Chapter Thirteen
Finishing School for Fathers
“The petty despot of the man – made home is hindered in his humanness by too much manness.”
--- Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Chapter Two, “The Man – Made Family,” of her 1911 work,
Our Androcentric Culture, or The Man – Made World
There was Mona at the first, of course, then Justine, Trevor’s mom and a local municipal judge’s wife able to work at mothering from her home 24 / 7 and very watchful of Trevor’s asthma which I, as his soccer coaching assistant, had to also be. Justine was not overprotective. I was actually surprised. Jesse was a bit this way – asthmatic – but not too badly. Exercise – induced and viral – induced, the pediatricians were terming it to me from time to time, especially two or three days into cold – and flu – like illnesses, but we had experienced nothing yet really serious with Jesse although with that kinda’ little cardiac thing of his, too, I always wondered about the potential of his pulmonary system to turn against him and worsen. And although Justine had been elated to learn Dr. Edinsmaier would be coaching, she was equally reassured and satisfied with my skills as a veterinarian to be able to discern when enough was enough and easily allowed Trevor to participate. The brisk, cold air coming on strong in November and early December could help relieve at the onset of an attack or it could bring it on in the first place; that was somewhat mysterious but just the way it was for him, and Trevor himself handled this with the polish of an emergency room nurse so we all managed. Lastly, I met with the loftiest luck a lady could run into when I was introduced to Grace Portia, who in everyday parlance, certainly was the epitome of both her first and married, last names. All soccer moms – so all of them with little boys in Mirzah’s Unit A, too.
Grace and Grace’s gentle – hearted and, thankfully, not too blue – blooded husband, Lionel, have remained my friends. Simply there, and at any time, day or night. If not this year, then when I needed ‘em the next year, they were. One time recently when I hadn’t talked to Grace in months, Jesse asked, when her name must’ve come up or that of one of her kids, if I ever still saw her.
“Well, it’s been awhile, I guess.”
“Well, how long?”
“Uuhhh, I don’t know. Maybe six months, maybe eight. I don’t remember.”
“Then how can you say you’re still friends with her?”
O o o o o o! Grace had that answer when next I did visit with her and told her of this exchange with so youthful a Jesse but who was now a legal adult. “It could be years and then when one of us rang up the other, it’d be like we took up where we left off, ya’ know, … ‘last week’. I mean it. It could really be years.”
It isn’t as if Grace and Lionel hadn’t a thing else to do with their lives than attend to me either. Lionel is a microbiologist, even now working his entire microbiologist heart out on that marvelously elusive (for it, anyhow) Mycoplasma creature in all its variants. Such a bugaboo this itty bitty bug is to swine, feline and, O, yeah, people – and all of their lungs and some of their joints! I like a lot what Lionel is doing for a living, and he does it a lot. His passion, Mycoplasma.
I like a lot what Grace does, and not only does she do it a lot, too; but so do I, and have, for quite a few years now. But before we both got into keeping secrets – secretarying, that is – secretarying for a salary, we did a bunch of other stuff together first. Grace is the mother of three kids, just as I am. Boys they happen to be, too. And, voila, they are all just within the same knockabout ages as mine, each just a year younger so both of her two younger sons, Nathan and Noel, were Mirzah’s teammates and became the fastest of friends with both my Mirzah and Jesse. Zane, maybe because of his proximity to most of the Portia family by way of his own brothers, took an interest in Grace’s oldest, Neil, or the other way around, I don’t remember. At any rate, all three of her and Lionel’s Boys and all three of mine, it really was incredible to watch. And I loved it.
Grace had been an accountant with Willard’s Department Store chain for seven years before growing and bearing anybody. Very gently married that entire length of time and on the road much of it, she, too, was able and very much wanted to stay at home like Justine and I were doing. Mona, on the other hand, married but not so tenderly as Grace, took care of BJ and his older sister and traveled on treacherous wintry Iowa highways the nerve – wracking 35 racing interstate miles it is into the capitol city to work evening shifts as a pediatric intensive care nurse who had actually saved children discovered unconscious and way under the iciest of waters for long, long over life’s time limit. This just frickin’ fascinated me as well as her stories of the little kids’ plastic surgeon there, Dr. Jude Carruthers, who made it the holiest of his missions in life to lower Iowa’s legal limit on blood alcohol to 0.04 striving, he was, to stop the butchery to those same little kids’ smiles – and the emotional carnage to the viscera of their mommies and daddies.
* * * *
One of those other jobs Grace still accomplishes superbly and did so extremely well for years before she as aptly assumed her duties as a merit – level university secretary is the evidently difficult work of listening. With the exception of AmTaham, I know of no one who has mastered this job of developing empathy for nearly all other people through the work of listening as Grace has.
She should open a private college of her own where the only major offered is Listening. And, for tuition, charge the bloody beYesus out of the students who most need ... to be willing ... to learn to listen: politicians, world leaders, judges, lawyers, corporate executives, some teachers – – the always – a – teacher ones, some college administrators, all the journalists and media and entertainment artists, film, television, music and otherwise, athletes, militarists and many, many doctors, in fact most of them actually. Most definitely, every last one of those walking around the World who think in any way – most especially via their particular path to freedom and peace – that they are going to proclaim it their life’s purpose, much less, make it their life’s earnings to go around telling the rest of us others how we all should know a redeeming and delivering god and act like we do know one. Ya’ know, ‘holy’ … men.
Grace could start with the basics as in any undergraduate degree program. Like with a course called “On One Simple Observation of the Earth.” For the media students and entertainment industry folks, this would be a requisite, the nucleus course, I am thinking. As it would be the same for the degree requirements of all the world leaders and politicians and certainly for the programs of all of them that are the generals and any other manner of military leaders. I guess included in the militarists’ category are also all of the lawyers and the judges who, we so well remember, are still lawyers after they get elected or appointed to judgeships.
As well as, equivocally it may appear at the first, those peacenik catechists espousing from this nation’s Washington Mall pulpits, sermonizing love and brotherhood and commitment all over its vast gymnasia and sports areas and any other of the Entire Globe’s rooftops, basilica balconies, bloodied mosques, enshrined embankments, big – sky blocs, disheveled levees, simple taluses, tabernacle bunkers, Baptist alters. And master bedrooms.
Course content would center, then, around just what its title states, one simple observation the World over.
The fact that there are children across six continents isn’t the observation either. But nearly.
Connectedly enmeshed to this fact that there are these said children – and that are not our children everywhere really the ‘it’ that anyone working toward being able to call herself or himself by the title of Ancestor does anything for every single day during her or his own entire lifetime – is the Truth that: this fact is fuckingly and totally forgotten with every single move that every one of Grace’s college students thinks up and makes. That’s the simple observation the course covers. In depth.
Or, not. It can probe it shallowly, too, for that matter. Because it isn’t difficult nor profound to see and to understand. Certainly not hidden or disguised at all. It’s everywhere in everything any one of these community pillars thinks up and, then, decides to go ahead and do.
And that is because of the only corollary to Grace’s core college course matter. The one easily established and known for millennia already: the heartbeats, thoughts and opinions, the passions and struggles, of 53 percent of the general, daily human population is, by the media and by almost all of the legislatures and societies of the Earth, lumped into both its reporting and into its statue – making and into its decision – making as if that 53 percent acquiesce to or, for that matter, wholly support – by their silence, their softness, their submissiveness, their servility, their deference and their kowtowing – the massively destructive decisions made that so smash their Not Male comings and goings on this Planet.
The IMPACT on certain others, certain others known as the majority, of what these dudes think up and then implement is, well, it’s just staggering and, nearly always, life – altering. That is simply and merely all that there is that can be said about these everyday decisionings by these guys who cannot possibly hope to start, on their deathbeds, as even interning, amateur or apprentice Ancestors if they, first, haven’t graduated from Grace’s curriculum. Each breathing his last breath will only be that forever. No one two years, ten years, 100 years after the guy’s death will care. Much less, remember him. It will merely be as if he … never walked the World at all. Ever.
Not if he hasn’t learned, while still breathing, that the job of Ancestor is the only one that there ever really is. As the character with the Listening degree waiting in the dungeon, Sengbe Pieh his name was, after his ship, the Amistad, beached had been well – taught.
An easy illustration: About a particular hot spot or raging issue, all major networks’ anchors report, evidently without glancing at their own footage, their own photographs, their own recordings, any images or words beamed from their satellites in the heavens or their nebulous and amorphously received internet transmissions, something like the following, every single night, on the World’s news, “India today denounced yada, yada, yada brought about by scores of uprising Pakistanis to the north and east, yada, yada, yada. And the militant Pakistanis, in return threatened retaliation against the deploying Indians who now have unparalleled nuclear capabilities in the south, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
The honest and accurate account, whether printed or broadcast, one that would be … dah, accountable and, well, truth, might, instead, be projected to all us listeners, even those of us who listen only with our eyeballs or our fingertips, as something like:
“The men of the armies and government of India today denounced yada, yada, yada brought about by scores of uprising Pakistani men to the north and east, yada, yada, yada. And the militant men of Pakistan, in return, threatened retaliation against the deploying Indian men assigned and stationed just today to man the x number of poised nuclear warhead launches in the south, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
But. Do we ever hear the general, daily news reported in as flat – out an accurate and honest an accounting as that? Let alone, account after account after account --- through an entire broadcast of up – to – the – hour news, through every single enraging issue printed in newspaper accounts? Even when it is the TRUTH. We do NOT. We do not. We never, ever do.
On television this morning, 04 October, this very same mother – fucking morning that a dozen years ago already a most fat and irascible lummox in one thud on my Forest door launched against it and me, the Ancestor who I am studying to be, the divorce proceedings’ papers thereby annihilating my world peace, what do we see instead? Madeleine Albright, literally now, bursting out from the Palestinian and Israeli shitfuck otherwise known as a ‘negotiation session’ and, literally again she is, running down the corridor after one of the mother – fucking (remembering, I am, to be literal a second time here in just this paragraph alone) ‘world leaders’, some guy in a head turban thingy which seems to mean to the rest of us all that he is some sort of a religious person. And I, do I, believe that this well – fed guy is religious because he wears this drape, calls himself a leader of something or someone led and, with the alliance of a few or a lot of other guys, cripples and kills a few or a lot of humans who aren’t in his cabal – all in the name of his Allah?
AmTaham used to invoke Allah, too. I first remember hearing the word when I was probably three. AmTaham knew everything; he was my daddy. And when he prayed, no one died. No one even got spanked. “Allah, our Allah,” this archival and ancestral Missouri Synod Lutheran all his years prayed, “Thank you for our little Legion. Thank you for this little bit of land.” I was beside him again, both of us barefoot on the dewy, cold grass just out the south front porch door, the smaller of the two porches just off the massive kitchen but this one also with the gray – painted floor suitable for the harsh seasonal weather – beatings and the color of all the farm porch floors in Iowa. It was 5 am, and I was watching him, no small feat for a three – year – old; Daddy was 6 foot 2 inches tall forever, and I never was.
We would then quietly glide inside, we angels of Allah, after a deep breathing and a – praying session, our daily negotiation, and have coffee together whitened with real and fresh cow’s cream from the Jersey named Camel ‘til she passed. Then her next name was Camel II, and her last name was Pearl, and she was a Guernsey by then. Just the two of us and boiled – over coffee made in a black and blue – speckled enamel pot with its bald wire and wood grip, brewed over an open, cob – fed flame by AmTaham’s own hand, coffee with the grounds swirling and settling, sweetened and so lip – smacking delicious.
And AmTaham gently negotiated with mutual whispers and sips, ones probably not the best for a little itty bitty kid, but, hey, not harmful at all by comparison to those taken in some Kashmiri embankment or aboriginal backwater rez or rat – infested boiler room in South Tremont where the one Canuck, white – trash twin died on me in her dresser drawer – crib set by her mama just a couple inches up, literally now, off that Bronx slum’s well – packed and greasy dirt floor when, 17 years hence, I was ‘practicing’ some type of maternal – child / public health / student nursing religion, “How would you like to be able, when you grow up, Legion, to get up every single morning, go out onto this land of Allah’s and feed the World, too?”
So I learned, AmTaham being an excellent teacher – just like this other religious guy is an excellent teacher, the one who fucked with Ms. Albright and truly fucked with her beseeching, with her begging of him – I learned from watching AmTaham but who, then yet, at my tender age of three hadn’t tutored me on reality, I learned from him that men, that Males were wonderful, absolutely wonderful human beings.
Madeleine Albright, the only one of the majority to ever be the Secretary of State in United States history, the only woman to boss that federal Cabinet agency possessed of the cunning to exact profound international impact, and this is what she has to do to try to allure the attention of this child – killer?! The pains, even their deaths, of any one of those little itty, bitty kids bursting out and running down corridors away from the bullets and the landmines is, to him, shitfuck on his shoe soles. Not to mention the spirits of the starved and breathing dead ones never to bound forth from anywhere. If it weren’t – – if it weren’t so much mother – fucking and mere shitfuck to him, then he wouldn’t kill any children. And he wouldn’t allow anyone else to either. Period.
Not amazingly deep nor crafty at all. Pretty simple, that.
AmTaham True is dead and gone to Allah now, but Ms. Albright could sure use him, I am thinking.