Where’s The Override?

The classic moment In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where Khan, flustered as his commandeered ship’s shields are dropping, looks helplessly around the unfamiliar console asking “Where’s the override? The override?!”is a meme at Anglocat Central. Where la Caterina is very keyed in to physical reality, a crowded field of vision bewilders me, and I can (or should I say “Khan”) unconsciously reproduce that sequence in real time while the object I seek is literally right in front of me.

This came to my mind this morning when I was seeking the smaller baking sheet to heat up a frozen breakfast. It took me 10 minutes to see the bloody thing, and it’s a weird experience when I finally can lock on to it.

I dont know if this is just some weird fluke of my own mind, or if others can, in this one aspect at least spare a drop of sympathy for the beleaguered Khan Noonien Singh (C’mon, I grew up on Trek. Of course I know his full name.)

But I can.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? A Sermon on Luke 10:25-37

[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York City]

One of my earliest pop culture memories is that of a friendly faced, slender man taking off his suit coat, hanging it in the closet, and putting on a cardigan. He’d change out of his outside shoes to slippers, and, all the while, sing gently an invitation:

“Would you be mine, could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”

Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood was a safe place, a place where angry voices were reconciled, where divisions were healed by empathy, where everyone was a neighbor, with a place in the neighborhood. All were welcome.

Race, religion, gender didn't matter, and everyone, person or puppet—everyone was welcome to Mr. Rogers.

That’s what we all called him. In fact, he was the Reverend Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister of the Gospel, who from 1968—when I was two—to August 31, 2001 told children throughout the world that they were special, that there's only one person in the whole world that's like you, and that's you. And people can like you just the way you are.”

Nearly two weeks after Mr. Rogers went off the air, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 began what will soon be 18 years of endless war. In this war-forged America, neighborliness is a trait that seems to be harder and harder to find.

Today, the New York Times warns us that ICE is mounting a major operation to seize those who it believes are not lawfully within our borders. On the same page, the President of the United States has told four Congresswomen—all women of color—to go back to the countries they came from. Three of them, of course, were born here, and the fourth came as a refugee, rising to represent her district, and thus her state in the U.S. Congress.

At our southern border, we are caging asylum seekers and their children in facilities that have been described by observers as “concentration camps.” Rather than impel our government to improve the conditions, the a highly technical debate over the name has ensued, over whether the term “concentration camp” can be applied to anything outside of the Third Reich.

Not that it is relevant, but the British created concentration camps, overcrowded, crude facilities that held prisoners without trial, during the Boer War of 1898-1902. We called them internment camps when the United States imprisoned Japanese-American citizens en masse, because their ethnic origin made the government distrust their loyalty (unlike German-Americans, who remained free unless there was evidence that they took action against the United States).

So never mind the nomenclature, look at the reality on the ground. As Judge William Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals described our modern-day camps, the children are “cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket” against the cold. In response to Judge Fletcher, the United States argued that its legal obligation to provide “safe and sanitary conditions” to migrants who are children do not include soap and toothpaste.

Not all those children are held in camps. But the number that have been separated from their families is itself a daunting figure. Something like 3,500 children have been separated from their parents by our Government, with no plan to keep track of the children in place.

The war at home has other casualties beyond those who seek asylum here, though.

Racist and antisemitic violence continued to plague the country, increasing by 30 percent from 2014 to 2017.

The Anti-Defamation League and the SLPC have recently issued reports warning of a new kind of hate group: men who express violent anger toward and loathing for women.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has also documented a rise in hate groups focusing on women as the primary target. Describing misogyny as the “gateway drug” into the world of hate groups, the SLPC has cautioned that violence against women, always rife in abusive relationships, is becoming a cause of its own.

In 2018, a Florida yoga studio was the scene of a mass shooting by an avowed male supremacist. As the Washington Post described his beliefs, “The term encompasses a worrying new array of assaults by men who view women as genetically inferior, inherently treacherous or unwilling to provide them with the sex and submission they see as their birthright."

How far we have fallen from the gentle request of Mr. Rogers to his viewers, “won’t you be my neighbor.”

Jesus would have recognized our world, though. And the familiarity of today’s gospel reading should not blur how radical it was when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, and, sadly, how radical it still is in our time.

The original auditors would have been shocked at the events of the parable. That of the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan, the one who would show mercy would be the hated Samaritan would appall the listeners. That it would be the Samaritan—the hereditary enemy, and not the most holy of the People of God—who would cross over and take care of the injured man, pay for his stay at the inn, and promise more money if it was needed turns the moral order of those listening to Jesus completely upside down. The shocked lawyer—as always, my other profession doesn’t come out well in the Gospel—can’t even simply say “the Samaritan.” He can only answer “the one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus’s truth, even in a parable, is so subversive of the moral order which informs this lawyer’s life, that it is literally unspeakable.

But always, this unspeakable truth has a way of mirroring life. Mercy wells up in the human heart, in the volunteers who offer sanctuary, the lawyers who provide free representation in immigration hearings. The shooter in the yoga studio was stopped by a brave young man who struggled to stope the senseless violence. The families of his victims forgive the racist shooter who in 2015 killed 9 Christians in prayer the American Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina. Heather Heyer’s father forgives her murderer, yet another white supremacist.

So the parable of the Good Samaritan is not just a moral lesson about mercy over righteousness. It’s a reflection of the deepest wellspring of human nature. It is hope, when our hope fades.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Let me tell you a story.
One day, 22 years ago, I was shocked to wake up in a hospital. I was even more shocked when I was discharged later that day. I was newly unemployed, I still had insurance, and, apparently, my blacking out the night before was not going to kill me. The emergency was past, and I could go home.

The sun was beginning to set, and the hospital was not in a good part of town. I couldn’t find a cab, and it was a long walk to my apartment.
I headed downhill, and after a few blocks, I began to get that uneasy sensation that you can get when someone is following you. I sped up, but I was still tired. I heard footsteps behind me, and a man passed me, and turned to face me.

He was African-American, about my age—early thirties, at the time. Taller than I am, and bigger than I was then. An athlete by the look of him.

And I was a tired, washed-out white guy in a neighborhood that wasn’t familiar. So he says to me, and this was just the cap to a perfect weekend, “I just got out of prison today.”

I nodded. Really, what did I have to say to that?

Then he goes on: “I haven’t done anything good for anyone else in a long time. A really long time.”

He paused. Then he said, “You look like you’re having a tough day. Let me walk you home.”

I didn’t want him to. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t want anyone, even if I had trusted him. I just wanted to slip away, alone, get home and forget all about being in that hospital, of having lost consciousness. But I didn’t know any way out. So I said yes.

We didn’t talk much that I remember. We just trailed through the City until we reached my door. I fished out my keys, ready to disappear into my safe bright little box. And the man turned around to face me again.

Here it comes, I thought, expecting—what? Him to ask for money? A mugging? I honestly don’t know that I had any expectation. Just that something was going to happen.

And then it did.

“Thank you,” he said, clearly meaning it, and he took my hand.

“Thank you,” I heard myself say, not really having planned to. And he disappeared from my life.

Who was my neighbor that day? The ex-con, the other. The man who wanted to turn his life around, and wasn't sure if he could.

And was my friend, even though I never knew his name, on the day when I needed one most.

We are all each other’s neighbors, as Mr. Rogers taught us as children, as Jesus taught the young lawyer. Sometimes you’ll be the injured man in the road. Sometimes you have the choice—to be the Samaritan. To pass by on the other side, or to show mercy. To love.

Seize that moment. Trust your kindness. It’s the best of you. And it’s of God.

In The Castle of the Forest Sauvage

We begin:

An older boy, leading his foster-brother, angrily tries to fly a hawk, who flaps away, itself in a mood. The hawk will not be taken willingly, and heads deeper into the dark, frightening forest near the boys' home, the Forest Sauvage. The older boy, angry at himself, his brother (who warned him), and the hawk, storms off home. The boy follows the hawk into the depths of the Forest Sauvage, and pursues, even as the shadows lengthen.

The world changes.

***

As a better writer than me once put it, " I really didn't know. I wasn't sure. You lose sight sometimes. Thank you!"

I've been revisiting T.H. White's original, uncut, unblemished, "fully rounded, bright and done," The Sword in the Stone, and it is every bit as glorious--no, it is far more glorious than when I read it as a child. Seriously, it is a beautiful book.

But you must read it alone and apart from the compilation volume The Once and Future King. Brilliant though that volume is, comprising the two sequels, and a final book, The Candle in the Wind, that only appears in the tetralogy, the edits White made to Sword lose much of the grand daylight sense of whimsy and anachronistic comedy that make the original so special. The lost set pieces--Merlyn dueling Madam Mim (White's original cries out for Michelle Gomez to play the mad, funny, beautiful-but-deadly villainess), the rescue of Morgan le Faye's captives (Morgan as a jaded 30's sophisticate (Constance Bennett, perhaps?), whose sunglasses blot out what she doesn't want to see), and the lyrical visit to the kindly snake T. Natrix--the inserted materials from the aborted The Book of Merlyn are well worth having, but not in Sword. They are a harder, older man's writing, the writing of a man whose hope in his kind is flagging, and the sunset of that uncompleted volume is bright, but not like the dawn-filled sky of White's first Arthurian romance.

No. Read the original or go home. And do not watch the Disney movie. Wait for a proper adaptation (Michelle Gomez required!), or read the original--aloud, if you can; this marks two books I have read aloud to myself for the savor of the language. The Christmas dinner and Boxing Day boar hunt are beautiful in ways that I simply missed as a child, as a youth, as a young man. Now, ensconced in middle age, I laugh at Sir Ector--but for him, too. King Pellinore, Robin Wood, and, most surprisingly, William Twyti, King Uther's gnarled and wiry huntsman, strike different chords in me now. (I defy you to read aloud the boar hunt, and remain dry-eyed at “He [Twyti] said, 'Good dog, Beaumont the valiant, sleep now, old friend Beaumont, good old dog.' Then Robin's falchion let Beaumont out of this world, to run free with Orion and roll among the stars.” )

But White's use of language is extraordinary throughout. Here he is, setting a scene, and creating a song another man would simplify two decades later:

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush

Such gems are freely strewed by White throughout the novel; here's White describing the young Arthur (called the "Wart" because he's illegitimate (so everyone thinks), after falling asleep in the woods:

The boy slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they begin to lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars
above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth

Not a bit of showing off to be seen; the similes enrich and convey the feeling White wishes to convey, concretely.

Among all the character beats (on Sir Ector's "proper" son, Kay: “He was one of those people who would be neither a follower nor a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it.”), apothegms, the comedy, the call-backs (or forward; Merlyn lives backwards in time), and may have been Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s), comes the single best advice I have found in a book:

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you.”

There speaks a man who has battled his own demons with curiosity, books, keen observation.

And then read the rest, The Witch in the Wood, The Ill-Made Knight, and then return to the omnibus, and read The Candle in the Wind. And don't neglect The Book of Merlyn, because this last gasp of White's Arthurian genius, as the Second World War engulfed, and threatened, everything he believed in, White manages one last affirmation of humanity:

He [Arthur, now in old age, the night before his final battle] caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had

The Book of Merlyn closes with a dedication to Sir Thomas Malory, and asks prayers for his soul, and that of his humble disciple (White himself), who now "lays down his books, to fight for his kind."

The books are extraordinary, unlike any others in literatureI have read.

The story begins with a boy, chasing a hawk, into the Forest Sauvage, where he meets an old man (or a young man?) who will be his tutor.

Begin.

Hat-Tip: Words and Music

I write to music. It can't be the music that can overwhelm you, and compel engrossment into itself alone. But it needs to resonate with my mood. Not something so powerful as to distract me, but something that jibes with the general emotional state I'm evoking in myself, and hope to share with my readers. Phineas at Bay was largely written to film scores, mostly John Barry, specifically his score to Mary, Queen of Scots (1971).

This year, this parlous year, in which division and distrust have increasingly marred the country I love, I have preached on those themes, and on love--not sentimental goop, but real love, that is, a fundamental commitment to the well-being of the other, however you describe that "other," as the only hope to heal our divisions, and our world.

Just as I have written books because I myself needed them to exist, so too I have preached, as I often do, the sermons I need to hear. I have made myself confront the sins to which I all too easily can fall prey--arrogance in my sense of rightness, self-certainty, and righteous indignation. I have sought to call myself, as well as those who hear me, to the better angels of my own nature.

Along that path, this year, I have written several sermons to the accompaniment of Murray Gold's "The Shepherd's Boy" above. Somehow this piece speaks to me in this year of discord. Perhaps because the long build, the deceptive gentleness of the theme, its reaching a crescendo long delayed, speaks to me of the rebuilding, the re-weaving of the fabric of a nation fraying in ways I never expected to see ours fray.

I won't deny that Steven Moffat's recent writing seems to me to be seeking to that same basic mission, with his repeated emphasis on the virtues of courage and kindness. Ultimately, they are what I think we need: the courage to see ourselves in the other, and the kindness to trade them as we would treat ourselves. It is not easy to forego the luxury of righteous indignation, and choose instead the harder path of love, but, oh, I am trying. And I have many companions on the way--not just my friends and colleagues at St, Barts and throughout the Episcopal Church, but also friends and family writ large. But to my surprise, fiction, storytellers--often authors whose work I haven't visited in many years have come to my aid--T. H. White has more to say to me in my fifties than he did when I was a child, and I learned much from him then. Mark Twain and Henry James, Jean Anouilh and Jean Giradoux, have flared back into relevance this year. They have been good companions on the journey.

So too have Gold and Moffat.

I have read less theology than usual, but more stories, more parables, and I have found in them the resources to do that which has been needful, if only to myself. Robertson Davies's reminder to "never overlook the charm of narrative for the human heart" has come true for me this year. And so being an English major has turned out to be eminently practical after all. As has a taste for music.

"I Can Be Wrong!"

Susan Howatch's character Lewis Hall: "Now just reflect on that sentence for a moment. Say to yourself quietly, calmly, intelligently: 'I CAN BE WRONG'"

I am reminded of my late grandfather, whose medical condition went undiagnosed, because his GP assumed that his memory lapses and befuddlement had to be Alzheimer's Disease. It wasn't; it was the result of a lifetime's work with asbestos and brick. But the doctor--no doubt well-meaning--assumed that what seemed true at the surface must be--that the easy answer was the right one.

The lesson I took from that, and which I have tried to take with me in every professional capacity, from public defender in criminal appeals to the present, is to look in the mirror every morning and say to myself, as Howatch's Lewis Hall advises, "I CAN BE WRONG." And to review every case from scratch.

Every professional whose work impacts the lives of others owes that to them, to try to resist complacency and self-regard smothering our doubts, and treating any case--any person--as routine. No case is routine for the client, the patient. They only have the one life, and we owe them our best work, and a healthy dose of self-doubt in our assessment. And as Trevor Howard almost ends Ryan's Daughter, "That's my gift to you--dat doubt!"

"The One I'll Care for Through the Rough and Ready Years": Charles Aznavour (1924-2018)

It's with some sadness that I note the death of Charles Aznavour, a songwriter whose lyrics and melodies touched a melancholic strain of romanticism that has always moved me. (Like Inspector Morse before me, I've always "been more attuned to life's adagios than its legatos.") It's a sort of karmic pun that his death was reported on the seventh anniversary of my wedding to the woman whose impact on my life his lyrics so well described:

She may be the reason I survive
The why and wherefore I'm alive
The one I'll care for through the rough and ready years.

The lyrics are quite apt, though I'll spare you the personalia. So I will miss him.

Still, these two stories from his obit made me smile with the old rascal:

Mr. Aznavour’s career spanned the history of the chanson realiste, the unvarnished tales of unrequited love, loneliness and anomie that found their apotheosis in the anguished voice of Piaf. He wrote songs for her and for Gilbert Bécaud, Léo Ferré, Yves Montand and others. When Piaf rejected one of his songs, “I Hate Sundays,” he gave it to Juliette Gréco, then the darling of the Left Bank philosophers and their acolytes. When Piaf changed her mind, she was enraged to find that she’d lost the song and, according to François Lévy, one of her biographers, confronted Mr. Aznavour, shouting, “What, you gave it to that existentialist?”

***

In “Yesterday When I Was Young,” an autobiography published in 1979 — it shares its title with the English-language version of one of his best-known compositions — Mr. Aznavour recalled a Brussels promoter who had ignored him for years and was now offering him a contract. He offered 4,000 francs. Mr. Aznavour asked for 8,000. The promoter refused. The next year, he offered 16,000.

“Not enough,” replied Mr. Aznavour, now a major star. “I want more than you pay Piaf.” Piaf was then making 30,000 francs. Again the promoter refused. The next year, he gave in. “How much more than Piaf do you want?” he asked. “One franc,” Mr. Aznavour said. “After that I was able to tell my friends I was better paid than Piaf.”

"She"(1974), my favorite of his songs, heads this post, a cheerful-resigned celebration of the heights and depths of love, of the many faces the beloved presents at various moments. (If you're thinking Billy Joel's 1977 "She's Always a Woman" might bear some influence, well, perhaps, but Aznavour's Gallic philosophical resignation and muted yearning create a different vibe than Joel's song.) Rather than (as I've seen it described) a sexist musing on the mutability of women, I read Aznavour's lyrics as consistent with Robertson Davies's observation in Fifth Business that "I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two sides to him"--or her.

Advocatus Volubilis Minimis: A Birthday Bonus for the Lesser-Booming Barrister

(Photo from The Clarence Darrow Foundation).

Back in the summer of 1988, I worked for a brilliant, irascible at time, but mostly kindly criminal defense lawyer. Stanley Teitler died in 2005. In the acknowledgements to First Amendment, First Principles, I called him, quite accurately, "my first mentor in the law."

Now, in the summer between first and second year, Columbia Law School actively discouraged us from taking summer jobs. The theory was that we needed to recover after the rigors of first year, and to prepare, if we had been lucky enough to make a journal, for the rigors to come. But (a) I needed the money; and (b) I wanted something to do that summer that would be interesting. So, in those pre-internet days, I wrote to every New York City lawyer who did criminal defense who was listed in the huge volumes of Martindale Hubbell (remember those volumes?).

I got one letter back, from Stanley.

His single associate, Michael Coyle, whom I'd met on the debate circuit when he was senior and I was a freshman at Fordham, prevailed on Stanley to give me an interview. We clicked, and I found someone who was a magus in the law. Unlike most small firms, he had a full law library of his own, and used it. He had studied at Oxford, and was a firm believer in the importance of criminal defense work--having been a strong Assistant US Attorney first. I learned an enormous amount from him (and Mike) in that summer.

He had a strong reverence for Clarence Darrow, and had, on the wall of his office, a print of the famous portrait of Darrow by Nickolas Muray above, with Darrow's autograph underneath.

I could yarn about Stanley for a series of posts--and maybe I will, because I see very little online to commemorate him, beyond the brief obit, and his name as counsel on some cases, some important, others less so. The advocate's art, John Mortimer contended, was even more evanescent than that of the stage actor.

John Mortimer had his archetypical criminal defense lawyer Horace Rumpole describe himself as "advocatus volubilis minimis, "the lesser-booming barrister."

He's not denigrating his own talent or skill, just saying that lawyers of his kind are a rare species, and their wins and losses soon forgotten, except to the principals they represent, and, if they have been acquitted, they want only to forget those hours of fear and shame. I touched on these themes in depicting the funeral of Anthony Trollope's criminal defense Mr. Chaffanbrass, in the first chapter of Phineas at Bay.

Stanley was one, too, and, in the part of my career when I was an advocate, strove to warrant, in my days as an advocate, the honorable title "the lesser booming barrister."

For my birthday this year, la Caterina bought me a framed print of the Darrow photo that looked down on me when I was first learning how to litigate, from a brash but brilliant master of the art.

It'll be good to have Darrow looking over my shoulder again.

End of an Era: The Gentleman Barber

Soon after la Caterina and I moved to Bed-Stuy in 2010, I found myself walking through our new neighborhood. Quite near our house was the barber shop pictured above. Needing a haircut, and wanting to be a part of the neighborhood, I went in, and got a cut and a shave. My barber, Gene--well, here's what I wrote on Yelp:

J & P Barbershop is a rarity; an old school neighborhood shop that's a hub of the community, and a place to get a great haircut, and a close shave.

Gene is an artist with shears and straight edge, and in the 5 years at least that I've been going to him, I've never had a less than excellent cut/shave. I've watched him train barbers, too, and can tell you he takes his craft seriously.

Genes a great to talk with as well, but if you prefer silence, he gets that too.

Every word true. Best haircut in Brooklyn, absurdly low price.

But I didn't, in my review, mention the shop's owner, known as "John" or "JP", depending on how well you knew him. Only because Gene is my barber, and so I couldn't appraise JP's skills. But I can say that he was himself a draw, with a strong loyal following, just as Gene had his own. That's how it is with barbers. But JP welcomed us all, chatted with us, made us at home.

And all the folks who were the core of the neighborhood, who weathered the hard times in years past, would wave or shout a greeting to the man who occupied the first chair.

The real denizens of the neighborhood, not us new arrivals, knew him as "Mr Johnnie Patrick." That mix of dignity and approachable informality captures him pretty well, in my opinion.

He was an elderly gentlemen even then. Polite, unfailingly welcoming, and, as you left, handing you a "Bible Helps" tract.

The shop was mostly frequented by neighborhood guts--I think I was the only white regular, though a lot of great reviews suggest that I had company after all. On a Saturday morning, we'd hear Gospel music and sermons, and the customers would hash out politics, talk neighborhood news, and just be.

I was mostly quiet. I was glad that my neighbors accepted me as part of the scene, but this was politics and the neighborhood from the men who'd been there for many years. I was welcome, but very junior. And that was just fine by me.

The day before my ordination, I told Gene and JP why I wanted Gene's best work. From that day on, JP called me "Rev," and, at first, he stopped giving me the tracts. I asked him for one, and he smiled. Thereafter, he'd give me the tract after every cut, but I was forever "Rev."

Yesterday, la Caterina let me know that JP had died.

I left Albany early, planning to attend the service. I had miscalculated the traffic, and was stuck in the Bronx and Queens for hours. I was too late to pay my respects in person, so this little memorial must suffice.

When I got home, the little stand-alone shop was locked up today, with the notice of the funeral, and the white lilies softening the chain links and the padlock.

Somehow, I hope the little shop will survive; it was--it is--a real neighborhood hub, a place where the community throve. I was glad to be present among that community. And I will miss JP's friendliness, his strong faith, and his welcome.

And there is no barber in Brooklyn better than Gene.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Johnnie Patrick, and Rise in Glory. You were a quiet but strong pillar of the community I have come to love, and which my wife serves in her own legal practice. We will miss you, but I have faith that you are with the God you loved so well; to steal a line from Robert Bolt, "He will not refuse one who was so blithe to go to him."

Between Books

Ronald Knox, who was, among other things, enough of a Trollope fan that he wrote the charming (if slight) Barchester Pilgrimage, was a Catholic priest, Sherlockian, detective story writer, and amiable eccentric.

He was also a formidable scholar. And who but Knox could begin his magnum opus with a dedicatory epistle to a novelist, his friend Evelyn Waugh? The opening of the epistle, though, speaks to every scholar who has put pen to paper, or keystroke to pixel, for that matter:

There is a kind of book about which you may say, almost without exaggeration, that it is the whole of a man's literary life, the unique child of his thought. Other writings he may have published on this or that occasion; please God, the work was not scamped, nor was he indifferent to the praise and blame of his critics. But it was all beside the mark. The Book was what mattered--he had lived with it all these years, fondled it in his waking thoughts, used it as an escape from anxiety, a solace in long journeys, in tedious conversations. Did he find himself in a library, he made straight for the shelves which promised light on one cherished subject; did he hit upon a telling quotation, a just metaphor, an adroit phrase, it was treasured up, in miser's fashion, for the Book. The Book haunted his day-dreams like a guilty romance.

Barring his restricting of writers to whom this feeling would be known to men, and disregarding women writers, even those of his own day and in his own field, such as Evelyn Undehill, the sentiment is profoundly true, although in my own case, each phase of life has produced a different Book.

When I was a young man, I read in the biographies of Oliver Wendell Holmes of his ambition to write his magnum opus, The Common Law (1881) before his 40th birthday (he just made it). In a fit of bravado, I resolved to write my book on freedom of speech before my own 40th birthday, and published First Amendment, First Principles in 2000; the revised edition with two added chapters came out while I was still under 40. It was the Book for me through my young manhood, finished and expanded before I hit the line of middle age. A young man's book, not to be mentioned in the same breath as the classic Holmes wrote, but it was the very best I could do, and it defined an era in my own life. It was, for that time, the Book, and I never thought I'd write another.

But then came the great surprise--Phineas at Bay, a novel, for me the greatest form of literature, and one which I had aspired to write when I scribbled a few stories by hand in off hours as an English major at Fordham College, or at Columbia Law School. But I had no staying power, and the stories waned and died. But then I had the Book, First Amendment, First Principles, and counted myself lucky to have written that.

In my mid-40s, though, I was gripped as I had been a decade before, and wrote the continued adventures of Phineas Finn, Marie Finn, and their set. I had another Book. It sells, a few copies little here and there, now and again, and I have been paid and have used that money to pay the light bill, so I meet Stephen King's criteria to be deemed a talented writer (thankya big big, sai King!).

In just a few weeks, I will be 52.

As I move into the latter half of middle age, I wonder: will lightning strike thrice? I don't mean in the quality of the books--I'm no Holmes, no Trollope, no King--but will the tank refill, inspiration ignite, and the wonderful madness of pursuing the Book again be mine to revel in? Frankly, I feel guilty hoping for it--once was luck, twice was inexpressibly joyful, but three times--why, it feels almost greedy to hope for it.

Almost.

And earlier this week, I found that a drying up point at another novel I'd started over a year ago suddenly was not a stopping point. It's too early to tell if this will be a third "the Book"--but hope--well, hope comes unbidden.

Only time will tell.

The Prayer Kitty

This--how you see her here--that's how I like to remember her. Betty the Prayer Kitty, whose love for the nubby-textured red version of the Book of Common Prayer warred with her love of the two volume black Daily Office Book. Betty, who shared my journey to the diaconate with me, by cuddling ferociously to the liturgical books that formed the core of my rule of life as a Christian.

Betty was, as you can see from the photo (click to embiggen, as we say on the intertubes), a subtly beautiful cat, with gold fur highlights in the seeming brown-grey patches that made continents against the ocean of white that made up most of her body. She lived a remarkable life, nearly 19 years old when she died tonight, and< was the last survivor of her litter. (We lost Elvis, the Comfort Kitty in 2014, and their brother Buster a year later (Buster was basically Steveie Smith's galloping cat come to life.

Betty kept on keeping on, a gallant High Church lady of the old school.

Except when she and my cat Elspeth went to war every now and again.

About two years year ago, she began to seem wan, a little bullied by Elspeth. We moved her up to the Northern Residence, where she rallied, and soon asserted sovereignty over the Albany home. (Poor Ninja cat!) And then Betty got sick, an instance of what the NYT called "the mystery of the waiting house cats"--hyperthyroidism. Despite the fact that she was already well over than the 12-15 years house cat life expectancy, she responded well to treatment, gained back most of the weight she had lost, and enjoyed her new digs. She was a happy, snuggly kitty, claiming the bedroom, leaving Ninja the couch. Peace reigned in the land.

Yes, I had to make sure she got subcutaneous fluids (not from me, folks, I have a very skilled cat sitter), and twice a day orally administered medicine (that I got quite handy with. I'm apparently a natural with a syringe.)

And there was much rejoicing.

Until a few weeks ago, when Betty quickly lost all the weight she'd gained, and her kidneys were malfunctioning. Suffice it to say that, once again, I had to accompany another beloved pet to the vet for one last time, one more goodbye.

I read the light tone of so much of what precedes that last sentence, and I can't help it or change it. Betty was a happy cat, a companionable animal, whose heart shaped little pink-and-brown nose, whose golden tinted fur, whose kneading my chest, always made me smile.

Even now, sad as I am, and ravaged by the ordeal of having to make the choice for her, and hold her to me until the end, a pale reflection of all the happiness we shared in the nearly 12 years we shared together comforts me little bit. Better to have been with her in that moment than not. Better to have shared all of the experience, to the end.

Better to have loved to the last moment. And beyond.