Gladness
What the American poet William Carlos Williams said of poetry could well be applied to the living of our lives: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” My director of novices, Leo Rock, used to say, “God created us—because He thought we’d enjoy it.”
We try to find a way, then, to hold our fingertips gently to the pulse of God.
We watch as our hearts begin to beat as one with the One who delights in our being. Then what do we do? We exhale that same spirit of delight into the world and hope for poetry.
I remember being invited to an early-morning radio show, in Spanish. It’s in-studio and covers nearly two hours of the drive to work, 7 to 9 a.m. Callers ask me about gangs, and, often enough, mothers seek advice about their wayward children. “Tenemos una llamada de Yolanda, de Inglewood.” It goes on like this for some time. As we near the nine o’clock hour, they take another call.
“Tenemos una llamada de Filiberto, de Downey.”
I think— Filiberto is not that common a name, and I have a worker named Fili who also lives in Downey. The voice booms into the studio.
“Hey, yeah, G, it’s me, Fili . . . Yeah . . . well, I’m not feelin’ so good . . . so I’m just callin’ to let ya know—I won’t be coming into work today.”
Fili has chosen a radio call-in show to call in sick.
“Um . . . okay . . . Fili,” I say, stunned. “Uh, hope you feel better.”
As I drive home after the show, replaying Fili’s call over and over in my head, I steep in the utter fullness of not wanting to have anyone else’s life but my own.
(In the category of “Can You Top This?”—a homie supplies an excuse to Norma Gillette, who has worked at Homeboy longer than anybody and consequently has heard it all: the homie says to her, “I have Anal Blindness.”
“Anal Blindness?” she says.
“Yeah, I just can’t see my ass coming to work today.”) Apparently, FDR had a sign on his desk that read: “Let unconquerable gladness dwell.” Our search to know what’s on God’s mind ends in the discovery of this same unconquerable gladness.
Dorothy Day loved to quote Ruskin, who urged us all to the “Duty to Delight.” It was an admonition, really, to be watchful for the hilarious and the heartwarming, the silly and the sublime. This way will not pass again, and so there is a duty to be mindful of that which delights and keeps joy at the center, distilled from all that happens to us in a day.
Nearly eight o’clock at night, I pass the front of the emergency room at White Memorial Hospital. On the bus bench, all by himself, is Spider. He’s wearing pastel blue scrubs, and he’s just gotten off work. He is a light-skinned huero, and his hair rests in the limbo between clean-shaven pelón and locks ready to be trained by a dollop of Three Flowers. It is all tucked neatly under a nylon stocking.
I had only met him recently and come to know his story. He isn’t nineteen yet and works in the hospital as an orderly, moving patients and equipment, a job he secured through Homeboy Industries. Spider is from a gang in Aliso Village, where he and his sister mainly raised themselves, having been abandoned by their parents. I was never quite sure how they duped the Housing Authority into thinking there was a responsible adult around. He and his lady, with two small sons, now live in an apartment in Highland Park, several bus rides away.
“Get in, dog, I’ll take ya home.”
We speak of many things as we go, and I question him about his bills and rent and how he’s faring. I’ve helped him get jump-started in this regard a few times already.
“I’m okay,” he says, then steers himself in a whole other direction. “You know what I’m gonna do when I get home right now? I’m gonna sit down to eat with my lady and my two morritos. But, well . . . I don’t eat. I just watch them eat. My lady she gets crazy with me, but I don’t care. I just watch ’em eat. They eat and eat. And I just look at ’em and thank God they’re in my life. When they’re done eating and I know they’re full, THEN I eat.
“And the truth . . . sometimes there’s food left and sometimes there isn’t. Tú sabes, ” he says to me, putting his hand on my shoulder as I drive, “it’s a Father thing.” The duty to delight is to stare at your family as they eat, anchored in the
surest kind of gratitude—the sort that erases sacrifice and hardship and absorbs everything else. Jesus says, “My ways are not your ways,” but they sure could be. In the utter simplicity of breathing, we find how naturally inclined we are to delight and to stay dedicated to gladness. We bask in God’s unalloyed joy, and we let loose with that same joy in whoever is in front of us. We forget what a vital part of our nature this is.
* * *
From diagnosis of a brain tumor to his death, my father lasted thirty days. We had noticed at the dinner table, when many of us were home one weekend, that one side of Dad’s face was droopy. Soon he was at St. Vincent’s Hospital for tests. He spent a handful of nights there, separated from my mother, a rare occurrence in their forty-eight years of marriage. On one of those initial days, I go to retrieve my mom at her home. As I wait in the driveway, she emerges from the house, arms laden with magazines and bags and an elongated pillow with a flowery case. I help her with the things and then try to help her with my commentary. “You know, St. Vincent’s provides pillows.” She makes a face and sighs heavily. “Oh gosh . . . your father . . . he asked for a pillow from MY side of the bed.” We eye-roll our way into the car.At the hospital, my folks greet each other in their customary way—the two-peck kiss. Two birds snatching up the last seeds. My mom slides into the restroom, and I am at the window of his room, just north of the head of his bed.
I’m about to make small talk about the view from up here, but I turn and see that my father has placed the flowery pillow over his face. He breathes in so deeply and then exhales, as he places the pillow behind his head. For the rest of the morning, I catch him turning and savoring again the scent of the woman whose bed he’s shared for nearly half a century. We breathe in the spirit that delights in our being—the fragrance of it. And it works on us. Then we exhale (for that breath has to go somewhere)—to breathe into the world this same spirit of delight, confident that this is God’s only agenda.
We want to cover our bets, though. A battle gets waged between disparate takes on God’s hidden agenda. What seems to vex us is our tendency to conjure up a tiny God. I remember arriving at a CEB (base community) meeting in my very earliest days at Dolores Mission. Spanish, in those days, was more of a struggle than it is now. When I arrive, an older lady, Lupe, strong and influential in the group, has gotten her hands on this tiny brochure. It’s a message from the Blessed Mother, and, boy, is Mary pissed! There apparently was an apparition somewhere in New Jersey. A woman is calientando a tortilla, and when she flips
it over, Ay, Dios Mio! there is an image of La Virgin in all her glory. So apart from imminent plans to build a cathedral, say, right in this kitchen, Mary has come with a message. This little brochure explains it all. So Lupe is holding us hostage and has completely derailed our meeting. Mary is gonna let us have it, she tells us, and she is not one bit pleased with the state of the world, and everybody is going to hell on the “Dynamite D” train. This is the gist. I feel hopeless to bring us back on track, no match for the fluidity and command of Lupe. She has us in her thrall for some time, until Socorro, a respected and elderly “church lady,” a sacristan and gentle soul, pidio la palabra. She daintily poises her finger in the air, asking to be heard. The only power I have in the group, at this point, is to permit her to speak.
“Well, you know,” Socorro begins with a quiet strength and humble tone, “I am from a ranchito in Mexico. I’ve never been to school. I can’t read the Bible. I certainly can’t read that fine folleto you’ve brought to our meeting, Lupe.” Then she pauses as if to employ some other unseen second engine. She gears up and rears up and looks straight at Lupe. “Pero, te digo una cosa, Dios no es así.” (I’ll tell ya one thing, God is not like that.)
Socorro knew the opposite of God when she saw it. God is surely too busy delighting in us to want to ship us off in hand-baskets to Hades. Socorro knew this with unshakeable certainty (and with, I might add, a dash of unconquerable gladness).
Socorro finds herself, as Bill Cain says, “living within the withinness of God.” This is the intimate union and full promise of kinship that is being offered to us every second. The poet Hafez writes, “We are content with a phantom of you. Oh God, how pitifully poor our aspirations are. And how estranged and distant, how far we are from union!” It is okay to aspire to a glad and delighting union offered every moment, right here, right now. Woody Allen says, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Everything on this side of death, however, is “requesting the honor of our presence” so we can delight in life’s astonishing, joyful poetry.
* * *
Moreno now works at the reception center in our brand-new headquarters. In his midtwenties, he is the father of two daughters and has worked at Homeboy for six years. I have watched him grow immeasurably into a responsible, mature worker. (If there is an area for further growth, it’s in his language. I’m always trying to curb his tendency to the mal hablado. He’s trying too. He left me a voice message not long ago: “Hey, G, yeah, it’s me, Moreno, ’n shit . . . I mean,’spensa, it’s me, Moreno and FECES.” I think we can all agree—progress.) He was a tiny, skinny kid when I met him years ago through some of his homies. An elementary school dropout, he was getting socialized on the streets. His mom couldn’t keep him at home or in school, and he had a disaffected relationship with his stepfather. He was a kid classically unable to find a strain of enthusiasm in his life. Delighting was some foreign country, say, Mozambique. He always made a point of letting you know that he was entirely “too cool” to get excited by much. I call him once and ask what he’s doing. “Just right here—blaséing it.”
As an English major, I was actually not aware you could do that to “blasé.”
Street life finally catches up with Moreno, and he gets locked up. After the briefest of stints in Juvenile Hall, he gets sent to a “suitable placement” instead of a probation camp. Days after arriving at this group home in Orange County, he is enrolled in the local high school, and two weeks into school, he calls me.
“Hey, G, kidnap me, yeah? I don’t got no clothes and, tú sabes, mi jefita, she don’t got no ends. So, yeah? Kidnap me?” Moreno was aware that at Homeboy we had a program called “New Image,” which allows us to buy clothes for gang members released from detention facilities—enabling them to trade in their oversize Ben Davis for Dockers that más o menos fit them. I arrange with the group home staff to “kidnap” Moreno on the upcoming Saturday.
I pick up Moreno, and it is immediately apparent that, today, he’s decided to stand tall for the “Blaséing-It Movement.” No matter what I say, I can’t topple him from his “whatever” parapet. Naturally, I press him on school. “Wow, dog
—I mean, felicidades. Nice goin’, you’re in school again after all these years.
So, how’s it feel?”
Moreno shrugs—can’t even muster a “whatever.”
“Now, come on, son, you gotta have a favorite subject?”
“Nope.”
“How ’bout English?”
“Hate it.”
“Math?”
“The worst.”
“Like History?”
“Can’t stand it.”
“There’s gotta be sumthin’ ya like . . . Do you . . . have a science?”
These last words of mine seem to have a cattle prod attached to them. Were it not for the seat belt, he’d be in my lap.
“DAMN, G—BIOOOOLOGY. THAT’S THE BOOOOOMB, right there.”
He settles in to have me share his joy. “Watcha, dog,” he continues, “On Monday, we’re gonna DIGEST a frog!”
I nearly swerve into oncoming traffic.
Greatly amused, I say to him, “Well, actually, mijo, it’s not digest a frog, it’s dissect a frog.”
Moreno resumes the blasé.
“Yeah, well, whatever . . . Monday we’re fuckin’ with a frog.”
The poet Mary Oliver writes, “All things are inventions of holiness—some more rascally than others.” There is magical poetry in a kid on the margins discovering biology. Moreno is all the more holy in being “rascally” about it.
Some time back, at the turn of the century, during a general election, some pundit tried to compare and contrast Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush.
He said Bill Clinton walks into a room and wants everybody in the room to like him. Al Gore walks into a room and wants everyone to thinks he’s right. “W”
walks into a room and wants the room to know he’s in charge. We all feel all of these at one time or another, because they’re fear-based responses, and it’s hard to get out from under that dread. Our frightened selves want only for the gathered to like us, to agree with us, or be intimidated by us. I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what he finds there. Delights in it, in fact. Maybe, He makes a beeline to the outcasts and chooses, in them, to go where love has not yet arrived. His ways aren’t our ways, but they sure could be.
We have grown accustomed to think that loving as God does is hard. We think it’s about moral strain and obligation. We presume it requires a spiritual muscularity of which we are not capable, a layering of burden on top of sacrifice, with a side order of guilt. (But it was love, after all, that made the cross salvific, not the sheer torture of it.)
I’ve been keeping informal track of “homie-propisms” at all the detention facilities where I celebrate the Eucharist. These are the moments when the homies get up to read and they’ll come to an unfamiliar word and will supplant it with one they know rather than what it should be. Sometimes, it’s the usual slipup. “A reading from the letter of Paul to the Phillipinos.” They don’t know what a Gentile is but have a passing familiarity with “Genitals.” (Try this one yourself—go to the Acts of the Apostles and substitute “genitals” wherever you find “Gentiles.” It livens up this book as never before.) Psalm 23 gets read as
“Beside resentful waters, he leads me.” Resentment they know, rest is what they could use more of.
Homie-propisms aren’t limited to liturgical celebrations. A homie called me once, experiencing hard economic times: “It’s so bad, I had to go eat at the Starvation Army.” Once, a homie needed legal assistance: “Hey, G, ya think you could get me a lawyer for free. You know, one who’ll do the legal work, Sonny Bono.” A homie in the office wrote a phone message: “Professor Davis at UC
Irvine wants you to give a talk. YOU WILL BE CONSTIPATED.” I went to the homie, who apparently had powers to predict my future, and was relieved to discover that I would be “compensated.” Whew.
The Suffering Servant passage from Isaiah is proclaimed: “He did not shield his face from buffets”—not pronounced as it should be, like Warren and Jimmy’s last name, but as in Hometown—all you can eat. (I remember first hearing it this way, and as one who rarely shields his face from any buffet—I felt thoroughly indicted.) My favorite homie-propism happened at the Dorothy Kirby Center, a locked-down placement for juvenile males and females. An African American sixteen-year-old boy arrives early at the tiny Kirby chapel and wants to practice his reading before Mass. It is the Responsorial Psalm, whose refrain is, “The Lord is my shepherd. There is nothing I shall want.” His voice fills the chapel, and he is positively stentorian. Olivier. It is great. He moves through the psalm with an absence of self-consciousness, reading the verses and then indicating (with a sweeping hand gesture) to the congregation, which isn’t there yet, when they are to chime in with him: “The Lord is my shepherd. There is nothing I shall want.” Soon, both sides of the aisles fill, and Mass begins. Our man approaches to lead us in the responsorial psalm. There is something about him that makes me watch carefully. Nerves haven’t kicked in—quite the opposite. He is cocky and acts as if he’s requested the net to be removed. He seems to want to maximize eye contact. He figures he’s practiced enough—got the thing memorized. And so he makes the exaggerated movement with his hand and leads our little congregation: “Our response to the psalm this evening is:
“The Lord . . . is nothing I shall want.” The volunteers, in unison, cringe and scramble with their body language to find some way to push this toothpaste back into its container. Too late. The congregation belts back to our leader, “THE
LORD IS NOTHING I SHALL WANT.”
There is enough strained obligation in what we think God asks of us that our mantra might as well be “The Lord is nothing I shall want.” But the task at hand is only about delighting—with joy at the center. At ease. We can all relax. John 3:16 is displayed on big signs at every televised sporting event. “Yes, God so loved the world . . .” Yet the most electrifying, wholly affirming, life-altering word in the entire sentence is “Yes.” It’s about alignment with God’s own “yes,”
deciding to actually be there, all the time, when delight happens. So, as the letter of James ends, “Let your yes mean yes.”
* * *
One day, I’m looking for a runner—a homie to take a message to someone else in the building. I look up from my desk and see two homies in the “well” (the sunken computer area in the old office, where phones got answered and data entry got entered). I spot Mario and Frankie, two big homies, staring at a computer screen intently “working” (though “work” may be too strong a word).I’m about to call Frankie to be my runner, when I observe him lean into Mario’s chest and take a deep, deep breath. He exhales contentedly.
“Frankie, come here a minute,” I yell at him from my office inner sanctum.
He looks cookie-jar startled. Embarrassed, he runs to my office. I hand him the message and instruct him to go to the financial office. He inches toward the door to leave but then turns around, sheepish and tentative.
“Uh, G . . . uh, did you see me . . . right now . . . you know . . . smelling Mario?”
I admit that I had.
“Damn,” Frankie huffs and puffs, “I mean, it’s just that . . . well . . . he be smellin’ GOOOOD. I mean . . . all the homies . . . we be likin’ his cologne.”
Breathe it in, breathe it out. The Lord is everything I want. A yes that means yes.
You want to be there when the poetry happens. Isaiah has God say: “Be glad forever and rejoice in what I create . . . for I create my people to be a delight.”
God thinking we’d enjoy ourselves. Delighting is what occupies God, and God’s hope is that we join in. That God’s joy may be in us and this joy may be complete. We just happen to be God’s joy. That takes some getting used to.
* * *
Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, “I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you’re talking to, the one right in front of you.” A mantra I use often, to keep me focused in delight on the person in front of me, comes from an unlikely place. I find it in Jesus’ words to the good ladrón nailed next to him. He essentially says, “This day . . . with me . . . Paradise.” It’s not just a promise of things to come; it is a promise for the here and now . . .with Him . . . on this day, in fact . . . Paradise.
Thich Nhat Hahn writes that “our true home is the present moment, the miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment.” The ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing
mantra. And the word wasn’t “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.” The word was
“Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.
I come back from a speaking trip, and Marcos is sitting there in the reception area. Gus at the front desk tells me, “He’s been waiting for ya, for like three days.” Marcos greets me and is brimming with news. “While you were gone—
my son was born.”
“Nice goin’, mijo—tell, me, when was he born?”
“ON HIS BIRTHDAY!” ( Wow, I think, what are the chances of that happening! )
God, right there, today, in the person in front of me, joy beyond holding, beholding this day, Paradise. You delight in what is before you today in Christ.
Richard Rolheiser writes that, “the opposite of depression is not happiness, it’s delight.” After all, we breathe the Spirit that delights in our being. We don’t breathe in the Spirit that just sort of puts up with our mess. It’s about delight.
Before they tore down the projects of Pico Gardens and then rebuilt them, the two identifying locales within them were “first and second playgrounds.” They were areas ostensibly for kids to play in, though the jungle gyms looked like hand-me-downs from Mogadishu, and the patch of lawn never deepened in color past yellow. “Meet you at second playground” was commonly heard, or “They crept in at first playground and started blasting” was also ( desafortunadamente) a recurring refrain.
On a summer night, I’m on my bike and settle in the heart of second playground. It’s still light out, and soon I’m surrounded by homies from this barrio. I straddle the bike and listen to the homies “bagging” on one another (kidding one another endlessly—truth be told, this is the main occupation of all gang members). There are eight who ultimately gather here, the banter is fast, and no prisoners are taken. In a flash, one of the homies, Minor (a “new booty”), points up to a telephone wire perched above the apartments (each playground is surrounded by two-story apartments, boxing the play areas into squares).
“Look, G, IT’S AN OWL.”
“YEAH, DAMN, A FUCKIN’ OWL,” says another.
“In the projects,” a third chimes in, setting our collective volume to a hush, indicating that some cathedral has just been entered. Sure enough, there is the largest owl imaginable resting on this telephone wire just above Lupe Loera’s cantón. We stand in a straight line, eyeing this anomalous creature that has chosen to visit the poorest, most owl-less sector in LA (pigeons and mice are generally our only wildlife). Mouths agape, the silence is maintained only briefly as Psycho turns to Minor with a whisper.
“Get the gauge.”
“Nope,” Gonzo intervenes, reaching over and touching Minor on the arm. As a shot-caller, Gonzo’s “got it like that.”
“No,” Gonzo says, with the heft of some tribal leader. “Let him be.” No one wants to speak too loudly or make any sudden moves. Even when it does occur to someone in the group to say something, no one takes his eyes off this bird.
“It’s a sign,” says one.
“From God,” adds another.
“What’s it mean, G?” says Minor, the wide-eyed pup of this litter.
I lean in to him, but with a stage whisper so all can hear. “It’s God saying to give up your weapons, love your enemies, and work for peace.” The unified moan nearly sends our unexpected owl packing.
“You think every sign means that?” (Uh-oh. Gonzo’s onto me.) There we stand as others join our vigil in the temple worship of this massive animal. Silence prevails, as no church service I’ve seen ever commands, until this astonishing owl opens its wings and takes off (suspecting, no doubt, that Psycho and his gauge can’t be restrained forever). And he is gone in a majestic flapping and a slow-motion gliding, disappearing from view behind the gigantic tower of the corn factory fronting the projects. Today. This day. An owl. Second playground. Together we breathe this all in, and it seems a paradise to us.
* * *
I take Israel and Tony with me to Christ the King parish in Los Angeles. I’m going to speak after the parish spaghetti feed and my two associates will try to sell out all the Homeboy/Homegirl merchandise we’ve packed in our trunk. But first, they have to sit through the 5:30 p.m. Saturday Mass, with me presiding.On the way home that night, Tony, singularly impressed at Israel’s breadth of liturgical knowledge, regales me. Apparently, Israel had absolutely nailed all the responses.
“May the Lord be with you.”
“And also with you,” Israel confidently returns.
“Lift up your hearts.”
“We lift them up to the Lord.” No beat gets missed in Israel’s comeback.
Tony stares at him, amazed. This goes on for the duration of the Mass, and Tony keeps turning and marveling at Israel’s adroit certainty in this back and forth of liturgical protocol.
“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”
And Israel, blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, returns the volley.
“Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
That does it. Tony can’t take it anymore.
“Hey,” he says, tilting toward Israel and whispering, “How you know all this?”
“Juvenile Hall, fool.”
If only Tony had been detained on as many cases as Israel, he, too, would be churchgoer of the year.
As we bask in God’s attention, our eyes adjust to the light, and we begin to see as God does. Then, quite unexpectedly, we discover what Mary Oliver calls
“the music with nothing playing.”
It is an essential tenet of Buddhism that we can begin to change the world by first changing how we look at the world. The Vatican II Council Fathers simply decided to change the opening words of their groundbreaking encyclical,
“Gaudium et Spes.” Originally, it read, speaking of the world: “The grief and the anguish . . .” Then they just decided to cross out those words and famously inserted instead, “The joy and the hope . . .” No new data had rushed in on them, and the world hadn’t changed suddenly. They just chose, in a heartbeat, to see the world differently. They hadn’t embraced, all of a sudden, Pollyannaism.
They had just put on a whole new set of eyewear.
One of my favorite examples of this came from a sixteen-year-old homie and, no doubt, budding Buddhist, Lorenzo. He settled into a chair in front of my desk, and when I looked up, I saw he had scratches all over his face, and his two forearms were raspberried with scrapes. He was pretty much beat up, and I presumed an encounter with rivals.
“My God,” I say to him, “What happened to you?”
Lorenzo, nonchalant and unbothered, points at his numerous red markings and scabs and dismisses it all with glee.
“Oh this? My bike was teaching me how to fly.” Music with nothing playing.
* * *
On an early Saturday morning, several members of an enemy gang, with faces obscured in ski masks, enter a part of the projects where they are certain to catch some rivals “slippin’.” They turn a corner and see three brothers enjoying the bright early-morning sun right outside their kitchen door. Clearly, the older two, Rickie and Adam, twenty and eighteen, are targets for the invading masked men, but in the frenzy of bullets flying, their twelve-year-old brother, Jacob, not from any gang, is felled, and his brothers’ lives are altered immeasurably and forever.I had known this family since 1984 and watched how, almost imperceptibly, the older brothers would dance close to the gang life and then drift back to other,
safer boundaries. Eventually, they were in, and the death of their baby brother, from a bullet inscribed with other names, would be their pervasive and enduring wound for some time to come.
I hired them both shortly after their brother was killed, and they worked in our Homeboy Merchandising division, selling T-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, and a variety of items sporting the Homeboy logo. They worked closely with enemies
—even those who belonged to the gang surely responsible for their brother’s death.
A speaking gig to San Francisco came up, and I invited them both—thinking a change of scenery would restore them. They were very excited but completely confounded to discover (once we were at the airport) that, well, we were going to fly and not drive. I guess I thought I had made this clear. Seeing their panic, I decide not to calm them down. Instead, I stop under the wing of the Southwest Airlines plane (at Burbank Airport you walk the tarmac and climb the steps) and stare up, with consternation. “Uh-oh,” I say as they rush to my side in a breathless “What?” “What?” unison. I point. “I don’t know—is that a crack in the wing, or am I seeing things?” It takes them a while to see what I’m doing, and then they say in brotherly chorus, “You ain’t right,” “Damn, don’t be doing that.”
We climb the stairs and find our seats. Rickie lets his younger brother, Adam, get “SHOTGUN” (which I suggest is usually not a thing one tends to yell on planes nowadays). Quickly they discover the laminated emergency cards in the pouch before them, and Adam thinks they’re menus and that we’re in a flying Denny’s. “Two oxygens, please, when you get a chance,” he says to the
“waitress,” who fortunately for all involved does not actually hear him. The pilot speaks over the intercom and drones on in his pilot cadence, “We’ll be traveling at an altitude of, etc . . . thank you for flying Southwest Airlines.” I shake my head with some force. “Damn, I hate that.” Again, they turn and begin the
“What?” “What?” refrain. “Well,” I tell them, “It’s ten a.m., and I think our pilot has had a couple of 40s already,” making tippling gestures with my hand.
“OK . . . cut . . . that . . . out.” They seem to be catching on more quickly now.
“Well, what I want to know is, where’s the parachute at?” Adam asks, searching everywhere one might search for such a thing. “Well, there is no parachute,” I say, becoming Mr. Rogers on a dime. “NO PARACHUTE?” Adam squeals, a bit worked up, “Well, what we sposed ta do if THIS SHIT
CRASHES?” Now I’m Mr. Rogers on Valium. “Well, I’ll tell you what to do in the event of a crash.” They could not be one bit more attentive. “Are your seat belts securely fastened?” They check and nod earnestly. “Okay, now lean forward.” They are very compliant. “No, you have to lean as far as you can—is
that as far as you can go?” They are so low, I can barely register the nodding of their heads. “Okay,” I say, steady and calm as she goes, “Now . . . if you can reach . . . kiss your asses good-bye . . . cuz that’s all you’ll be able to do if this thing goes down.” They can’t even believe that their chain has been yanked so egregiously. “Qué gacho, right there.” “You . . . ain’t . . . right.”
Takeoff (as is always the case with novice homie flyers) transforms these two big gangsters into old ladies on a roller coaster. As usual, there is great sighing and clutching and rapid signs of the cross. Adam and Ricky can’t take their eyes off the tiny window to their right and manage plenty of “Oh, my God’s” and
“This is proper.” Terror melting into wonder, then slipping into peace. The peanuts and sodas are delivered, and they feel special (they later report to those back at the office, “They EVEN gave us peanuts!”). Then, after we climb above the bounce, Ricky pats Adam’s chest, as they both look out above their own clouds, and whispers, “I love doing this with you, brother.”
Life, after unspeakable loss, becoming poetry again. In this together, two brothers, locked arms, delighting in the view from up here.
Thomas Merton writes, “No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there . . . We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.” The cosmic dance is simply always happening, and you’ll want to be there when it happens. For it is there in the birth of your first child, in roundhouse bagging, in watching your crew eat, in an owl’s surprising appearance, and in a “digested” frog. Rascally inventions of holiness abounding
—today, awaiting the attention of our delight. Yes, yes, yes. God so loved the world that He thought we’d find the poetry in it. Music. Nothing playing.