paulmuses

When I walked into a start-up yesterday, KD Refillery, I discovered a new word, adulting.

Merriam-Webster says it is “The act of attending to the ordinary tasks required of a responsible adult” and has been in use since 2013.

As I walked through the door, I heard the voice of Father Eugene Harrison.

“Paul, please use adulting in a sentence.”

“Paul committed an act of adulting today by looking up a word he did not know.”

“Very good. Now, use this new word as a gerund in a sentence.”

“Adulting is very hard work for Paul.

“Why do you think so?”

“Because Rebecca wants me to do the laundry, the yard work, and clean the toilets, when all I want to do is look up and turn words into sentences.”

“Father”

“Yes, Paul.”

“Why is adulting so much harder than teenaging?”

“You want hard? Try priesting.”

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Means I will die a child of the sixties

Some things change, and some things remain the same. This is me, fifty-six years ago, protesting Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University.

Last April, clad in my protest uniform, I was with hundreds more at a No Kings resistance day.

The past curves back, more spiral than arc.

What remains is war. Always war. And stupidity. And blindness. And greed.

King Don is only the latest!

For you and me, it can feel hopeless. Unless someone offers us words that express what we feel. Then, we feel less impotent and alone.

In Why Bob Dylan Matters, Harvard Classics Professor Richard Thomas puts it this way:

It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times insufficient…Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along.

Master Dylan adds this

It doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you.

Where do these words, written so long ago, take you today?

The words for Dylan’s “Masters of War” came to him and to us in 1963.

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

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I’ve definitely got a life to recall. It seems aeonian, but it’s only been 76 years. And will soon end. Soon, in relative terms, perhaps twenty years at most.There’s still work to be done.

Sadly, we aren’t here very long, are we? So we’d best not waste time.

It was only yesterday when my brothers and I were playing wiffle ball in the backyard, trying not to knock our mother’s Monday washing off the cotton ropes strung diagonally from the garage to hooks in the maple tree growing up through the lower-level concrete-block patio our dad rebuilt every few years.

Now, Dody, Pat, and Peter are gone. So is Paul, Sr, who took this photo, and who reminded us every Monday morning to help our mother hang the clothes before the first pitch and to ‘be careful of the clothes line.’

That leaves me to finish the game.

Peter died two months ago, and I’m his only surviving relative and the executor of his estate.

He and his late wife, Pamela, have left their money and property to the Sisters of Charity (BVMs), the religious order of our late aunt and Dody’s sibling, Sister Marilyn Thomas.

My task is to make sure this gets done.

It’s the latest clothesline.

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If you want the highbrow version of this story about a writer’s voice, read this terrific article by Charles Yu. It includes the words “elides” and “obviates,” two terms never used by me in my 811 tales.

Here’s AI’s rendition of Yu’s essay. It includes the phrase “key insights,” the best tell for plagiarized papers over my 40 years of college teaching.

In the photo, under the microwave on the left, you see Paul and Rebecca’s oven. Whenever their furnace blows, something behind the cooker rattles. It’s a repetitive knocking sound that, Paul wagers, is different from the clatter coming from a loose part in your kitchen.

This unique echo of their oven is its voice, its tone, its perspective. It can’t be replicated.

Just like this little essay. Its author’s screw-loose imperfection is its value in this anodyne (also used for the first time) world of AI.

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Grey-haired, stooped Mrs. Thompson always wore a dark sweater when she gardened in the summer. I wouldn’t have noticed except she occasionally retrieved a “foul” wiffle ball from her garden’s crocuses and peonies, with never a scold.

Her backyard bordered the driveway we shared with our neighbors, the Bartoski’s, with their garage serving as the backstop and our garage the pitching mound. An ancient, bowed wire-link fence served as the left-field foul line.

Like many major league baseball players in the fifties and sixties, I had an off-season job as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Times. Mrs. Thompson was one of my 44 customers, which meant on every Thursday evening, I would collect a weekly sum.

As a proper business boy, I carried a small three-ring notebook with a page for each client, containing perforated stamp-sized receipts. For change, I attached a coin changer to my belt.

Collecting gave this impressionable 12-year-old access to the early evening lives of adults other than my parents. Most invited me into their living rooms, including Mrs. Thompson. As far as I knew, she lived alone. My mother told me her husband had died years earlier.

I remember her front room was always warm and dark, with the shades down on each window. Once, it must have been late summer, early evening, she took me through the house to her kitchen in the back, with side and back windows that looked over the garden that bordered our play area.

I don’t remember what she said or what kind of cookie she offered. But I do recall the openings with rolled-up blinds that overlooked her backyard and our ballpark.

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The Cartels

For the past three Januaries, Rebecca and I have been guests in a complicated country. We’ve rented an apartment in San Miguel, a city of 170,000 people northeast of Mexico City, marked by the purple arrow on this US State Department travel advisory map.

The yellow-coded areas suggest vigilance, with the orange a warning to stay away. The color admonitions covering the entire country give one a visual image of the Mexican cartels’ tentacles throughout this country of 133 million, which includes, each year, 20 million travelers from the USA and 3 million from Canada. Roughly 20% of San Miguel’s residents are ex-pats from the USA and Canada.

So I’ve paid close attention to news from Mexico since Mexican government security forces killed ‘El Mencho,’ a top Cartel leader, four days ago in the state of Jalisco, just west of San Miguel’s province of Guanajuato, with reports of flight cancellations at the Guadalajara Airport and ‘narco-blockades’ throughout Jalisco and several other states.

An excellent source of non-sensational reporting is the English-language Mexico News Daily. This article is a good summary of what has occurred.

John, a retired minister from Washington, DC, who settled in San Miguel two decades ago, told me in an email that schools were cancelled on Monday, some businesses closed, and many were ‘sheltering in place,’ as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum counseled.

By Tuesday, everything seemed back to normal. According to John, there have been no reports of cartel-related incidents in San Miguel.

Calle San Antonio

A week before we departed, in a rumor that was later confirmed in a news report, two young men were executed in mid-afternoon in a cartel-related action on San Antonio, the street in the first photo, and an avenue we walked every day.

Here are two more photos of this major thoroughfare.

A Mexican friend of Rebecca said she walked by the scene of violence an hour after it happened. The bodies had been removed. The police were present. Rebecca’s friend, a teacher, was followed up the street by two large men. Unsure and worried, she popped into a pharmacy and hid in a back room. Later, to Rebecca, she said, “These men likely wanted information. They aren’t interested in and won’t bother tourists. It’s Mexicans that are in danger.”

Calle Aldama

When friends ask what we do in San Miguel, our short answer is we walk, around 9000 cobblestone steps each day. San Antonio is our second-favorite street; Aldama is our first. In the photo below, you see a bird’s-eye view of our daily destination, San Miguel Arcángel Catholic Church, from our apartment rooftop.

We see you have the right kind of shoes with thick soles. Follow us. We’ll give you time for photos.

“On your right, Buenos Dias.”

Rebecca at the halfway marker.

A sandwich and a cookie at Parque Juarez.

Meet our old friend. He’s a constant at this sentinel spot across from Juarez.

His owner sells beautiful pottery.

Would you believe it? Three years and not a single honk.

The Aldama two-step: learned behavior. We can live together!

You saw it here, first.

Our destination, El Jardin, the central plaza. A Mariachi Band will be by in a moment.

Sorry, on the return trip, it’s all uphill.

San Miguel

Two weeks before we left, a neighbor told us three women had been robbed by two masked men on motorcycles at knifepoint around 9 PM on Aldama. This was confirmed by two Mexican friends who said it’s likely these guys came in from a surrounding village where the poverty rate is much higher.

On that Friday evening, a younger male friend had accompanied Rebecca and me as we walked up Aldama from Johnny’s Piano Bar, across from El Jardin. Apparently, the attack occurred about 30 minutes after we passed that spot. Our friend, an artist, wanted some fresh air before he went home to work. None of us thought about danger.

Like the USA, Mexico is a complicated country. If one looks closely in both countries, there’s a lot of nastiness.

We will return to Calle Aldama next year. In fact, we plan to arrive in mid-December to experience Christmas in San Miguel — to see this tree go up as well as come down.

I don’t know enough about Mexico to put the right words to why I always feel I am a better person after a month in San Miguel. In our experience, walking San Miguel’s streets, the good overwhelms we see overwhelms the bad we don’t.

But I’ll let another American, Katherine Corcoran, speak for me. Ms. Corcoran has written a poignant and informative book, In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, A Cover-up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press, about the killing of a Mexican reporter.

I’ll leave you with her words.

Mexico was so antithetical to the American emphasis on getting ahead and a lifestyle that made me feel I was under constant stress. Among the middle and working class there was zero sense of entitlement. To an outsider, Mexicans lived in the moment. They seemed to wake every day looking not for ways to get ahead , but rather, for the necessities to survive, which made them infinitely more gracious.

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September 20, 1963, was my 14th birthday. Always the youngest in my class, I was usually the last to, well, whatever. Even then, I had a paper route. My first hidden Playboy Centerfold was still two years away.

Bob Dylan arrived on the scene that same year. 43 years later, in 2006, I saw my first concert.

In two months, with my 37-year-old son, Ben, I’ll see performance number seven.

I’m always late but eager. Like a young pup. Bursting with potential. What accounts for this dormancy?

I blame it on the Bossa Nova.

Of course, you’ll say, “Do you mean The Dance of Love?

And I’ll respond, “‘No, no, the Bossa Nova,’ the very first song I heard on my orange transistor radio, a birthday gift from my parents. They also gave me ear buds so that I could listen late into the night, esconced in the protective privacy under my covers, without waking my younger brother Peter.”

However, you know what they say. The first is always the most important. It sets the tone. My first song could have been Nino Tempo and April Stevens’ Deep Purple. Or Busted by Ray Charles. What about The Chrystals Then He Kissed Me?

Instead, I got Eydie Gormé’s Bossa Nova.

So I’m still trying to make up for lost time.

Dig it.

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A few minutes before 6 PM, Steve greeted, one by one, eight of us at the door. Two, with notes from grandchildren, lie on beaches.

Benji substituted, but obviously hadn’t finished the book.

We demolished two delivered pizzas, wrestled with

and lingered over Steve’s ginger snaps.

If you think our older men’s book group is too highfalutin — Benji’s charge — Ozzy Osborne’s Last Rites, is our March book.

Matthiessen’s 1965 story is a morality tale centered on four Protestant missionaries (two couples) and a fictional Indian tribe, the Niaruna, living in the Amazon rainforest. Other characters, especially a Catholic priest and an American Indian mercenary, interrogate the motives of the evangelists.

After 45 minutes of around circle feints, probes, and jabs reconnoitering our literary quarry, David settled us in with. . .

What does it mean to be called?

Six hundred years of living coalesced. Even Benji relaxed.

Until Steve brought out the treats.

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Rebecca and I just returned from a visit to snowy Marblehead, Massachusetts, where we participated in the Bat Mizvah of Rebecca’s granddaughter, Sivan. It was a beautiful ceremony at Congregation Shirat Hayam.

Four years ago, we attended the Bar Mitzvah of her grandson, Elan, on a radiant fall day.

As we walked through the Synagogue’s entrance doors, this sign greeted us.

In the summer of 2022, I took a three-day photography course. Jay, our instructor, repeated this mantra: taking pictures helps us pay closer attention to our world.

Since that class, the habit of taking photos has become a useful nudge to focus on images that help me understand what’s going on.

This article from Time Magazine details the recent rise in anti-semitism in the United States.

It is roughly 1000 powerful words.

Illuminated by these pictures.

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I believe we tell stories to make sense of the world. We write, sing, dance, act, draw, and snap to create meaning from the chaos of our lives.

A few days ago, I read this absorbing story by Maria Rattray. She reintroduced me to the word “synchronicity” and to Carl Jung’s work.

In the 1920s, Jung coined the term to highlight a coincidence that is more than mere chance.

Yesterday, Rebecca and I added up our individual expenditures from January in San Miguel, Mexico. These included Uber trips, restaurants, groceries, and cash withdrawals. In the fifteen years we’ve been together, we’ve kept separate bank accounts and shared most expenses.

For example, on January 16, she found gifts for grandchildren at this market.

In the two columns of numbers on my notebook page in the first photo, you can see my expenses listed and totalling $1418.

Rebecca’s summation precisely.

Serendipity or…?

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