Choosing Ebenezer

What is the difference between price and cost?  I admire people who can understand numbers, crunch them with ease.  I used to be good with numbers myself.  There was a time when I could calculate GPA in my head.  I paid that much attention to grades, and then something began to shatter inside me.  I think it came from the time just after my father died.  I went through a time of great confusion and grief.  I couldn’t figure anything for about six months, and I couldn’t take tests.  I got so deep inside my head I over thought everything.  I came through it, eventually.  But, it left a scar.

Here’s the thing.  Money isn’t even paper anymore.  So, costs are really time and energy, and an entirely different set of numbers, some quite mysterious, figure in every calculation.  How much is a bottle of wine worth?  How many hours am I willing to work in order to purchase a top notch computer?   How much does it matter if the floor is clean, and how much does it matter that I get eight hours of good sleep?

The best thing in all the world is waking up in the morning feeling ready to put out rivers of work, to work like a horse, to generate like Verdi, to defy all numeric expectations.   I’ve been listening to old albums I haven’t heard in years, and one of the songs I’ve fallen in love with all over again has a funny lyric.  “I keep so busy praising my Jesus, keep so busy working for the Master…I ain’t got time to die.”  I like the cheeky attitude in it.  “Get out of my way, let me praise my Savior.  GET OUT OF MY WAY!”  See, that’s why I like to work.  It makes me feel invincible, incalculable.  Here I go with my praising.

I love watching a PBS show called Antiques Road Show.  They show all these treasures of good old normal people.  They give them these wild valuations for pieces of furniture and pottery and jewelry.  The people on the show find some of these items in the TRASH.  They purchase them at yard sales for a couple of bucks.  Here’s my big secret.  I would love to buy something like that, hit the jackpot of the big buy, but (even weirder) I would be almost as happy to sell the treasure for a dollar that was worth thousands.  Being part of such a transaction would be a blast from either side.  How does one figure that–value divided by expectation multiplied by satisfaction raised to the power of surprise.  When I write a good story or poem, I’m trying to discover the secret algebra of genuine value–price and cost in perspective.

So…I’m quitting the sophomore story thing.  I wrote an explanation of why, but I lost it, and I don’t think it was that good.  Quitting makes me feel lousy, so I try to avoid it, but sometimes I have to.  Let’s try to make quitting a good thing, shall we?  Let’s try to make quitting 2013 a positive thing.  Let’s scrub the scum out of the tub!

I used so much AJAX in the tub it made a fan.

Let’s change the old shower curtain and make those tiles sparkle.

My shower walls are clean; all the metal shines.

Let’s even give the old toilet a buffing.

Yes, even the toilet has it’s own arctic charm.

New Year’s Eve I made Shu Mai for Mother.  We toasted the old year and planned what we would do for New Year’s Day.  You’ll see.  I made it into bed just after midnight.

New Year’s Eve and my clean bed. This is the last thing I saw that night.

The next morning, the first morning of the year of Our Lord 2014, Mother and I took down Christmas.  We have four (well, five) Christmas trees of varying sizes, a train set (I would put in the video, but I don’t know how), and about three hundred nativity scenes scattered throughout the house.  We have eleven plastic tubs and a “tree bag” that hold it all–nearly.  It was a little depressing this year, putting almost all of it out myself because Mother wasn’t feeling all that well.  Putting it away was oddly pleasant.  Go through the pictures quickly because I don’t know how to load in the videos.

We begin at about 8:00.

I start taking ornaments off the tree, and Mother tries to find the right boxes.

There are plenty of lights.

Lots of lights and lots of ornaments.

All packed away. Let’s shine the floor.

I’m thankful Mother is feeling a little better though she still has to use her walker.  I’m thankful I have a clean bathroom and bedroom.  I’m glad to have all those pretty decorations and even more glad to have them neatly stored again.

I have to quit writing for now.  I wish I had more time, but other jobs await, and the suns pauses for no one.  Joy and peace in the new year–anyone who is reading.  Joy and peace to you.

                Billy was having the same dream for the fourth time. 

                The first time started with him in a valley.  Up on the ridge the peaks were lit green against an impossibly blue sky, but the valley he was in was midnight dark.  He could just make out the wheel at his feet, a stone disk about three feet across, pale in the moonlight.  He sensed he was supposed to get it up the valley side, but he couldn’t focus on the wheel or the job.  All around him, the forrest was filled with the skittering of little feet.  He wished he had night vision goggles, so he could see the heat registers of the bodies around him.  He felt certain there were others ranged along the valley floor that had the same job to do, but he could not hear them.   He knew all of this the same way all those in dreams know.  Some intuition told him what he was supposed to do.  He looked at the wheel for a bit then wandered down the valley, following the sound of what seemed like elk calls. 

                When he woke, he looked out his bedroom window to see his father’s Dodge pulling out of the driveway.  He knew there would be a list of chores on the cork board beside the back door.  That vacation break he had to clean the gutters on their house.  Eventually he got a job at the hardware store moving wood pellets and unloading trucks. 

                The second time he had the dream was in May of the next year.  The valley was back; the wheel was back, but the darkness seemed less intense.  He examined the wheel.  It was heavy and felt like sandstone.  He searched the valley floor for a stick to serve as a lever.  That took forever, but he managed to find one, lever up the stone and begin to roll it.  When he lifted his eyes, the ridge stretched upward and then the light winked out up there.  He woke in darkness. 

                One day that Fall his friends at school got into a discussion about how living life in a military environment never really went away.  One of them claimed he woke to the sound of reveille.   All of them complained about not being able to sleep late anymore.  Their bodies had learned to expect to be fed by 0700, so they got fed by 0700.  It wore off some over the course of the summer.   Winter breaks were different. 

                The third time Billy had the dream, that December, he was back in the valley, and the ridge was lit.  He was sitting on his big stone wheel, but the darkness had become a gray twilight.  Down the valley he could see his friends from school.  One of the boys was wearing camouflage and a huge pack was strapped to his shoulders.  Billy could see from the outline the pack had a big stone wheel in it.  To his right one of the girls had her wheel balanced on her head, and was slowly ascending, using various outcrops as a type of staircase to the top.  Billy looked again for his lever and managed to begin his climb.  The wheel resisted him.  He kept trying, but he got winded halfway up the slope.  He was afraid to lift his eyes, but he could not resist.  Up there, where he meant to be, where he wanted to be, the light began to fade.  He shoved as hard as he could at the stone, but no go.  His father was calling from down the hall. 

                Billy had gutters to clean.

                The next May, the month following his Sophomore year at military school, when the dream came back, Billy was ready.  He ignored the undergrowth and the skittering sounds of animals in the underbrush.  He ignored the other climbers and their burdens and triumphs.  He did not even search for a stick to use as a lever.  He gripped the stone, heaved it onto its rim and began to roll.  He recognized his dream, a dream of Sisyphus, when someone was doomed to push a stone but never get it up the hill.  All the students had spent parts of the last two years at school studying old stories and myths.  He knew about Sisyphus from junior high, but when they reviewed the old tales, it came back to him, and he recognized how the story and his dream were the same thing.  Billy might be doomed to dream this strange dream forever.

                Screw that! thought Billy.  I’m ending this.

                As he rolled the stone up the hill, he knew it would get heavier, and it did, for a time, but then the stone began to change.  He felt the edge soften, and he felt the stone begin to shrink.  When it was only a foot across, he simply lifted it into his hands.  Smaller and smaller, it split into two halves, each only three inces across.  It began to warm, and it smelled like melted butter, and from the ridge came the smell of bacon.  Finally, he got the courage to lift his eyes, and the ridge was no longer high above him.  He merely took one step to be standing on the edge of the great blue plate of the sky.  The sun was orange and ribbons shot from it.  The clouds floated a melting white.  The grass along the ridge flew up as it was mown and roasted in the heat of the sun. 

                “Bill,” his father called.  “Bill, I have some breakfast for you.”

                Billy found his father in the kitchen.  He had cooked for them.  “I made up my own sandwiches like they do at the fast food places.  I like mine better because I fry the egg instead of scrambling it.” 

                That morning when the mail arrived there was a letter from his school.  Billy was now part of the Junior class.

He sits in his usual chair at the kitchen table in the predawn darkness. The light overhead bathes the scene in golden light. His head is down, as though he is studying his own reflection from the surface of the coffee in his mug. The cigarette between the fingers of his right hand spools a white ribbon of smoke that blends with the rich smells of coffee and frying bacon–my Daddy lifts his head when I enter, and his dark brown eyes greet me. He is neither happy nor sad, but content. He says, “Good morning, little girl.” He is the only one who ever will call me that.

My relationship with my father was full of contradictions. He did not like to be called father. He preferred “Daddy,” but as a former Marine and a high school principal, he commanded respect. He was not physically demonstrative. He hugged with one arm only, and I do not remember a time when he ever kissed me, not even a peck on the forehead, but my favorite picture of us together is from when I was a little baby, still pink and bald, and I am squeezing his neck. He is smiling.

Though he was not physically demonstrative, I don’t mean to imply that he did not show love. His shows of affection came in other forms. One way he showed great love was through his lavish, superb gifts. He not only gave gifts of value, but he chose those that would perfectly satisfy the one he wished to please–a rifle for his little brother, perfume for my mother, a music box for me. He also showed his love with his attention.

My Daddy’s attention was better than anyone’s. He saw not only what a person was doing or making, but what that person could do and make. He could watch a student and see all the things that student would someday be able to do, all those future possibilities. This gift made my Daddy a special blessing to many people who were hurting, lost, and confused–people rejected by others, tormented by doubts. He saw the artist, the musician, the teacher, the builder, and the leader. He offered them reassurance that they could and would find a way through the spreading wilderness and eventually locate their joy. This made them cling close to him at times, made them beg for attention, made them proud to call him their teacher and friend. I admit I would sometimes experience the keenest point of jealously where he was concerned. After all, he was my Daddy, not theirs. Why should he put so much energy and attention into their lives? Why didn’t he behave like the TV fathers who came home and seemed to have endless time and energy to spend on their gorgeous children?

Now, obviously, I am glad he was the man he became. He left too soon, for me, for everyone in my family. We were none of us ready for, or resolved to, his going. So be it. Years later I read the letters he wrote before he was any kind of Daddy, letters from his days in the Pacific. In only one of those letters did he describe any event in the war, and that letter was written on Iwo Jima. When I think of all he did, and carried, all those years–the memories too horrible to discuss, the needs of all of us (my mother, my brothers, me), the burdens of thousands of teachers and students–I am deeply grateful and humbled. He was the best man I ever knew.

My Daddy is the one on the left. He smoked Pell Mells and tried to quit hundreds of times in his life.