Friday, August 11, 2017

Sometimes you just want a day job.  Wake up feeling stupid.  Everyone else does it, why not you?  Shame.  You went to a nice funeral service up in Shepherd's Park, stayed out too late with the crowd. Restaurant people.  Well, on the good side you made peace with Johnny, an old boss of yours.

The day off.  The spirit was pleased with going to the service, but the shots of Jameson with the restaurant people crowd leaves it anxious, wishing to get back to the quiet, away from 18th Street.  The live music was great, but the rest was strange, a feeling of not being where your own mind is at.

Forgive us, father, for our stupidity.  Nice guys to hang with, but a different pace than the one you normally keep.

Blank look at the computer, the iPhone, what's happening, as if life were led now through the screen thing.  What can you do when you are feeling stupid?  You meditate.  Light some incense.  Take a shower.  Write a grocery list.

But it was not nothing to go seek out an old friend.  You'd worked for him briefly at his new restaurant, but somehow didn't take to it, almost twenty years ago.  You worked a couple of nights, but it wasn't your cup of tea.  You called him to tell him, rather than go face him, and you went back to the restaurant you were familiar with, used to, comfortable with.  You hurt him.   You weren't sure how it was going to go, but you were immediately forgiven, and had a nice chat, catching up, and it felt good.   And then later you talked to the bass player of the blues band that played that night at Madam's Organ.    The old religion, the old way, meeting people out in the life of a street, not always clean, sometimes rather messy.  It had seem called for anyway, to tag along with Jason and his friends at his watering holes along Columbia Road.  And you'd been careful enough to eat at the Korean barbecue, a nice bowl, a full meal.  You'd been careful enough about the shots too.  Beer.  It had been nice to put a suit on and go to a very different part of town, way up Georgia Avenue.

Maybe you'd even made a little progress in this messy thing called life.  A paycheck cleared, and that made you feel better.  There was not yet the energy to do anything resembling hearty exercise.

Observations from a memorial service in an African American funeral home would be that things are taken in stride.  All the ease of friendship and community.  Honoring each other with gesture, brother hugs, the clap of clasped hands.  A celebration of life.

Later I tag along.  The Greek American chef and his girlfriend;  the restaurant guy who now works managing property management, fixing and flipping, down to one night bar tending.  I feel like the gullible one in all this, out of place with shrewd city boys who know the streets and how to talk to women.  Relaxed hang outs, doesn't have to be fancy.

Adventures of a night.


All this is related to the nature of a calling.  The calling, as Kathleen Norris reminds us, in The Cloister Walk, is the story of one who feels the self-based original calling for poetry, the finding of an inner authority that is not based on credential as the rest of life and professions seem to be.  It includes the hardness of Jeremiah, the struggling, the difficulties, the world at odds with callings and the people who receive them.

To be a poet requires invoking your own authority, different from the credentialed academic...

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