It is the artist's prayer, of daily bread, that inspiration and revealing things will come through the everyday routine.

Even without a pattern, there is a pattern.

Back from my mom's, my work schedule at the bar was off and on.  I'd worked an impossible night, not my usual, Friday, a downstairs wedding buyout, Saturday expected to be back for another beating, be given the night off, was still dragging when I came in for Sunday night, another wedding party buying out the main floor of the bistrot, then back for Monday jazz night, and then, the kid wants to switch with me, so, I do not need to show up for the usual Tuesday night wine tasting I'd been doing, placed in charge of, for years, and will work instead Thursday, and then Saturday.

At then of the night, the gypsy swing in my ears all night, poked, and prodded, big bodies moving about behind the small bar, the waitress hovering over her cell phone by the cash register computer terminal, the bull in a china shop busboy who likes to do, and does, everything fast, and then the waiter from downstairs up to deal with the back room, all in and out.... toward the end a retired couple, he, a retired IMF economic scholar, she, in public relations and event planning, German, organized--they organize wine travels in Europe, and he writes a wine blog--mention a tasting of Finger Lakes wines down at a new wine bar down on 9th Street.  And I consider giving it a go, but by the time I get things organized the way I, at least, would like to find them tomorrow, and eat my calves liver, blue, reheated in the oven, with spinach, pepper and red wine sauce, it's getting on that hour of not being worth it.

The Uber driver who picks me up, a deaf man, picks up one young woman down in Georgetown, and then another on the West End, and then, gratefully and tired, and not having been drawn into anything too adventurous that turns out to be just another snare and a delusion, I just take off my clothes, brush my teeth, not even bothering with any wine, and go off to bed and lights out.

But it is tempting, after you've been knocked around, and this is your job anyway, hustling over wines by the glass, wines by the bottle, sparkling wines, whites, rosés, seven reds by the glass, dinner to be served, three courses, professors and administrators in the back room, aye, you get thrown off, and think, well, maybe I should, since this appears to be my profession, and let's go see what the young and mighty are up to down there on 9th Street.

The truth is, on a Monday night, despite lavish visions of industry people meeting up over Finger Lake Cab Franc, a list of quirky interesting wines, the place would surely be packing up anyway, and I've been on that side far too often, 'we're not keeping you, are we?'   And bed feels very good, and so does sleep.


Logic tells you to go one way, breaks down the issue.  The heart tells you other things.  Logic tells you, "it might be good professionally...," and then, "but it might be too late."  And then the heart, also talking to you, and more lasting, and truer, "first, get home, and take care of yourself, there are dirty dishes in the tub in the sink," and then, after waking at the odd hour of just-before-dawn, fearful, and anxious and different shades of heart-sick, as happens to the nervous creatures who write, the heart asks, "but what good can you do in the world?  you're not doing anyone much good, maybe, are you?"  And the heart must answer itself and say,"hmm, you have a good point, you might be quite right."  But then the heart brightens, and the head, with its logic, keeps up with all this, as if both were hoping for the same simple calm, as if to say, "hey, it's okay, take the day off;  sufficient in the evil thereof."  The heart brightens, and praises you for your simple good decision not to confuse following the Christian path with going down to 9th Street and ending up spending money you don't have and too late anyway.

And, more to the point, the heart says, now that you are displaying, at fifty three years of age, a certain maturity to take better care of yourself, and this notion of "fun," a misleading one, be damned, what you can do now, really, is "be not afraid."


What good is there to do in this world?  Is it not good to find the simple way to assuage fears and anxieties and heartsickness, and an ache in the left arm?  Is that not a lasting good thing?  Well, cheer up.  You were nice to people.  They were brave enough to come see you, and you did your usual thing of treating them well and calmly, friendly, a little chit chat, a little wine to taste...

The head of logic comes back at you then, maybe, a little.  Good in the world, this is done through actual work.  Like school teaching.  Like, being a cop.  Like, being a lawyer.  Like, being a professional, as the professions are the thing that help the world.  Sore tooth, go see a dentist.  Terrible rash, go see the doctor.  Etc.


But the heart is always going deeper, and it has a need to speak up, even just tiny, even if just very faint and distant.  The heart needs to impress upon its own logic.  The still small voice only the prophet can hear.  The heart must itself convey the terrible struggle an Abraham or a Moses must go through, as one of its lessons, one of its athletic skills.

And there is fear.  There is always fear.  And shyness.  The human being of flesh and blood wants to hide, out of shame, when God's angels voices come calling.  The human, so low sometimes, so mistaken, so capable of murdering and then saying, "my brother? no, I haven't seen him..."

What have I to write today?  I have no special inspiration.  I've cleaned the big green Crueset dutch oven casserole of the beef tomato red wine onion ragout the idiot made the previous early morn, leaving it in the oven at 250 degrees to cook slowly, the sides caramelized with a dried reduction residue, after transferring the contents into a pyrex dish.

But isn't that funny.  "Be not afraid."  As if to say, maybe you are not quite so far off as you might think.

Your habitual sense of your own strangeness, having always been taken as a kind of individual, private, an eccentric stuck stubbornly in his own ways... your saintliness hidden in occasionally loutish behavior and other seeming irresponsibilities...  that sense of your own strangeness, private, and individual, that too makes you feel a bit afraid, always having to bridge the awkwardness to other people.

Poor Jesus Christ:  I have to walk over the water to go see them again.  They're going to think I'm strange again.  But I have to do it.  I have to do it this way.  Sure, they'll be frighten, agitated, confused, not comprehending.   But that, precisely is my little test for them, and let's see how they do with it...  The teacher, rabbi, cannot help it.   Wist ye not I was at my father's business.  Ye of little faith. 

And the usual startled reaction to Him, He would have come now to expect... remembering His own town people wanting to throw Him off the high hill...

He has his mysterious ways.  He lets us think outside the anxious traps we have fallen into.  Isn't that how you get adults to learn, by taking down their panic concerns.

And that He does so, is quite touching.  It reinforces the lesson.  That He would risk being such an oddball to come approach us like a ghost, doing that which is just about as strange as you can get, walking around on water.  The guys, the men, the human beings, the mortals on the boat, they are more important than he;  He is just a teacher, and they are the ones who have to live in society and make a living to stay married and have their families, and keep a bank accounts.  Whereas He is noble, different, undefinable, as much a mystery as quantum physics is.  How sweet and beautiful and richly funny it is that these people, the people of his time actually had the amazing and broad imagination to register all this that He was saying, first of all, and then even begin, as they really did, understand it.  Remarkable!  It's even like an afterthought, the miracles, the loaves and the fishes, the hearings...  The miracles were, are, secondary to the powers of His teachings and the commensurate powers of normal people like them, like you and I, unchanged, unchanging for thousands of years, the same creature endowed with the same "godlike" powers.  Completely amazing people, they were, stopping to listen, to ponder, to record even, the Sermon on the Mount.  Amazing.

Nowadays a writer seeks fame, an agent, publicity professionals and grooming editors, marketing strategies, as if life itself depending on such things.

But this Jesus Christ guy, you sense He is breaking free now, He is opening out himself, after years of absorbing wisdom and marking His place...

Jesus should be able to open a wine bar anywhere.  And be sort of like Dionysos, sitting calmly, the pirate's tethers having loosened, and now grapevines climbing the masts and the sail beams, and wine flowing from vessels.  Clientele would not throw him off.


And so, how do we ourselves accomplish good in this world of ours?  When there are such masters as he, and even such masters as those who, like Peter, or anyone with eyes and ears, just not those professional urban urbane nay-sayers who are supposed to be doing the job, yours and mine, when there are such masters, where and how do we, in our time, in our own times, begin?  How do we go and begin and take up the work which is good?  How do we hold ourselves up to those standards, which seem themselves so impossibly high that we've already broken a thousand times the commandments of them, sinned so many a time, as if to be stuck being permanently irresponsible, no way to start fresh over again, clean, renewed into a non-sinful way...


But Jesus... now that is faith and confidence.  And no one to bring him down with worries.  He walks on water.  Maybe this makes him hard to deal with.  But who else can you turn to, sometimes.