Sketch: Atticus and Father

Atticus, through icy blue eyes masked by a mop of dark hair, penetrates a glare into his father who is "rat a tap tapping" on the family dinner table. Father's fingers pound down on the plastic, the plastic that wishes it was wood and imagines itself so with brown paint and darker circles and lines attempting to mimic the grain. Father's thumb is the bass drum leading the beat with a pounding rhythm inside of one of those faux circular grains. Father even leans into it with his upper body, as if pushing down a pedal, but Atticus can't see his father's feet through the railing from his spy perch on the stairs.

Atticus watches as his father's ring and index fingers, the hi-hat and snare, join almost automatically with the upper body convulsions and bass beat. Atticus' icy eyes glare with increasing intensity at his father's fingers and the fake wood of the dining table, while father's eyes look black and empty staring off in vacancy. Father's hand continues pounding rhythms in a mathematical fashion that makes father an automaton connected only to the fake wood with a long string of zeroes and ones.

From the beige carpeted stairs that grow out of the living room, Atticus sees his father through the doorway to the kitchen and dining room. Suddenly, the tapping stops. Atticus shoots up on his two legs and bolts down the steps. Without a word, he heads straight out the front door that beckons him at the bottom of the staircase. With Atticus gone, the tapping continues.

Restaurant

When I saw the white sign with the green lettering that read, “Food-Liquor-Motel,” I knew we were close to home. The little one-stop triumvirate was about fifteen miles from our home in Frederick. It was the end of a large stretch of farm fields, wooded parks, and a petting zoo that made up Thurmont and Emmitsburg.

            Seeing the sign brought back memories of the one time we stopped at the restaurant there. It wasn’t a pizza joint or a sandwich shop, they were actually trying to be a real restaurant, white tablecloths and all, directly off the side of a highway. The attempts at formality without a thought for current tastes froze the restaurant at least thirty years in the past, a 1960s steak house that was once the height of stylized dining for wealthy ad men in New York City. Being inside the restaurant, however, I felt more like the housewife waiting at home in suburbia for her husband as he downed drink after drink and hit on the waitresses in the city. A brown roast was drying up in the oven, bland mashed potatoes were crusting over in a pan on the stove, and green beans were cooking to smithereens in a vat of pig fat.

            The restaurant's food, in truth, was so bland and tasteless that I don’t even remember it. What I do remember is my father being angry about the food or the service, or both. The water glasses with smudges and stains were filled and then overfilled causing a spill into my mother’s lap. “Oh, oh, that’s okay,” she said trying to allay my father’s anger.

            “No, it’s not okay. Someone needs to get a towel and clean that up. Somebody needs to get over here and take our orders too,” my dad shouted at the busboy and the two other members of the wait staff wandering near our table. The bus boy ran off to grab a towel. He apologized for the mishap as he handed my mother the towel. My father glared at him. I was just glad that the young man didn’t attempt to over apologize by awkwardly mopping up my mother’s lap for her.

            Why we ever stopped at that restaurant, I will never know. Maybe it was the incessant screaming of my sister, “We’re hungry!” while I drowsily passed out from the soothing hum of the car engine.  My dad always responded with frustration, “I’m not stopping for fast food. I need some vegetables, Abby!” So many times we had passed that restaurant on our way home from a day trip to Gettyburg, but we never stopped. It was as if fate was determined that the Bateman family knew why they never stopped.

Rant on the Right

Rarely do I get fired up about political issues, but the past week or so of politics has made my blood boil. Of course, I think it is no coincidence that this feeling is coming to a head as the GOP candidates make their rounds for the Republican Presidential bid. My biggest problem with all of the Republican candidates is their lack of consistency. For example, Republicans claim to stand for liberty. Their favorite, as of late, is religious liberty. While defending this religious liberty, however, they are denying many Americans liberties and freedoms such as the right for gay men and women to marry. Furthermore, "religious liberty" seems to be defined more specifically as "protection of Christian mores." Christian "liberties" are defended so whole heartedly that the Bible becomes the words by which national laws are created. What ever happened to separation of church and state? The argument that we cannot allow gay marriage because it infringes on the rights of Christian Americans to define marriage in a particular way directly disagrees with the foundations of a free country. Remember the Declaration of Independence?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Yes, all men and women are created equal and should be granted the same rights. Everyone should have the right to marrying the person that he or she loves. We cannot conflate "belief" and "liberty." Someone can hold a different belief than you without infringing on your liberties. With that in mind, I have never heard a logical argument for why gay marriage is illegal in so many states. It is an embarrassment to our nation that this is a topic that is up for debate. Have we learned nothing from our past transgressions on the rights of our fellow humans?

Plath as inspiration

I decided to rename this blog. I have not posted anything in quite awhile, and I came to realize that this purpose of having this blog has changed for me. So, the name had to change too. The title is really a line from a passage in Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar:

One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor. . . . I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.


The quotation doesn't leave the reader with inspiration or hope necessarily (and Plath's suicide certainly doesn't scream those adjectives either), but there is a hopeful message in the fact everyone struggles with decisions. There is a powerful message for women in the fact that we are together in our struggle to conquer the many roles of professional, mother, wife, vixen, etc. Sylvia Plath's work reminds me that the things I struggle with do not alienate me; they make me a part of the human race. To struggle is to be human and to overcome that struggle, make something happen, that is when we start to let our divinity sparkle through (of course, only for it to come crashing back down again...humility, humility, humility).

Check out this wonderful article that reunited me with The Bell Jar on its 40th year: The Bell Jar at 40

"Live for A Living"

Live For A Living by Buddy Wakefield


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an excellent collection of Buddy Wakefield's poems and his thought processes that lead into his poetic work. My favorite poem is "Gandhi's Autobiography." He prefaces this poem with an anecdote from his life and the sentiment of feeling like the work a writer does is never good enough. But you can't sit down and expect to create a masterpiece every time. The idea is you are writing, and eventually that will lead you to something great. Action is better than inaction. Plus, regardless of its importance or greatness, it is expression. That is priceless. The poem itself is about humility. It is about recognizing your imperfections, your demand for other people. We can't all be Gandhi, but it is a source for inspiration even if you never get there. The truth is, recognizing that you are imperfect is what creates the best, most honest works of art.

Wakefield also has an excellent love poem in this book: "Giant Saint Everything." Again this poem is about imperfections. We say forever, but can we ever really promise that? We never know what is coming next. We never want to hurt each other, but pain is an inevitable part of love and life. The important message here about love: We may not always have each other, but we will always have our memories. No one can take those away.

My other favorite poem is "The Art of Die Smilingly." I see this poem as a commentary on the human desire to be remembered, and if you haven't done anything to be remembered by, then die with a big bang. But there is something more important than this selfish desire for fame, the love that is pulling you back to earth, the love of your family. He presents these images beautifully with a flashy neon sign and a rocketing jet pack on death day. With this line he changes the poem from a show, to a feeling: "willing to bet that if you just cool your jets long enough to drop the rocket act maybe you'll feel the glory in why everything keeps pulling on you relentless, towing you all the way back home." While you are up on your high horse, looking for glory and fame and escape from responsibilities, something always brings you back. There is something to be said of the simple glory of being an important person in your loved one's life. You will always be that to them if you are true to yourself and don't become blinded by selfish endeavors. There is beauty in the little things. People appreciate more that you helped them to cook dinner than bought them a personal chef. Love is about the little things. Love is about humility and recognizing that you will never be good enough, you will never be perfect, but the people who really love you will love you anyway.

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See the Cat? See the Cradle?

I finished Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. The themes Vonnegut develops throughout the story really dive into the thoughts that often overwhelm my thinking: "People tend to see what they want to, and read into what is there in reality. Religion is no exception to this." That is, people apply meaning to what would otherwise be meaningless. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut uses Bokononism (the religion he created for the text) to raise questions of the validity of any religion. Aspects of Bokononism seem so ridiculous while reading (although, some things make our hypocrisies so apparent). If not thinking from a culturally relative perspective, it is easy to look at Bokononism and question its validity, but by the end of the book we come to see why one would turn to it or come to believe in Bokononism. It could be a reason why one would turn to any religion. The protagonist states that he feels his karass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karass) has been moving him all along to climbing a mountain. He sees Bokonon and reads something he wrote which solidifies this belief. Have you ever heard of a story where someone turns to Jesus Christ because of a near death experience in which he/she saw or spoke to god? Have you ever heard of someone turning to god because they were compelled to take some specific action that turned their life around? Whether because good things are happening or bad, people are look for a reason why. They want to place it an orderly arrangement, so maybe it will happen again or they can avoid it. Coincidences just don't have the same flair as religion. Even people who don't accept religion are looking for some explanation of coincidences: math (probability/chance), science, or supernatural explanations. We have so many methods of applying meaning in our world. Are any of them really valid? I think it is just human beings trying to make sense of this world in the only way we know how. We think about it. We think about what, how, why... We try to place it in some orderly arrangement so we can understand more things. The minds of most humans are prone to label making (explains our struggle with prejudices) and grouping. There are so many things in this world, it would be pretty difficult to get by if we couldn't place each individual within a larger group. The ability to make comparisons allows us to consolidate our thoughts and ideas so we can not only have more but function in day to day life as well. Well, I am obviously digressing from Cat's Cradle, but really these are all ideas stemming from those I share with what Vonnegut expressed in the book. Vonnegut is making his readers ask the question: Are any religious practices and assumptions really valid? And I extend that to say what about science, math, philosophy, etc (of course, these types of assumptions are not followed by specific practices generally)? These are all theories or ideas created by human beings (and so, inherently flawed as our perceptions and understanding are really so limited in the grand scheme of things). We see with our two little eyes what we can, the brain receives that information and attempts to make sense of it so we know what we're seeing, then we can think and think and think about it. How can one human being or even a group of human beings find the absolute answer to anything we see or think about?