My Mother, the Universe, and a ukulele

My mother is dying. A day at a time, an episode at a time, she is shutting her systems down. Withdrawing. Preoccupying herself with the Big Riddle.

Those of her children who live close by oversee the details of her care. Nursing home. Hospice. Oxygen levels. The inexorable advance of the pneumonia. The menu for meals she will no longer eat. Her children on the scene are a tenuous tether to a world where she no longer wants to be. Those of us who live in other places hover and worry at a distance via cell phones, text messages and email.

She is Irish, and she was raised Roman Catholic, but she has become vehemently agnostic these past twenty years. She despises the rites, the priests and the church hierarchy.

“Let those pampered old men bear the children,” she has taken to saying. “Let’s see how fast their outlook changes then.”

She loathes the Church’s salvation story itself.

“It’s just a story,” the woman who schooled me in the Baltimore Catechism rants. “Something they made up to get through the dark months.”

Her blood pressure is low these days. My guess is that changing the topic to religion would fix that, but it’s probably best we don’t. The word is out among family and visitors. It’s tick-a-lock, regarding religion. Even the most devout visitors—people who usually tell sick people they are praying for them—drop their eyes and mumble they’ll keep her in their thoughts.

No matter how agnostic she is, that numinous aura that always shows up at the end of a life is beginning to hang in the air and color everything. Believers might say there are angels hovering around. This would cheese her off immensely, were she to hear it.

“No there are not,” she would respond if she heard them say it. “The damned angels are just part of the story too. The one made up by old men and imposed—no inflicted—on women…”

We’d be off to the races all over again.

Darn that nagging, numinous whatever-it-is. Spare her the faintest whiff of holiness, thank you very much. If the product were available, she would find the remote control that adjusts her hospital bed, elevate herself, and spray an aerosol can of, “Aura-B-Gone” into the air around her.

On the other hand, I seem to be especially aware of whatever-it-is that’s haloing everything these days. My mother is dying and the whole world is shimmering. I refuse to try to shoehorn it into any one religious tradition. Life is too big, too complex, and too short to waste time trying to make one set of beliefs fit all.

Instead, I rely on an abiding sense of awe for the Universe that created this world and my mother, and plunked her down in the middle of a big Irish family on the South Side of Chicago where, a few decades later, she gave birth to me.

Everything shimmers these days. Even the ukulele my children gave me for Christmas. It is a simple and happy little instrument. It makes me feel simple and happy to play it—even badly—even though my mother is dying.

As I play it, the ukulele provides a rhythmic, tonal rubric over which I would drape a melody, should I ever stumble across one. It establishes a basic, plinking, plunking, optimistic little framework for life, and I have been working to find simple songs for it.

The Internet is full of ukulele sites. The sites are full of songs I first heard on Sundays at our house after we moved out of the city, up into the suburbs. My grandmother would talk my grandfather into making the drive to spend the afternoon, and, often, other great aunts, great uncles and family friends would make the trek too.

They would arrive fresh from mass in their South Side parishes, bearing Sealtest Ice Cream Cake Rolls they’d bought at the local drugstore (a South Side cake roll would have melted on the way out). Back then, a cake roll seemed numinous in and of itself. There would be dinner and talk, then Sealtest Ice Cream Cake Roll, and then someone would suggest my grandmother play something on the piano.

She was a contemporary of Irving Berlin, and, like Berlin, her roots were in ragtime. She would play Maple Leaf Rag, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and a few other rags. Eventually, she would wander off, down four or five decades of Tin Pan Alley tunes. Sometimes one of her sisters or friends would uncase an accordion and take up the cause. Always, the others would gather around the piano and join in the singing.

In rummaging ukulele sites, I have found all those songs again. They shimmer with the spirits of the people gathered around the piano. They shimmer with the Universe too.

“We were rough and ready guys but oh how we could harmonize…”
go the words to an old song called ‘Heart Of My Heart.’ It was a favorite with the ice cream cake roll crowd, a song about singing a favorite old song.

Rough and ready? No. Good and gentle would be more apt. But oh, how they could harmonize. They’re harmonizing with the Universe still.

I stood at their gravesides. I watched a generation of priests sprinkle aspergillums of holy water on their caskets and pray for perpetual light to shine on them. If she were on top of her game, my mother the agnostic would tell those priests to stick their perpetual light where the sun doesn’t shine. She loathes anything maudlin. She despises the euphemisms and platitudes in which we wrap the cold hard fact of death.

I think, though, that she would appreciate—and maybe even come to embrace—the infinitely larger harmony that seems to resonate everywhere in the Universe—that seems to be the essence of the Universe itself.

The ukulele chord progression for the last few bars of “Heart Of My Heart,” is simple: E7, A7, D7, G. The words go, “I know a tear would glisten if once more I could listen to the gang that sang ‘Heart Of My Heart’.” Think I’ll go buy an ice cream cake roll, bring it home, have a big slice, and go to work on my harmonies.

Flying squirrels and the people who attract them

A friend of mine who lives on a small lake up north reports flying squirrels have discovered the bird feeder outside his living room windows. The squirrels are nocturnal, and I can imagine them gliding in—a squad of rodent paratroopers out there in the dark—their drop zone that pool of yellow light from the windows.

We found an old magazine article full of flying squirrel lore and little known facts about them the last time they showed up. But we’ve lost it now, and anything I told you about flying squirrels would be hearsay at best.

I have spent years observing the guy who owns the feeder, though. I consider myself an authority on the kind of human behavior it takes to attract flying squirrels.

You need what this guy calls, high appreciation—to be able to observe and take pleasure in nature’s small details. The wind in a white pine this time of year, for example. Or the way a coyote sneaks across the ice on the lake in the distance.

Content yourself with the small things and you will almost certainly acquire a contemplative frame of mind. With any luck, you will find yourself living in a stand of pine, ash, oak, maple, and ironwood a few miles outside of town.

And if you tend your feeders diligently, you may discover you have flying squirrels for neighbors—and that the neighbors don’t mind dropping in for a late evening snack, bringing an entirely new set of stuff to observe and appreciate.

High appreciation and simple observation can generate new questions too. Ever since the flying squirrels showed up, we’ve been going back and forth, wondering what a group of flying squirrels ought to be called. Is it a, squadron? A circus? Lately, I’ve been calling it an, “O’Hare of flying squirrels.”

We live in complex, noisy times. Often, Life seems to drive back and forth outside the house with the subwoofers thumping all night.

And it’s when Life is at its fractious, most distracting worst that you come to appreciate little things the most. Like a fire ticking and flickering in a north woods wood burner and flying squirrels gliding down to feed in the snow.

A poem for Minneapolis in the snow

Been reading Shel Silverstein and cowboy poets like Wally McRae lately. Led to this poem about Minneapolis in the snow:

I was waiting for the Lake Street bus -- this was several years ago
My jacket up around my ears, watching traffic come and go
When this old woman shuffled up -- no one you’d ever know
‘N said, “Tell me son, now aint this fun? The city in the snow?

Said, “I been in Lake Street 3-2 joints from Lyndale to the River Road
Ran tabs in every one of them -- God knows how much I owed
But Hamm’s or Schmidt or Grain Belt beer I never got a glow
That warmed me near the way I warm to the city in the snow.

“And I skinny dipped in Lake Calhoun one summer long ago
And saw Willie Mays play at Nicollet Park. The kid put on a show.
Shopped Lake Street Sears for all those years. It was sad to see it go
But you know what makes me happy, boy? The city in the snow.

“Me and ‘Husband Number Two’ -- we had a place upstairs on Lake that was hot as hell in summertime -- just about all we could take
But when winter came we’d pull up chairs, turn on the radio
Hold hands, look out the window, ‘n watch the city in the snow.

“And we used to slide at Powderhorn. Either that or we would skate in that park off Hiawatha -- the one down towards Thirty-Eighth
And afterwards we hurried home down streets of bungalows
Christmas trees in picture windows in the city in the snow.”

It was six at night. The vapor lights gave off a ghostly glow
“Here comes the bus, little late,” she said, “traffics got her running slow.
Go ahead. Hop on. Get moving, boy. You got places you should go.
Me? I’m waiting for the streetcar in the city in the snow.”

The weatherman’s on the TV now, putting on a fearful show
Full of sleet and snow and wind and cold, says, “Look out, she’s gonna blow.”
And when all that wintry hell busts loose, know where I’m going to go?
I’m gonna catch a Lake Street bus and watch the city in the snow.

Damn you, carbohydrates

I have never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like. And, this time of year in Minnesota, carbohydrates are everywhere.

At the office potluck Holiday party. In mail order packages from family, friends, and business associates. Stacked on silver trays on sidebars. In bowls with salsa and bean dip on the coffee table during TV football games. Everywhere.

I try to ignore them, but they know my Holiday routines. They arrange themselves alluringly where I can’t help but run into them.

“Hey, big boy,” they whisper as I walk by, “Want some real Happy Holidays?”

There are traditional Holiday carbohydrates—gross upon gross of my sister-in-law’s cookies, for example. Every year, she enters her manic holiday baking phase just after Thanksgiving and doesn’t snap out of it until late Christmas Eve afternoon.

Or those open boxes of chocolates that find their way to the living room end tables. Would they be there any other time of year? I don’t think so.

There are the commercial Holiday carbohydrates. Only yesterday, paying for gas down the street, I almost fell for a couple of festive red and green, two-for-a-buck gas station doughnuts. The candy bars sported Holiday wrappers. Most seductive of all, I could get two pints of eggnog for the price of one.

Two pints—two whole pints—of gas station eggnog for the price of one.

What I need here—and I need it badly—is some sort of cap-and-trade program, where I could buy carbohydrate credits from someone who isn’t going to use them. Or maybe donate the extra carbohydrates I’m going to consume to someone who needs them… A runner, say… Or a yoga addict.

But no. It’s not going to happen. Even as I speak, hundreds of Holiday carbohydrates out there are heading my way.

Ignoring the evil eye my wife will give me from across the room, I will ingest them. They will go down the Holiday hatch, join the carbs from Christmases past ,and enjoy a free ride on my hips into the New Year, and on toward Christmases future.

And I, for my part, will fend off any pangs of guilt by deliberately considering, however briefly, each of those “No enrollment fee” health club offers that arrive in the mail with the Christmas cards.

A Minnesota Thanksgiving Tradition

It’s Thanksgiving week in Minnesota, and in small town public works departments all over the state, maintenance guys are digging out the town Holiday decorations and heading for Main Street.

Dented sheet metal snowmen wearing top hats and mufflers. Big plastic snowflakes. Dusty green plastic garlands. Rusty candy canes. Snargles of Holiday lights. Eight-foot plywood stars for water towers.

Decorations etched in our childhood memories. Decorations that lost their luster forty years ago. Decorations that would probably be replaced if times—and the town budget—were better.

But the times, like the decorations, are what they are. Two guys will put everything on a pick-up, take the cherry picker, a handful of tools, and some traffic cones, and spend the day bolting it all to light poles from one end of town to the other.

It’s familiar work for the street garage old timers. They know every snowflake, snowman, and candy cane the way most Minnesotans know their family Christmas tree ornaments. They know which decoration goes on what pole. They know every bolt and clamp, too—right down to the bottom bracket on that one snowman that goes on the pole outside the municipal liquor store—the bracket that “Swede,” the shop foreman, rigged with a radiator hose clamp after that big wind came through on Christmas night in 1987.

One guy will get up in the cherry picker, and bolt. The other will stand below, and warn pedestrians to steer clear. Everyone else in town will mutter that hanging the Holiday decorations is a one man job.

Undaunted, the two guys will work light pole to light pole, up one side of Main Street and down the other. They’ll finish near sunset, and as that early winter dusk settles in, they’ll plug everything in or flip a switch on a timer, and the Holidays will return to Main Street again.

It won’t be like lighting the tree at Rockefeller Center or the White House. No big ceremony. But the two guys will stand there for a moment and take it in.

“Not too shabby,” one of them will say.

“Yeah, the other guy will say, “Close enough for government work.”

Veterans Day

I’m a veteran, and this fall, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the VFW Honor Guard who worked at Memorial and Veterans Day ceremonies in my home town when I was growing up.

They were World War Two guys… No longer young, but not yet old… A little post-prime, I guess you would say… With a bit of a middle aged slouch.

This would have been in the early 60s, and it was obvious that the 50s had been good to them. Each man sported a paunch of some sort, and each man dealt with his paunch his own way.

Some of them chose to go up a pant size or two. Others just buttoned their trousers lower. Others still resorted to using their white, ceremonial web belts as a surrogate girdles, cinching everything up two notches tighter than it ought to have been.

Our services were always at the cemetery or at the park in the middle of town, and the men would come ambling up, one at a time, trailing their rifles, hats at jaunty angles, cigarettes hanging from lips here and there.

The commander would line them up, make a quick inspection, straighten hats, and pass out clips of blank ammunition for the salute that would occur near the end ceremony. Every kid in the crowd strained to get a glimpse of those bullets before the Honor Guard guys shoved them into their pockets and resumed slouching and smoking.

Eventually, the commander would drill them just a little—left shoulder arms, right shoulder arms, present arms, and parade rest—commands that old soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen never forget.

They’d flip their cigarettes away and straighten up. Time had tarnished their brass a little, though. Their moves weren’t always crisp or in synch. But they did their best. Those guys always did their best.

And when they fired their salute at the end of the ceremony, you could see it meant something to them—and to the other vets in the crowd—something more than it meant to the rest of us back then.

They’re gone now, for the most part, but it’s Veterans Day, and wherever they are, I hope they know that, well, it means something more to me now, too.

God bless the poll workers

Later this morning, I’m going to pull on a sweatshirt and wander over to our polling place. With any luck, the early rush will be over. The poll workers will be sitting there, enjoying the lull, and I’ll have a chance to shoot the breeze with them.

I like poll workers. They aren’t your run-of-the-mill, take-a-number-and-wait, Department of Motor Vehicle types. Poll workers genuinely care about doing the job well, and doing the job right. Even the grumpy ones.

We’ve endured months of bluster and polarization fueled by cable television, talk radio, and political advertising. Many of us will go to the polls today not so much to vote for someone as to vote against the other side. We will walk in with teeth clenched, and black-hearted vengeance on our minds.

And there will be those poll workers—the first group of positive people we will have encountered since before the precinct caucuses last winter. They won’t be looking for an argument. They won’t have an axe to grind. All they’ll want is to help us vote.

I like the way poll workers come prepared for monotony. I like walking into that church basement or school gym and seeing them sitting there, reading glasses balanced on the tips of their noses, with a library copy of a Barbara Kingsolver book—or with knitting. I love poll workers who knit. Somewhere down deep, I wish one of them would knit an Election Day scarf just for me.

I even like the way you get to stand there with a poll worker and watch your ballot slide into the machine. There’s something so nice and final about it. Then they hand you that little “I Voted” sticker and send you on your way. What can I say? I just plain like poll workers.

Growing up, I wanted to be a cowboy or a football player. I write for a living now, but you know what I really want to do? I want to be a poll worker.