by Brian Doyle
Our father does not have his uniform anymore, but he does have a wooden box in a drawer in his bureau at home. There are medals and service bars and ribbons in the box. We have secretly opened the box, my brother and I, and handled its contents, and put them back exactly the way we found them, so that he would not know, but he knows. His photographs are in another drawer. In them he is tall and thin and shockingly young. He is a private, a sergeant, a lieutenant. He is on Bougainville Island in the South Pacific. Then he is in the Philippines. He is preparing for the invasion of Japan. He is preparing to die.
Today he is standing next to us at the Memorial Day parade as the soldiers and sailors pass by. Some men in the crowd salute, but he does not. He keeps his eyes locked on the soldiers, though, even as we are pulling at his hands and pant legs and the baby is crying and wriggling. The one time he hands off the baby and applauds quietly is when the firemen pass by in their trucks. After the firemen come the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and the Little League baseball players, and the Knights of Columbus, and the Rotary Club, and finally a visiting fife-and-drum corps from Ireland, and then we walk home, our dad carrying the baby, who fell asleep just after the Girl Scouts walked by.
100th Street
By chance I was in New York City seven months after September 11, and I saw a moment that I still turn over and over in my mind like a puzzle, like a koan, like a prism.
I had spent the day at a conference crammed with uninformed opinions and droning speeches and stern lectures, and by the evening I was weary of it all, weary of being sermonized by pompous authority, weary of the cocksure and the arrogant and the tin-eared, weary of what sold itself as deeply religious but was actually grim moral policing with not the slightest hint of mercy or humility in the air, and I slipped out and away from the prescribed state dinner, which promised only more speeches and lectures.
I was way up on the upper west side of the Island of the Manhattoes, near the ephemeral border of Harlem, and as I was in the mood to walk off steam, I walked far and wide; down to the Sailors and Soldiers Monument, by the vast Hudson River, and up to Joan of Arc Park, with Joan on her rearing charger, and up to the Firemen’s Memorial on 100th Street. I thought about wandering up to the great old castle church of Saint John the Divine on 111th Street but by now I was footsore and yearning for beer and I stepped into a bar.
It was that russet hour between evening and night and the bar was populous but not crowded. Most of the people seemed to have stopped by for a beer after work. One table of men in the corner wore the faded coveralls of telephone linemen or public utility workers. Another table of mature women were in the bland dark uniforms of corporate staff. Interestingly there was a young Marine in glittering full dress uniform at the bar, with two older men I took to be his father and uncle, perhaps; they were laughing and resting their hands affectionately on his shoulders and he was smiling and savoring their hands like they were pet birds he had not had on his shoulders for a long time.
I got a beer and sat in the corner and watched as the bartender, who wore a lovely old-style long bowtie, set a beer in front of the Marine and waved off the uncle’s offer to pay, and his little cheerful gesture made me happy, and I concluded that this would be the gentle tender respectful highlight of a day in which there had been very little respect and tenderness, but then the door opened, and two young firemen walked in. They were not in full dress uniform but they had their FDNY shirts on, and I noticed their sturdy work boots, and somehow you could tell that they were firemen and not just guys who happened to be wearing FDNY shirts.
They took a few steps toward the bar, and then something happened that I will never forget. Everyone in the bar stood up, silently. The table of women stood up first, I noticed, and then everyone else stood up, including me. I thought perhaps someone would start to applaud but no one made a sound. The men standing at the bar turned and faced the firemen, and then the young Marine drew himself up straight as a tree and saluted the firemen, and then his father and uncle saluted too, and then everyone else in the bar saluted the firemen. I tell you that there wasn’t a sound in the place, not the clink of a glass or the shuffle of feet or a cough or anything.
After a few seconds one of the firemen nodded to everyone, and the other fireman made a slight gesture of acknowledgement with his right hand, and the bartender set two beers on the bar, and everyone sat down again, and everything went on as before; but not.
God Again
Had a brief chat with God the other day. This was at the United States Post Office. God was manning the counter from one to five, as he does every blessed day. He actually says every blessed day and he means it. You never saw a more patient being. He never loses his cool and believe me he could. I would. I have been in line behind crazies at his window and heard vituperative abuse and vulgar character assassination and scurrilous insinuation and never once did I witness any flash of temper in response to this on his part. I have asked him how he could maintain his cool and he says things like I try to put myself in their position and Witnessing vented emotion is part of the job and All storms blow over and It’s only frustration and There are so many much more serious things and We are all neighbors in the end. I am impressed by these sentiments, in large part because I share them consistently in theory but inconsistently in practice. God, however, does not waver nor does he fluctuate in his equanimity. He stands there quietly as people bang their fists on his counter and offer rude remarks and stomp away muttering darkly. He does not smile when someone gets upset. He says he has learned that some people get more upset if you smile when they are upset. He listens to what they say and often, I notice, he makes a note on a pad as they leave. I make a note if I think they have a good point we should discuss with management, he says. Often what is couched as a complaint is actually a good point about how we could be of better service. He remembers pretty much every regular who comes to his window and he greets them politely by name. Sometimes he will inquire after children and animals. Dogs adore God and will sometimes rear up on his counter to see him better. He greets them politely by name surprisingly often. I would guess I know a hundred dogs by name, he says. Hardly any cats. People don’t take their cats with them when they go to the Post Office. I make a joke about how cats are the children of Lucifer and he does not smile and I realize later that probably Lucifer is still a deeply sad and touchy subject for him. How would you feel if one of your best friends, one of your most trusted companions, tried to steal everything you had and were and did, and for this breathtaking betrayal he was cast shrieking into the darkness, no longer the Shining One, the Morning Star, but the very essence of squirming withered despair, until the end of time? Wouldn’t you be haunted and sad about that ever after? I would. I felt bad and told God I was sorry about making a stupid joke. I said I made stupid jokes all the time even though I was now an older citizen and ought to have learned by now to not be so flippant. And God said, No worries, and Better a poor joke than something worse, and Do you want to use the book rate for your package, which will save you about five bucks? And I said yes, sir, and thank you, and walked out of the Post Office thinking that if we cannot see God in the vessels into which the electricity of astonishing life is poured by a profligate creation, vessels like this wonderfully and eternally gracious gentleman at the Post Office, then we are very bad at the religion we claim to practice, which says forthrightly that God is everywhere available, if only we remove the beam from our eyes, and bow in humility and gratitude for the miraculous, which falleth even as the light from the sun, which touches all beings, and is withheld from none. So it is that I have seen God at the United States Post Office, and spoken to him, and been edified and elevated by his grace, which slakes all those who thirst; which is each of us, which is all of us.
Beer with Peter
Twice in this life I had a beer with the great wry complicated writer, mystic, and adventurer Peter Matthiessen, and both times we ended up having more than one beer, and both times Peter ended up t
elling me one story after another with great high glee, and both times he finally said, Well, I had better get going, beer on me next time. But then Peter went and died, a year ago in April, and every couple of weeks or so, when I see his name, or see a face as craggy and ravined and humorous and weathered and amused as his, I think of his tall stooped lean grace, his lovely prose, and the fact that he owes me something like six beers, which I am never going to get in this lifetime, but hope to get later, if I have a chance to sit down with Peter again, and listen to him tell me stories with great high glee.
At dinner once with two other guests, I heard Peter explain quite seriously how he was convinced he was the direct descendant of Matthias, the 13th apostle, the one who was elected after Judas Iscariot came to an untimely end. But the times I sat and drank beer with him in Oregon, and we laughed ourselves silly, stay with me as the best times I had with Peter, and I would like to take a moment and remember those times.
He had joined the Navy in 1945, and been assigned to Hawaii, and being a bright and unprincipled young man, Peter set up a system whereby he could sell passes for the use of motor vehicles, which was not a practice approved by the Navy, although the Navy, he said, did not know about it, and perhaps still does not know about it, until now. He also set up baseball leagues for Navy personnel in Hawaii, he said, and when I asked if he had made money from that too he said no, although he had certainly thought about it, but the only way he could see to profit would be to promote cheating, and it would be a low sort of man who would cheat at baseball. He talked about his travels in Nepal and Africa and Latin America and the Antarctic; he talked about his travels in Indian Country, as he called the vast poor brave rough sad ancient lands on which so many aboriginal Americans live today; he talked about being a commercial fisherman off Long Island, which was called Paumonok by the first peoples there, he noted, and ought to be called Paumonok again, rather than Long Island, which is a remarkably unimaginative label for such a lovely place. He talked about being a Buddhist, and about his days in Paris after the war, and about his hundreds and perhaps thousands of friends among the writers and photographers and painters and poets and mystics and adventurers of the world, which in a way, as he said, is pretty much everyone, don’t you think?
He talked about his beer belly, what there was of it, which he thought every man of sense ought to have after age 60 or so, or else perhaps you have been too abstemious, too penurious, too fearful of joy, as he said. He talked about his predilection for vests, which he loved for their plethora of pockets, in which you could put fishing ephemera and good pens and small notebooks and cool feathers, such as the owl feather he had the second time we met for beer.
He was a wonderful talker, a raconteur, funny and observant and memorious, and he had the great talker’s gift of pausing occasionally and asking you questions and listening intently to you, so that your time would seem conversational, though it was much more a great storyteller patient with and amused by an apprentice storyteller; and most of all, I think, he was liable to humor, and humble enough, despite a healthy ego and sense of himself, to know very well that humor is the final frontier, that humor has something crucially to do with humility, and that humility is very probably the one inarguable mark of maturity, and whatever it is we mean when we use the word wisdom.
I suspect Peter had many travails and shadows in his life, most of them probably caused by or abetted by himself; I remember flashes and intimations of sadness in his talk, in his extraordinary mountainside of a face; but I will remember best and most his liability to humor, and the fact that he owes me something like six beers, which I very much hope to sip, somehow, someday, while listening to the direct descendant of the Apostle Matthias. Rest in peace, Peter; rest in the knowledge that many people remember you with affection and respect and laughter, and that millions more will read your books for centuries to come, and so meet you for themselves; perhaps, happily, while sipping beer.
The Lair
A while ago a man delivered the most stunning speech I ever heard. It was not taped and it was not delivered from a text, so there is no record of it, except in the stunned hearts of the fifty people who heard it. I have thought about his talk pretty much every day since, and I want to try to re-create it here, so that you will think about it every day, too. Perhaps then something will happen.
The man who delivered the talk is a devout Buddhist. Twice in recent years he traveled from his home in America to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps in Poland. In these dark scars on the earth two million people were roasted because they were Jewish. People from all over the world now go to these camps to pray.
The man and his companions stayed in those dark scars for a week at a time, wandering through the camps, weeping, sitting for long hours in prayer, walking silent through the silent museums. Some of his companions were so oppressed by the spoor of evil that they could not rise from their beds.
One night at Auschwitz, he said, we were all gathered together in one room, more than a hundred of us, when a rabbi with us reached out with both hands and grasped the hands of the people standing next to him. Slowly most of the people in the room began to hold hands, and then they began to sway a little, and then some began to gently dance, and then, he said, there rose up in that room such a powerful joy that we were stunned and speechless and confused. Nearly every person in that room felt that sweeping joy, he said, but not everyone; several people ran out, horrified that there was dancing and joy here at the very lair of evil.
What happened that night? he asked. How could there be dancing at Auschwitz?
I do not know, he said. Help me find an answer.
When we came down from the trees sixty million years ago, he said, we were naked and slow and weak, and to survive we evolved superb brains and great ferocity and an endless thirst for killing, and that is why we kill everything, including each other. We are capable of unspeakable evil, every one of us. The Nazis are in us. No one can be at Auschwitz and not feel evil twitching in himself. It is the place where arguments end.
But, he said, what if our moral evolution sped up now as fast as our physical and intellectual evolution has? What if this is happening to many of us already? What if this evolution sometimes feels like reasonless joy? What might our world become if this is so?*
* The speaker was Peter Matthiessen, who told me the same story as I was driving him up the Blackfoot River to fly fish. The “rabbi” is Tetsugen Bernard Glassman, a Zen Buddhist roshi and Peter’s friend. To experience joy at Auschwitz and Birkenau, Peter told me, was no laughing matter. He tried to write of it for years but couldn’t find a way to do so without alienating Jewish friends. He finally solved the riddle, fearlessly, fatally, by contracting terminal cancer and spending his last months fictionalizing the experiences in his last book, the novel In Paradise. Peter was gracious to Jewish friends in describing the joy: he makes his protagonist’s account ambiguous. Did the joy really happen? Even if it did, might it have been some kind of desperate group hallucination? But when Peter described his experiences on our way up the Blackfoot, there was no ambiguity. Two times, he said, turning “his extraordinary mountainside of a face” toward me so his eyes could say I mean this, Peter and the majority of two groups of people, after a horrendous week, were assailed by a sustained joy that moved those who didn’t flee to join hands and gently dance, though only the joy itself knew why.
A Song for Nurses
The first time I saw a nurse I was four years old and someone had cut my tonsils out and I woke up addled to find a cheerful woman wearing white leaning over me and murmuring something gentle. The room was all white and the bed was all white and there were white curtains framing the window. I thought I had died and was in heaven and the woman leaning over me was an angel. I was deeply relieved to be in heaven because I had recently sinned grievously and my brother still had a black eye. For a moment I wondered if the woman smiling at me was the Madonna but then I remembered the Madonna wore blue. The woman lea
ning over me then said gently, everything will be all right, which it was, after a time during which I discovered that I was not dead and that she was a nurse. For me ever since nurses are essentially angelic and gentle and witty and brilliant and holy beings who bring light and peace, even though I know they must have dark nights when they are weary and sad and thrashed by despair like a beach by a tide.
