia (God rest her soul), once told me, “Down here, we tell you what we are going to say, then we say it, and then we tell you what we just said.”

That’s pretty accurate.

In any case, Hans had my attention. He told me,

“Dad, you know how in some of the grocery stores they let the old people shop first?”

“Old people?”

“Yeah, you know, your age.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well, anyway, we were at Walmart, and these old folks had been looking for toilet paper and such. The shelves were almost empty, so they couldn’t find any of what they needed, and they were walking out the door empty-handed.”

“Okay.”

Hans drawled, “Well, I’m watching these people, and this young black guy stops his car near them. He talks with them a bit, and then he hands the old folks a plastic bag filled with some rolls of toilet paper and hand sanitizer. He doesn’t charge them anything. He just gives it to them.”

“Okay.”

I could hear Hans lighting up a Pall Mall. He continued,

“Well, this black guy, he’s doing the same thing with all the old people coming out of the store. If they ain’t got any toilet paper, he just gives them some. His car is packed with the stuff, and he’s just giving it all away.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

Hans took a drag, and said lazily,

“Yeah. I talked to the guy for a while. He told me that some people in his family had bought up a bunch of toilet paper and hand sanitizer. They were hoarding it. The guy told me that he got into a big ole fight with his family about it. They finally got tired of listening to him yell and carry on, and they told him to take half of the stuff and do whatever he wanted with it.”

“So, he’s just giving it to whoever needs it.”

“Yep.”

“Good.”

Hans said, “It restores my faith in humanity…a little bit.”

“Yeah. I can see that. Good.”

“Hey Dad, you know, down here, the liquor stores are still open.”

“I guess that’s good too.”