One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  Just as the boy turns the corner of the next street he actually begins to dribble the ball while still riding his bicycle, which delights me all the more because I did the same thing at his age, thinking of it as yet another cool training exercise much like taping cardboard across the bottoms of my spectacles so I could not see the ball while dribbling, and playing with ankle weights in practice so that I would soar all the more weightlessly in games, and dribbling for miles along paths and trails using only my left hand, and not coming into the house at dusk until I hit 10 straight shots from both of my preferred spots on the floor, and learning to sink hook shots by recruiting my much taller brothers to play defense which they did with burly alacrity and roughhousery, and dribbling between and around my legs for 20 minutes with each hand, not to be tricky or show off, but so that I could rely on the skill unconsciously if a sudden change of direction was called for in a tight spot during a game, and practicing every sort of bank and spin shot on the same theory, and a thousand more things, and these memories do not make me sad or nostalgic but rather thrilled and happy that I had those hours. No man ever savored those hours in the game more than I did, no man in the history of the world; and rather than sigh at their loss, I sing at their gain.

  Our Daily Murder

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and I am totally wrestling with feeling bad about sinning, which I do a little and then don’t at all—I’ll explain. Yesterday a guy walked into a classroom in my state and shot nine people to death and shot up ten others so bad that they’ll limp and be in pain in a dozen ways every hour the rest of their lives. A cop shot the shooter and now the shooter is dead. But this all happened too in Columbine and Aurora and Sandy Hook and Charleston and Norway and Dunblane and Tasmania and on and on and need I go on? And what is my sin? I’ll tell you, Father. Lean in a little here so no one hears. I wanted to shoot the shooters. In the head. I did. And then when I calmed down I wanted to punch the idiots who immediately started shouting that this doesn’t have anything to do with gun control. And then I wanted to thump the people who excoriated the school for not having armed guards on duty every fifty feet around the perimeter. And then I wanted to afflict everyone issuing comment and opinion and advice and sound bites with laryngitis that would last a month. And then all I could see were body bags and people sobbing. The mother and the father of the shooter sobbing and speechless. And I was ashamed of myself, Father, because I wriggle with violent impulses, and I have punched and thumped and shouted, and in me is the same squirm of lashing violence as in every other man and probably most women, if they were honest. So I come to you, Father, to see if you can help me. I need you to tell me this will end someday. I need you to tell me Christ was right and turning the other cheek will not always mean getting a knife slash on the other cheek too. I need you to tell me that this has nothing to do with easy useless labels like Satan and Evil and Insanity and everything to do with the brooding shadow in every heart. I need you to tell me that shadow will be dispersed and disseminated someday and not by fiat from the One but by us working our asses off to make violence something that you visit in war museums. I need you to confirm that it’s us who can solve our daily murder. I need you to confirm that Christ is in us and we can do this if we stop posturing and preening and labeling and actually do something about lonely idiots with brains full of worms. And we are not just talking about addled lonely boys with squirming brains, are we? Aren’t we also talking about arrogant pompous blowhards like bin Laden and Hitler who are sure they know what’s best and right for everyone? Aren’t we talking about slimy wannabe caliphs who want to own a desert where they pretend it’s the seventh century? Aren’t we talking about everyone who thinks they know best? Aren’t we talking about that jagged splinter of bloody bile in every man’s heart and probably most women, if they were honest? Aren’t we talking about your heart and mine, Father? What’s my sin, really? Deeper than the rage I feel with people who murder innocents, people who close up their brains as they open their mouths, my sin, down deep, is that I often despair of us, Father. I do. At night. I don’t wake my wife. She has enough to deal with. But I lie awake and think maybe we are exactly the same savage primates we were a million years ago, and culture and civilization are mere veneer, and we will always be pulling triggers in so many ways—pistols, rifles, cannons, drones, bombers, warheads, whatever brilliant murder tool we come up with next. We’re so creative, eh, Father? Always looking for a new way to blow the other guy to bits and then drape righteous excuse over the bloody dirt. So that’s what I wanted to tell you, Father. I rage, I despair. I am ashamed of that. Both are small. I want to be big. I want us all to be big. I want Christ to be right. I want the word shooter to be forgotten. I want us to outwit violence. But I am so often so afraid that we will always be small and that Christ was a visionary whose words will drown in a tsunami of blood. I know you can’t forgive me, Father. I know the drill. But I ask that you join me in intercession to the One for hope, for endurance, for a flash of his love like water when we are so desperately thirsty we think we will never find water again. Amen.

  Because It’s Hard

  I was in a monastery the other day and got to talking to a monk who, when I asked him why he was a monk—why he volunteered for a job liable to loneliness, a commitment to an idea no one can ever prove or document, a task that entails years of labor in the belief that somehow washing dishes and cutting grass and listening to pain and chanting in chapel matters in the long scheme of things—said, because it’s hard.

  I was startled; sure I was. You would be, too. Rarely do people say with a grin that they do something because it’s hard to do it. But he said it again, still smiling, and then he talked about it for a while, haltingly at first, as he felt for the words, and then with a lovely flow, like something let loose from a dam after a long time pooling behind the dam.

  Because I am not sure I can do it at all, he said, let alone do it well, and do it for years and years, perhaps for my whole life. I cannot think that way. I try to be a good monk for a week at a time. Walking helps greatly, I find. Also birds. We have a resident heron here who has been a great help to me. Sometimes he or she is right there by the reeds when I am in pressing need of a heron. I have come to think that the birds are shards of faith themselves in mysterious ways. You could spend a whole life contemplating birds and never come to the end of the amazing things they do. There are many swallows here and I spend hours at a time watching them conduct their intricate maneuvers. They have the loveliest gentle chitter with which they speak to each other in the air. Remarkable creatures altogether. When I was first a monk I was of a mind to adopt one as a pet, and I actually got a ladder and climbed to one of their nests, but when I loomed into view there, surely a great horror to the parents and the young ones, I could not find it in myself to reach in and steal a child. I went back down the ladder and went to the chapel.

  I want to be a monk because I think that would be a very good use of me, he continued. Does that sound strange? It sounds a bit arrogant, I suppose. I don’t mean to be arrogant. I want to be an implement. Something like a shovel with a beard. If I live with humility and intent, if I do what I do well and gracefully, that is good. Beyond that I cannot go. When I speak to children they will ask me things like, if I do enough good, and other people do good, then the good stacks up, right? and the good eventually beats the bad, right? and I cannot say this is so. I am not very interested in speculation about such things. I was never interested in theology. I think theology is an attempt to make sense of that to which sense does not apply. I cannot explain why I hope that what I do matters; all I can do is do what I do, either well or ill, patiently or not, gracefully or not. And I do find that doing things mindfully, patiently, easefully, makes the task far more interesting. I love to cut the grass here, for I sometimes come to a sort of understanding with the grass, and the hill, and the creatures in the grass, and with my legs and arms and back, a sort of silent conversation in which we all communicate
easily and thoroughly. Do you have any idea of what I mean with all this?

  I think I do, I said. I have children and a fascinating graceful mysterious wife and sometimes we are like five fingers in a hand. And sometimes when I write, that happens, that the page and my fingers and my dreams are all the same thing for an hour. I always emerge startled.

  Yes, he said, yes, that is why I am a monk. I thought perhaps I could add to that larger music, by being a monk. I might have held almost any job, I suppose, been any sort of man—I was very lucky in life, and had a wonderful childhood, and education, and I loved women, and they loved me, and I might have been happy and fulfilled in a dozen ways. But I knew inside that I had to try to do what was hard for me to do, to be of best use.

  That’s well said, I said.

  Then perhaps I was a good monk during the saying of it, he said, smiling again. And now I must be off. Perhaps my best use for the last few minutes was to talk to you; and now my work is certainly to clean the kitchen, for it is Wednesday, and it is my job to make the kitchen shine. Come down a little early tomorrow, before everyone else is up, and see if I have been a good monk for the next couple of hours. Sleep well. The birds begin to sing at about four in the morning. It is my belief that the warblers are first but I could be wrong. A better monk would know, but I am not yet a good monk in that area, though I have hopes.

  Irreconcilable Dissonance

  I have been married once, to the woman to whom I am still married so far, and one thing I have noticed about being married is that it makes you a lot more attentive to divorce, which used to seem like something that happened to other people, but doesn’t anymore, because of course every marriage is pregnant with divorce, and also now I know a lot of people who are divorced, or are about to be, or are somewhere in between those poles, for which shadowy status there should be words like mivorced or darried or sleeperated or schleperated, but there aren’t, so far.

  People seem to get divorced for all sorts of reasons, and I find myself taking notes, probably defensively, but also out of sheer amazement at the chaotic wilderness of human nature. For example, I read recently about one man who got divorced so he could watch all sixty episodes of The Wire in chronological order. Another man got divorced after thirty years so he could, he said, fart in peace. Another man got divorced in part because he told his wife he had an affair, but he didn’t have an affair, he just couldn’t think of any other good excuse to get divorced, and he didn’t want to have an affair, or be with anyone else other than his wife, because he liked his wife, and rather enjoyed her company as a rule, he said, but he just didn’t want to be married to her every day anymore, he preferred to be married to her every second or third day, but she did not find that a workable arrangement, and so they parted company, confused.

  Another man I read about didn’t want to get divorced, he said, but when his wife kept insisting that they get divorced because she had fallen in love with another guy, he, the husband, finally agreed to get divorced, and soon after he found himself dating the other guy’s first wife; as the first guy said, who could invent such a story?

  I read about a woman who divorced her husband because he picked his nose. I read about a woman who got divorced because her husband never remembered to pay their property taxes and finally, she said, it was just too much. Is it so very much to ask, she asked, that the person who shares responsibility for your life remembers to pay your joint taxes? Does this have to be a crisis every year? She seemed sort of embarrassed to say what she said, but she said it.

  It seems to me that the reasons people divorce are hardly ever for the dramatic reasons that we assume are the reasons people get divorced, like snorting cocaine for breakfast or discovering that the minister named Bernard who you married ten years ago is actually a former convict named Ezzard with a wife in Wisconsin, according to the young detective who sat down in your office at the accounting firm one morning and sounded embarrassed about some things he had come to tell you that you should know.

  I read about a couple who got divorced because of irresolute differences, a phrase that addled me for weeks. Another couple filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable dissonance, which seemed like one of those few times in life when the exact right words are applied to the exact right reason for those words. I read about another woman who divorced her husband because one time they were walking down the street, the husband on the curb side in accordance with the ancient courteous male custom of being on that side so as to receive the splatter of mud or worse from the street and keep such splatter from the pristine acreage of his beloved, and as they approached a fire hydrant he lifted his leg, puppylike, as a joke, and she marched right to their lawyer’s office and instituted divorce proceedings. That particular woman refused to speak to reporters about the reasons for divorce, but you wonder what the iceberg was under that surface, you know?

  The first divorce I saw up close, like the first car crash you see up close, is imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, and I still think about it, not because it happened, but because years after it happened it seems so fated to have happened. How could it be that two people who really liked each other, and who took a brave crazy leap on not just living together, which lots of mammals do, but swearing fealty and respect in front of a huge crowd, and filing taxes as a joint entity, and spawning a child, and cosigning mortgages and car loans, how could they end up signing settlement papers on the dining-room table and then wandering out into the muddy garden to cry? How could that be?

  The saddest word I’ve heard wrapped around divorce like a tattered blanket is tired, as in “We were both just tired,” because being tired seems so utterly normal to me, so much the rug always bunching in that one spot no matter what you do, the slightly worn dish rack, the belt with extra holes punched with an ice pick that you borrowed from your cousin for exactly this purpose, the flashlight in the pantry that has never had batteries and never will, that the thought of tired being both your daily bread and also grounds for divorce gives me the willies. The shagginess of things, the way they never quite work out as planned and break down every other Tuesday, necessitating wine and foul language and duct tape and the wrong-size screw quietly hammered into place with the bottom of the garden gnome, seems to me the very essence of marriage; so if what makes a marriage work (the constant shifting of expectations and eternal parade of small surprises) is also what causes marriages to dissolve, where is it safe to stand?

  Nowhere, of course. Every marriage is pregnant with divorce, every day, every hour, every minute. The second you finish reading this essay, your spouse could close the refrigerator, after miraculously finding a way to wedge the juice carton behind the milk jug, and call it quits, and the odd truth of the matter is that because she might end your marriage in a moment, and you might end hers, you’re still married. The instant there is no chance of death is the moment of death.

  Lost Dog Creek

  Our creek rises at the top of a serious little hill to the west and slides all the way down into the lake below. In the summer it’s a trickle and in the winter it’s a bigger trickle. Only once that I remember did it get big enough to drown anything, which it did, a beaver, although I think maybe the beaver was hit by a car first, as it was not only bedraggled when we found it but much flatter than your usual beaver. My children and I were going to bury the beaver but by the time we came back with beaver-burying implements the beaver was gone. I think maybe it washed down into the lake, which feeds a massive river to the east, which feeds a massive river to the north, which feeds the Pacific Ocean, which is really massive.

  No one knows what the Tualatin people who lived here called the creek, and the white people who lived here didn’t write down what they called it until 1974, when the mayor, my friend Herald, had to file a resource inventory with the state of Oregon, which he did, naming unnamed or lost-named features like little creeks where beavers occasionally get drowned. Herald used to lose his dogs there so he called it Lost Dog Creek, which is
its official name on maps and such now, but I have small children and they like to name things and at the moment one son calls it Squished Beaver Creek and another son calls it Found Dog Creek and my daughter calls it Not A Creek because most of the time it doesn’t have water in it.

  The thing is, though, that when they ask me what I want to name the creek I don’t have words for the names I want to name it. I want to name it the way it mumbles and mutters in late fall. Or the gargly word it says after a month of rain. Or all the names of the colors it is. Or the deer-language names of the two deer we saw there once. Or the bip-bip-bip sound the deer made when they bounded away. Or the sluggish murkish sound of people dumping motor oil in it. Or a really long name like how long it’s been creeking. Or the first words of all the prayers prayed there. Or the plopping sound chestnuts make when they rain into the creek every fall. Or the sound of the bamboos sucking creek water day and night like skinny green drunks. Or the whirring song of the water ouzel we once saw there. Or the wet scuttly sound of crawdads tail-flipping away from kids wading and the screechy sound of the same kids scuttling away from the crawdads. Or the whinnying of the million robins there. Or the name of the first human who ever drank from the creek. Or the proper word for the prickly pride of the old lady who lives in the moist basement of the cement house above the creek who says her husband’s on vacation but he’s actually been gone for ten years. Or the sound that the creek doesn’t make when there’s no water in it. Or the sound that a kid down the street made right after she learned how to walk and she wobbled all the way down the street holding her mama’s pinky and when she teetered past the creek she looked at it amazed and said an amazed word that no one ever said before and maybe no one ever will again and the word fell tumbling end over end into the creek and away it went to the lake and to the river and to the next river and to the ocean where everything goes eventually.