A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew: "After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.  and he was transfigured before them: his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.  And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him.  Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, 'Lord, it is good that we are here.  If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.'  While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them, then from the cloud came a voice that said, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.'  When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid.  But Jesus came and touched them, saying 'Rise, and do not be afraid.' This is the scripture that came to me while I was walking my dog, Arrow, at Simpsonwood Park, doing my best to reconcile the joy I have for my daughter who just started a new adventure at Georgia Southern University with the broken heart I have because of her absence and the weight of the reality that a season of my life is coming to a close.  The struggle, as they say, is real.  For nineteen years, we have been building up to her launch, but when it finally occurred, it was very, very hard to accept.  I am excited for her but sad.  I know it is the best, but I still cry.  Suddenly.  Walking up the stairs.  Glancing at the door to her empty bedroom. I have been praying about it.  Perhaps I can use this experience to better understand our Heavenly Father's heart.  What did sin do but separate Him from his children?  And how did He respond but launch a massively scaled rescue mission, sending a savior, a Messiah, His Son, to defeat sin and death on the cross so that the distance between Father and all of His children is closed?  I miss her.  God missed us all.  Perhaps this small taste will draw me closer to His heart. But then I thought of Peter and his statement that "it is good that we are here."  And then it hit me.  I am just like Peter.  In being so reluctant to turn a page, go from one season to another, I am essentially saying the same thing: "it is good that we are here."  And I also have the impulse to build tents.  One for this daughter.  One for that daughter.  One for yet another daughter.  I am trying to stay in this season, trying to keep my daughters little, in princess dresses, reliant on me and their mother for everything. But what does scripture tell us?  While Peter was still speaking, still drafting plans to stay in that moment, that season, something profound happened.  They heard the voice of God.  What was good turned into something even better, something unimaginable.  To be sure, they got a glimpse of their own future glory, and their reaction was typical enough.  Fear. They were terrified.  But what does Jesus do?  The same thing He has been doing all along...saying to them, "Do not be afraid." Our lives are made up of a series of seasons.  I thought about the many seasons in my life on that walk in the park.  Some seasons are good while others are more challenging, but a common response to going from one season to another is fear.  Becoming an empty nester makes me afraid. Not having all of my daughters living under one room with me and my wife makes me afraid.  Yet this scripture tells me that my impulse to want to stay in a season – declare that the season is "good" and begin to build tents – is not in God's economy.  Though I cannot see it, God's plans are better, way better than mine.  Here was good for a time, and I cherish every single memory of that season when the girls were little, when they held my hand to cross the street.  But here is not where we were meant to remain.  Peter wanted to build tents.  God wants to build His kingdom.  May all of our children have a hand in that glorious effort as we continue to love them fiercely from a distance. 

Today, we put down our beloved cat, Flash.  He was fourteen years old.  At first, the signs of his decline were small.  His fur lost its shine.  There was a scratch in his meow.  But then he stopped eating, grew skinny, wouldn’t even nibble on his treats or the deli turkey he loved so much.  I bought the fancy stuff.  Nothing.  I finally took him to the vet where they ran blood tests.  The results were mixed and inconclusive.  It could be this.  It might be that.  We would have to run even more tests.  We did what families do: talked about it, weighed our options, looked at Flash intently as if doing so would give us the answers.  Perhaps he was just getting old.  Let’s wait and see.  But then he disappeared, and we feared that he had wandered off to die on his own.  We canvased the neighborhood, asked the neighbors to be on the lookout.  But then he turned up, lying by the fountain water dish.  When I came downstairs, my three daughters were huddled around him, petting him, stroking his paws.  Flash hardly moved.  I knew I had to make a phone call. 

We put him in a box with a towel and drove to the vet.  He didn’t meow.  He didn’t fuss.  After an examination and the presentation of more options, I made the call.  It was time.  No more prodding or poking. 

First the sedative.  Then the poison that would stop his heart and lungs.  Flash went easily.  A life.  A cat.  But not only a cat. 

My youngest daughter was only two when we got Flash, which means that this little grey and white tuxedo cat witnessed my daughters grow up.  They learned how to feed him and give him water.  They took him to the Blessing of the Pets ceremony at their Catholic school a number of times, and he regularly slept on my youngest daughter’s bed at night.  It was all a part of a routine.  She went to bed, and I found Flash.  I carried him upstairs and lightly knocked on her bedroom door.  “Package,” I said, and she would open the door and accept Flash into her arms.  We all performed our duties very matter-of-fact, even Flash.  He came to expect the nightly performance. 

Of course, we had our way of talking with him as pet owners do: words, phrases, silly ways to communicate.  And that is part of the experience.  If you, dear listeners have a pet, you know exactly what I am talking about.  But what I have been reflecting on all day – after we returned from the vet’s office, after I dug the hole, placed him in it, and said a prayer – is what Flash, in particular, and pets, in general, mean.  They are not providers.  They are not protectors.  They are companions.  Companions.  And that means something.  Just being there is important.  And Flash was there.  While the family was abuzz with activities – carpooling to school, soccer, volleyball, family vacations, playdates, and work, endless work – Flash sat with us through it all.  In our coming and going, he would offer a friendly meow; at the end of a long day, he would quietly jump onto the couch and sit with us, letting us pet him to help us unwind. 

We loved Flash, and he loved us, and I suppose he taught us that love does not always have to be about doing something.  Love can look like just being present.  Just being a companion  Not giving advice.  Not making demands.  Just sitting beside us all those years as we marveled at how quickly the girls grew and how the gray hairs just kept coming. 

That was his gift to us.  Until it was time to go.  A mere week away from dropping our oldest daughter off at college – an event for which I have been steeling myself for months, maybe years – Flash concluded that his journey with us was done.  Other companions would come our way.  The girls were young women now, and everything would be alright. 

To paraphrase 20th century American author and professor of literature, Joseph Campbell, “life’s greatest tragedy is not failure but climbing the ladder of success only to realize that you had leaned your ladder against the wrong wall.”  Elsewhere, this quote is attributed to what mid-life is all about.  One falls into a career path, works hard, burns the candle at both ends, and reaches middle age only to realize with some horror that they back the wrong pony, discerned incorrectly, made a wrong turn and just kept on going. 

What a person can do in this predicament is anyone’s guess.  I suppose this is the precursor to a midlife crisis.  Once the supposed err is realized, an attempt to reshuffle circumstances takes place.  Down comes the ladder; up it goes somewhere else.  But anyone with eyes to see knows that this rarely ends well.  Broken marriages, broken relationships, peculiar purchases and moves.  This is the blond secretary, the red hot rod.  Witnesses laugh at first then become sad because the event is sad.  Time flows in only one direction after all. 

Rarely is there a life without regrets.  We muddle through, doing our best to make good decisions and kicking ourselves when we don’t, but when it all adds up, we simply have to live with the burden of roads not taken.  We did not always heed the advice of Robert Frost.  Most times, we took the predictable route. 

Apart from being an astute insight on the sometimes experience of being middle age, Campbell’s thoughts on what he considers to be one of life’s greatest tragedies leaves readers wanting.  A person might ingest his words and say, Well, my ladder has been leaning against the wrong wall this whole time.  I am ten or fifteen years from retirement.  Now what?  Do I just muscle through until I can retire, buy my boat, and sail off into the distance? 

Perhaps little Emma Knight, a grade school student, has the best advice for those mulling over the efforts of their lives and the next steps after middle age.  She writes, “When I turn 100 years old I will be tired of everything and everyone, so I will tell everyone that I am going to Canada but actually go to the Bahamas.  I’ll live in a tiny hut with my tiny dog.  I will order fish tacos when I’m hungry and live my best life with no crap.” 

The point, dear listeners?  Living involves great effort, and not all decisions will be sound.  At some point, we will all get tired and begin to take careful stock of our circumstances.  If we are fortunate, the wall our ladders have been leaning against has been the correct one or, at least, something close to it.  Our internal compass had been right.  We had listened to the correct voice.  If the wall had been the wrong one all along then we might reframe our lives to look at the intent and not the gains.  We meant well.  We really did.  Perhaps there is time enough for grace and a redirection – another wall to receive our ladder.  The very lucky are granted this wish. 

At fifty-one, I am examining my own wall.  Perhaps this is the real takeaway from Campbell.  His thoughts are less an indictment of making the wrong decision and more a call to study where one happens to be: how they got there, was it worth it.  I, for one, am doing my best to understand the initiatives I have taken and those I chose to dismiss.  My question, really, is in a poem I wrote.  I hope it lands well. 

A Cucumber at Fifty-One 

 Optimistically, I bought many 

packets – cucumber seeds –  

and prepared a nice bed. 

They sprouted after a time 

and grew, tendrils reaching upward, 

climbing the wire lattice. 

And when the yellow flowers began to 

burst, I thought of the cucumbers 

gramma would sprinkle with salt, 

but as the days grew hot and 

the insects droned, the flowers 

simply wilted, refused to 

transform: a great tangle of 

cucumber vines – so much potential 

unrealized.  It yielded just one. 

The present sum of my endeavors, I thought. 

J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, retains its relevance in the present year as the very existence of artificial intelligence prompts everybody to wonder about the phoniness of a thing.  This is, after all, protagonist Holden Caulfield’s favorite epithet.  Everyone – his teachers, his friends, the individuals who populate his universe – is a phony, a fake, a walking and talking lie.  It is precisely this worldview that aggravates his sense of alienation: a feeling that he does not belong – that he is perpetually out of alignment with the world and all he can do is suffer through it.  Holden Caulfield the character became emblematic of an entire generation – the Baby Boomers – who were birthed into a world of Allied victory over the Axis powers only to question American exceptionalism, lose themselves in hyper-materialism, and eventually take to the streets to violently protest a police action taking place in Southeast Asia.  The narratives that had once kept the peace were beginning to be questioned for their true agendas, and the conclusions many reached was that these narratives perpetuated falsehoods that, in many cases, funneled money to the already rich and powerful. 

So phony it was.  Holden Caulfield and a generation of the likeminded called out the lies and lost themselves as a consequence.  How do you build a world from scratch?  You can’t.  One can only rearrange the pieces and hope for a better outcome. 

It has been my observation, dear listeners, that human beings can rarely if ever outwit their own proclivities.  We are fallen by nature, which means that being phony is, regrettably, our common default.  If we are apathetic, we wallow in this default.  If we strive to be better, we acknowledge and confess our sins.  Salinger seems to be making a similar observation when he writes, “It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”  Here, he is making a point about human behavior.  Ignorance and fealty go hand in hand.  Human history is propelled by dedicated individuals doing things they do not fully understand.  Phonies.  We are all phony.  Faking it until we make it, though the final aim is never really achieved. 

It is understandable, then, that Holden Caulfield feels alienated – that an entire generation feels alienated.  How can one operate in a world they know to be false?  Surely, this recharacterizes bizarre behavior into desperate acts.  I will not list them here, dear listeners, because I am sure you can generate a list just as quickly on your own. 

Artificial intelligence, therefore, only exacerbates the problem.  If we did not truly know what was true before AI, we really do not know what is true with AI.  This, of course, refers to the things of the world and it even might explain, in part, why so many are migrating to Christian orthodoxy: Roman rite, Latin rite and Eastern.  When small t truth is in chaos, a seeker can only cleave to capital T truth. 

Salinger ends The Catcher in the Rye with a nod toward saving children from despair and alienation – in effect, saving them from a phony world – and while that effort remains noble even today, it seems that a more effective solution to the AI problem is one that very much includes a recalibration of what we should be pursuing, a rethinking of the problem long at hand. 

If we cannot do this, the vicious cycle will only continue, and the spiritual malaise and all the self-destructive behavior that goes with it will only deepen.  Perhaps artificial intelligence will ignite a revolution in the way that The Great Awakenings sparked religious revivals.  Perhaps it is the threat we need to change our ways and embrace authenticity.  We simply must decide how long we are willing to put up with the phony and not be resigned to being yet another generation that, as Holden Caulfield puts it, “never notice anything.” 

Nicholas Carr tells us what we likely already know intuitively: the internet, our iPhones, and AI are rewiring our brains.  His book, The Shallows, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, lays out the argument that, while we have a great abundance of information, we are eroding our ability to process it – to think critically about it – by off-loading various tasks to applications sold to us to make our lives easier.  We no longer engage in deep processing because we are quite happy with accepting the answer of a prompt we put into AI.  Our imagination is compromised, our curiosity diminished.  The more we outsource the things that make us human, the less human we become.  And all the while, we remain distracted by the pinging, the alerts, the bells that grab our attention and give us the quick dopamine rush. 

What should alarm us all is that the way we are now finding ourselves was intentional.  There is nothing accidental about this rewiring.  To be sure, if we look at the results even for a minute, we can easily see that an illiterate and unthinking population is the end goal. 

But for whom?  Perhaps the answer is where the money tends to spill. 

But even so, the ramifications of this series of nefarious events are far and wide – beyond merely rendering ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren powerless in the face of those with authentic ideas – ideas meant to horde wealth and power.  Carr writes that “[t]he price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation.  The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies.  the tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities – those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.”  The price we pay for the convenience of technology answering even the slightest of difficult questions is that we willingly surrender some critical part of what it means to be human. 

Why we do this at all is a head scratcher.  Where does this impulse to self-destroy come from?  I can only hazard a guess, dear listeners.  Perhaps being human and the struggle inherent in this condition is too difficult.  Living is hard.  So we take a stroll on easy street never mind the harm it causes us – the harm that, at the time, does not seem like harm at all.  And the result?  Our minds atrophy.  The output of our creative endeavors become infantile.  Conformity is codified into our society.  We become easy to manipulate.  And our culture degrades.  As Carr writes, “culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as the world’s information.  It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the New.  To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.  Outsource memory, and culture withers.” 

I can only hope that the human spirit will somehow bridle against this evil effort.  I am not sure there would be a Luddite-styled revolution – a violent smashing of the machines – but it is not unreasonable to hold out for a decisive reckoning of a technological trend that is clearly wrecking the minds of young and old alike.  Who among us has silently judged the group whose members are all engrossed in their screens?  Who else has decried the acceptance of being in front of a device the majority of one’s waking hours?  What will become of us when we do not even notice that?  When living digitized lives is the norm? 

We have put all of our eggs into one technological basket.  Will we eventually be so uncritical that we will forget the outcome, the lesson, the consequence of being so tragically myopic in our thinking? 

Nicholas Carr has sounded his alarm.  Let’s hope the day won’t come when we will no longer be able to hear it. 

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750

Cultural critic, poet, and Kentucky farmer, Wendell Berry, is to the publishing monolith what the late Robert Duvall was to Hollywood: a talented force who does not care a bit about changing trends and what is and what is not being liked on some silly social media platform.  In effect, Berry is true to himself and his art, making his words a breath of fresh air in a world where the aims are rarely noble.  He tells it like it is, and in doing so, remains a rarity, which is why his insights are that important, especially when they apply to universal experiences the vain and the self-absorbed can hardly speak to. 

I am fifty-one years old, and while I know that this is not ancient, it is an age, I am learning, where certain thoughts are unavoidable.  The cast of characters – family members and even friends – who populated my youth continues to dwindle.  Aunts and uncles are gone.  Cousins.  Folks in town.  We all had that landscape of humanity, and depending on where you are in your own lives, dear listeners, you can also likely understand what it feels like to experience its change.  It is a surreal feeling.  Were they really there, or was I dreaming?  Did they impact me more than I knew at the time?  What does it mean to cross paths in time and space?  Do our souls possess a greater wisdom that cannot be accessed in the here and now but only then: upon our parting? 

In my study, rosaries hang from the framed photographs of those who have gone on.  I share some thoughts on the meaning of the rosary in Episode 2 of The Professor’s Bayonet, and I invite you to revisit it.  The rosaries are reminders that death is but a transition – that death, as John Donne characterizes it, is nothing more than a comma – a pause – on the way to something greater.  In this life we can have intimacy with God; in the next, union.  For the latter is more robust than the former.  It is the preferred way.  It is, as the Baltimore catechism teaches us, “to be happy with Him forever” in the next life. 

As I write this, Wendell Berry is ninety-one years old.  If certain thoughts for this fifty-one-year-old man are unavoidable, I can only imagine that those thoughts and others are, for Berry, very front and very center.  For this reason, I am grateful for his wisdom: hard-won and given freely in a poem he wrote entitled “The Loved Ones.”  I share it here with you, dear listeners.  I hope it lands well. 

The Loved Ones 

The loved ones we call the dead 
depart from us and for a while are absent.  And then as if 
called back by our love, they come 
near us again.  They enter our dreams. 
We feel they have been near us 
when we have not thought of them. 
They are simply here, simply waiting 
while we are distracted among 
our obligations.  At last 
it comes to us: They live now 
in the permanent world. 
We are the absent ones. 

www.48bconsulting.com

If memory serves me correctly, Jeff Haight of Jeff News fame was elected class clown for the graduating class of 1992.  We were classmates at Youngsville High School, which is now closed.  The closing was a result of the mass exodus of youth from the “biggest little town” on the map in northwestern Pennsylvania, but not all packed up their stuff and left.  Jeff, it seems, hung around.  While others fled to the four corners, the class funny man remained. 

Everybody loved Jeff in school.  He was the very personification of affable, and unlike others from surrounding high schools who were awarded the same moniker, Jeff’s humor was dry and subtle.  He was no loudmouth.  The jokes were clean, and they always landed well, causing many to experience the priceless bellylaugh. 

Our tiny class did what classes big and small do – disperse into the world, each member doing or trying to do what was meant for them to do – but recently, I came across something on social media that gave some perspective to how one might respond to the ever-increasing pace of our world. 

We are living at a time when print media is all but dead.  Newspapers across the land are putting their content behind pay walls, and most of us learn about current events either through the massive news agencies that are, themselves, in some existential trouble or social media feeds.  Both, I would argue, alienate the population, exacerbating the gulf between self-proclaimed “important” news and the humdrum events of individuals who are just trying to make ends meet, make sense of the world they inhabit, and get a good laugh from time to time.  It seems like a simple order, but we do not have to look very far to see how that is not being fulfilled. 

Enter Jeff News.  I happened upon this one-man organization on social media, and after perusing a few reports, it occurred to me that this might be an answer to the fragmentation we are all experiencing.  You see, dear listeners, Jeff Haight, my old high school classmate, was not done tickling everyone’s funny bone.  Indeed, he took his efforts on the road, so to speak, never leaving our common stomping grounds, Warren County – the very same place so many abandoned for so-called greener pastures. 

Jeff News returns the very local to the spotlight.  Warren County eateries.  Warren County issues.  Trout season.  Potholes.  The people.  The culture.  I guffawed when I saw Jeff News spoof Punxsatawney Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog who predicts the coming of spring.  Jeff News showcased another groundhog: Conewango Chuck.  Jeff stands outside on a snow-covered day next to an animal crate, sitting on a small table.  He tells us that some city councilmen are there to witness the festivities and members of PETA to make sure Conewango Chuck is well-treated.  The build-up is genius.  The icing on the cake is when Jeff reaches into the crate to remove Phil’s fellow prognosticator.  Suffice it to say, dear listeners, that the accolades and applause in the comments section were many. 

Beyond being able to laugh at more of Jeff’s antics all these years later, I am impressed by how his efforts as a local newsman have clearly filled a need, and I wonder if this is what our nation is currently leaning toward.  The pendulum has swung far, far to one direction – unwieldy news agencies that pound us with “breaking news,” faceless institutions that claim they know best for the populace, distant and powerful entities that pull levers at the expense of ordinary folks.  Small communities across America need Jeff News or, more to the point, their own version of Jeff News.  He gives Warren County what it wants.  Let others, class clowns or not, discover what their communities want.  It may not be Conewango Chuck but, for them, I bet it is something better, a perspective that hits the spot. 

www.48bconsulting.com

https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306

First published in 1975, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is, according to the Chicago Tribune, “a most important book that will change the way many of us look at animals – and, ultimately, at ourselves.”  Riding the waves of other liberation movements – notably, the Civil Right movement and Women’s lib – Animal Liberation changes the question from, Can animals reason, to, Can animals suffer?  In effect, Singer’s thesis dislodges the way we assign value to sentient beings from the framework of reason and rationality and, instead, recognizes the universal truth experienced by all species that being in this world with this life inevitably involves suffering.  My cat may not be able to decipher complex language.  My dog, Arrow, may not be equipped to pen masterpieces of literature.  But they suffer like I do.  And in that common footing, so argues Singer, a new conversation must be had. 

Once upon a time, animals were seen as mere automatons: creatures of a mechanical nature who, when injured, emitted sounds akin to mechanical malfunction, not cries of pain, despair, horror, or sadness.  As such, the barbaric practice of vivisection was sanctioned.  Students keen on understanding the inner-workings of some animal would gather round in a large lecture hall, peering down at the learned professor who, scalpel in hand, would slice, say, a bound dog or cat up the middle and peel away its skin to reveal the inner anatomy.  The animal would screech in pain, but no matter, so was the assumption.  It was a malfunction, the cry of unimaginable pain akin to the sound a broken carriage, a squeaky wheel, a rusty pulley might make. 

Other experiments – too many to list here – have also been performed on animals in the spirit of scientific inquiry, though the nature and purpose of that inquiry is certainly dubious: Chimpanzee mothers, upon giving birth, were denied physical contact with their offspring in order to observe and record psychological trauma, fevers were artificially induced in kittens, pigs were intentionally shot with rifles so that would-be medics could practice treating gun wounds, the feet of a hundred or so mice were electroshocked to measure who knows what, and so on and so forth – the cruel kids with magnifying glasses burning ants on the sidewalk grown up and given even more power to cause pain, not, as Singer notes, for therapeutic needs but for “commercial returns.”  You heard that correctly, dear listeners.  Much of the experiments done on animals is not meant to ameliorate the suffering of human beings.  It is, rather, to siphon more money into the bank accounts of Big Pharma and the like. 

What I am proposing, however, is that the scope of empathy and kindness can and should be widened and that there are even Biblical reasons to justify this necessary shift.  Consider all the animals who were enlisted in the larger Biblical narrative: the animals in Eden, those invited to board the Ark, Balaam’s donkey who saw the angel, and Mary’s and Jesus’  The animal world is not accidental.  It has purpose, true and real. 

What Singer seems to neglect in his calculus, though, is humankind’s fallen nature.  We do not do what we should.  We willfully do the opposite.  This is what it means to sin.  As such, while Christian teaching tells us we “should” respect animals, the reality is that we have not much of the time.  Our abuse of animals is more a reflection on our nature than it is on any dictate from on high with regards to an animal’s placement in the great hierarchy.  We and the animals that surround us may be outside of Eden, but this does not mean that the efforts we take to right cosmic wrongs cannot or should not include the furry, the four-legged, the companions who look past the cruel sins of man and wag their tails nevertheless. 

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It was difficult to hear the news.  Out of two classes, nobody, not a soul, had ever heard of Laurel and Hardy, the comedy duo who earned international fame in the early 20th century.  The lesson for the day had to do with the evolution of humor.  Students had the choice of writing down their thoughts on the matter and then bringing that small essay to class.  Writing.  Critical thinking.  The boxes were checked for a typical composition class.  But Laurel and Hardy were not to enjoy any commentary.  They were strangers to my students – relics from the past so old that seeing them in black and white pretty much summed up the situation.  Laurel, the slim Englishman who was prone to, in his words, “dumb” behavior and crying while kneading the hair on the crown of his head was in cahoots with Hardy, the portly, hotheaded leader of the two with the toothbrush moustache also made popular by Charlie Chaplin and Hitler.  Together, they entertained millions with situational routines that involved a lot of slapstick and even Three Stooges-styled physical violence. 

In one bit, Hardy mistakenly believes that Laurel had a leg amputated.  Feeling bad, he pledges his undying devotion to caring for his friend before getting slapped by someone who is trying to reclaim the wheelchair Laurel is using and then physically carrying his two-legged friend to his car.  Hardy stumbles and struggles, drops his bowler hat, gets doused with a water hose, and eventually falls over. The routine is amusing and indicative of what counted as funny in the 1930s. 

While Laurel and Hardy proved to be an archetype for a certain kind of comedy duo – think Abbott and Costello, Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza, Chris Farley and David Spade, John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, Steve Martin and John Candy, and even Kristin Wiig and Melissa McCarthy – what stood out was that, while the two were making people laugh with strong physicality and sometimes violence, the world in the 1930s was experiencing something quite telling. 

Nazi Germany.  Fascist Italy.  Imperial Japan.  We do not, dear listeners, need to walk through a history lesson, but suffice it to say that while Laurel and Hardy were entertaining audiences far and wide, the world was steadily marching toward world war.  Violence beget violence; the first alarmed, the second was to cope.  Put another way, the violence on screen mirrored the violence in the world.  What is interesting, though, is that we laughed at Laurel and Hardy.  What does that say about how we collectively dealt with the rise of naked aggression? 

The Laurel and Hardy bit mentioned in this episode takes place in a convalescence home for veterans.  Laurel is a patient; Hardy – again with the toothbrush moustache -- is the visitor.  The joke is centered on Hardy’s belief that Laurel is an amputee.  He believes he only has one leg.  Viewers, though, know the truth that Laurel is very capable of walking by himself, yet the physical comedy pokes them in the ribs.  The comedy, in one sense, might be called dark.  Dark humor for a dark time. 

Only when Hardy sees Laurel walking away does he realize his folly – the last to know – making the end of the bit all the more hilarious.  Or that was, at least, the intention.  Even so, we might conclude that the best way to face our fears is to laugh at them.  This is Laurel and Hardy’s lesson to us.  What is more, we might see how other funny men and women throughout the decades make us laugh and then imagine what they might be reacting to.  We project our fears onto the stage or screen and allow those steeped in the craft of comedy to translate those fears into laughter.  What were we afraid of when Seinfeld was popular?  Or the Blues Brothers?  Or Bridesmaids?  There have been many iterations of Laurel and Hardy.  What else were they iterating beyond being skinny and fat? 

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Rachel Landrum Crumble’s collection of poetry, In Praise of Detours, might be deemed a study of the individual’s plans versus the plans of the Divine. We have all heard the joke: Want to make God laugh?  Make a plan. The title poem certainly speaks to this conundrum of the human experience.  Crumble writes, “At the starting line of my white / suburban guilt, I first foresaw a tweedy / liberal blue-blood in my future, / a family friend.”  The reader soon learns, however, that the speaker’s “one,” so to speak – the true intended spouse – was nothing like what the speaker had imagined.  A detour occurred, and the speaker ends up falling for a man who was on his way to “winning / a black trophy wife to please your father, / who always disappointed you. / You were this quirky drummer / with a blowout ‘fro, a laugh and a stutter.”  Thirty-five years and three children later, the speaker pronounces him her true “home,” at least in the earthly sense, and the poem concludes with a bright, sentimental note.  And that would be fine but for the possibility that the raw material of this particular poem – race, time, expectations, and reality – seem to orbit something much greater: The very Source of a trajectory that leaves at least one mortal, the speaker, pleasantly surprised. 

I certainly do not want to see what is not there, as it were; however, the tone of the very first line suggests naivete borne out of inexperience. Crumble had expectations in the beginning.  We all have expectations at some point.  But Providence always gets the best of us.  Providence, dear listeners, is also a character in this poem.  He is, if you will, the road worker who puts up the detour sign at all, making Crumble’s poem relatable to those who have experienced similar changes of plan. 

Ultimately, it is a lesson in letting go – a lesson, I hasten to say, that is not easy in the least.  It almost seems counterintuitive, but the fact of the matter remains that it is essential for freedom to be experienced. 

Take, for example, another poem in Crumble’s collection entitled, “Threads for a New Robe.”  The word “threads” itself implies something used, something old, yet it is out of the threads that something new emerges.  The poem is about a mother’s need to let her child grow up. What began with youth and love became a precious child that the speaker is somehow expected to “swallow my heart / and let my youngest son be delivered / into the rough hands of circumstance, forced / to walk on his own two feet / in a dangerous / world.”  The speaker’s motherly anguish is evident, and, in my estimation, no parent can come away from this poem without echoing back that anguish.  The lesson is painful, but it is necessary, for this is part of the rhythm of raising children since time immemorial.  They “grow under our heart” until it is time for them to take off on their own or, as Crumble tells it, “run in the rain.” 

Crumble’s “Lessons of Loss in January” reinforces the relationship between parenthood and Providence by returning that relationship to where, in the Biblical sense, it all began: the Garden.  In a series of observations of trees in the dead of winter, Crumble elucidates that part of being human that has us experiencing loss and pain but finding a way to move on, not so much by our own volition but, to bring our study of Crumble’s work full circle, by the sheer insistence of life: through loss, through coming together, through letting go, through trusting what we cannot see, what we cannot hear life will come our way.  Life wins.  Providence is victorious.  "Leave me my heartwood,” Crumble writes.  “I am evergreen.”  This is the constant.  The unshakeable.  The true.  Far from ending on a nebulous note, Crumble seems to deliver her readers to the doorstep of something good, something accessible to all if only their own “heartwood” is right.