So once again, like a deer caught in the headlights of oncoming traffic, all my good words flee and i am faced with a blank page. It is unbelievable to me that i could have ever reached a saturation with rain where enough became too much - enough already · 3 months ago at the beginning of September a character on the expat page posted a line from “Forrest Gump” - ‘then one day it began raining and it rained for the next four months’, pretty sure neither of us gave much credence to the anthropological reference; nothing i’d seen in my previous year would suggest truth to what i’m sure was meant as humor; yet here 3 months past and 13 typhoons later - still it rains · At my college graduation - the quote on my cake read from William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” · ‘Enough or Too Much;’ that wife did not make it past the emergency appendectomy, but the memory of my University graduation did. I elected to forgo the trappings of cap and gown, then found myself glommed onto by the only other person in the crowd of graduates to leave go his cap and gown.
Writing now, i feel nothing but compassion that person having made such a daring choice, or economic, idk, then clutch at the only other recognizable individual in the crowd. The error is mine for not having the moral courage and compassion to open my heart and embrace him like a brother, rather than a rival for notoriety that his all too human gesture then represented to my fledgling, however aged intellect. It was only the beginning of a long road of lessons from that day day forward. I was a 50 year-old college graduate, but by g_d i was a graduate. Pop could not remember where he parked the car, foreshadowing a memory fade which served to rend the tender fabric of a never-close family to shreds soon. Some within that constellation would argue the point given their conceit of strong family ties, but from where i stand, he my father was left alone searching for the car that carried the memories of a loving family to his mission at the church of learning. My stepfather couldn’t wait, and so it was a graduation dinner fraught with all that was to define the later days of that merry band of fellows - myself included ·
My stepfather was a complicated factor in a complicated equation - suffice it to say he conned me to gain the love of my mother · and that is enough. She will die happy because he loved her as best he could with the cards he was dealt. Much havoc was wrought however with the collision of his patrician old money roots and the working class DNA Ma had finagled herself out of. I believe to this day that the walk my stepfather and i took the day we first met with nothing but a tennis ball between us was an honest and decent exchange of positions and that his intentions were honorable - that they moved their household and the economic center of gravity of our conjoined families to the deepest recesses of the canyons of Beverly Hills is an entirely different issue. Leo was a CEO of an insurance brokerage firm and as such swam in waters which none in my family knew - including Ma. The ensuing confusion involved, basic loyalties, to the extent, i once stood in the exiting aisles of a cultural event torn between the call of my father and my mother’s husband. I apologize Pa, i selected wrong and followed the wrong leader.
Again, none of these humans i describe herein are evil; i am simply attempting to describe the inequity that wealth can wreak on normal relations - including that of one’s own understanding of self. Leo came ill, an inexplicable wasting and i tried to ameliorate using metaphysical therapy based on an arrogant, however plausible quote by Pablo Picasso - “When art is properly understood, it will cure the toothache.” At great personal sacrifice with little regard for my effort i transported a 5’ granite femur to a window in the desert where my stepfather could see it as he lay wasting away for no other reason than he favored it. I am not claiming to be all “that,” nor was my gesture devoid of self-interest. My gesture did not save him from his destiny; whether it provided him any comfort, i’ll never know. I do know that same femur gained my last wife a dental implant when she sold it at a loss to my “best friend,” unbeknownst to me, while our marriage was collapsing which mostly added grist to that mill of domestic destruction.
Neither of those two characters are in a position to gain much traction with me, nor are they vile or despicable creatures simply because they betrayed me at my most vulnerable; if anything they have become Professors Emeritus at the University of J.Todd; helping me to better understand the character of those i know, those i’ve known and those i may someday think i know. For example, having spent 22 years gaining a Bachelors Degree in English - i understand better than most the cost of education, and having spent nearly as many years in one institution of Fine Art Study or another - i know what i know, and what i don’t know · I know i would have to live a 1,000 lifetimes to begin to appreciate the ineffable quality of really fine art, i can also tell you at a glance, what is dreck, what is fake and who is in it for the money; i’m not going to tell you what i’ve learned for it might rob me of my last great amusement - laughter.
jts 01/12/2020
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