One More Cup Of Coffee Before I Go

That last adventure took up full half the editorial page, didn't it? I'd apologize to management, but not until management apologizes to me for my abysmal compensation and complete lack of the several perquisites customarily granted incisive political philosophers such as I. I won't apologize to the public, because I know most of you wandered off years ago, shaking your heads, mumbling in disgust, spitting or cursing if given to those sorts of expressions, and begging your children's forgiveness for having brought them into a world where such obtuse, puerile maunderings are allowed to displace alternate-side-of-the-street parking notices to a secret location deeper within the newspaper.

But I'm all about moving forward. The past is history. I no longer pay my postmaster to inject monkey gland extract into me when a new vial arrives from my Mexican supplier. I'm clean and articulate and it's been three days since my last drink. Since she moved out I no longer beat my wife.

Now another fortnight has faded away. I'm back before you to report—what? Not much, but then again, everything. I have attended no sporting events, watched no motion pictures and scant television. Once I had lunch at the Olive Garden. I don't see why my wife can receive endless bowls of bean-riddled minestrone soup for a flat fee while I'm limited to a single small serving of spaghetti, but by emptying the first three baskets of bread directly into my jacket pockets then calling for more I at least assure myself of a grand welcome when the dogs meet me at home.

I worked some, but not much these fourteen days. You never know in the winter. Some years we sail safely from Thanksgiving through midseason on a single customer; other times a succession of smaller jobs keeps us in groceries. There's no sense getting agitated about a short week or a week or two with nothing when it happens. You eat macaroni and potatoes and if the snow isn't too deep, cut wood. You read books. The bills accrue. A job will manifest sooner or later.

How different this is, of course, from the conventional model. There are persons I've met who have always had a job, a paycheck, a benefit package. They talk about their vacations, their investments, their plans to do this or buy that or go there. Such lives allow the trickle-down economy so beloved of our Republican thinkers such as the revered and, truly, almost God-like (if actually and obviously dumber than a stump) Ronald Reagan. The quality lives of the regularly employed in the better subdivisions eventually require some alteration or improvement that will engender a call to some bum such as I who will apply shovel or hammer or wrench.

So God's plan for me required that I hang around this shack if not until the mail train comes back at least until that woman in Brunswick convinces her husband he wants to pay how much? For a wall of plywood cabinets. And, as I've told you here in some detail previously, that great jokester Our Heavenly Father also saw fit to blind me just before the season of our great Savior's birth and again, just to set the message in bold type, after the turn of the year. So I have a relationship with a nice Doctor of Ophthalmology and he and I have reversed the trickle-down flow to the sum of nineteen thousand dollars. Perhaps some of my contribution will later be redistributed to a marine engine mechanic or oil-change technician at a Mercedes-Benz dealership.

But I'm not complaining. Not really. Or not much. My doctor was capable, personable, and I think I may have full vision again by the time the snow is gone. I do note that no man or woman presently running for the presidency has expressed a willingness to route our health care delivery system around the grasping tentacles of the insurance companies. Hillary Clinton proposes we all be required to buy their inadequate, overpriced product. Barack Obama wants to "sit down at the table" and negotiate with them. They'll clean him like a carp and sell dried strips of him to his family as a dietary supplement.

Oh, Ralph Nader would give us a clean, more Medicare-like, simple system, but we must not speak Ralph's name except in disgust or derision. He is not a participant in the two-party system that has given us such a satisfying past and portends only a sparkling future domestically and abroad.

So I have no money, little work, we've had two snowstorms a week since late November, gasoline is expensive and its use increasingly immoral, and I've pruned all the oaks around the place too high to make hanging myself anything but a tedious effort involving ladders and maybe even some sort of timber scaffold. What else can a farm boy from Chenango County lost in the Maine Woods too close to sixty and too many miles and years to turn this ride around do?

I did watch Bill Moyers on Public Television Friday night. I'll tell you that LBJ's old press secretary would make a better president than any candidate we've been allowed to vote for in many years. Intelligent, thoughtful, reflective, decent, humane, and incapable to empty rhetoric. And he interviews his well-chosen guests by asking them calm, direct questions. Of course mostly they tell him and us the ugly truths about ourselves, our society, our culture, our government and the course of civilization that many of us ignore or deny.

Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age Of American Unreason," laid out again the well-known statistics about just how willfully ignorant and backward we choose to be. A simple Internet search will give you reason enough to throw a rope over your own barn beam and jump.

Depending upon the year, the pollster, the precise question asked, between 79 and 97 percent of the citizenry believes in miracles. Take what comfort you wish that only 31 percent think witches are at work among us. Thirty percent believe the literality of the Biblical six days of creation. One poll indicates 48 per- cent accept the reality of evolution (if stipulated that it can have been directed by God); another says only 42 percent of us think species evolve. Well, maybe that's not so bad, huh? Almost half of us can see what nature makes so evident every day. But wait—only 26 percent "believe" in natural selection as the means by which changes occur. That is to say, if God ain't pullin' the switches, they ain't buyin' it!

Forty-two (or maybe 48) percent of us believe evolution is a fact. Sixty-two percent­ think Hell is a real, physical place administered by the Devil (aka Satan, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, Beelzebub, etc.). Oh, those crazy, ignorant, backward, medieval Muslims! "I'm so glad I'm livin' in the USA."

Well, that's dispiriting. So what I've done, once a week, when I just couldn't take it any more, is I've burned a half gallon of distilled tree fern remains (either hundreds of millions of years in the making, or just recently put in the bedrock pores by Great God Almighty against the day His creatures would want to pump it out and pollute His Creation with it) in a trip to my own undisclosed location where I can spend two or three hours talking with rational human beings.

We drink much coffee. I waddle to their bathroom to pee every ninety minutes or so, and there admire the now-aging cabinetry and tile work I installed when I was a much younger man, as well as the view out the window of the woodshed we were trimming and roofing last November when my retina first unhinged. Sometimes we eat donuts.

I am not the only man or woman to present myself for entertainment and elucidation. (The lady of the house sighed that only two days since November have they not had visitors.) We talk of politics, mostly local. We discuss music, mostly Hank Williams and Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan. But really, Hank is all you need. Lately there's been quite a bit of psychology; I left my copy of John Elder Robison's "Look Me In The Eye," a book that explains and describes much of my own life experience, and have promised them a turn at his brother's famous "Running With Scissors" as soon as they've finished. Psychology leads to philosophy.

I won't say no one ever expresses an outlandish opinion or intemperate thought. We trade in those—revel in them. But these conferences are characterized by a complete lack of bombast, prejudice, close-minded-ness or party ideology. I am in the company of free-thinkers. That home where I and others are welcomed is an oasis of enlightenment in a world slipping rapidly into shadows. My visits restore me.

Then I go home and shovel more snow. In February I am at the disposal of various selectmen and committeemen and firemen who from time to time require my advice or counsel or opinion, wish to have me draft a document for their purpose. I remember more, perhaps, of who said or did what, where the records may be found or the bodies exhumed, than any retired selectman in town. This is partly a function of my continuing interest in matters municipal, more because of my particular diagnosis, concerning which read Look Me In The Eye .

I produce the town report cover, which requires a poem as well as a photograph. Poems are hard. You start from nothing, go slantwise through uncertain substance until a sort of conclusion may be hinted at. And I require rhyme, meter, alliteration and several other important components left out of much modern verse.

So we shall find our way to spring. We do not do so unaided. There is a higher power, but I think it is not in Heaven. Nor is it in our stars—that light is too distant and too old. It is in ourselves, collectively, as we build a bulwark against ignorance, foolish chasing after vapors, superstition, ego, intellectual laziness, cruelty and fear. The job requires music and coffee and the printed word and a heroic effort by ordinary persons. It is a winter's work. A lifetime's.