One Week Later

Since it has been a week since I was assaulted, I'm writing now basically to say I'm "OK," but also to try to capture some of the fleeting moments that have happened, basically before they fly out of my memory!

1) "Shattered Assumptions:" In part this is what I was talking about in a previous post. It's the sort of "official" description of what happens to a person when they are assaulted. I was telling someone how I felt about losing a sense of safety around what is essentially my backdoor. I was told that, along with the physical damage is this notion of "shattered assumptions," a kind of official PTSD term. Like, I assumed my garage area would be safe at 7 AM when I pick up my paper. One morning, I was wrong about that. But all it takes is one time, to shatter assumptions.

The issue then becomes, how both to re-assemble an assumptive world, and make appropriate adjustments, reasonably and with as little fear as possible. At least, that is how I put it to myself. So I had the company deliver my paper to the front door, where I can better see if someone is coming or lurking. Still, it's different getting my paper now...

2) Robbery was not the motive?: No, most likely not-- because nothing material was taken from me. What was taken from me was a sense of safety in my own home environs. I'm not the first to experience this, obviously.

3) Am I still a lion?: Being a Leo, I identify with lions. The symbol of them as regal. The whole "pride" thing! I even like that hyenas are their principle nemeses! Sort of puts lions in their place. But last week I was feeling less like a lion and more like a wildebeest! I felt like I had wandered absentmindedly just a little too far from the herd, had been jumped by a predator, and had escaped and made it back to the herd. I spent a lot of the week literally "shaking off" the attack, a la Waking the Tiger, and just being glad for the herd gathering around me. It was not a week to have to fend for myself.

4) I went to the ENT doc yesterday, which was an adventure in itself. One of the nurses told me that, given what I'd been through, I looked "good." I told her that was a lot better assessment than I'd received from other people, who simply had said I did not look "too bad." Now the ER doc had told me that they found nothing wrong with my brain-- which was a pleasant surprise in itself. But the ENT doc said that he couldn't do anything to "help" my face... which was kind of sad to hear. I mean, I'm glad about my brain, but I was kind of hoping to get some help for my face...

5) What people say: Art Linkletter (remember him?) made a name for himself by recording what children told him. His "Kids Say the Darndest Things" books were a riot. Well, I've read enough Dear Abby, and Ann, and Amy columns to know that people say the darndest things to each other at times of trauma. I've had enough trauma in my life to have heard some of them, and now I'm wondering whether I could find a way to get us to laugh at ourselves when we say the darndest things to each other in an effort to comfort. For instance, one person said to me, "This is going to age you." Well, yes... Other people said, "Protect yourself." Of course-- but I thought I either was protecting myself or didn't need to at that hour in the AM. Someone said, "You should have had a gun." Maybe, but, given how quickly everything happened, I probably would have found my own weapon used against me. I don't know that any sort of "preparedness" would have helped, really. Many people said things that had the ring of closing the barn door after the horses has got out-- because, after all, they too were trying to restore their assumptive worlds. More than just my assumptions got shattered.

This is probably why the most comforting things I was told had to do with how my telling them what had happened was affecting them in that moment. People said they were shocked, horrified, even sick to their stomach. They were sad, or angry, or worried for me, or sympathetic. Getting back some sort of emotion from others was like a Red Cross blanket and cuppa joe for me as I was sitting in my own disaster. There were offers to help, too, but we all knew we were helpless to turn back the clock and undo what had been done. So the "being in the moment" with me meant more than anything.

Honestly, there is more than enough good to have come from this to make me almost glad it happened... Almost glad, I said. Truly, I wouldn't wish this on anyone-- let alone me, all over again.

Calling All Angels

There actually are more than a few gratifying things about being beat up. One of them is, you find out who your friends are!

No, sorry, I really do not mean to joke about this. I mean to express my gratitude and seriously affirm the abundance of the universe. I truly am "getting by with a little help from my friends." I have been lifted up, as by angels.

Here's what I would say about angels: Some of them have come from places I would hope and expect-- family, friends, people I know love me and whom I am privileged to love.

Some of my "angels" have come from within me: resources of intellect, emotion and spirit that I rely upon more than I know in everyday life, and rediscover when life is not so "everyday." Angels like my sense of humor. And my knowledge about and previous experience of PTSD... So when I'm in shock and numbed, I am; and when I'm shaking, and weepy, I am. And when I'm walking through the valleys of the Shadow that are ERs and doctors' offices, I am.

I am, I am able to be, because I am aware that I am accompanied.

Which brings me to the third sort of angels who've been called and who have come: those I didn't expect. As if to balance the Surprise of the One Who Would Harm have come the Surprises of the Many Who Would Heal. So: a neighbor brings dinner; someone I hardly know sends a card; people whom I wouldn't expect, call, or email; many offer to keep me in prayer.

All of this is more than gratifying, more than reassuring. This is a community of care I've discovered that I didn't even know I had, really, or better, that was part of my "assumptive world" yet not my presumptive world, if you know what I mean-- the tacit become tactile, the silent, speaking and speaking up!

I am more than grateful, because, at the moment, I need this widened awareness of the essential benevolence of the world. Nothing material was taken from me outside my garage, but still the motive was robbery: for what was taken from me was my sense that at least THAT part of the world was safe.

We all need to feel safe. I mean, yes, it does take courage to live and to go about living in this world. But some times it takes more courage than at others, and right now, at this time in my life, I needed to feel safe again. I needed to re-establish where I could be safe and whom I could be safe with.

The angels who came from without and within, the angels who might have been anticipated and those who were unanticipated, all served to make me feel safe again. My face and body would heal on their own, but the rift in my world could only heal with the help of these angels.

People have said to me: Take care! Be wary! Be cautious! Be alert! And yes, I am more aware of where I am and who is around me now than I was. But I also know that if I go into the world in too much fear, if I am jittery and apprehensive, if I am suspicious and distrustful, if I am short-tempered and reactive-- then the Assailant won.

So I will not live in fear and I will not let my basic trust be broken. I will walk in confidence and I will be unafraid.

How can I do that? Well, I got Angels watchin' over me!

You do, too! Blessings...

Can Sense Be Made of the Senseless?

This is no rhetorical question for me at the moment.

This morning, when I went to get my newspaper, I was jumped! Assaulted. By an unknown assailant. And beaten about the face and neck. Until he ran off...

I was down for the count on the first blow, and so did little to protect myself from what came after. Then, when he was gone, I got to my feet, and called 911. I did some other things, too, but remembering them became problematic.

The police and the paramedics were wonderful, both professional and kind. Plus, they laughed at my jokes!

So did at least some of the medical personnel at the local hospital. They were kind, too. The nurse told me about her own facial trauma, from a car accident, and I guess that was supposed to make me feel better since she's looking OK right now.

And the MD gave me the most surprising news I've ever heard. He told me that the CAT scan of my head showed "there was nothing wrong with [my] brain!" Many other people have told me just the opposite with less concrete information to go on! I was relieved.

Physically, the immediate outcome is that I have a broken nose. I am becoming more like my father everyday! But he got his from an opponent he could actually see-- in a boxing ring in the Army.

My assailant? I got a look at his clothes, coming and going. And I didn't see what hit me... But I also didn't see his eyes... This is what bothers me most right now: I can see him coming at me, in his black hoody, but I can't see his face, and I can't see his eyes...

Like Death: black hood; no eyes...

I'm pretty achy at the moment, and I can't breathe very well, but I still have my half-wits about me, and I'll survive. But I have experienced a "random act of violence." One of the few that occurs in my neighborhood every decade or so...

And I can't yet make sense of it... That's the hard part at the moment-- I mean, except for the breathing. It doesn't make sense to me.

It didn't at the moment either. I mean, I didn't scream or cry out or say, "NO!" or any of the things self-defense classes teach. All I did was shout: "Why are you doing this to me?"

Of course, he didn't say...

Death never does have to explain himself. Maybe his younger brother, Assailant, doesn't either.

Poets, Society: Dead or Alive

I am still trying to figure out what to think about Elizabeth Alexander's poem, "Praise Song for the Day," the one she read at Barak Obama's inauguration. At the time of the reading, I was underwhelmed. I realized that she followed one of the great orators of our time-- our new President. Yet, I wanted her to rise to the occasion, as Maya Angelou had done for Bill Clinton, and more, as Robert Frost had done for JFK. So I was disappointed.

I took some consolation in reading afterward, that I was not alone. Little of her imagery had stuck in the minds of many-- and what are poets, any way, if not image-stickers? I felt for her. How often do poets get so grand a stage, so great an opportunity to make the case for poetry? When Alexander missed the mark, the rest of us might too. Yet now, more than ever, we need creative writing. On the coming-down side of our national shopaholic binge, we could all lift ourselves up by the bootstraps of our language-- if we simply were inspired to do so.

Two events have occurred to inspire me. One is to read that a radio DJ in New Jersey has been about inviting "remixes" of Alexander's poem. He seems to realize it needed some redeeming, too. Kenny G is his name, and we can listen to him on www.wfmu.org. He's also posted 51 MP3 remixes on WFMU's blog! One of them simply took all of the words in the poem and put them in alphabetical order-- which turned out to be a poem all its own.

I don't know what Alexander thinks of this, but I find it to be in the spirit of poetry itself. Robert Frost used to say that a poem was never "finished, only abandoned"-- a view I've come to take about my life itself. Maybe Alexander's offering was meant to be remixed or reworked or otherwise taken in by us and redone, like the abandoned given a new home.

The other thing that happened was an editorial in the local paper, that begins with this quote from JFK: "Power corrupts, but poety cleanses." Ah... I'm breathing easier already! Then the story is told of what really happened on JFK's blustery inaugual day: Frost abandoned the poem he was going to read, the one he had written for the occasion, and instead recited from memory, "The Gift Outright." Who knew? "The Gift Outright" was shorter...

Anyway, here are the closing lines of the poem Frost wrote, "Dedication-- For John F. Kennedy, His Inauguration":

"Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom's story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Come fresh from an election like the last,
The greatest vote a people ever cast,
So close yet sure to be abided by,
It is no miracle our mood is high.
Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate and's and if's.
There was a book of profile tales declaring
For the embodied politicians daring
To break with followers when in the wrong,
A healthy independence of the throng.
A democratic form of right divine
To rule first answerable to high design.
There is a call to life a little stearner,
And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.
Less criticism of the field and court
And more preoccupation with the sport.
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour."

Frost got much right in that poem-- a fair forecast of Camelot, and our national mood in the early '60's. But the line I like the most is the next to last: "a golden age of poetry and power...". When we approach our personal lives and our national life together with that order in mind (poetry, then power), we'll not only get through this dismal and discouraging time, we'll find new ground for pride and new reasons to rejoice in triumph.

Reality Shows

Given our celebrity culture, I am frequently amazed at who we admire and of whom we are envious. Television influences us more than we realize-- which is why I confine my TV watching to sporting events and the occasional PBS special!

But I read about television and its shows, just in case I find something interesting, but mostly to justify my decided lack of interest. So there I was the other day, reading a review of a TV show-- and I found myself reading good writing! How did THAT happen?! Mary McNamara wrote an intelligent review of a show that is either unintelligent or unintelligible, I don't know which.

Here's the line that hooked me: "So it's true then. John Updike is dead and we are left with 'The Real Housewives of Orange County'." Well, yes, and we were left with them even when Updike was alive, but even he could not have written about them in any way that was redeeming.

But curiously, even as she skewers those lamentable housewives (who admits to be being a "housewife" any more?; and is this what "housewifery" has come to?), McNamara is almost sympathetic in her prose: "They embody the moral, spiritual and intellectual anorexia that writers have grappled with for years, but in terms a child can understand. Cheever for Dummies." "Hedda Gabler left the building years ago; these heroines are tragic only in their lack of consciousness." "[T]hese women will no doubt remain right where we want them to be: trapped in the fabulous shabbiness of their lives, having conversations that run back and forth like trained rats along dim and narrow mazes of the mundane. Which is precisely why we will always need our poets."

Ah, yes, our poets... Surely emptiness and vacuity are not confined to Orange County and its families (for don't vacuous men find vacuous women attractive?). Maybe the OC is more like a cultural Void into which vacuity flows and collects? But which poet among us can make meaninglessness meaningful?

McNamara did not seem to know one. I don't. I'm waiting for the "Real Bards of Orange County" on PBS...

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

I had a dream the other night that I was crawling through a cave. It was a genuine spelunking experience, with stalagtites and stalagmites, and mud and water dripping.

The thing about it was, I could see where I was going. The whole narrow cave was lit up, as if by a light on a camera. I felt like I was in one of those history channel experiences, you know the ones, where the man intones that he is going to be the "first" to explore this dark, underground place, but we see him enter, so we know that the one who really got there first was the cameraman?

When I woke, I remembered a Monty Python sketch wherein all of the characters realize they are being filmed, and look for the cameraman, find him, then realize they are still being filmed, so search for THAT cameraman, and so on in infinite regress.

"Someone's watching us," Bette Midler sang, but most of our experiences of being watched in this way are more close up than her "from a distance."

Which I learned in another way today from the man who'd come to replace my wind-shredded awning. Like a lot of guys in businesses having to do with roofing, this awning salesman was in recovery, and not shy about saying so. No wonder. He had quite a testimony! (He thanked me for listening, saying not too many other people tolerate his preaching. I told him I knew what he meant!)

He recounted with some bravado some of the life-threatening experiences he had survived-- including three marriages!-- but "survived" wasn't his word. He spoke more of being "brought through," as in guided. "I was being watched," he said.

In addition to his three marriages, which led me to think about my own (we were like "brothers" in a now life-long marriage-recovery program!), one of his adventures was a car accident that nearly took his life. This, too, led me to think of one car accident I'd had. Like him, I'd done a lot while in shock that I wasn't aware of doing at the time. And like him, afterward, I knew I was still alive because I was in a lot of pain. But also like him, I had the experience of being "brought through:" not just watched, as if the Watcher either had no interest in the outcome or couldn't do anything about it anyway; but something more hands on... Involved... The cameraman may be taking the picture but he is also shining the light.

And he's walking backwards, while facing forwards, his eyes on me...

Maybe this is God's singular saving capacity: to be able to walk backwards, with sure steps and bold, yet keep us in sight as we are brought through our peril and led safely home. Amazing Grace!

Go Like 60!

"Tell me one thing that's good about being 60." I'm at my dentist's office, and his assistant has just discovered that we are very nearly the same age. She takes great delight in knowing that I am a few months older than she.

But her question stumps me. She notices my pause, my unusual lack of a quick answer. Any snappy retort I might have spoken has already snapped like the buttons of those who don't eat at Subway. But even the ricochet strikes nothing worth repeating.

"See!" she says, triumphantly. "There's nothing good about being 60!"

Especially for women, I'm thinking, remembering a conversation I'd had recently with a female friend who wanted to set me up with a friend of a friend. "But she's over 60," my would-be yenta lamented. And we went on to talk about how women "change" when they get to 60, how they feel their age in certain sad, fleshly ways. We concurred with the old cliche that men get distinguished, women just get old, and the time for that turning seems to be about the age of 60.

I don't know the truth of any of this, but I'm guessing that my dentist's assistant was thinking something along these lines about herself, and feeling a kind of loss of attractiveness or desirability. I'm guessing that this varies, and I'm sure it is more or less an internal sort of thing. I mean, my dentist's assistant was attractive enough to me that I might have flirted with her if she weren't married. But then, I've been told I flirt a lot, even indiscriminately.

The saying goes that "there's no fool like an old fool," and I'm just now finding out what that means. One of my discoveries on reaching 60 is that, while I've been a fool many, many times before, now I'm having the experience of being an old fool! It's having a curbing effect on my flirting, as if at this ripe age I might finally be learning to be a little more discriminating.

Unfortunately, it just feels like I'm too old to have as much fun as I used to! Now THAT is a sad thought!

Being 60 has led to another kind of vulnerability besides the relational one, and that's the vocational one, the one that connects the significance of one's life to one's accomplishments. Much more than the way my age influences my attractiveness in terms of how other people see me, my age influences my sense of my life's meaningfulness.

(Of course how I am perceived by others is no small thing: just try to get a real job or even health insurance when one is 60 or older! I was told by a health insurance salesman the other day that "60 is the age when everyone starts 'breaking down'." I told him we aren't used cars... But he didn't seem to get the point. Besides, he's got a ways to go before he's 60!)

Anyway, I'm watching this movie the other night, a foreign film that, on the eve of the Oscar's, is being re-released into selected theaters, as foreign films seem to be. I read a wonderful review of it in the paper, and then, lo and behold, discovered it on my cable's pay-per-view! This is the closest thing to an Act of God (at least, a positive one) to happen to me for some time.

The name of the movie is, "The Secret of the Grain." It is French, with English subtitles, and it is about a Tunisian man and his family, so even the French is not what we learned in school, because it is spiced with Arabic like en Provence with turmeric. Point is, the man is 61, and he's just been laid off from a ship yard where he's worked for 35 years.

He's at a certain point in his life that resembles mine in the uncomfortable way that art and life can imitate each other. There was one line in the movie that especially resonated with me, a line that revealed his innermost thoughts. He says, "All this time, and what do I have to leave my children? What do I have to show for my life?" At least, that's a reasonable facsimile of what the line is, and I can't remember whether he actually says, "nothing," or just distinctly implies it.

Either way, what he expresses is what it means to be 60 and male. There truly is this turning in us, from the so-called "power years" of the 50's to the "dis-empowered" ones that begin in the 60's. We go from feeling we are useful to fearing that we are utterly useless to anyone.

Realizing that this turning is occurring can lead to some rather comic/tragic decision making. In the movie, the man decides to invest his severance in transforming a scrapped fishing boat into a restaurant. I decided to invest my retirement in writing. In the movie, the man's decision has some tragic consequences-- but as I was watching it, I kept hoping they were going to turn out comically! I have the same experience in watching my own life: I keep hoping it is going to turn out comically.

In either case, I am learning first hand more about what it means that "there is no fool like an old fool!"

And when I come up with an answer to what is "good" about being 60, I'll let you, and my dentist's assistant, know.