Soulful Muse

My mother wanted Frank for my name but my dad insisted on Tom.  I’m glad that he won.  It’s hard to be frank and serious when an abundance of humor in our world is always needed.

It begins with yourself and it is the healthy ability to muse over things you consider imminently important but in reality are just passing inconveniences.  This just can’t be good for your heart when the minor stuff stuffs up your life.

I like to think of myself as having a life perspective that neither begins nor ends with me.  It is a warning that always takes me away from myself and into the situations and lives of people around me.  My enjoyment is triggering a quick smile or unleashing a deep laughter.  The sounds it creates can warm the cockles of anyone.  (What are cockles anyway?  The dictionary says an “edible, burrowing bivalve mollusk with a strong ribbed shell.”  Its relationship to warmth eludes me.)

Puns are the silliest of humorous elocution.  I rarely use them.  People reduce themselves when using them.  Those forced to hear puns seem to be either amused or annoyed by them.

The special laughing release is reserved for irony.  It starts with a deep-felt roar in your stomach and then quickly moves its way to a rousing laughter that only puns can envy.  You can try to stop it but you can’t, it only take seconds before it happens.

Our lives are full of ironies that lie in wait until a connection between that and what this should be is made.  Once that connection is connected and shared is the time when jollification begins.  Priests, as I’m sure many others, take their professions much too seriously and at their own peril.  The world did not begin with me nor will will end with my wise and carefully chosen words.  The ironic part of my profession rests in its irony and I often laugh about it to myself.  (I’m quite thankful for that.)

We like to imagine ourselves as stable, consistent, in-control folks when realities are strewn with confusion, misunderstandings and misconceptions.  We can only laugh it up to our own limited and, often times, senseless lives.  The biggest laughs I receive arise from irony and its attempt to connect to the unconnected.

A friend asked me how she could be funnier in the classroom.  I smiled to her and wondered how you teach humor, how do you teach irony.  (I find that it’s ironic, in itself.)

An observation made at a funeral, of all places, can lighten depression and express our own mortality while grieving the loss of a good friend.  A sly remark can switch a meeting that is going nowhere back to the matters at hand.  An off handed thought can liberate an awkward moment between two strangers.

It’s been said that for every tragedy Shakespeare wrote, he wrote a comedy.  What a better summation for our planned and organized and surprisingly spontaneous journey through life.

So please let me be Frank with you in saying that my name is Tom and it’ll never change; Foolerary is the family name.

Like it or not, we are all compared to someone else and often found wanting.  The person you replace at work suddenly becomes a wonderful and enduring employee.  (Then why was she fired?!)  The previous teacher who gave a student a “C” is now promoted to a “great teacher,” when the day you arrive.  You replace a priest who puts Bing Crosby to shame and you’re asked to be better than him.  (It’s not easy playing basketball in the morning with the youth and visiting the nursing homes in the afternoon without something smelling.)

For us kids it was “The Schroeders,” our four cousins who lived 45 minutes away which in the 50’s was a trip to be carefully planned for.  We barely saw them which made them, well, perfect children compared to the five of us local kids.  “Why aren’t you like the Schroeders?” my grandmother would often announce as though she knew them better than we did.  We didn’t know how to be like them since we rarely saw them which makes for a perfect expectation of a never reaching perfection.  Our mother would even mimic her mother’s words but we were too young to know that our mother saw our cousins the same way her mother did.

During our seldom visits to their 45-minute-away home, it never struck us to examine their behavior to duplicate or to search their closets for clues of perfection.  We just had fun with them and then returned to our imperfect home.

Measuring up to anyone’s expectations is a feat in itself.  I don’t envy anyone who assumes that task since I’ve tried in earlier years and soon abandoned those unreal expectations.  If your perfection-goal was a sibling then you’re really out of luck.  Now you not only cannot achieve his/her perfection but you have to live with it.  There have been songs of defiance that I’ve enjoyed, “My Way,” “I’ve Got to Be Me” and “I Am What I Am” but there is nothing defiant in discovering and embracing your own self, as imperfect as it may be (or compared to others).

Unseen and imagined, everything is perfect.  What is lived and muddled through is what provides and ensures peace of mind.  I’ve always like “The Schroeders,” but I never wanted to be like them.

It looked majestic standing proudly in my grandmother’s living room.  Its towering presence captured you as you entered the room.  (There’s a lot of towering things around when you’re ten years old.)  Four times an hour it announced itself to everyone in the living room that it existed and was worthy of your attention.  I think my grandmother appreciated it most because it alerted her when “As the World Turns” and “The Guiding Light” were to begin.  (No DVR or recorders back then, you miss one episode and you missed who was brought out a coma!)

When my grandmother died the marvelous clock made its way through several relatives while I sometimes remembered it and wished I had it.  Oh well, a remembrance from her was gracing the living room of someone else.

A family gathering brought us together which gave me the opportunity to check on the treasure that was still buried for me.  The relative who possessed the magnificent dark cherry wood grandfather clock told me that she’d be glad to give it to me.  She told me she thought I wanted it but wasn’t sure.  “No problem,” she said, “I’m glad that you want to have it.”

I brought it up to my apartment and found the perfect corner for the perfect remembrance of my grandmother.  Carrying and touching it seemed a bit odd to me because it was not the rich wood I imagined but only a half inch veneer not to mention the battery holder  behind it.  When I heard the first chime I smiled to myself because of its tinny, cheap sound.  My cherished heirloom must have set my grandmother back, at most, $20.00.

A wise person once told me that “you are who you represent yourself to be.”  Umm.  Curious.  I had always thought life’s goal was to “be yourself” and to uncover “who you really are” as though there are solutions and answers to any situation.  “Who do I present myself to be” has become an important mantra in my life.  It’s too long for a car’s license plate but I can let it live deeply in my heart and soul.  Who can say what is real, unreal or unsure in this magical, mystery tour we call life?  “Authentic” and “genuine” should be reserved for leather products and car parts, not for human identity.

We are too important and fluid; we are those folks that everyone around us thinks are rich cherry wood when we really only have a battery behind our half inch veneer.

One of my favorites themes is, “inbetween time.”  It’s supposed to be two words but it is always one event and it’s choked full of meaning.

Most of our lives is lived “inbetween.”  In between the yesterday event and the upcoming happening.  If you wish someone “Merry Christmas” the day after Thanksgiving, well, it just sounds awkward.  You are unable to say “Happy New Year” right after Christmas because people will think that you’re ahead of yourself.  (But if you don’t plan on seeing them again prior to January 1, then it is permitted.)  Or begin a new tradition saying, “Merry New Year?”  Nah, it’ll never catch on.  We’re stuck in the “inbetween.”

Some people hate the “inbetweens” of life.  Divorced and remarried within a year.  God forbid an inbetween-time-breather to weigh your life back into balance.  Going from one party to the next and you’ll end up in rehab.  Doing nothing can create an encroaching boredom.  Without something ahead there would be no inbetween time.

The Church says that our whole life is one big “inbetween” time.  We were with God before birth and return to His care after our death.  Suddenly our patience kicks in and we don’t seem to mind waiting for life’s parting so much.

And, how can you actually be “inbetween” time?  Am I able to crawl between the first minute and the second and live “inbetween” the two of them?

We can kill it, schedule it, race toward it, measure it, remember it, point toward it, generalize about it,  count it, pass it, be on it, repeat it, share, stretch and season it; stage, patch and trim it.  We’ve had the best of them, the golden of them and the prime, peak and length of them.  And, we can be and enjoy the “inbetween” times of them as well.  “Happy New Year,” I mean “Merry Christmas.”

St. John was definitely having a bad hair day when he wrote this.  “Do not love the world or the things of the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life, is not from the Father but is from the world.”

My advice to St. John: Leave the monastery for a day and visit someone, anyone!  Monastic life, by the way, is considered one of the higher callings in the Catholic Church.  It’s right up and close to the angels.

The rest of us schmucks (Yiddish, by the way) are stuck in this world, for better or for worse.  In my religious community there is an undercurrent that missionary work in a foreign country is second only to angelic.  The rest of us (schmucks, again) are stuck in this awful and sinful world as it erodes and rots away.

I am saddened that those who are not of this world (Mork, Mindy anyway?) missed out on:

• Mozart’s Violin Concerto, number 3
• witnessing a baptism as a godparent and hearing the baby softly cry
• taking a friend out for a drink after being terminated
• attending a surprise 50th birthday party for a friend in remission from cancer
• congratulating a friend who found a job after a year’s search
• losing an evening through a mystery novel
• tucking in your son in bed singing a song that your mother sang to you
• laughing at a funeral for a long time friend who wanted you to laugh
• getting up in the morning and anxious to return to work
• a Mexican sunset, a Tucson sunset
• a Milwaukee sky in October
• an unexpected “thank you” note
• writing a handwritten letter to a friend in 2011
• meeting three foster children who’ve been rescued from a neglectful mother
• wishing luck to the first college graduate in their family
• saying “goodbye” to a good friend as he moves south
• having a cat jump on your lap after having a tumor removed

Perhaps St. John woke up the next morning and continued a more balanced account of this world of ours after an evening out with good friends.