The Winter Holiday

The Winter Holiday

by | Commentary, Kenneth Weene

Are the holidays here already? Sometimes this season reminds me of the difference between a normal person, a neurotic, and a psychotic. Come morning, the normal person says, “I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work.” But they get up anyway and off they trudge.

Come morning, the neurotic says, “It’s morning. I really don’t have the energy to live.” And they pull the covers over their heads and go back to moaning sleep.

“Ah,” but the psychotic says, “It can’t be morning; I blew the sun out yesterday.”

It seems it was just yesterday that we dealt with this season. I remember it clearly: smiling through gritted teeth, wishing everyone a happy something while not remembering who they were or why on earth I was speaking to them, and worst of all giving and receiving gifts that were destined for a landfill in some country with no need of more plastic.

No! No! I know what you’re thinking. I am not Scrooge! I do not begrudge others their happiness. Please, feel free to watch all those movies once more, even the ones that were never intended to celebrate the holidays, even the ones that use farcical chipmunk voices and those that save depressed fools from drowning themselves. Make believe that you are home alone, if you wish. Just don’t invite me over to share that mock loneliness. I have better things to do, and they do not include shopping, especially not shopping in crowded malls the day after Thanksgiving.

Holidays shouldn’t be about shopping and spending money anyway. Nor about eating too much or drinking too much. By the way, when are there the most drunk-driving incidents? Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving. Yep. People getting drunk so they can tolerate being with the people they’re supposed to love.

“Well, then,” you might ask, “what should the holiday season be about?”

Gosh, I’m glad you ask me that. Let me start my answer with a big shoutout to seasonal affective disorder. Yes, Virginia, lack of daylight makes us depressed. It especially made our ancestors depressed because they weren’t really sure that winter would pass and that brighter, better-fed times would come. Imagine if you will a group of paleolithic warriors—men and women—dancing around a great monolith to appease a mystical being who might or might not allow the plants to again flower, the water to melt, and the bison or mammoth return to roaming nearby. “Where, by the way,” they undoubtedly wonder, “have all those birds gone?”

No wonder they were grouchy. Being hungry and cold, they were depressed, lethargic a good part of the time, lacking much motivation—except of course when it came to trying to appease that god who controlled the cold wind blowing down from the north.

If we can identify with those hungry, scared cave-dwellers, we might be better able to appreciate what the holiday season could mean: a last-ditch effort to reassure themselves that the world wasn’t going to end, that they weren’t going to starve, that the forces they could not understand would not abandon them.

We all of us, even in these “modern times,” need that reassurance. We turn to tradition so that we know what to expect—albeit now a turkey and canned cranberry sauce instead of the return of the geese. Some of those traditions might still involve a god or two. But, let’s be honest, are people any more enthusiastic about singing Come All Ye Faithful than they are when belting out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

I have no quarrel with our human need for hope and reassurance. I, too, like to glance into the abyss and hope that something will pull me back. Perhaps we speak here of the umbilical cord of the soul. I just don’t displace that basic human need into rooting for my college football team, who may or may not win or even play in a holiday bowl this year. I do not pin my hopes for salvation on a package left under a tree that has been cut down simply to be decorated and discarded in distant memorialization of the logs that ancestors once burned those long and fearful winter nights in the dark wood.

No, in darkness I search not for tokens of religions, nor for their sacraments, not even for the still small voices of their gods. Neither is it the assurance of science I seek, not even a cosmology based on astronomy, the third law of thermodynamics, or the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. At the moment of the abyss, I know that science offers no more certainty for the next moment than faith.

I can, perhaps, turn inward. I can allow my life to flash before me and with a deep sigh perhaps reflect that I have done it my way. Yes, at that moment, I can decide that I have indeed blown out the sun, that perhaps madness makes the most sense after all. Well, if I have to spin another dreidel, sing All I want for Christmas one more time, or even admire another belighted and star-bearing tree resplendent in gaudiness, I will go mad any way.

So, let’s hear for the holy days of psychosis when we realize that it’s all over and doesn’t matter because, well, because we are humans and can make believe that depression is joy and that the ever-shortening days demonstrate hope that tomorrow might just be sunnier.

Are the holidays here already? Sometimes this season reminds me of the difference between a normal person, a neurotic, and a psychotic. Come morning, the normal person says, “I’m tired. I really don’t want to go to work.” But they get up anyway and off they trudge.

Come morning, the neurotic says, “It’s morning. I really don’t have the energy to live.” And they pull the covers over their heads and go back to moaning sleep.

“Ah,” but the psychotic says, “It can’t be morning; I blew the sun out yesterday.”

It seems it was just yesterday that we dealt with this season. I remember it clearly: smiling through gritted teeth, wishing everyone a happy something while not remembering who they were or why on earth I was speaking to them, and worst of all giving and receiving gifts that were destined for a landfill in some country with no need of more plastic.

No! No! I know what you’re thinking. I am not Scrooge! I do not begrudge others their happiness. Please, feel free to watch all those movies once more, even the ones that were never intended to celebrate the holidays, even the ones that use farcical chipmunk voices and those that save depressed fools from drowning themselves. Make believe that you are home alone, if you wish. Just don’t invite me over to share that mock loneliness. I have better things to do, and they do not include shopping, especially not shopping in crowded malls the day after Thanksgiving.

Holidays shouldn’t be about shopping and spending money anyway. Nor about eating too much or drinking too much. By the way, when are there the most drunk-driving incidents? Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving. Yep. People getting drunk so they can tolerate being with the people they’re supposed to love.

“Well, then,” you might ask, “what should the holiday season be about?”

Gosh, I’m glad you ask me that. Let me start my answer with a big shoutout to seasonal affective disorder. Yes, Virginia, lack of daylight makes us depressed. It especially made our ancestors depressed because they weren’t really sure that winter would pass and that brighter, better-fed times would come. Imagine if you will a group of paleolithic warriors—men and women—dancing around a great monolith to appease a mystical being who might or might not allow the plants to again flower, the water to melt, and the bison or mammoth return to roaming nearby. “Where, by the way,” they undoubtedly wonder, “have all those birds gone?”

No wonder they were grouchy. Being hungry and cold, they were depressed, lethargic a good part of the time, lacking much motivation—except of course when it came to trying to appease that god who controlled the cold wind blowing down from the north.

If we can identify with those hungry, scared cave-dwellers, we might be better able to appreciate what the holiday season could mean: a last-ditch effort to reassure themselves that the world wasn’t going to end, that they weren’t going to starve, that the forces they could not understand would not abandon them.

We all of us, even in these “modern times,” need that reassurance. We turn to tradition so that we know what to expect—albeit now a turkey and canned cranberry sauce instead of the return of the geese. Some of those traditions might still involve a god or two. But, let’s be honest, are people any more enthusiastic about singing Come All Ye Faithful than they are when belting out Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?

I have no quarrel with our human need for hope and reassurance. I, too, like to glance into the abyss and hope that something will pull me back. Perhaps we speak here of the umbilical cord of the soul. I just don’t displace that basic human need into rooting for my college football team, who may or may not win or even play in a holiday bowl this year. I do not pin my hopes for salvation on a package left under a tree that has been cut down simply to be decorated and discarded in distant memorialization of the logs that ancestors once burned those long and fearful winter nights in the dark wood.

No, in darkness I search not for tokens of religions, nor for their sacraments, not even for the still small voices of their gods. Neither is it the assurance of science I seek, not even a cosmology based on astronomy, the third law of thermodynamics, or the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. At the moment of the abyss, I know that science offers no more certainty for the next moment than faith.

I can, perhaps, turn inward. I can allow my life to flash before me and with a deep sigh perhaps reflect that I have done it my way. Yes, at that moment, I can decide that I have indeed blown out the sun, that perhaps madness makes the most sense after all. Well, if I have to spin another dreidel, sing All I want for Christmas one more time, or even admire another belighted and star-bearing tree resplendent in gaudiness, I will go mad any way.

So, let’s hear for the holy days of psychosis when we realize that it’s all over and doesn’t matter because, well, because we are humans and can make believe that depression is joy and that the ever-shortening days demonstrate hope that tomorrow might just be sunnier.

On Love

On Love

by | Commentary

On love, thoughts from this man.

Some words mean so much, carry so much emotion that they overwhelm us. Usually, these are words we cannot adequately define. Oh sure, we can look them up in dictionaries, but those definitions don’t do justice to the emotion evoked. One such word is love.

When we are in love, words often become stumbling blocks. We start to tell that special someone about our feelings and even the simplest words turn to tongue twisters, to feeble attempts to express the intensity of our emotions.

We may resort to gestures: flowers, candy, perhaps even lingerie or sexy accessories. We may get down on one knee and propose, usually a commitment called marriage but perhaps just to propose that that so special other person understands we are in—that word again—love with them.

How do we know we are in love? Perhaps it is the sense of preoccupation. That other person is always present in our mind: We dream of them; We want them near to us; We need to know that they are okay. Of course, such concern can take an unhealthy turn, one in which we must be in control, one in which that other person is not loved as separate from us but is felt to be part of us, to belong to us.

True love is preoccupied and protective, but it is not possessive. To love is to want the other to flourish, to individuate, to be the best they can. Even when those we love fail, we are not there to simply pick them up. No, we must help them to pick themselves up and go on. Their growth matters to us.

Those we love need to know that we can share their defeats and continue to love. They need to know that their failures and foibles do not push us away but allow us to better share with them. To love is to know that pain and tears can connect us because there is “no end to the tears of the heart.”

We must always remember that love is the language of possibility and of connection. Love defies time. We may not know what tomorrow will bring, but we have faith in true love that our relationship will endure.

Wishing you a loving relationship so true that it will last forever.

 

 

After Jeremiah 31:16

After Jeremiah 31:16

by | Commentary

Did they cry for their mothers?
Pray to a god? Ask for mercy?

Perhaps they died without a sound
not a whimper or tear.

Nobody talks about their actual deaths
about this slaughter of innocents.

We remember them for their could-have-beens­:
hopes, wishes, childhood dreams

delusions of a better place where children
are safe from madmen’s hands.

This one an athlete another a chef;
this one perhaps a dancer, poet, doctor, nurse

a writer of tales a lover of dogs.
Now bloodied and their faces blown away.

Did they wonder why their fathers did not come?
Did they shudder at the popping sounds?

Did their dying bodies jerk
about the classroom’s cold vinyl floor?

I wonder if they cried in pain.
Can we explain to them why
that madman came to school that day?

By Kenneth Weene

 

Good Morning – Goodbye

Good Morning – Goodbye

by | Commentary, Kenneth Weene

I say good morning to them all…by name. Do inanimate objects have names? Perhaps even souls? I think so. I greet them in order. First the stuffed animals. Thackeray the sloth is always first. After him, I make the living room rounds. Bloomie, also a stuffed sloth—this one looking like the businessman turned politician—never responds. On the other hand, I refuse to greet his Samoan imaginary followers who somehow live with us—six original delegates to the Democratic convention plus one born here, all he has to show for $500 million spent campaigning. I don’t know their names, only that they insist on ordering imaginary spam for which I refuse to pay.

The list goes on. I won’t tell you all the names, not the categorizations of their being except to mention the last two greetings of each morning. Delores del Rio and Rive Gauche sit beside our comfortable chairs, the ones in which we watch television and in which we plan to die. Delores and Rive have a lot to do with that last statement; they are the means of our self-exiting. Tanks of inert gas, one for my wife and one for myself.

I won’t spell out the methodology for our exits. Suffice it to say that we have studied up and that we are strong supporters of Final Exit Network and a related group, Choice and Dignity, in our home city. When it comes time to exit, I don’t know if I will say goodbye to Thackeray, Bloomie, or any of the other beings, real, imaginary, or in-between, with whom I interact each day. Indeed, at that point I may not remember their names. No longer remembering is one of the metrics I have set out, the measures of when enough of life is enough.

To me, life is a thing of choice and of dignity. I want quality, not quantity. When I can no longer live with the joy and sense of accomplishment that has become my expectation, I will use Rive, my tank, and the accouterments which are stored nearby to end the downward trajectory. Those metrics are the method by which I will measure when the last day has come. Remembering all those names is one of the metrics.

Another might seem rather simple: bending over and picking up a small piece of debris from the floor. That’s a simple act, but when balance and coordination go, the simple becomes difficult. I don’t have to drop something on the floor to test myself. There are enough bits and pieces floating through our lives to provide the test kit without having to think about it. Just pick a bit of paper or a crumb of food that has found its way to the carpet, bend over—albeit with the sense that a can of WD-40 might be in order—and pick it up.

A third is doing my on-line banking. I have three linked accounts. Each morning, I go online and quickly add them. The grand total is my goal. Not because of the money it represents but because it requires some quick mental calculation. Can I estimate the sum or am I befogged by numbers?

For now, just one more daily test. What will I have on my bagel? Today, it was butter and some bacon on the side. There are usually four or five cheese options plus that butter and then there is lox in addition to the bacon. Quick, Ken, what are you having today? Can your mind work that flexibly?

One day, I won’t pass all the tests. Then there will come a day when I fail two. When that happens, it’s time for goodbye. I will give Thackeray a hug. I don’t know if I will remember his name. I won’t hug Bloomie. As for the rest of the crew, well, I have no idea. I only hope I can remember how to hook everything up and how to turn Rive’s valve.

No doubt, you are wondering if I will have Thackeray on my lap when I turn that valve. No. He might try to talk me out of it. I will have my stuffed moose, Potty, on my lap. I know that he won’t try to intervene. He will say, “Whatever,” and kiss my nose. Potty understands that life and death are waystations on an adventure and who are we to know where souls may be found.

BOOKS BY KENNETH WEENE ARE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON CLICK HERE  

A Gesture of Love

A Gesture of Love

by | Friends Sharing

I hear the tree branches hitting what sits above me and the howls of wind outside the house.  I rush to mom and sit at her side. She strokes my face and tells me it is okay; not to be afraid and it is only wind.  Yet, I am fearful. Even when she kisses me on top of my head, I can’t keep my fear at bay. She leaves the room and I am alone.

What’s that noise? I think it is coming from the kitchen, so I move and peek from the office door and watch. Is mom upset? Because she is forcing Joey into a cage. Why would she do this? He is howling and fighting to get free. A patch of his hair falls to the floor. He looks horrified and keeps screaming as mom latches the door shut.  I don’t understand.  She would never harm us.

Next, I see her pick up CharLee and stuff her inside another large cage. CharLee holds the door open and is screeching. She scratches mom with her long nails. I see the blood begin to form around moms’ wound. Yet, this does not stop her. She pushes CharLee back inside and again slams the door shut and locks the latch Though CharLee is screaming, mom ignores her pleas and I watch as she runs from room to room, bringing with her bits of clothing and personal items. I watch as she stuffs them in a plastic bag.

Her gaze turns to me. There is panic in her face, so I back up as she approaches. I hear her say, “Come here, little guy. Mommy loves you; I won’t hurt you. Come here, sweetie.” Well, I’ve heard those words before, and they mean only one thing – something I shall surely detest is about to happen.

The dogs, Harry and Rooney rush to her which averts her attention from me. I take this chance to hide in the closet and pick a spot I can still peer out to see what is going on but be safe from getting discovered. I watch mom attach a leash to both dog’s collar. Guess it is ‘potty time’ Yet, she tells them to stay and she’ll be right back. I cannot see her now

She is calling for me, but I stay silent. Something is going on and I do not want to be a part of any of it. I hear scuffling and then the slam of the front door. I slip into the secret hiding place within the wall. She’ll never find me here.

You see, I know mom is growing old.  She already must carry two animals and pull the two dogs, on foot. I know dad takes the car each day, so I wonder why she must do this now.

As if to answer my question, she shouts out, ‘Mommy has to go, sweetie. They are evacuating us. Fire is heading our way. Please, honey, please come to mama”

Fire. I’ve seen pictures of it on TV and I did burn myself by touching the hot burner on the stove-top. Mom told me to be careful; that I could catch the house on fire. So, I know fire is not a good thing.

After two more attempts to get me to come with her, I hear footsteps leaving the room. I am so afraid.  If only mom knew how much I want to leap into the safety of her arms and be carried away.  If only there was a means to tell her how much I love her. I love her so much that I must be brave and strong this time. I must remain hidden until she leaves.

The wind is howling through the rooftop and I hear mom talking to someone outside. I can’t make out what she is saying. Maybe I should run to her right now and tell her she is right; that I am weak and cowardly. Dad and mom are always saying I don’t have to be afraid, but everything scares me. Well, this is my time to prove them wrong.

I run to the window and peer out. Mom is gone as well as the animals. It is getting dark now. The last thing I heard mom say to me was she loves me. The room is filled with something I’ve never seen before. It is thickening the air and it is grayish-black in color. It smells funny. I hear crackling above me.

Look, mom, I am not afraid anymore. I am brave and strong as you asked of me each day. I hold your last words of love within my heart as I fall into a deep sleep from the smoke-filled room.

⁕⁕⁕

It has been a couple of weeks since I last saw my family and my mom.  I keep hearing her calling my name and directing me to where she and dad are now living. The force of their love is drawing me toward them. But I can’t get through into their dimension. I am now floating through space and time and find myself on a farm. I see dad drive up and when he opens the car door, I jump into his arms.

Dad cuddles me and holds me close to his heart and rushes to open the milk barn door and bring me to my mom. She squeals with delight and grabs me from dad’s arms and puts me on the bed. She strokes my hair and kisses my head. It feels so good to be home. I sit in her lap and purr and purr and purr.

⁕⁕⁕

The woman awakes to the sound of the cell phone’s alarm. She sobs and wails in disappointment. No! How could it be a dream? She’d held him in her arms. She’d petted his coat. She felt him just as if he was in the room with her.

She rushes to her husbands’ arms and tells him of Stubby cat’s visit; how real it was; how she smelled him and touched him. How his body was alive and warm and how it all crashed to pieces when the alarm brought about reality. Yes, he was gone. In her heart and soul, she knew this and as she lay down on the bed, tears of grief, blame and love poured forth.

⁕⁕⁕

I watch mom cry and wish I could be with her again. Dad is at her side trying his best to fight back his own tears. If I could tell them one thing, it would be how I chose to sacrifice my own well being to ensure the rest of my family made it to safety. More than anything, I want mom and dad to know, when faced with such danger, my love for them meant more than my own life. For I saw that mom could never carry my big orange kitty body, along with all the other animals, to safety Yes, I was no longer fearful. But proud I had shown I was no longer the Scardy Cat mom had saved from being euthanized so many years ago. I am brave and strong and will watch over my family, in spirit, for as long as they live.

And, I purr loudly.

 

Monica Brinkman,

Host, It Matters Radio