Uh oh, p.8
Uh-Oh, page 8
He’s lived in this crummy apartment for seven years, and for every minute of that seven years he has been down and out about how awful the apartment makes him feel. He hates to come home to it at night. Says it’s so ugly in there. His friends agree. Nobody goes over to Grady’s house unless he wants to be depressed.
The walls are gray. The rug is gray. The drapes are gray. So’s the furniture. He ought to at least paint the walls. He even knows what color. Yellow. Two gallons would do the living room, easy. It would be a start. And that’s the heart of the problem.
See, if he painted the walls, the furniture wouldn’t look good in there and he’d have to have new furniture, which means going shopping, and he doesn’t have time to go shopping, and interior decorators are too opinionated and trendy, so he doesn’t want one of those, and besides if he is going to buy new furniture, he might as well move on up to a better apartment.
But the kind of apartment he wants is expensive and he’d have to sign a lease and change his phone number and have his stationery reprinted. And if he is going to go to all that trouble and expense, he might as well buy a house, because real estate is going up and up and why wait until he can’t afford it?
But buying takes so much time and is such a hassle what with real estate agents and banks and credit checks and all that. Besides, what if he falls in love in the meantime and she doesn’t like the house, or maybe she would want kids and there he’d be owning a house in a neighborhood where the schools are not good, which would mean all the expense of private schools for the children.
Or, who knows, his wife may finally decide she made a big mistake in leaving him and would want to come back and there he would be with a house his wife wouldn’t want and still having to pay private-school tuition for the children of his second marriage. He’d need a therapist before long, and everybody knows what they cost.
Grady figures a couple of gallons of paint could cost half a million dollars in the long run, and who needs that?
And I agree. It’s a risk, I tell him. When the sun finally starts to die and gets so hot it turns the surface of the earth into boiling rock, his new house will burn down, and he will regret all the time and trouble gone to waste, and his insurance money and the deposit money on the nonexistent children’s nonexistent private school will be down the drain to boot. In between there will be carpenter ants, inflation, depression, famine, floods, earthquakes, mold, athlete’s foot, and entropy. Painting his apartment living room yellow could lead to the end of the world. Grady seems comforted by the depth of my comprehension of the problem.
“Grady,” says I, “you should turn yourself in to the Humane Society, and if nobody claims you in a couple of weeks, they will put you to sleep. It’s the only way out. Because you are too dumb to live.”
Grady’s stuck. And he thinks getting unstuck and coming unglued are the same thing.
Grady also has this scale problem. Trying to live in several different time frameworks at the same time. He’s trying to live today and tomorrow and next week and next year and next decade and next century all at once. And trying to live in his apartment now and in houses yet to come. I tell him he should just buy himself a cemetery plot now, dig a hole in it and pitch a tent over it, and move in. Save all that hassle in between.
So we had enough—Grady’s friends. Enough of his being stuck straddling the present and the future. Enough of his moaning and groaning. It was casting a pall over poker games. We decided to shove him headlong into the perils of the next phase of his miserable existence. While he was off skiing one weekend, we bought the lousy paint and repainted his crummy living room. Hauled half his furniture to the Goodwill, had his rug shampooed, the windows washed, and bought him a potted plant and one goldfish in a bowl so that something alive was in there with him at night.
Oh, he appreciated the gesture all right. He even cried about it. Took us all out to dinner and made a great fuss. But he’s not happy.
It’s the paint. The paint’s the wrong color. We used medium yellow. Lighter yellow was what he had in mind. And now if he repaints it, he will hurt our feelings, and if he doesn’t, he’ll go crazy living with that yellow, so Grady’s stuck again.
We sent his ex-wife a sympathy card.
And sent Grady a bill for the damned paint.
The only reason I still hang out with him has to do with getting some new curtains in our house. You know what getting new curtains means. Grady’s one of the few people I know to talk to about what getting new curtains can lead to. In fact, we may form a club called the Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t Society of America. A subsection of the Fellowship of the Fridge. We’d probably never get a membership going. Most of our kind of folks wouldn’t be able to make up their minds whether to join or just wait and see.
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD, MR. FULGHUM?” (THE journalist interviewing me has shifted scale suddenly from the details of dailiness to the definition of the Divine.)
“No, but I do believe in Howard.”
“Howard? You believe in Howard?”
“It all has to do with my mother’s maiden name.”
“Your mother’s maiden name …”
“Was Howard. She came from a big Memphis clan that was pretty close and was referred to as the Howard Family. As a small child, I thought of myself as a member of the Howard Family because it was often an item of conversation as in The Howard Family is getting together,’ and The Howard Family thinks people should write letters to their grandmother.’ The matriarch, my grandmother, was referred to as Mother Howard.”
“And you thought … she … was … God?”
“No, no. I just wanted you to first know how it was that Howard was a name that was important to me from early on in my life. What happened was that I got packed off to Sunday School at around age four and the first thing I learned was the Lord’s Prayer, which begins ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.’ And what I heard was, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, HOWARD be Thy name.’ And since little kids tend to mutter prayers anyhow, nobody realized what I was saying, so I went right on believing that God’s name was Howard. And believing I was a member of His family—the Howards. Since I was told that my grandfather had died and gone to heaven, God and my grandfather got all mixed up in my mind as one and the same. Which meant that I had a pretty comfy notion about God. When I knelt beside my bed each night and prayed, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, Howard be Thy name,’ I thought about my grandfather and what a big shot he was because, of course, the prayer ends with ‘For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen.’ I went to bed feeling pretty well connected to the universe for a long, long time. It was a Howard Family Enterprise.”
“You’re not putting me on, are you?”
“Not at all. All human images of the ultimate ground of being are metaphors, and as metaphors go, this is a pretty homey one. And I thought it for so long that even when I passed through all those growing-up stages of skepticism, disbelief, revision, and confusion—somewhere in my mind I still believed in Howard. Because at the heart of that childhood image there is no alienation. I belonged to the whole big scheme of things. I lived and worked and had my being in the family store.”
“So. Do you still believe in … Howard?”
“I’ll give you what may seem to be an enigmatic evasion, but it’s truly the only answer I have to your question. It’s a line from the writings of a thirteenth-century Christian mystic. Meister Eckhart. The eye with which I see God is the very same eye with which God sees me.’ That’s what I believe.”
“Does that mean that you are God?”
“Yes and no. It depends. In some cultures if a man says, ‘I am God,’ he will get shunned or even locked up as crazy. In some other cultures if a man says, ‘I am God,’ people will say, ‘What took you so long to find out?’ If you say you pray and talk to God, we will think of you as religious. If you say God talks to you, we will think of you as loony.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Consider it this way. It makes a big difference if you think of God as transcendent or immanent; as up there somewhere or present here.”
“Yes.”
“Howard is a transcendent image of God. The God of childhood. The man in the long white beard on the throne in heaven—up there, somewhere else, separate from us … transcendent. On the other hand, if God is immanent, then there is no place God is not, and I am not separate from God. Hence, ‘The eye with which I see God is the very same eye with which God sees me.’ No boundaries between God and me.”
There was a long silence between us. The journalist smiled. I smiled. She changed the subject. None of this discussion about Howard appeared in her article. I understand. Some things are hard to write about … hard to think about … hard to sort out. Maybe when she asked the first question, I should have just said, “Yes.” As a favor to her. But the truth is I haven’t finished thinking about God, and the God of my childhood and the God of my middle age are mixed in with the God of the wisdom that may yet come to me in my later years. Howard would understand.
On a long flight from Melbourne to Athens, an Australian carpenter, an Indian college professor in hydrology, and I had a memorable late-night theological discussion. The three of us were seated in one row, and the subject of God came up because our meals were accompanied by a little card on which was printed a short prayer of thanksgiving.
The professor made some remarks about not being thankful to any of the gods for this particular food. The carpenter composed a prayer of complaint. And the discussion was off and running.
The carpenter declared his theology had a lot to do with fleas and a dog.
Arguing whether or not a God exists is like fleas arguing whether or not the dog exists. Arguing over the correct name of God is like fleas arguing over the name of the dog. And arguing over whose notion of God is correct is like fleas arguing over who owns the dog.
We three ate our meal in silence for a while—digesting the godforsaken meal and the Australian version of theological Truth.
Later on, the Indian professor and I stood in the forward alcove of the 747 where the galley and rest rooms are, comparing the route map with what we could see out the porthole in the door.
Across Australia, Indonesia, to Singapore; across Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and into Athens. Much of what we crossed was ocean.
Theology again. The Indian professor of hydrology this time. Hydrology is “the scientific study of the properties, distribution, and effects of water in the atmosphere, on the earth’s surface, and in soil and rocks.” He had this printed on his business card since he always had to explain about hydrology. In sum, a water expert.
He noted that we had just left a country where people worshiped the sun—on the beach with most or all of their clothes removed. And we were flying over countries whose people believed it was the will of Allah that women should be completely covered, even on beaches. The name of God varied from country to country; the holy book was not the same; the rituals and dogmas and routes to heaven were not the same. And so certain were the followers of the different religions of their rectitude, they would gladly war with one another—kill each other—to have their beliefs and metaphors prevail. Yet in this same plane, flying peacefully along, are these same people.
Clearly this troubled the professor—grieved him.
He shook his head and asked why this must be so. Why? Why?
The professor pointed out the Indian Ocean beneath us at the moment.
He spoke of water, his specialty.
“Water is everywhere and in all living things—we cannot be separated from water. No water, no life. Period. Water comes in many forms—liquid, vapor, ice, snow, fog, rain, hail. But no matter the form, it’s still water.
“Human beings give this stuff many names in many languages, in all its forms. It’s crazy to argue over what its true name is. Call it what you will, there is no difference to the water. It is what it is.
“Human beings drink water from many vessels—cups, glasses, jugs, skins, their own hands, whatever. To argue about which container is proper for the water is crazy. The container doesn’t change the water.
“Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it iced, some fizzy, some with stuff mixed in with it—alcohol, coffee, whatever. No matter. It does not change the nature of the water.
“Never mind the name or the cup or the mix. These are not important.
“What we have in common is thirst. Thirst!
“Thirst for the water of Life!”
As it is with water, so is it with God.
“I don’t know much about God,” said the professor of hydrology. “All I know is water. And that we are momentary waves in some great everlasting ocean, and the waves and the water are one.”
He poured us each a paper cup full of water and we drank.
Emily, six, has become a grace fanatic. Or, in her own terms, “a great amenner.”
Though her family is not particularly religious and has not previously had a tradition of prayer before meals, Emily is now committed to the custom. Her father, my friend Willy, isn’t sure where she got the idea, but the family doesn’t want to squash rectitude in their youngest child. So they dutifully hold hands and bow heads at dinnertime while Emily, the high priestess of her own sacred mystery cult, holds forth in prayer:
“Hello. This is Emily. I’m fine, how are you?
Thanks for the sky and birds and stuff.
Actually, I’m having a pretty good week.
And thanks for the mashed potatoes, but not for the lima beans.
I thank you really much for the meatloaf.
And thanks for the chairs, and the tables, and the doors, and the couch and the television and the walls and the roof and the bed and the bathroom and the towels and the grass and the clouds and the street and…”
(By now her eight-year-old brother, who says his prayers in private, is beginning to grit his teeth and roll his eyes into the back of his head as he endures what he thinks is a shameless shuck on Emily’s part—and Emily knows she’d better shut up now or she will suffer later, so she ends.)
“Take care. Amen, from Emily.”
Her parents think of this daily vesper as the Emily Report. She’s found a way to get her family to sit still and listen to her—something that doesn’t happen too much during the daily traffic of family life.
As she prays, her father peeks at his six-year-old. He wants to be sure he sees her. He wants to remember his youngest child like this—as she heads out the door of innocence into the world-as-it-is. He wants to be there as she makes her announcement of self to the mystery of existence.
These times of quiet grace calm his spirit. Unlike Emily’s brother, her father is in no hurry to have the prayer end. These times go by once and all too quickly.
“Hello. This is Emily. It’s a good day here, after all.
I’m really sorry for what I did and I won’t ever do it again.
Please help Poppy. Thanks for dogs and cats.
Thanks, again, for more mashed potatoes.
Please try to do something about lima beans.
I really want to thank you especially for my birthday which is coming soon.
Thanks for friends. But not for people who are jerks [looking at her brother].
Take care and keep in touch. Amen. From Emily.”
Sometime soon I should tell Emily about Howard.
Howard is Emily’s kind of guy. And vice versa.
In my childhood I was told that God was all-powerful and lived far, far away. And that I could not see Him until after I died. When I asked why, if God was so powerful, there were children starving in Mexico, I was told it was the will of God and that I should not worry about it. Instead, I should be concerned about making sure I didn’t attend the upcoming high school prom, because dancing was a sin and I should try not to sin.
Now I am older. And I know that God is everywhere and in all things. There is nowhere that God is not, even in me. I also know that starving comes from not having enough food, and that is a human problem about which something can be done.
I know now that dancing comes from having much joy.
And when everyone has enough to eat, everyone will dance, especially Howard.
It took me fifty years to figure that out. Pass it on. Come to the dance.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1959. AT THE FEATHER RIVER INN near the town of Blairsden in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. A resort environment. And I, just out of college, have a job that combines being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping out with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner/manager is Italian-Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I do not get along. I think he’s a fascist who wants peasant employees who know their place, and he thinks I’m a good example of how democracy can be carried too far. I’m twenty-two and pretty free with my opinions, and he’s fifty-two and has a few opinions of his own.
One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut, and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of meals was deducted from our check. I was outraged.
