Ironic Advent 2016 Meditation #6:
Home Ec.
HOME EC.*
I.
This is the basement.
Cool, a little bit humid, spiders if you looked
carefully. Or cared. My two brothers slept down here in a room with an old
black and white. A bong not very hidden in a little shelf above the closet door.
Other “supplies” hidden there too. For a while, a summer or so, we tended to
congregate there once the folks had gone to sleep or at least into hiding.
Gordon, Noel, maybe Billy, sometimes Kerry (if
he wasn’t out drinking cough syrup in the back of a car somewhere), and me. I
was the least likely to be there, I guess. Going to be a priest. Going to be a
scholar. Whatever, not supposed to be wasting my time like this. Neil Young
blasting Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.
Indeed, everybody knows this really is nowhere. Cinnamon Girl,
Down by the River, Only Love Can Bring You Down. Maybe so. Or maybe not.
Lots of things can bring you down.
Lies about girls. Lies about God. Lies, but
some kind of love, I think. Some truths. Some signs of grace.
This
is the basement.
I used to love lying on one of my brother’s beds
on a lazy summer afternoon watching bad Japanese horror films, for some reason
a regular feature on Denver Saturday television.
I’m
not sure I’ve really relaxed since. It’s a grace to rest. To be at rest. The
Japanese know these things, we just don’t expect to draw that conclusion from Godzilla vs. Reptillicus.
One day we put on Stevie Wonder You are the Sunshine of My Life. It was
a few years later, bong was gone or the boys had hid it so I couldn’t find it. Mom
had quit drinking and was happier and more lucid than we had ever known her.
Perhaps the joy of knowing that about herself and knowing that her boys knew
that about her just overwhelmed her. But we all started dancing. Gordon and I
taking turns dancing with our crazy mother, which would have embarrassed us all
a year before.
I still see Gordon wearing that old Russian
winter furry hat, twirling mom around the little basement room. We were Jesus
freaks by then. Mom was just starting in AA. We were angry with her about dad. I’m
sure she was angry because we refused to buy her cigarettes at the store now
that we were holier than her.
But for that moment, the one I’m remembering
right now, the one I'm treasuring and chewing one, we were dancing in the little basement room. Home of “the little
boys” as we always called them, even when they had grown to be over 6 ft. tall. And, by the way, Stevie Wonder? He was the man.
II. The kitchen.
This is the kitchen. When Noel was fifteen or maybe fourteen, he
was the first boy to ever sign up for Home Ec. at Denver’s East High. It was a
no-brainer. If you are getting high every night, and you have the munchies
every night, and your mom is a depressed alcoholic who rarely cooks anymore,
and your dad is barely holding things together so you’re lucky if there was maybe
some ice cream in the fridge (to go with lots of beer), you need to adapt. So you
learn how to bake stuff.
Noel made the most awesome cakes and treats
and bread and such late at night in that kitchen. Or we thought so at that very
hungry time of life. We devoured what he cooked like
lifelong atheists devour the sacrament after tasting and seeing for the first
time. We didn’t say "Grace." We didn’t say "Thanks." Not then, anyway. I am doing it now.
Mom loved antiques. She had a store once,
earlier, back in Texas, before everything went to hell and dad lost his job and
had to take a huge cut in everything and move us to Denver. It
was called Nita’s Hobby Shoppe. I used to call it Nita’s Hobby Shoppy.
Sarcastic even then. She had a lot of cool stuff, but, hey, we lived in
Mercedes, Texas, on the Mexican border. Not a real big market for 19th Century
spinning wheels. Or antique books with the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. She never
sold them, but I got the itch to collect old books and things from here.
It’s a sickness. Thanks Mom.
It’s a sickness. Thanks Mom.
So
on the counter in the kitchen, we had this antique radio, you know the kind
what that wonderful gothic shape, a kind of medieval pointy arch (just slightly
tapered and rounded). And it still worked, of course only with an AM dial. But
that didn’t matter. We loved that old thing. And we all loved music too. That's something we really did share. Dad’s
“Streets of Laredo.” Mom’s “Redwing.” And we ALL loved the Beatles. Obviously, all you
need is Love.
Dad and I would sit there and listen to minor
league baseball games on that thing night after night. He’d fall asleep
sometimes and I’d have to try to get him up to bed. Depending upon how much
beer he’d had, that could be more or less difficult.
Kitchen is a very strange word if you listen.
Sounds more like a sneeze than a place to be nourished.
Missy hated that room, because when mom was
bad, which was most of the time, Missy would have to sort of play mom to the
other three even though she was still in high school. I don’t remember a lot she
cooked except grilled cheese, but I know we ate. But Missy hated that
room. She hated mom too. For a while. I can’t blame her. Not one bit. That was then. She was 17. It still hurts, but now it's a lot more complicated.
One day Mom, Nita, was standing in that room with her
scotch and whatever drink in hand (maybe she said she had a toothache, she said
that a lot). It was early evening and she was in her bathrobe. I don’t remember
much else except that Missy was cooking dinner (though she had school,
homework, boyfriends, and teenage angst on her plate already). She should have
been out with her friends, not doing this.
Something finally snapped and Missy started
prophesying. OK, she wouldn’t call it that. But I do, now. And these are my meditations, so just go with it. Missy told mom she was leaving. Not
yet, but as soon as she finished high school. She had had it. She had never
been a child. She had never had a mother. She was sick of her drinking. She was
sick of her. And she was leaving the day she graduated.
It was difficult to say difficult things to mom;
because she was either genuinely a deeply wounded child or she really knew how to impersonate one. You felt guilty saying things like, “try being a mother for a
while.”
But Missy did. At least that time, the time
I’m remembering. Obviously, that’s kind of a bad memory from the old kitchen at 1825 Albion
Street. But not all bad. There was truth
there. Buried love. A certain strange grace. You can't see everything at once, you know. Old T. S. Eliot probably said something like that once. Or should have if he didn't.
So time passed, as it does in memory. Missy
left. The kitchen was quiet that summer. I was getting ready for my senior year
of high school, working out, trying to get ready to go to state in basketball.
The boys were running around with Billy and
Kerry, kind of wild. Who could blame them? Mom had cut her wrists and spent some time in Presbyterian
Hospital where I was working my first job, washing dishes and putting trays of
food on the tray line for patients.
Dad was drinking more and more. Mom came home.
Missy was up in the mountains somewhere. And mom, one day, couldn’t take it
anymore. Something finally snapped. Eudora Juanita Ricke started prophesying. OK,
she wouldn’t call it that.
But she said, I cannot live this way. Maybe I can
live another way. Maybe I can make a life that my children will look back on in their Ironic Advent Meditations and see a sign of grace, a kind of redemption. I'm pretty sure that's what she said.
Anyway, she
opened up the phone book, sitting on that old stool in the kitchen, by the
phone, just next to the door to the “living room” where people lived, but not
too well in those years.
She
called a guy whose name she found in the phonebook. He told her to come to a
meeting. She did. Then another. And another. And she never drank again for the
rest of her life. It wasn't easy. I skipped some stuff. But it's true.
There was grace in that kitchen, though it sometimes, maybe most of the time, looked like something else.
A
couple of years later, after mom had kicked dad out because of his drinking
which was just way too ironic for us and way too mean we thought, I stood there talking to
him, next to that radio where we had listened to all those games and listened to music when he was
sinking further and further into what looked like the end of the line or the bottom that they always say you have to hit before you figure it out.
He was one amazing bigger-than-life man, a born
performer, always the life of wherever he was. When I got a call that said he had died, my senior year of college, I just wrote a little note (for some stupid reason I was taking notes), "You're too big to die, daddy."
Well, anyway, now, or then, or whatever it is or was or will be, he'd hit that proverbial bottom. He'd been living on skid row. Then . . . he met some guys from a mission who brought him
back. Cleaned
him up, gave him a job (just like my first one, washing dishes), helped him get
sober. And stay sober.
So there he was, looking healthier than I could
remember him ever being. Strong deep blue yes. Sort of clean shaven, at least better
than the wildly uneven drunken shave I had gotten used to. Forty pounds lighter.
He was clear—that's the best word I can think of. Clear. In thought, word, and deed. And those blue eyes. And animal movements.
Graceful. Graceful, gigantic dear broken
healed daddy of mine. Charles Ricke, Navy vet, fought the big one, Knight of
Columbus, businessman, father, lover, helluva dancer, drunk, now dishwasher. Healed. Better, anyway. Better than I'd seen him in a long time. As they used
to say in the Pentecostal churches (and maybe still do), “happy to be in his right mind.” Restored is a good word. A sweet word.
As I chew on my roots this Advent, I think of
these dear people, all of them wounded and all of them wounding. Many of them
gone now. The house in Denver is still there and looks pretty much the same. I
have more memories to unpack from that place if I ever get quiet enough to
ponder further. Perhaps it’s our crazy present and our possible future(s) that
has me so much looking backwards.
But Advent time is so messed up that I’m not
sure which way is past or future any more. Advent starts, as it did Sunday, with the
future, with the end, in which all things will change (if not pass, see George
Harrison). But it also asks us to think of the past, long ago by our standards,
which it also, somehow, foretells and points toward (right?). The prophet says, a baby will come, or a family
will move to Denver, and it will all kind of look like heaven. Until it doesn’t.
Then the coming King will not look so glorious and, in fact, things will really
get messy. Skid row. Skull hill. And we say, and we’re . . . looking forward to that?
And, what exactly were all those songs
about?
This is going to sound like heresy I guess in
terms of the Christmas liturgy, but I’m going to say it anyway. In a small
font, though. You can’t really be looking forward to the birth of baby Jesus,
Ricky Bobby. If anyone appreciates the irony, I do, so you can rest assured
that I’m going to keep singing the songs and pretending to look forward to what
already happened, but unless we are chewing on the past and trying to figure
out what the hell happened and what that means for all of us, we might as well
just turn the whole damn thing over to Macy’s and Amazon.com.
The more I chew on my roots this Advent, the
more I’m seeing a story of ironic love and redemption, and, believe me, it’s
not one that anyone would choose ahead of time, especially if I were in that
Robert Frost poem and had other choices. The gaps in my life and the cracks in
my story (and yours, dear reader) are nasty and brutal and damn sure worthy of
some kind of Divine sympathy if there is any. While we are waiting on that, let’s
share some of the human kind. That may be how we get ready for the other if there is the other.
In Paul Gerhardt’s lovely hymn for the first
Sunday of Advent, “Wie Soll Ich Dich Empfangen?" (“How Shall I
Greet Thee”), one that Bonhoeffer references several times in his Prison Letters (which I wrote about in
Meditation #3), it is exactly this world-weariness and disappointment that the sympathetic
savior comes, now (a fraught word in Advent time), to heal. The most
popular English translation of this hymn, by Catherine Winkworth, misses the
passionate intentionality of this love by translating the great expression of
the kenosis thus: “Love caused Thy incarnation, Love brought Thee down to me .
. . .” A more faithful translation is something like: “Nothing, nothing, could
drive you from your heavenly home (tent, actually) but your love above love . .
. .” An earlier, more literal though still problematic and heavily-condensed
translation renders the key “incarnational” verses of the hymn like this.
Nought,
nought, dear Lord, had power to move
Thee
from Thy rightful place,
Save
that most strange and blessed Love
Wherewith
Thou dost embrace
This
weary world and all her woe,
Her
load of grief and ill
And
sorrow, more than man can know;--
Thy
love is deeper still.
Oh
write this promise in your hearts,
Ye sorrowful, on whom
Fall thickening cares, while joy departs
And darker grows your gloom.
Ye sorrowful, on whom
Fall thickening cares, while joy departs
And darker grows your gloom.
Despair not, for your help is near,
He standeth at the door
Who best can comfort you and cheer,
He comes, nor stayeth more.
Gerhardt
is careful to remind us, something which Bonhoeffer points to several times,
that this door is one we can’t open for ourselves. One would think, though, on
the strength of reading the gospels and the prophets, that one way we do Advent, that
is, get ready for the Bridegroom, the baby in the manger, the Coming King, the
Lord of the Universe, Doctor Strange, the Wonderful Wizard, all the things, is by
doing what we can to open doors for as many others as we can in the little time
we have.
And I’m starting to see that
this includes even those who are gone from us. We can open doors and let them
in or out, as the case may be. Welcome them (back, perhaps) into our lives.
So now (?) I’m
standing, reunited with my healed (or at least mid-healing) father in the kitchen of
the old house on 1825 Albion St. The bong is well-hidden. The Beatles or
minor-league baseball is playing on that antique radio. I’m taking him out to
dinner and to a Broncos game. My treat. The first time I’ve ever treated the old
man.
But first we grab some brownies that Noel had made and left out on the counter for us.
The door slams, and we leave the kitchen. I'm leaving the kitchen. I left the kitchen. I will leave the kitchen. But I'm leaving the door open, so we won't forget the things we learned in Home Ec.
But first we grab some brownies that Noel had made and left out on the counter for us.
The door slams, and we leave the kitchen. I'm leaving the kitchen. I left the kitchen. I will leave the kitchen. But I'm leaving the door open, so we won't forget the things we learned in Home Ec.
Note
to reader:
*Home
Economics (usually called Home Ec.) was a previously (that is, before Noel) gendered
class in high school taken by girls to prepare to be good homemakers (sewing,
cooking, slaughtering and butchering buffalo, and so forth—depending upon where
and when you took it). Guys took shop to learn how to make leather straps and
benches and crap like that. I went to Saint Anthony’s, so I took Latin instead.
[after A. A. (just about Stevie Wonder time) but before skid row]
I have always felt selfish that I left you boys...you were just babies..
ReplyDeleteI believe that you have forgiven me