Author Archives: Greg Wees

Are You Trying to Kill Me, Mister?

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During a recent diversion on an Internet “forum” dedicated to a novel (yes, I’ve come to my senses since then), someone proposed a thread of topics on “amazing things that have happened to you.” I rather liked the little tale I told, so here it is, slightly…modified.

 

When I was about 11 I lived near Naples in southern Italy. My neighbors were an American expatriate married to an Italian woman and their family. Even though he was American and lived in an American enclave, you got the distinct impression he didn’t like Americans. At least, he didn’t act very cordial to the adults in our little housing area. As foreigners of the same nationality living abroad will tend to be, the rest of us were quite chummy. But not this guy.

Their son, who loved everything American, which probably pissed Dad off even more, was quite fond of me. They were planning a trip to the beach, at Sorrento, and he invited me to come along. Sounded good, so along I came. I didn’t consider him a great friend, but he was OK, and I was hoping to see his hot older sister in her underwear or, better yet, naked.

So we go to Sorrento. At one point, the Dad said we would go rock climbing. I’d never done it, but being a game lad I was ready to give it a try. So we all headed out to a cliff he knew of that was apparently good for rock climbing.

We got out onto this cliff, which was very steep, and here I was suddenly clinging to rocks on a sheer cliff, which I soon discovered ended about 50 feet down in a completely sheer (90 degree) sea wall, itself about 20 feet high, and below that were rocks and crashing waves. The sea wall went on for as far as one could see in both directions.

I realized that if I lost my footing and fell–50 feet down the rocky cliff, then the 20 feet of the sea wall and onto the rocks jutting from the sea–I would probably be killed.

The going got tougher. I could barely find any places to hold on–the rocks seemed to get further apart, with only scrub in between. A few times I almost fell, and grabbed instinctively onto the scrub plants to keep from falling.

“Don’t do that,” says my friend’s dad, “those won’t hold you.” He’s perfectly calm, like he couldn’t care less if I do fall.

Meanwhile, he and his son are scrambling along like mountain goats, obviously experienced at this and familiar with the terrain.

Somehow, I made it to the top of the cliff. I didn’t get too freaked out at the time, but later realized that I could have easily fallen at any point on that climb–especially since I was only 11 and completely inexperienced at rock climbing.

Later, we’re going to go swimming. These guys are big swimmers, and since I’ve only been in Italy a few months, I have never experienced swimming in surf. “We like to swim out to that rock,” Dad says, pointing to a large moss-covered rock about a hundred yards out in the bay. “Kind of a race.”

They dive in and start swimming to the rock. So off I go after them, quickly realizing how difficult it is to swim against a current. But I make it to the rock, only to realize it’s wet mossy surface means you don’t get to climb up on it and rest – you have to tread water next to it. “OK, well, let’s head back,” he says. I’m not sure I can make it, but being a kid I don’t say anything. I just start in after them.

I almost didn’t make it. They were way ahead of me, standing on the beach while I was about halfway between the rock and the shore. I slowed way down, treaded water for a while to rest, then swam some more. I finally made it, but was completely exhausted. A few more yards and I would not have made it.

It was strange. After a while I realized that the guy was probably hoping I would either fall off the cliff or drown in the sea–perfectly explainable “accidents.” He seemed disappointed for the rest of the trip, didn’t speak to me much.

I’ve often wondered since growing up what kind of person would toy with a child’s life like that, concluding that the guy was kind of nuts.

I pretty much avoided that family after the trip.

Notes on the Passing Scene…

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I’ve been thinking about “a lot of different stuff,” as the kids say.

  • It appears our elected officials are doing their level best to prove they are interested more in themselves than in governing. This is nothing new, of course, but it’s reaching epic incestuous proportions – at present, the House is wrapped up in whether it should have an Ethics Committee to investigate itself or not; the Senate is bogged down in endless debate and frequent press potshots on whether it should change its rules on the filibuster; the administration is ga-ga over Social Security “reform”, although it has no actual plan. Meanwhile the rest of us are thinking about–hold on to your hats–the actual issues facing the country.
  • I hear teenage girls are now using steroids to “tone up” or win at sports. Why girls would want to raise their testosterone levels is beyond me, but somehow I’m not surprised. The whole country seems to be on a de-evolutionary binge, trying to become less civilized and more…barbaric. Violent entertainment, violent pastimes, increasingly violent personal interactions, “aggressive” business tactics, a foreign policy based on instigating wars–it goes on. It’s as though we’re all in basic training, toughening ourselves and putting our “game” faces on to get ready to…what?
  • The Republican party appears to have become the official political wing of the religious right. In case anyone wanted to know.
  • Some people don’t take compliments well–inferiority complex. The Democrats don’t take to political advantage well, retaining the politics of “shrill indignation” even when they’re gaining ground–fear of success? Or just plain dumb?
  • I heard some “experts” talking today on why the U.S. cannot seem to find Osama bin Laden, who is, incidentally, living quietly in a condo in northern Pakistan with his two cats. The one expert, an apologist for the government, said essentially that we don’t need to find him–that to spend all our energy trying to capture one man who is not directly involved in current threats to the U.S. would sidetrack more important anti-terror efforts. Funny–that sounds like the case not to go after Saddam Hussein.
  • In a little town out here on the Plains, a teenage girl burned her house down, killing two siblings in the process. She was trying to kill her dad, who was sexually abusing her and taking pictures of the rapes for his personal collection. She’s only about 16, but she’ll be tried as an “adult,” because…well, I guess because no one will stop them. Dad survived–he’s in jail now on child porn charges. Oh, and the attention of the case led authorities to arrest mom on outstanding bad check charges. Just one all-American Iowa family.
  • Around here, folks like to hunt Morrell mushrooms in the spring. This year, they’re getting shot at by nervous farmers who think these folks are setting up meth labs. Three words: know your enemy. One more word: relax.
  • Speaking of meth, a local grade school teacher was just busted for dealing it (though not to her students, apparently). She’s claiming hardship because she couldn’t survive on her $31,000 annual salary–which is about 1,000 times the average Guatemalan’s annual salary.

Spring and Hope, Together Again

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The sap rises in my newly shorn trees. Buds poke out of the stems I have been warily watching, dreading  they may have died over the winter. But they didn’t. Nor did I. Another spring, another promise.

My daughter has progressed with her bicycle riding.  We will buy her a bigger one this summer, so her knees don’t hit the handlebars. We’ll finish reading her Lemony Snickets book to her, then we’ll start another. Fairly soon the three of us will head off to Niobrara for a therapeutic weekend away from the city, a needed diversion from all of these same days of work, school, and the rest.

I’m trying to punch up my own activity level. Last weekend I took a huge pile of branches from an overgrown shrubbery to task, bending and twisting and finally splitting the green wood, which needed tearing away from its supple bark to make the complete break. It was a Herculean task, one that didn’t really need doing, but I did it anyway. Then I broke them further and spent the afternoon burning the twigs and branches in my outdoor fireplace while drinking a beer.

Very satisfying, but my winter-soft muscles were sore for days afterward. Next week I will plant grass.

I need to get my own bike down off its inverted perch in the garage and put it to use again. I need to get on the trail, feel my legs again. Lately, all I feel of them is the pain from sitting too long, working too long, twisting my impatient legs in knots under my desk. I told my daughter we’d ride the trail together now that she’s a good rider, which scared her a little. But she’ll be fine.

She says she wants to cut her hair short for the summer. That’s a good idea.

We’ll take her to Colorado in June, to the Rocky Mountains. She can climb, breathe the thin air with us, pan for gold in the little stream beside the cabin. We’ll build fires at night, watch the stars from the deck. We’ll eat well.

My house is in order. My trees are trimmed. My clothes fit. It’s a good spring so far, and my home is happy. We are of this Earth, and we belong here. I was made to enjoy these things, and not to wonder at joy’s quotient.

Wordsworth lamented, “The world is too much with us.” And it is. The idiocy of the world won’t stop just because I’m in a good mood. But he also knew that being at one with the real world–nature–was something to aspire to, even as the world of men continues to vie for our attention and tries its best to demonstrate to us our soul’s corruptibility, our body’s corporeality, and our great grand experiment’s utter futility.

Frost knew:

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

Here’s to the futility of grand things.  I too am a happy swinger of birches these days.

The Pope and Mrs. Shiavo

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Terry Schiavo  has passed, and the pope is not far behind. As if in rebuttal, the little tufts of grass on my lawn are puffing up and greening in a small pageant of renewal.

To obsess as a culture, a world, over a life over or nearly over seems odd, misplaced, as lives in full are threatened daily, hourly, by the very circumstances we create for ourselves–in war, poverty, and all those conditions and crimes we assign to the realm of the inevitable.

And here are those crying, mourning souls all bent out of shape over ends which truly are, or were, inevitable. Schiavo has been, from her own perspective, gone for 15 years. Now her body can rest too, its marionette strings cut, the puppeteers given the pink slip. They will find another poor soul to symbolize before too long, and we’ll start this sidewalk theatre over again.

The Pope, in an odd convergence, has a feeding tube inserted as they remove Schiavo’s. He too is on that inevitable path, but why not keep him alive? He is alive, after all, not dead like Schiavo was. Yet the same madness that insisted on animating her corpse for fifteen years may steal the life from His Holiness prematurely, because just as the Catholic law forbids taking–or preventing–life against God’s will to create it, it also forbids “extraordinary means” for preserving life against God’s will to end it. The philosophy is simple: don’t interfere with God’s process for life. But medicine complicates the question, and now, suddenly, it seems we need an answer.

Do we? How do we formulate a single answer for conditions so wide-ranging in their prognoses, and in the quality of the life we may save? Do we revive our 93-year-old grandma after her third heart attack, or do we accept the body’s end? Do we pull the plug on 60-year-old Dad because, even though there’s a chance he could recover, he’s costing $12,000 a week to keep alive?

The Pope wants his suffering to symbolize Christ’s suffering, he wants to share it and display it to the world in a show of faith. Now, he is silent. Like it or not, others will have to decide for him how long the show must go on. And, not incidentally, the church needs a pope. One who talks. Can he keep his job with a ventilator down his throat? If he’s relieved, will his suffering still symbolize Christ’s? Or is he at that point just a disturbed, dying old man? I don’t want to answer. But the questions do not go away.

Schiavo may or may not have wanted her life ended once her brain was beyond recovery. To my mind, it makes little difference what they did or didn’t do once she reached that point. We have certain predilections when we live, and once we’re gone they really don’t matter. Not to us. But they matter to the living. Now if only the living who have the luxury to worry about such things could get excited about what the rest of the living want–food, homes, safety, good government, and all those things that make life worthwhile.

Reprieve

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It’s the oddest thing living in a state of ill health. Having had a pretty much completely healthy life until recently, I had no experience with “chronic” health problems, as so many unfortunates do. It has kept me from these writings, from nearly all things that I do for pleasure, for months. And now it appears to be over.

I don’t think I want to get into the nature of the problem itself. I’m feeling better now, so it’s as though it never happened. I just recently read some writer’s “voyage back from addiction,” with all the mundane details of how heroin ruined his life etcetera, and oh how pathetic I was, and all that. It may sell newspapers, since folks love to read about someone more down and out than they are, but to me–a Plainsman after all–such confessionals erode one’s dignity.

Suffice to say I’m back to being me. I don’t want to dwell on it; but I’m writing of it now as a kind of farewell to paranoia, to daily pain, to endless doctor visits, to awkward and embarrassing medical procedures.

So let’s just be done with it, and be thankful for that wonderful feeling of the keys under my fingertips, tapping out my thoughts so obediently.

What I find remarkable is how easy it is to shift from a day-to-day existence to a “here and now” existence in the face of a possible life-threatening situation. It became, for me anyway, nearly impossible to think seriously about anything more than a few weeks into the future. Long-range planning seemed naively idealistic. Better to just get through this week, see the doctor, then we’ll move on from there. And any event supposed to be pleasant is never fully pleasant, tinged as it is with thoughts of impermanence. You sit at the dinner party, everyone laughing and talking, and you hear them, and you even join in, but your mind keeps butting in, whispering to you that “sure, this is nice, but what if it’s the last time for you? What if you learn the awful truth tomorrow and become incapable of enjoying a single moment free from thoughts of an impending death?”

Melodramatic, to be sure, but that’s how my inner mind works under stress, not allowing me to take “focus” off the problem. It’s a personal assistant who won’t quit bugging me about my “twelve o’clock with a Mr. Death?” or “Yes, I have a Grim Reaper here to see you? Says he has an appointment?”  I’ve even considered the idea that I’m a hypochondriac, that this stuff is all in my mind and I just need to snap out of it. But then I remember the pain, and the hospital stays, and the bills. Yep, I’m forced to admit, I’ve got some problems.

But as with another near encounter with the Undiscovered Country a few years ago, there is a pleasant by-product to a reprieve from the self-imposed death sentence. It’s like getting a promotion when you thought you were going to be fired, like getting probation instead of the chair; it’s another chance and the proverbial clean slate.

And so I keep moving toward my ultimate goal, which I think I’ve outlined here before, of living deliberately. I get closer to a life of the here and now, because I’ve been so close to feeling like life could be gone forever. Each day now I am aware of my luck at being alive, of the comforts of my home, of the love of my family–all that corny stuff. Though there are many who would probably feel cheated or like some kind of failure living a life as simple as mine, I can’t get past being immensely grateful for another day free from pain and anxiety. I wake up, I feel normal–and hey, it’s a great day. Can’t complain, as they say.

So the ugly here and now of existence, living in constant pain and fear of serious illness, gives way to the beautiful here and now of existence: of feeling rapturously relaxed during dinner with friends, or engaging in a calm and sweet conversation with my daughter, free of those background thoughts of dread.

Free from fear, thus free to live. That’s all I need for now.