Yowl

I open my eyes to music. I rise up to a dawn chorus.

The first morning sound I hear is Paddy at the woodstove, emptying the ash-box, piling up the tinder, striking matches. He puts on the coffee. He says hello to Bob the Canary and fills the little seed-tray and slices up an apple or fig or plum. Paddy and Bob share that for their breakfast. I hear all this from my bed in the room upstairs, through the cracks in the floorboards that are the kitchen ceiling. (I take my waking slow.)

On the other side of the meter-thick wall of adobe bricks, the Big Dogs hear Paddy move, they hear Bob chirp. And so begins the Dawn Chorus of the Peaceable.

Bella says “woof.” Just once. Then Harry joins with his staccato baritone: “arf arf arf.”

And if the sun is just right, and she feels in the mood, Lulu pitches her pointy muzzle toward the rafters and softly, tenderly say “ooooo.”

Tim and Rose, the Inside Dogs, hear them from their comfy beds by the fire. If it is still dark outside, they stay quiet. If he deems the hour decent, Tim will bark. If it´s Rosie´s turn, she yodels. Rosie has a remarkably human voice, and like a lot of small yappy dogs, she could talk if she wanted to. She could probably conjugate preterite verbs if she could be bothered.

All our dogs know when it is time for their breakfasts, and for their morning walk – the high point of their day. By 8 a.m. their food-processing equipment is at the end of its cycle, and the holding tanks are at capacity. Their bellies are empty, but their hearts are full of joy. It is time to sing.

So they do, five dogs strong – barks, moans, yodels, yowls. A mournful, funny racket, a wonderful way to be roused from bed. And from the window of my room above the town I can hear the song spread southward through the fog.

In the garage across the alley live Oliva and Justi´s dogs, a brutal German shepherd and a white-muzzled old pointer. They never go outdoors. They have a lot to howl about, and they do it very well. They harmonize with a smooth doo-wop kind of woo-woo-woo.

The song is taken up next in the haymow behind Segundino´s carpentry shop, where five or six assorted dogs spend their lives. One of them routinely barks throughout the night. He does not sleep, he does not eat. He lives to bark. And at dawn, with the start of the yowl, his backbeat is engulfed by the songs of his brothers. They shriek and descant, they add operatic coloratura runs, they leap and run. From Pilar´s splendid garden come song stylings of little Perla, the pup who looks like she´s made of pipe-cleaners.

I do not know if the Dawn Chorus extends right on down to the Plaza, to include yappy little Roque and Esteban´s Terry and Toby, and over to Manolo´s barnyard full of baying beasts. Our dogs slack off after a couple of minutes, just long enough for us to hear the reverb shivering up the street. It is brief, intense,  and magnificent.

Tim and Rosie then slink back into their beds. They do not look at our faces. 

The truth comes out in the morning, and they know it. These dogs are really wolves, every one of them. There are more dogs in this town than people. And they are only pretending to be tame.

So we´d better get a move on with the kibble.

Confession

"Confession" sounds so intriguing, so sexy! But hearing other people talk about their faults can be very dull indeed. You have been warned.

I decided recently to undertake a spiritual discipline. I am trying to be really deeply honest with myself, in an ongoing, unrelenting way. 
I find it is like dieting. It is really, deeply hard to do, and it takes a long time to start seeing any benefit.

But now I am. Just the beginnings...
  
I am an ego-driven do-gooder. Much of the good I do is not so much to serve pilgrims or St. James or God or good. I do good because it makes me look nice, and because it makes me feel good, and it costs me so little in real terms. Pilgrims ask for little. They occupy us for a few hours, and they leave the next day.  I do this because it keeps me busy. It is respectable. It makes me feel unique and honorable and righteous. The benefits for others are, honestly, secondary to my ego. This is my hospitalera mask, my Camino Expert disguise. I think this person must be a great bore.

My Writer Mask: I write. I wear a Writer mask crafted over decades, and it makes me feel competent and professional and superior. It also drives me to write even when I am not able or willing to. It makes me write stories and articles and blogs that are themselves self-serving ego exercises. This mask slots together with the Camino Expert to send me off to obscure camino paths, where I wander up and down  mountainsides and bust my gut writing trail guides that very few pilgs will ever care to use. This, too, is tiresome. It makes me feel adventuresome and heroic, like a pioneer. But I am fooling myself. I never go too far from home. At the end of the day I always find a good meal and a decent bed.    

I am a daughter and a mother and a wife, a neighbor, a student and a friend. I am not very good at most of these things. I do not always take good care of my family and friends. I do not stay in touch. The few close friends I have live many miles away. Recently, several people from this area have made friendly overtures to me -- they want to include me in their circles. They want to befriend me. I find this exhilarating and amazing somehow. I do not answer them right away. I stand apart and feel afraid. I delay. I am not unfriendly, but some part of me does not want to be a day-to-day friend.

I say I am, fundamentally, a hermit. I think this may be true. I have always been introvert, stand-offish.  When I am alone I do not play music or watch movies or read many books, not very often. I haul wood. I walk the dogs, I check up on FaceBook. Sometimes I take myself to a museum. I don´t feel bad. I do not think I am depressed, or otherwise ill.

But I do not want other people to be too close to me. Not for any length of time.
I think Patrick is much the same way. And we chose to live out in the middle of this severe nothing because it suits us. The outer landscape reflects the inner.

But maybe Hermit is just a handy disguise, too. Because another part of me loves people, and is full of compassion for the searching and suffering that goes on all around me. This is a neglected part of me, the healer and artist, the confessor and the counselor. They are for real. They are probably my best parts, and I do not use them so often.

There´s still a lot of work to be done.

I do not intend to stop living here, or to stop living. I intend to keep peeling off the layers I have built around me, to find just what is hiding here, under all these disguises. I am very fortunate to have the time, silence, and resources to do this kind of mental scrub.

I am lucky, blessed, and very grateful. That´s a good starting point.


 

The Mongrel Horde

Lots O Dogs: Paddy with Rosie, Tim, Bella, Harry, and Lulu

I am back at The Peaceable, sitting by the fire surrounded by animals. It took me forever to get home, but travel travail makes for mighty boring reading. I left Boston at 7 p.m. Monday, and rolled up at my door at 8:30 p.m. the following day, wracked with jetlag. I don´t remember ever being so lagged. I grow old, alas.

The world grows old.

I downloaded the photos from my trip. We all look much older and greyer and rounder. We look tired, every one of us, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Still, Paddy looked very good to me, there on the platform at the train station He is on his annual January Wagon, eating only healthy food and drinking no alcohol. His weight is down, but he says he feels no different than before.

Horrors waited at home, the things Paddy never tells me for fear of spoiling my holiday. 

Harry´s turn on the lead

On Sunday Paddy had all the dogs out on the camino, heading east toward the labyrinth. After the cemetery he let the greyhounds off the lead for their customary game of keep-away. Once their ya-yas are sufficiently spent, they take turns walking on the lead – they only get up to mischief when they are loose together. As luck would have it, Raquel and Modesto were out on the camino for their afternoon paseo. Alongside them toddled Roque, Edu´s yappy little dog. When he saw the mongrel horde approaching.

Roque bolted into the adjacent field to hide. Lulu and Harry, being greyhounds, went right for him, rolled him over and tore him limb from limb – or so it appeared.

Modesto and Raquel and Patrick ran as hard as their septugenarian legs and walking sticks could take them into the plowed field. Modesto fell down, but got back up again. By the time Paddy beat and dragged the greyhounds off, little Roque was lying very still on the ground.

When the slavering hounds were safely restrained, the Moratinos Dog Resurrection Juju rolled in. Roque opened up his beady eyes, shook himself, and scarpered off home by another route.

Two days later in the Plaza Mayor, Paddy thanked heaven he had both the hounds on that lead – Flor´s little brown dog came barking out of their house. The greyhounds yowled at her, but Pad held on tight. And watched as the noisy-but-harmless Rosie went straight for the little dog. And peaceful, slow, 50-kilo Bella went right in after her and knocked the little dog off her feet.

Pad managed to hand off the greyhounds to Martina. He waded into the melee and threw himself bodily onto the little dog until Bella and Rose got the message. He picked up the lapdog and handed it off to the owner, who hustled it indoors. It was still very much alive when he stood up, Pad said. No visible damage, no blood. Except on Paddy. Something colorful and bad happened to one of his fingers.

And so I returned to grey winter meseta, to a pueblo where our beloved dogs are Caninae Non Grata. Roque is back in action, yapping and snapping, but we wait to learn how Flor´s little dog is doing. The pup took to her bed, and has not moved much in the last few days, according to Manolo. No word on if they took her to a veterinarian, which Paddy duly promised to pay for. I am praying for another dose of Resurrection Juju. (I spend an awful lot of prayer on animals.)

We walk now with all the dogs but Tim on leads. We are thinking big thinks. It is clear that so many dogs do not a Peaceable make, especially when two are more wolf than dog, and another is part polar bear. We have many options to choose from:

> We can fence a chunk of our land and give the dogs more space to run and exercise throughout the day.

> I can give up on leaving here for longer than a day, seeing as five dogs cannot be safely exercised by a single person, and awful things happen when I go away. I can adjust my still-shredded sleep schedule to better help with the morning dog-keeping duties.

> The clearest long-term solution is to thin the herd. But:

    Tim is too old to give away, and he didn´t attack anyone.

    Rosie really belongs to Kim.

    Lulu and Harry are greyhounds. Attacking small animals is what greyhounds do. Nobody around here wants a greyhound, because they are by nature high-strung hunting dogs.

   Besides that, Lulu is crazy as a bedbug. We are the only people who can touch her.

Which leaves Bella as the low-hanging fruit.

Bella and Paddy

Paddy loves Bella, but the other dogs only tolerate her. She is large and overly affectionate. Her kisses and clumsy play drive them up the wall. She is a smart dog, eager to please. She learned from the others not to make messes inside the barn. She´s learned to pee straight into the sewer drain in the patio – something none of the other dogs has mastered. (I suspect she saw Paddy do that, and just copied him.) She (maybe) learned from me, finally, not to dig up the garden. She would very much like to be a house dog, but we do not let her inside unless Paddy´s taking her through to the rear garden to “help” him cut wood. She loves hanging out where people are. She does not molest the chickens. She is only mildly interested in the cats.

Bella is big, and still growing. She is at least half Leonese Mastiff. Bella has all her shots, an EU animal passport, microchip, and cannot reproduce. She is about 9 months old, she still has her baby teeth – a good thing for Florin´s little dog! Still, I do not think she will attack another small animal. I think she was learning bad behavior from our other bad dogs, and once she starts keeping better company she will put this shameful episode behind her.

I understand that all this is our fault. There are no bad dogs, just idiot owners. And all that. In many places we would be fined or jailed or have our dogs taken away for what happened. The Guardia Civil would have something to say if they saw us walking in the fields with five unleashed dogs. If someone filed a complaint, we would be in trouble.

But even though every single household in this town has had some less-than-happy encounter with our animals, no one has denounced us to The Man. We apologize, we give them a fresh young chicken to replace their greyhounded hen, we really are sincerely sorry. And they tell us “dogs are dogs. Just be more careful. Don´t worry.”

And this time, “Maybe five dogs is too many.”

If you have need of a polar bear, please let me know ASAP.

Born In the USA: An Intensity Checklist

I am back in America, living a couple of weeks of holiday with my family. It is very intense. Here is my highlight reel:

Surprising Cora Lee: I found an incredible round-trip airfare back in October. I booked it, and told my sister Beth, who lives near my mother. Our family loves surprises, I figured I would sneak home for Christmas and surprise my mother, seeing as I have not been home in Pittsburgh at Christmas for a good seven years.

The scheming snowballed into a Great Christmas Conspiracy -- Operation Let's Surprise Mom! Beth, a born mastermind, eventually ensnared both my children into the plot, as well as my little sister Martea and her two boys. And so Christmas Eve saw my daughter Libby at my mom's house, and my son Philip driving down from New Hampshire to pick me up at the Boston airport, and Martea and family boarding a plane in Little Rock. Me and Philip picked up Mart and boys at the airport in Pittsburgh, and the lot of us converged at Beth's house, where Mom was setting the table for Christmas dinner. She looked tired. I hoped this wasn't going to be too much for her.

Me and Mart, the faraway daughters, stood in the dining room doorway.
"Hey, mama." Mart said, casual as you please.
Ma had just put the potatoes and gravy on the table. In her hands she held a flap of foil, and the lid to the antique china gravy-boat. I saw her mouth open, I saw her hands shake. She looked back at the table, and back at us. We were not ghosts!

Beth pulled to things from her hands. Mart and me and the boys swarmed around her, and mom/Grandma/Cora Lee cried like a little girl. (She was not the only one.)

Meeting Maximus: We visited Aunt Esther and Barbara, my cousin. These are two fine women, strong and wonderful, who live in a log house out in the woods. The Peaceable is a shadow of what they have going on -- Barbara's way with animals and machinery is a model I can only shoot for. Barbara always has a couple of dogs around the place, and this time she's got the biggest dog I ever met. His name is Maximus. He laid his chin on my knee (something Tim loves doing), it was akin to having a the head of a live ox set gently onto my lap. But an ox that drools and says "rrrumph."

It gave me a moment of whim-whams. I was very happy that dog was friendly!

Big Snow: The sky went dark, the weather went bad. Philly's car skidded and slid up the hill to the dentist's office in Vandergrift, where I learned my teeth are not so bad after all. I walked downtown along Hancock Avenue in the thick of the snowstorm, the ice pinging off my cheeks, past the house on Sherman Avenue where my great-granddad lived -- he founded that town, you know. Vandergrift is down on its luck, but everyone that day was cheerful and kind, offering me rides, holding off the snowplow so I could pass.

Wasabi Blast: Yesterday me and Philip said goodbye to all that and headed south over the Allegheny mountains to suburban Washington, D.C., where Libby lives. Her neighborhood is staggeringly diverse, and the ethnic food varieties boggle the mind of someone who lives in a world where the restaurant offerings are Castilian, Castilian, Tapas, Pizza, and Castilian. We went to a place called Osaka. I ordered Chirashi, a Korean take on Japanese sushi. The bed of rice beneath the fish was studded with honest-to-god real wasabi, freshly ground.

It was nothing short of spectacular.

A goodly lump went into my mouth, and sent a Great Wall of Fire to overrun the lymph nodes in my neck. My mouth watered furiously, and the heat swept up the back of my neck and the underside of my jaw and rolled through my sinuses. My eyes contracted, and tears squirted from the ducts alongside. It was as close to pain as pleasure can go without making me scream out loud. I was in a public place, with my children. It was almost embarrassing!

I had some more. I ate it all. I slept very well last night.

St. Alban's:  The latest and maybe best of all was this morning. I went to church. I love church. I love Santo Tomas in Moratinos, but I am most at home in the Anglican Communion -- a liturgy I feel is the apex of liturgical beauty, a work of poetry and ritual performance. Probably because it's in English, and probably because I know it "chapter and verse." It is home. And at St. Alban's Parish in Annandale, it is done up with all the altar boys and girls, crucifers, deacons, readers and Eucharistic ministers of every shape, size, gender and ethnicity. The people in the pews stand up and really interact. The songs are sung in harmony, with a big German-style pipe organ. Today it was "Angels We Have Heard on High," with all those descants on the "glorias!" and at Communion my favorite "O How a Rose 'ere Blooming." Communion is done at the altar, kneeling, with both bread and wine. Good, spicy wine, strong with Holy Ghost.

It is good I only do these things rarely. They don't lose their freshness. They stay glorious for me.

I feel very far from The Peaceable, but very much at home.
It is all very intense, and exhausting in its way.
When the time comes to go home to my Real Life, I will be ready.  

In the Bleak Mid-winter

Late December. It is foggy and dead quiet in the tiny pueblo. 

Mist comes in the night, and stays well into morning. Today we braved it. We took all the dogs in the car over to the Promised Land, to a new section, the dirt road that connects San Nicolas a dying adobe pueblo called Rio Sequillo.

The road was impassible. Yellow mud squidged underfoot. The dogs ran up and down the gray fields, but they stayed close. There was no horizon, no distance. We could hear the busy autopista when its sounds bounced off the facing rise, but our voices were muffled and softened.

Clouds laid themselves along the ground. What are usually the heavens came down to the earth.
We cut across the fields until we were lost. Distance stretched out. Time slipped. Mud clogged the treads of our boots and weighed us down like deep-sea divers.
Paddy has a chest cold. He started slowing, coughing.
We found the road again, a road, it could´ve gone anywhere but it felt right.
That is when Lulu and Harry, like Victorian villains, vanished into the mist.
They stayed vanished for three hours.

We are not sure what to do about this, aside from keeping them on leads all the time. They are greyhounds, designed to run free. They glory in their morning gallop, but when the two of them are loose at the same time, after their initial game of cannonball-run, they cannot  be trusted.

We know all this. We´ve been through all this many times. You would think we´d learn.
It was particularly stressful today, seeing as Paddy was feeling bad, and the days are so short and the sunlight so feeble. The trail was far from home, unfamiliar, and fog blocked out all the landmarks -- Lu and Harry are sight-hounds, they don´t navigate by nose. The roads between there and home are busy with holiday traffic. And these are not bright dogs.

We have three other dogs, good dogs who stay close. They were tired and dirty, so we took them home. Rosie had rolled in something smelly, so I bathed her. We had a bite to eat. Paddy had a lie-down.

Long story short: I drove the Kangoo out there once the mist began breaking up. The impassible roads were made passible, but not without hair-raising slides, spinning tires and flying muck. (Our little van has a nice high clearance, but the next one I buy will be a four-wheel drive, I swear!) I scanned the horizon with my little field glasses. I saw a tractor out there, and a couple of human figures -- hunters maybe. No dogs.

I drove down to where the drama started. Alongside the car was a flicker of movement.
As if from out of the very earth she sprang -- Lulu! She was beside herself with joy to see me, she cried and whined and yipped, and leapt into the back of the car when I opened the hatch. Her brother was nowhere to be seen. If Lu knew where Harry was, she wasn´t saying.

I took her home and gathered up Paddy, whose face by then resembed the very Wrath of God. We drove out to the same place, and found Harry waiting there for us.

The two of them are, literally, in the dog house.
The sun went down by 5:30. The rain started up again.

And so you see how little happens out here on a winter´s day. Nothing to write about. No deep insights, no revelations, no pilgrim tales. No Christmas tree this year, no bright lights or packages. We are being minimalist -- the doctor told Paddy his cholesterol number must come down, the wine-bibbing must dry up, and so we are being abstemious. The weather is right for asceticism. A box of Christmas wine arrived on Wednesday, crianza from Rioja, in huge magnum bottles. We opened one, but there´s still a few glasses left of it. 

We read all day, and chase dogs, and I go to my Spanish lessons twice a week -- nice progress is being made on the past tense.

On Thursdays, after my lessons, I can shop at the little weekly market in Carrión de los Condes. A man there sells lovely mandarin oranges, fat ripe pineapples, and dates and brussels sprouts still on their stalks. The bakery on the plaza makes real raised glazed doughnuts. One stall sells nothing but hats. One old lady comes into town to sell the three cloth-wrapped soft cheeses she and her sheep made that week. Above them all on her marble plinth is a bronze Immaculate Virgin Mary. She gazes into the heavens, ignoring the grackles cackling in her starry crown. The plaques say all of Carrión is dedicated to her Immaculate Heart, but her face is turned from them. No one down below seems to notice her, either. 

There´s not a pilgrim in sight. 

Nothing to see here, folks. Come back when the sun comes out. 

    

Plastic Lamb in the Home of the Brave

It´s a dark and stormy day here on the perimeter. The dogs and cats are sacked-out in front of the fire, our stomachs are full of lunch, and Bud Powell is playing "Time Waits" on the stereo with Bob Canary as front man. There´s no good reason to go anywhere, what with the fields all fallow mud and the days so very short, and the wind blowing the rain sideways.

We went to church. Flor and Family set up the vast manger scene in the entryway, in keeping with local tradition -- it´s got real moss and aluminum-foil ponds, plastic palm trees and heavenly hosts in several scales and sizes. It is janky and homely, and I love it. It is our dime-store Bethlehem, a Peace on Earth that fits in a big cardboard box in the choir loft.

In the Prayers of the People today Don Santiago first spoke of Newtown, CT., whose children and teachers were killed by a madman with a big gun. He held up the community, the state, and the United States of America before the Lord. I felt some eyes looking at me. I felt that dart of pain in my heart. It is a dart that is getting way too familiar these days -- another mass shooting, another moment of my neighbors wondering what the hell kind of place I come from, that would let this kind of thing keep happening.

I prayed, too. I put down that pain and self-consciousness and national guilt at the foot of the cross up front, seeing as I was at church, and that is what an altar is for. 

Back at The Peaceable I look at the internet, and it is full of horror and pain. It is also full of anti-gun and pro-gun self-righteous bloviating, the ugly kind I had kinda hoped was finished after the presidential election. America is clearly just as divided as it ever was. The country is in major trouble, and everyone is either wild-eyed and blazing, blaming "those people" for all the madness, or insisting that we all be quiet and stifle our outrage  "out of respect for the lost."   

I am American. I grew up on a string of military bases. My father was a military man, but he was not a soldier -- he served his 23 years in the Air Force. He did not carry a gun. "Guns are for hunters and soldiers, for policemen," he told us. "In the Air Force we aren´t soldiers, so we don´t have to carry guns. We have technology. We listen. We use intelligence," he said. So maybe from him I learned, in the way of a child, that guns are used only after discourse runs short.

When we moved off the military base we kept a (unloaded) shotgun behind the front door, "to keep the honest man honest." In summertime my mother, a crack shot, kept a .22 rifle handy for picking-off the groundhogs out in the vegetable garden. Dad used a thirty-aught-six rifle to hunt white-tail deer in November. We children learned to shoot at targets, but we did not handle guns. We did not touch them without our parents´oversight. Over time, we kinda forgot they were there.

It was an uncle who first made me fear guns. He lived very near, drank way too much, and was terribly unhappy. He wore a nickel-plated .44 in a shoulder holster, strapped to his bony chest. His "sidearm" was his "goddamn god-given right." One sunny morning he used it to kill himself. His daughter, my best-beloved cousin, found what was left of him. I love her. I saw how she suffered. That is why I hate handguns, and hate what her dad did with his. (I am not supposed to write about this.)

I was a news reporter for many years, some of those on the police beat. I worked with men who carried guns as part of their duties. I knew two policemen who were shot dead, one at work and another at home. I saw shooters, and I saw shooting victims, all but one were dead. (I saw stabbing victims. They were bloodier, but they were almost all alive. They had a chance, at least.) I covered the trials, I saw the evidence, the weeping moms, the disfigured, the incarcerated, people still alive but their lives blown away. I saw the guns, tagged as evidence, the ragged bullets, pieces of skulls. 
 
Guns make violence easy, and very final. Guns are part of America´s history. They are written into the U.S. Constitution, as a way for "well-regulated militias" to keep tyrants at bay. What was a reasonable check-and-balance back in Colonial days has, with 200+ years of technology and capitalism, morphed into a monster. Any American with ready money can buy an assault rifle, or a semi-automatic handgun -- weapons of mass destruction -- at the local K-Mart store. Not just jolly hobbyists. Fearful people buy handguns, or people in despair, or people with family or emotional or work problems. Not just madmen, either. People just like me and you. They have a gun nearby. Sometimes emotions get out of hand. Like one domestic killer told me through the glass at the Michigan State Pen, "It was there in the closet. She wouldn´t shut up. It was just so easy."

The outcomes are written in the scripture of Statistics: 

    In the US 2,694 children and teens were killed by gunfire in 2010. (This  number includes suicides, if that makes a difference.) Since 1979, when gun death data were first collected by age, 119,079 children and teens have been killed by guns. That is more child and youth deaths in America than American battle deaths in World War I (53,402) or in Vietnam (47,434) or in the Korean War (33,739) or in the Iraq War (3,517).  And that is just counting the people under age 20. In a first-world, developed nation.

We live in a country where someone´s "right to bear arms" translates to denying a kindergarten classroom its first-amendment "right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." No one seems to have courage or common sense enough to look it in the eye. Maybe because we respect the older parts of our Constitution too much to change it.

Maybe because we love our families, and this issue walks right up to our doorstep and rings the bell. 

My family lives in the United States, and my family keeps guns. They use the rifles to shoot deer, rabbits, pheasants, and wild turkeys. They use handguns to shoot targets and the occasional rattlesnake. (My in-laws include a police chief and a sheriff´s deputy; I do not know if they carry sidearms at work, but law enforcement is a legitimate armed service.)  None of my family has shot one another, at least not in recent memory. They are steady, decent, working-class people, not given to violence. If any of them carries a concealed weapon, I don´t know. I don´t want to know. 

But do they need assault rifles? Do they need guns that shoot entire ammo clips in seconds? No. They are not well-regulated militias. They don´t need arsenals. Weapons of mass destruction are not needed or desired by rational, decent human beings. Automatic weapons are are good only for SWAT teams and cold-blooded killers. Rational gun owners of America, the hunters and hobbyists, even the "mine is bigger than yours" macho men, will agree with that. I think.

But if I were to go home now, and meet with my family, and these shootings should come up in conversation... We are a family of gun owners, and a family of opinionated people! What would happen?

Nothing would happen.

I would remember how much I love them.  
I would remind myself that being loving sometimes is more important than being right. That love overcomes fear. That my family members are just as convinced of their right-ness as I am of mine. That I could not change their minds any more than they could change mine.  
I would breathe deep and keep my peace, secure in their love for me.
I know they might have a gun in their handbag or pocket, but they would never point it at me, no matter what I said to them. I would not say anything to them that might make them upset, because I love them. 
I would very much lay my prayer again at the altar, to remember what Jesus said how truth often is a sword -- or an AK-47 -- in family situations. It is dangerous. It can cleave a family into parts. Discretion is the greater part of valor.

All of us is well aware of the canyon that divides us. And unless somebody drinks too much and starts, well, shooting off his mouth, we would not go there. 

America has a genius for keeping millions of wildly various people, spread out over an enormous space, together in some fertile, dynamic tension. Americans, by and large, are amazingly tolerant people.

My sisters and cousins and uncles and in-laws are Americans. They might abhor my politics, but I know they love me. They know I love them, even if they believe...  well. I will shut up now.

I wonder if keeping my silence is noble and patriotic, or if it is the same cowardice that keeps Americans from facing the truth about the bloodbaths that keep happening in our home towns. Maybe we need to shout this out in our families before we can work it out on a policy level.

But half of us have only words for weapons. We all know how passionate many gun-owners are on this issue. We know 99% of gun owners can have a rational family discussion without getting crazy and shooting people. Gun owners love family peace even more than their guns. Am I right? 

I am part of a Peaceable Kingdom. A wacko lefty, a "libtard," an expatriate by choice. A black sheep in the Home of the Brave. A janky, dime-store plastic lamb.  I know when to shut the hell up.

Christmas is about innocence arriving to overcome darkness. It is about silence and peace and humility, and powerful potential for peace, most probably at a terrible price.

So once again we set out the manger scene, and say the words we all count as holy. Christ our sacrifice is born in Bethlehem!

Let us keep the feast.

The Poetry of Pretérito Imperfecto

The Country Clergy

I see them working in old rectories
By the sun’s light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.

- RS Thomas


Thank you to Rev. Andy Delmege, aka "Pilgrimspace," who published this in his Wordpress blog. It is simply beautiful.

I get a lot of pleasure from poems. They are so boiled-down and precise, but they look so easy and languid. As a writer I enjoy playing with technique in prose (as you can see from the last post, I sometimes get carried away!) but I leave poetry the heck alone. There´s enough bad poetry out there already without me adding to the pile. And wonderfully, deliciously, we seem to be living in a time of poetic flowering! I keep finding more contemporary poets whose work is superb. Friends send me poems. I have a whole file of them here on my computer someplace. Poems are helping me now.  

I am taking Spanish lessons in Carrión de los Condes with a sprightly lady named Lucía. She is very good -- our very first session she went right to the heart of my problem with verbs, and we´ve been bashing our way through them ever since. It is very hard. I have skated around this for years now, and it´s time to set aside my lazy-ass excuses and just do this.

I am letting myself imagine what it will be like to sit down at El Castillo with the neighbors and just chatter. We do a form of that now, I can keep up with all the byplay and gossip and jokes, but I am not quite fluent enough to put my zinger in there at the right moment. Not yet.

I want to. I can.

I will, if I just work really hard for a while. It´s about time.

Poetry helps, especially poetry I already know. Sunday Mass is the best example. I know and love the creeds and prayers already in English, and every week, sometimes even more often, we recite them together in lovely Castilian Spanish. They are some of the most beautiful words in the world, in every language. And just look at all those verb tenses:

Señor Hijo único, Jesucristo,
Señor Dios, Cordero de Dios, Hijo del padre:
tú que quitas el pecado del mundo,
ten piedad de nosotros.
tú que quitas el pecado del mundo,
atiende nuestras súplicas;
tú que esta sentado a la derecha del Padre,
ten piedad de nosotros:
Porque sólo tú eres Santo,
sólo tú Señor
solo tú Altísimo Jesucristo,
con el Espiritu Santo, en la gloria de Dios Padre.
Amén.

I want to read poems in Spanish, and the meseta novels -- I can read simple best-seller type books, but reading classical literature in Castilian still requires a dictionary nearby. I want to understand all the words of the Flemenco singers, my Diego el Cigala songs, my Buena Vista Social Club CDs (although Julia tells me nobody understands what they´re saying under all that yowling!)

I learned some poetry already from a Flamenco singer, my favorite, a woman called Carmen Linares. She sings Spanish poetry, she sets it to music. It uses all kinds of verbs, and that helps me out:

Remembranzas

Recuerdo que cuando niño
me parecía mi pueblo
una blanca maravilla,
un mundo mágico, inmenso;
las casas eran palacios
y catedrales los templos;
y por los verdes campiñas
iba yo siempre contento,
inundado de ventura
al mirar el limpio cielo,
celeste como mi alma,
creyendo que el horizonte
era de la tierra el termino.

No veia en su ignorancia
mi inocente pensamiento
otro mundo más hermoso
que aquel mundo de mi pueblo;
¡qué blanco, qué blanco todo!,
¡todo qué grande, qué bello!  

Like Andy´s poem. Simply beautiful.
Worth working for, working toward.
¡Ultreya!