***
"Umma Shamma Lamma" or something similar came out of the man's mouth during church service. Speaking in tongues is remarkably easy to do if you want to fake it sometime. The secret is to make it sound like non-sensical 1950s doo wap. Steer clear of Little Richard though, that's too much for even the Lord himself.
What's harder to fake is what happened next when the man fell backwards and cracked his head against the solid wood church pew. He didn't flinch, he didn't snap out of his trance, he just kept on following the transmission. It turns out that the Holy Ghost knows something about anaesthesia too. Dancing in the spirit is another captivating part of the church experience although I can't help but wonder if the Holy Ghost is still in the middle of Arthur Murray dance lessons. I have been hit in the eye with elbows on more than one occasion by marionettes channelling Holy Ghost dance recitals.
It was after the Sunday night church service that I loved my mother the most. I never saw her at peace very much and fresh from practicing her praises in the Lord left her in a state of simple joy. The ride home was always a time of great joy and dread. Great joy because once again I made it through a ritual I positively hated and great dread because Dad's opposing editorial viewpoint was still to come.
Herbert Julian Cook Jr, my father, was an intimidating man. He was 6 foot 7 inches tall and towered over my mother with a stature and unpredictability like a volcano looming over a Central American town. He also possessed volcanic certainty as he gave his own fire and brimstone sermon consisting of such sureties as.......
"You god damned holy roller, God doesn't exist."
or
"I'm going to live forever! Heaven won't have me and I am too ornery for hell!"
As an aside, but totally related, here's a nifty science trick:
If you sit in a room playing a guitar and lean another identical guitar up against the wall, the solitary guitar will start to resonate and play the same notes. My mother's strings were never affected by my fathers off key remarks. She had her own melodies going on, doo wap I imagine.
***
Bench, Perez, Morgan, Concepcion, Rose, Geronimo, and Foster. It could be easily be a multicultural law firm, but these were names from the 1975-1976 Cincinnati Reds roster better known to baseball aficionados as the Big Red Machine. This team couldn't exist today because their modern day salaries would be too expensive. They were the best team since the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers and unlike the 1953 Dodgers, they didn't lose the World Series.
Dad was a sucker for the seductive wail of the baseball concession. His bedroom was every inch a shrine to the Big Red Machine. Team photos, bobble heads, autographed baseballs, and every other shoddy thing you could buy covered the walls and available bureau top. Mom and Dad didn't sleep in the same bedroom, it was too crowded with all the ballplayers.
One day I accidentally knocked over Dad's framed photo of Mecca: Riverfront Stadium. He was so outraged that he punched me hard in the ribs. He had 39 years on me so it was nowhere close to being a fair fight. I used to fantasize about taking him down and beating him mercilessly. I just did what nine year olds do, I felt sorry for myself.
***
Mom had a 3rd grade education and spent all of her life from the age of 15 raising her kids. You could say that her career options were somewhat limited. Sometimes you don't have the luxury of pondering philosophical nonsense like arguing for your limitations and you are ordered as an ordinary person to do extraordinary things. Mom had the demand placed upon her to create a happy life for herself and her children and that is much more difficult to pull off than you think. It is true that when you insist on your limitations that you have an argument that you will win 100 percent of the time. Arguing in any form was something that Mom long grew weary of and she did not debate the possible outcomes. When I was 12, she left my father. We went from poor to destitute and I thank my mother profusely for that especially now that I understand the situation as an adult. These decisions are never monochrome but many shades of grey.
***
At 19, I turned my father in to the police for committing a crime, a very serious crime. It's not as if the authorities were working around the clock to solve the mystery and I broke the case by coming forward.
I won't say what the crime was because it's not relevant to this particular essay. He committed a crime, he ran away, I knew where he ran and the police suggested that I might be obstructing justice by not coming clean and that I might get some jail time too. Fuck it, I thought. I'm not going down too.
Society got justice, Dad got 10 years and I reveled in his downfall, something I regard today as a personal embarrassment.
***
I was at work when it hit.
"Hang on sir, I'll be right back". There was no negotiation as I abruptly unplugged my telephone earpiece and left the customer hanging. I ran to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror and to convince myself that I was still me. My breathing was shallow, I was very dizzy, my heart was pounding at techno dance levels (extended mix), but most strangely I felt as if I shed my earthly body and I had no idea how to get back into it.
At 25 I developed a mental illness, which would later be diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder with generalized anxiety coupled with an appalling lack of customer service
***
-Wake up
-Cry without knowing why
-Wonder what it is that you are so afraid of
-Go to work and worry about when the next attack is going to occur
That is the irony, the absolute pisser, behind having an anxiety disorder. The attacks are so devastating that you live in terror of the next one. You develop a fear of the fear.
Here's hoping you never honestly have to tell me that you know what I mean. I hope you understand of course, but I never want you to know. Why did I have this disorder? Well here's a snapshot...
***
On a cold, grey February day my brother flung open my bedroom door. His hand was over his chest and his eyes were as big as saucers. His mouth was gaped open like the Grand Canyon and he just wanted to yell something.
Blood streamers were spurting from between his fingers like crimson ribbons and he was speechless. He was in the unique position of having a self-inflicted shotgun blast to go woefully wrong, if I can say that.
He spent about two weeks before that riding high on a deep depression. The day before he asked me a straightforward question: "Where could I get shot and die instantly?" I knew something was up but not exactly what at the time. (Note: If you put your hindsight bias away for a moment, I need to point out that I have been asked all sorts of questions by my brothers, some even more stupid than this one).
Using a skill that would serve me well in the technology industry years later, I talked over his head with medical mish mash, pointed to my chest just below my right collarbone and said "Here".
It was that same spot where his breath was bellowing into my face blowing the hair off my forehead in regular and rapid bursts. I could see the linoleum floor through his chest as I laid him down. I slid my left hand under him to cover the exit wound and my right hand over the entry wound and pressed hard to control the bleeding. I no longer felt his breath warming my face and it got noticeably colder, much colder as he looked me straight in the eye and said, "You lied to me". All I could mutter was something like "Yeah, well....you know..."
Maybe if I had read more of Einstein's theories I would have understood why the next 15 minutes were so slow. The ambulance showed up, took him away, and I was left to wonder why I felt so bad about preventing my brother from dying of his own hand.
Ironically he saved my life seven years before when I was being mangled by a dog, an encounter that would leave me with 18 scars: 15 on my left arm, two on my right arm and a six inch one down my back. He picked up a clod of dirt and rock and with a surgeon's precision beaned the dog in the head releasing me from his jaws.
I am happy to report today that my brother is alive and well. We are forever linked by the mutual debt of saving each other's lives and that keeps us acquainted at least.
If you think I am placing some sort of blame against my brother then you would be magnanimously incorrect. Sometimes in life you find yourself greatly overwhelmed. It happens to the best of us.
***
In 1996, I was living in Washington DC, but found myself in Cincinnati to attend the wedding of my friend Joe. I discovered Dad's whereabouts through my sister and decided to drop by for a visit. It was a filthy hotel for transients called the Colonial Motel. It would have been a swinging place in 1920, which was probably the last time someone cleaned it.
I walked up the stairs to the second floor, knocked on his door and heard a dog barking his fool head off. I had another brief detachment when I heard Dad's voice say "Shut up lightning!" which was the dog's name, presumably. I wondered if I had gone too far. It was one thing to confront your fear but another to confront someone you sent to jail.
The door slowly creaked open and my father peered out like a six foot seven inch mouse. He was skin and bones with a beard halfway down his chest and reeked from who knows how many days of not bathing.
I could take him down right now if I wanted to, but I wasn't nine years old anymore. He wasn't the same either. He was frail, broken and alone. Now I just felt sorry for him as a human being. Now what? I was hopelessly lost.
"Can I come in? I asked.
"Oh yes, yes come in...." he said and pulled the door wider. His room was a wreck. It stank of dog urine and his bed was covered with tattered blankets. The only modern things were the microwave, TV and VCR.
"You look great son"
"Thanks Dad, you do too"
"I wish I could stop smoking"
"I finally did"
"Good for you son"
Dad perked up when I suggested that we go outside and talk a bit. Standing beside my car, never quite comfortably, he filled me in on the perils of his urban existence, about how he never went outside much anymore. He regularly had the neighbor boy to fetch his mail and occasional groceries from the supermarket next door. We had about 20 minutes of non-committal small talk and it was over. There was no further benefit from further faking a connection.
"Good to see you Dad"
"Good to see you too son"
He turned and walked away to the supermarket to get a six-pack of beer.
He never mentioned during our discussion that he had lung cancer. Acquaintances don't generally go into that kind of detail.
***
In 1997 I created a web site that taught travel agencies how to do things like get the best seats for their customers and how to circumvent ridiculous fare rules like Saturday night stay requirements to get the best fares. I had spent several years working for an airline as a computer programmer and reasoned that giving away the keys to the kingdom would be good especially to a hard working group of folks like travel agents.
Travel agents loved the web site and the venerable finance related Wall Street Journal (WSJ) loved it also. They ran a story about it and no one was more surprised than me. "Extra! Extra! Julian Cook in the Wall Street Journal!" Big time financiers and stock barons were in the WSJ and now, for some reason, so was I. The airlines didn't care for it much though.
I thought my Dad would enjoy seeing his son in the paper so I packaged a newspaper with my business card and sent it to him.
***
Just so you don't think I am building up to a climactic fireworks crescendo I'll point out that my father died without seeing the newspaper. I came into work, checked my voicemail and the first message started this way:
"This is David Sousma calling from the Kenton County Coroner's Office......"
He got the last laugh. The neighbor boy brought the mail containing the paper and the police knew who to call because I enclosed a business card.
He didn't die of lung cancer. He woke up, sat on the edge of the bed and death came quickly in the form of an acute cardiac event. By the time his body hit the bed he was already privy to those answers that those of us left behind can only ponder within the philosophical realm. It was as good of a death as you could ask for.
"I'm going to live forever! Heaven won't have me and I am too ornery for hell!"
Someone, apparently, changed his or her mind.
***
Fuming would be the adjective that best described my mood as I sat on my friend Joe's couch after a day of going through Dad's effects. It was just like that son of a bitch to die and inconvenience me like this.
I thought I had been robbed of closure and by extension, my happiness, because he died on his own timetable and not mine. I thought I was past all that "seeking validation" hooey but I was wrong.
I started watching TV to change the subject in my mind and the only thing of interest was Larry King Live on CNN. The guest that night was the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of the former kingdom of Tibet. "Former" because China invaded Tibet in 1959 and annexed it while the world did nothing.
I didn't know anything about Tibet at that time, but I grew more educated as the hour progressed. The Dalai Lama was funny looking in his maroon robe and shaved head and when he spoke English it was comical with his singsong delivery. He was immediately endearing.
The interview had been fluffy and light up until this exchange:
Larry King: "The Chinese have killed more than two million of your people and have destroyed almost all of your monasteries. Don't you hate the Chinese?"
Dalai Lama: "No, I do not hate the Chinese. I love the Chinese. You should love everyone, especially your enemies".
He smiled full and wide and I was struck immediately by the golden revelation that peace and certainty have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
***
One early morning in Nagarkot, a town on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley that affords breathtaking views of the Himalayas, I climbed onto the roof of the boarding house and watched the sun rise.
It was gigantic and brilliant as it lazily climbed from behind the steep, white meringue peaks of the Langtang range. It was profound and once again I had been mercilessly smacked by the reality truck and dragged 86 feet. The sun has been rising this way for hundreds of thousands of years before man was here and it will be rising this way long after we've worn out our welcome and have been banished from the earth. Nothing I could think was ever going to matter.
My view about my life and perceived drama would be forever altered after that.
***
All my adult life I was guilty of committing serial acts of improper perspective. The anxiety disorder was an imminent because of my inability to deal with the events of my childhood as a child. You can't pencil in resolution of those issues. When you're young and you endure these things you don't really know how to handle it. You just shove it down and defer it until mutiny is declared later.
Your neurosis picks you up with one hand by your throat, pushes you against the wall and says, "You will now pay attention".
You have to cope with it whether you like it or not. It can take a long time, but through therapy, role playing and other tried and true methods you and your neurosis develop a mutual respect.
What I am thankful for today is the gift of proper perspective which applies to my life from this point forward which is all anyone's life happens to be: this point forward.
All the events of my life have conspired to bring me to this very moment. It is a moment that I am happy to say finds me remarkably happy and content. If you ever get that you will realize that everything in your life has happened to bring you to that place.
I am thankful that I understand that life is short. Armed with the knowledge that my own death is unpredictable and a keen awareness of how lucky I am compared to many others gives me proper perspective. My life has no drama, not really.
These are things I remind myself of every day when I meditate and it is why I am in a Buddhist center in France: to practice proper perspective.
At night sometimes, especially now when the nights are cold and clear, I'll lie awake and stare out the tall ancient chateau windows at the night sky. It's so loud and I can't sleep because the stars are laughing at me as I crawl across this ant hill.
