Ring Tones

I prewoke the alarm yesterday morning, and turned it off. It was 5:10, which left 5 minutes of bedtime. The clock radio would emit a loud click at 5:15, but there would be no ensuing NPR news drone, so I lay there with one eye open, hoping a trickle of morning light would be enough to keep my reticular activating system activated. I listened to the sounds of the morning -- hungry cats stirring on the floor, DK breathing, and two musical notes, pitched a major third apart: mourning dove and the little morse-code-like tinnitus in my right ear. A pleasant, quiet duet. Just enough.

But it didn't take long to re-enter the world of more-than-enough.

At the click of the clock I got up and headed toward the shower. DK had propped a fresh bottle of the usual shampoo on the towel rack. After a long search when good old Ivory Shampoo disappeared from the cosmetological marketplace, DK and I settled on this type. Its main virtue ? It looks and smells like soap. Regular, plain, clean-smelling soap. Not a fruit stand, spice shelf or tropical garden. Soap.

It may have been our usual shampoo, but it came in a new type of bottle with an ominous new boast on the label. "Now With Amino Acids !!!" As if I didn't already feel guilty enough about using shampoo with various animal-related fats, now they'd gone and added animal protein to it. "Great," I thought. "Why not just blenderize and bottle a cow ?" As if putting "amino acids" on hair did anything anyway.

After a brief mea culpa, I dumped the stuff on my head. Cue spice rack in a fruit stand by a tropical garden. Full of musky quarupeds in heat. I gagged. And rinsed. And rinsed. And RINSED. No avail. I would have to stave off musky quadrupeds all day. Great. Multiple Chemical Sensitivity patients within a radius of ten miles of me would collapse in death throes. I'd have to shave my head. Or scalp myself. Or submit to the guillotine.

Which brings me to the topic of ring tones. For cell phones. Who would have thought there were so many bad jingles in the world, made worse by translation into electronic beeps ? Apparantly these have become commodities. The marketplace trafficks in these odious things. Believe me when I tell you I have heard the whole musical (sic) spectrum of these. Emitting from patients' purses and pockets. Interrupting my brilliant medical advice.

"Sir or Madame, you appear to have a viral upper respiratory infection, and consequently antibiotics will not help...."

Cue: Frantic, beeping rendition of I can't get no satisfaction. Embarrassed patient fumbles in purse or pocket. Brief, whispered furtive conversation ensues.

Hello ? Oh, hi, hon. I'm at the doctor. No the DOCtor. I'm in the exam room. Uh huh. Yes. Right now. I'm with the doctor. No, I told you. What ? No, that won't work. Call Frank. The number's on the table by the TV. I still think we should go with the chocolate. At BJ's. Put it on the VISA. Mm hmm. Talk to you later.

I know I am about to sound like a luddite granny waxing nostalgic for the halcyon good old days (before them new-fangled auto-MO-biles) but damn, those bakelite bell-and-clapper rotary dial jobs were sweee-ee-eet. And had the added advantage to being anchored to one's house. As opposed to cell phones. Which allow ring-tones and human yammering to be introduced virtually anywhere. Church. Concert Hall. Grocery. Car. Subway. Bank. Sidewalk. Cafe. Wilderness. I listened, once, while a woman in the adjacent stall of the cinema ladies' room had a long, animated phone conversation with her pal. While peeing. Like a racehorse. Much to the outrage (and secret envy) of those of us with bashful bladders.

I see a patient from time to time, an older guy, who endeared himself to me from the first by announcing "I am an existentialist." One day I entered the exam room where he'd been waiting for me and found he'd taken the clock off the wall and was removing its battery. The lugubrious, inexorable "tick tick tick tick" of the cheap pharmaceutical timepiece was driving him mad. He knew I wouldn't mind. After all, we'd had many conversations about ambient noise, and our sensitivity to it. How we both have had to flee stores with blaring muzak.

I understand completely, Mr. S, I said, as he placed the clock and battery side by side on the exam table, and we enjoyed an all-too-brief moment of silence together.

Mother Goose

Born Again

Wonderful things are erupting from vine



and thorn,



and branch,



and trunk



and ground



crowding up so vigorously they seem to shoulder each other aside.



New arises from old, as well as on and beside old. This little cantilevered pod has persisted, perpendicular, for months. It has survived snow and rain and wind, amazingly tough.



Elsewhere, a skeletal grass blade coils through a grape hyacinth,



furrowed orange blossoms appear on dehiscing bark,



spores and ferns stand side by side,



and four long, rusted pods persist, like ancient boats beached in the crotch of a branch, beside parturient clusters of pink nubbins.



This -- this ground, this moment, this body -- is where all things start. And are and end and then begin again.

Happy Mothers Day.

A Hallmark Moment

The path, little more than a trampled line through the new grass of the meadow, leads to a little clearing on an embankment above the river. Until last weekend's river clean up, there had been old mattresses and heaps of trash and clothing strewn all about. It certainly is a fine, relatively private congregating place, and obviously had been used for drinking parties and maybe even living. But it had been vacant all winter so we cleaned it out. It took a surprisingly short amount of time.

"Look !" said a young man. We approached. He pointed to a single, big egg in the sticks and dead leaves of the forest floor. "How sad," said a young woman. "An abandoned egg."

A single Canada goose watched us from the downstream end of the little glade. It sat on the ground, a big feathery loaf, and craned its languid head in our direction. Another goose paced on the meadow path, as if standing guard.

I returned to the glade yesterday, late, after work, to catch the last of the day's sun. Both geese were still there -- the sentry on the path, and the one within the clearing. I began to suspect it was a mother brooding her eggs and her protective mate. I leaned against a tree at the water's edge and peered through some branches at the goose. Six feet below, a few dozen yards past the old milldam, the brown water rushed past. There was a big, broken, empty egg at my feet, probably the same one we'd seen a week ago. I took some pictures of it. Then the brooding goose, maybe ten feet away, stood and began to preen her chest. Beneath her was a clutch of six, big eggs.

I took two pictures -- downcurved neck and bill, the vast gray chest, the eggs -- and tiptoed out. The sentry, surprisingly enough, neither rushed nor hissed at me. I thought of the female goose sitting there, patient, through the cold spring night. Through the weekend's promised cold downpours. Just as she'd wintered amidst the ice and trash of the cove.

I wished her happy mother's day and left.

From This Morning's Globe

Birdlike dinosaurs newly unearthed in Utah may be a missing link between primitive meat-eating creatures and more evolved vegetarians, US researchers reported yesterday.

More evolved vegetarians. I like that.

18

It's the last track on a CD of American 20th century choral music that DK had passed on to me, a song by my homeboy Leonard Bernstein. The disc happened to be in my car CD player this morning when NPR started wheedling for donations and shilling Mother's Day flowers. Annoyed, I stabbed at the CD changer button and the music came on. It was the lovely song from Bernstein's opera, Candide, that begins --

You've been a fool and so have I,
But come and be my wife,
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.

We're neither pure nor wise nor good;
We'll do the best we know;
We'll build our house and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.

Before long I was -- as, come to think of it, I often am lately -- driving and blubbering. It's our 18th anniversary today. The song, in its simplicity and honesty, struck me as the perfect marriage song. It's got it all: folly, death, imperfection, the search for meaning, the vow of domestic comradeship.

Neither pure nor wise nor good. The phrase shot through my heart. Is there anything more romantic ? Love that clearly sees and accepts the full reality of the beloved, rather than insisting upon some pure and wise and good fantasy ?

It brought to mind another beautiful love song I've listened to during other lachrymose drives, Ralph Vaughn Williams' Tired. It's a setting of a poem by his wife, Ursula Vaughn Williams:

Sleep, and I'll be still as another sleeper
holding you in my arms
glad that you lie so near at last.

This sheltering midnight is our meeting place,
no passion or despair
or hope divide me from your side.

I shall remember firelight on your sleeping face
I shall remember shadows growing deeper
as the fire fell to ashes and the minutes passed.

"No passion or despair or hope divide me from your side." What a remarkable statement ! Love is traditionally the prime arena of passion, despair and hope. Of desire, of thwarted desire, of imagining futures of desire. Just read the novels, listen to the ballads, watch the soap operas ! But in this song there is simply meeting. Presence. Attention, devotion. No division. All in a shadowy vallombrosa in which death is implicit.

Finally, taking a long, looping detour to delay the inevitable arrival at work, I put on another disc. The Well-Tempered Clavier. Glenn Gould.

And there it was again, the same thing I'd heard in Bernstein's and Vaughn Williams' songs. The same thing, but wordless now, in the counterpoint of Bach's C# Minor fugue. Something abstract, almost mathematical, yet something corresponding to the most intimate movements of the heart and mind. Something wordless, restrained, expressive, even stoic. Something beyond fretting about God, transcendence and meaning. I suddenly thought of the final chapter of one of my ur-texts, Sartre's Nausea in which the hero, Roquentin finds release from the nausea of the absurdity and contingency of existence in the melody of a jazz song.

This is what he says:

Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. The voice sings:

Some of these days/
You'll miss me honey.

Someone must have scratched the record at that spot because it makes an odd noise. And there is something that clutches the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by this tiny coughing of the needle on the record. It is so far -- so far behind. I understand that, too: the disc is scratched and wearing out, perhaps the singer is dead; I'm going to leave, I'm going to take my train. But behind the existence that falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip toward death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.

Today I finally heard it, too. The exemplary suffering. The pitiless witness.

It was a glorious anniversary gift.