Never Lose Faith

Never lose faith There are many that have been wondering about my health, writing without response, worrying that I have not been keeping up with my correspondence — anxious that I am sick, or worse, grown weary of this world.

I am writing here and now to let all know that the spirit of Christmas is eternal. It rests not in one man. Even me. And while I will be continuing my tradition of an all-nighter once again this coming Christmas Eve, you will find me quite silent on the subject. It does not mean I care any less or have forgotten any one of you.

Believe. Believe in love. Believe in redemption. Believe in new beginnings.

- Klaus

Neil Armstrong would like to buy a vowel, and a cell phone

It’s been forty years since man landed on the moon, and for the first time in my many recollections, dear readers, I have not a single personal connection to the events that transpired on that Apollo 11 mission. I did not know Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, or anyone at NASA for that matter. And I cared little that a tin can touched down a surface all too familiar to me, having had one too many times scraped the surface of that dead white rock while clebrating a job well done with too much whiskey and a team of very tired reindeer.

Still, achievement must be celebrated. And anniversaries even more so. At a time when Americans feel the weight of economic decline, wars that never seem to end, and endless variations on the same insipid reality television, we need the pride that can come from knowing that man once made it to the moon. That we, as a people, can overcome any seemingly insurmountable problem and do some pretty amazing things. So what if Armstrong flubbed his lines a little. “That’s one mall step for man” should have been “one small step for ‘a’ man.” But who was paying attention, really. Well, the media for one. Just like the vultures they are today, the newspapers at the time had a field day with Armstrong’s slip of the tongue. Like we didn’t know what he meant? C’mon. Give the guy a break.

What I find infinitely more facinating is that Apollo 11′s computers had less computer power than a modern day cellphone.

Think about that for a minute all you young ones under the age of 40. Before you were born (or while you were in utero), a group of scientists and hot dog pilots took a leap of faith that found them breaking free of the big blue marble and setting foot on the thing that, before they took the mystery out of it, was merely stuff that dreams were made of.

It was, perhaps, the last innocent expedition that mankind pursued simply because the moon was there. Undiscovered. Virgin. Who cares if we were trying to prove something to the Soviets. We weren’t fighting commies. We were fueling imaginations.

No oil. No ideological point to be made. No product endorsements (Sears made the flag, but they didn’t make a big deal out of it now did they?) or guarnteed rights to the movie. I would say it was a more innocent time, but it wasn’t. It was simply a nation’s unifying point of pride. A symbol? Perhaps, and an expensive one. But symbols have power. The power to inspire.

And if one kid, the child of those 40 somethings who sat in their living rooms and watched the news broadcast fuzzy black and white glimpses into what might be out there, beyond our own smallness, past our seemingly impassable egos — if one kid can take that spark and take us to the next step… Mars, green solutions, a cure for cancer, the who knows. Maybe anniversaries are necessary reminders.

In the face of that awesome potential, who cares if someone dropped a vowel.

Freedom, A Frenchman, and one hell of a Potato Salad

Seems that holidays — any chance to celebrate really — tend to bring me out of my self-imposed hermitage. There have been many wondering where I have been. Some have even written to question whether I was still alive — or worse — if I ever even existed at all.

Exist. It’s a funny word. Comes from the Latin meaning “to come into being.” Perhaps that’s what I do everytime the calendar rolls around to a milestone. I “come into being” as a metaphysical kick in the ass to those who forget why we celebrate the days we do. That these days are more than mere excuses to fire up the grill or down a few “cold ones” (not that I am adverse to either occupation). But that these celebrations have, at their core, a living history. A vitality. And something essential to the human condition that we must pass on to the generations that follow.

In my adopted country, today is Independence Day. And while my tendency would be to share some anecdote about my good friend Ben, or Livingston and Sherman (who history has somewhat ignored), or even Jefferson with his silly thermometer (the future of the nation at stake and this towering Virginian is outside taking temperature readings!), I turn instead to the very meaning of the day. And oddly enough, it’s a frenchman who I turn to for the right words.

Words that I myself could not so succinctly pen.

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better,” wrote Albert Camus. A complex fellow. Often labelled an existentialist (but he hated the association). Once a Communist (he later rejected the ideology). A brilliant writer — novelist, journalist, satirist, you name it — who realized that the price of freedom was individual responsibility: to make life — one’s own, and the lives of others — better.

Now remember, folks. No one is guaranteed that life will be better. But on this day, we are all reminded of the chance. The opportunity. The hope. The pride. We are a nation of people given the freedom to become something more. Something nobler. Something better.

Think about those words as you celebrate this Fourth of July. Appreciate freedom and what it means to be free. Thank those who have sacrificed so much so that the rest of us have that chance to better this life.

Oh, and keep the beer ice cold just in case old Klaus shows up.

Despite appearances to the contrary, I don’t just venture out once a year. I look great in bermuda shorts, and I make one hell of a potato salad.

Believe

William James, a true man of science who spent his entire life in the pursuit of truth in its many forms (I had the pleasure of traveling with him and an odd fellow named Agassiz a bit of distance up the Amazon in 1865) published a lecture in 1897 entitled “The Will to Believe.”

At the end of the lecture, James asserts that we “be not afraid of life.” But moreso, that we “believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

I think about that lecture in these days before Christmas. As my little friends ready the reindeer and pack the sleigh, I turn to pursuits that will fortify my soul and strengthen my resolve. Forget about checking some list. I have unionzied workers who have every detail of said list stored in databases that are kept on redundant servers around the globe. No, sometimes it’s a simple shot of whiskey. Something… anything to get my fat ass up out of bed and do what I do best for that one day of the year that has so many people desperately in need of me. A need that I likewise need for them to need (that’s a lot of needing).

See, belief is a poweful thing. And Christmas? Christmas is like the superbowl of belief systems. The big game. The great day. The leap of faith that has us celebrating the birth of a savior and the arrival of a old fool in a red cap that we hope will maybe leave a little magic behind after the sun has risen and the wrapping paper lies strewn about the family room floor.

The need to believe. James said “your belief will create the fact.” And here, in my last entry of the year as I prep for the big dance and then, after the party’s over, take a much needed break in a much warmer clime, I’d like for you, my dear friends, to remember this: it’s your belief that makes me real.

James, a man of science to the end, had difficulty in reconciling much of his faith with the practical and the pragmatic. Books are filled with his philosophy of faith. And I’m not talking “Sunday gone to meetin’” faith either, folks. For James… for me… and probably even for many of you, the faith at stake here is the faith we have in life itself. That getting up every day is worth the effort. Forget about that one day. Christmas Day. It’s easy to live for Christmas Day, when the world’s a little lighter and people are a bit more kind to their neighbors. But when it’s over, do I go away? Do you? Does life?

That’s the reason I remember James and his lecture just a few days before Christmas every year.

Believe. Believe that life — every precious minute of it — is worth the pain as well as the joy.

Believe.

Believe in me.

Believe. And you know what? Believe enough, and I’m real.

Of Presidents, Lady’s Book, Football and Turkey Legs

Many have written and wondered why I remained silent during the presidential election. It’s simple: when you have lived as long as I have and met more presidents than most, taking sides or espousing political views tends to alienate as many folks as would applaud. No, mine is not the place for rhetoric to change the world. Instead, I try to teach by example, and, for those who read this blog, through reminiscence.

Presidents.

I tend to think of the presidents I have known when it comes around to Thanksgiving.

It was George Washington who called the first day of national thanksgiving to celebrate the defeat of General Burgoyne at Saratoga. But then the concept kind of crapped out. Jefferson thought proclaiming holidays smacked too much of royalty. So official “days of thanksgiving” had to wait.

Almost a hundred years, in fact. Thanks to the efforts of one Sarah Joseph Hale (who I think I may have written about before?), editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the nation’s first women’s magazines.

Hale fought for decades to get Thanksgiving declared a national holiday. She wrote to influential people, including President Lincoln, many times during the years 1861 to 1863, arguing that a day of national thanks would help to heal a natin being torn apart by civil war. Then on September 28, 1863, she apparently captured Abe’s attention with one of her many letters. On October 3, 1863, he issued a proclamation setting aside the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

Of course, it wasn’t until 1939 that FDR moved the date to the third Thursday of the month of November. Why? Most say it was to give retailers and the public more time to prep (and shop) for Christmas.

Whatever the reason, the date didn’t catch on. Football coaches found their bowl game schedules fouled up. And others just plain didn’t like celebrating so early. So in 1941, the date was officially changed to the fourth Thursday in November.

So this Thanksgiving, I ask you to remember the tiny firebrand named Sarah Hale who wouldn’t give up on the notion that Turkey and pumpkin pie (mentioned in her novel, Northwood) should be on every American table come the end of November.

Me? I’m a leg man.

Baseball, beards and beer

The Fall Classic finds me coming out of my self-imposed blogging exile to dust off the keys and get these arthritic fingers moving once again.

Say what you will about baseball, it is, above all else, a ritual. There’s something deep in our collective cranium that craves games. And all games come back to the source. All games come back to the child — the one we’ve buried, forgotten, or lost somewhere along the way.

So drink your overpriced bear. Grow your mohawk. Wave your towels or ring your bells. Buy the big screen tv. Or hang out at the local tap room. However you choose to find that child, let him (or her) out for a little while to run the bases of liberation — freedom from our everyday worries and responsibilities. Time away from the every day.

Some folks say baseball is a slow game. Too slow. Dull. Boring. I counter with the assertion that time itself intentionally slows when we watch or play the game. Why? Because we don’t want the child in us to go away. For as long as the innings last, we hold on to that memory of being young and being free. When we cheer, we let loose that little kid who never has to go home. Who can stay for one more “at bat.” Who needs to break in that glove “just right.”

And for those who wonder why old Klaus is so nostalgic for the game, I give you a name: John Jay Remsen. Jack to his friends.

I’ve had a lot of fun in my many years. Now go. Each one of you. Find something that finds the child in you. Go play.

Poets, priests and politicians

If ideas are more powerful than people, then words are the weapons with which idealists wage war. But what of the silent majority that suffer without cause? With no banner to fly or flag to wave, their passion turns inward, eating away at the soul like a cancer.

On this day in 1957, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame was first performed in London, in French, for the first time. After his success with Waiting for Godot a few years earlier, Beckett could find no one in France willing to risk a theater on a play that featured one character who could’nt stand, one who couldn’t sit, and two others unable to come out of their garbage cans. He had written the play in French and wanted a French premiere, but when the Royal Court Theatre offered their space, Beckett agreed to cross the channel and perform the play in England.

Endgame was met with poor reviews. Beckett was unhappy with the production, and it is perhaps in the words of his character Hamm that we best get a glimpse into the “suffering without cause” of which I spoke earlier: for Hamm says “we ourselves . . . at certain moments . . .(Vehemently.) To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!”

In one phrase, there is such hope and such despair. The perfect marriage of reality interjecting itself into the absurd. And on days like there, I find myself sharing in the absurdity of believing that any words will truly change the course of the future. Will any of it have meaning? Will it Jay-Z? Will it Pope Benedict. Will it Barack Obama?

I turn from Beckett to an unknown poet, a friend of mine, who once wrote that “the paths we take are half our own / And half the universe in turn.”

If that is the case, then much is left in between. Like dogs, the poets, the priests, and the politicians can all tear at the corpse that is culture and watch it bleed out the words its bloated body can no longer hold. Let’s take them into our collective teeth, chew them up, and crap them out as something better say the masses. So here’s to the poets, the priests, and the politicians who sling that crap and try to make it stick. To make a difference.

Here’s hoping someone can do something more with words than this old man can.

I like Ike: Or meditations on God and prepositions

I’ve been so tired, my friends. Rarely do I emerge in the summer months. It’s just too hot, and I’ve grown too old, and I’d rather spend my time in front of an air conditioner, watching old movies, than retire to some shuffleboard court in Florida with all the other old-timers who actually like it this hot and would live on the surface of the sun itself if they could.

So what has me coming out of seclusion, putting down my popsicle and turning on the blasted laptop again?

Dwight D. Eisenhower.

For those who are too young or too senile to remember “Ike,” it was his servce as general during the second world war that arguably brought about the end to bloody conflict in Europe. Later, he would become president, oversee the cease fire of the Korean War, and decide the Russians were enough of a threat that the US began building up its nuclear weaspons arsenal.

All in all, he was not a bad guy. And his take on religion is often misunderstood.

Sure, it was Ike, on this day in 1956 who signed the USA’s official motto “In God We Trust” into law. This was two years after his push to have “under God” inserted into the pledge of allegiance. See, most folks think both those phrases have been with us since the founding of this country hundreds of years ago, but the fact of the matter is, the business of God so cemented in our political language, and on our paper money, is only a little over 50 years old. (sure, coinage bore the phrase since the Civil War, but Ike’s move is often the target of atheists and secular humanists who want  straw man to tack their personal gripes on).

Eisenhower himself was not such a religious man. At least not a zealot. He valued the transcendental aspects of faith, but when it came to his presidential library, a chapel like structure, he chose the secular name “Place of Meditation” and not some phrase one would expect of the man who made it certain that “God” would forever have a place on our folding money. An act that, along with the pledge, finds a whole lot of folks arguing to this day about the separation of church and state.

I knew Ike. When he was a boy. He actually wanted to be a baseball player. It was a childhood friend who was the one who wanted to be president. Neither got their wish.

The boy who had dreams of being Honus Wagner (a name ever fewer of you know and will now have to Google) didn’t get the life he dreamed of, but he did get the life he made.

As to the use of “In God We Trust” on paper money, people still argue. Some atheists cross it out as a form of protest. And Teddy Roosevelt objected to its use on coin because he thought it cheapened the sacred intention of the phrase by putting it on something as common as money.

So why do I decide to bring it up today? Ever hear the phrase “In God We Trust, All Other Pay Cash”? It’s the title of a Jean Shepherd collection of short stories that all take place during the depression. Some were used as inspiration for the 1983 movie A Christmas Story.

Ah Klaus, you sly devil, working Christmas into a blog about Ike. But no, not my intention. Well, not my intention beyond getting all of you to see that mottos are only as good as our ability to see them for what they are: meditations.

And this meditation has but one lesson: don’t take anything too seriously.

A Meteoric Observation

I’ll make this brief, as brevity is courteous, and courtesy is next to godliness. Or was it cleanliness? Well it certainly isn’t common sense.

Take the case of Father Adelir Antonio de Carli, a Brazilian priest who is still missing after tethering himself to 1,000 balloons this past Sunday (for Reuter’s coverage of the story, click here).

Seems Father de Carli has found a way to get closer to God. Literally.

The priest wanted to break a 19-hour record for the most hours ever flying with balloons to raise money for a rest-stop for truckers in the port town of Paranagua. He was last seen over the ocean. Bits of balloons have been found along the coastline near Sao Francisco do Sul.

Now you might ask yourself: why would a priest do such a thing? I’ve known more than a few priests in my time. And while you can’t judge them all for the actions of one, it has occurred to me that members of the clergy have a peculiar distinction of having men among their ranks who firmly believe that they possess some sort of invulnerability, invested in them from on high. It’s an arrogance of sorts. The epitome of “holier than thou.” But as we’ve found, especially in these past few years when the Catholic Church has come under fire for covering up all sorts of crimes committed by clergy, priests are only human. And human beings are frail.

Mark Twain once referred to a balloon as a “thing to take meteoric observations and commit suicide with.”

Tonight, I don’t care if you’re Cathoic, Protestant, Muslim or other, say a prayer for Father de Carli. His faith never faltered, even when common sense failed him.

And in the end, when all the air goes out of life’s balloons, isn’t that what religion’s all about?

Not easy being green

The calendar is full of many holidays, and seeing as I’ve become a bit of an icon for arguably the biggest holiday of them all, some folks expect me to be an expert on the others. The truth is, I only begin to re-emerge from many, many months of sleep, drink, food and travel at this time of year, and it’s always about mid March that someone, somewhere is wishing me “the luck of the Irish” while telling me I should be wearing more green.

It is with the latter that I take issue on this feast day of St. Patrick, and not only because I prefer the color red (and have no Irish in me), but also due to one oft overlooked fact among the Irish, especially the elderly: wearing green on the “Emerald Isle” is actually considered to be unlucky. And the reason? Simple. Daoine maithe. The “Good People.” Fairie folk. Trust me. I’ve known a few. Most are mean-spirited gits. Many are downright vicious. And for some reason, the little buggers hate it when humankind takes to wearing green.

And before I get a lot of hate mail from the Irish (especially Irish Americans who seem to get particularly defensive and increasingly quarrelsome as the tap flows on this sacred day), keep in mind that the dual nature (pun intended) of symbolic green is not confined to Ireland. For Hindus, green can mean both life and death; for the Chinese, both life and disgrace are represented by the color; for Muslims in North Africa, green can signify both growth and corruption. And to most Americans? Green’s the money, baby. Show me the money.

Poor green. We will be seeing more of her as the winter gives way to glorious spring. Something very old in our collective DNA responds to green, I suppose.

Rebirth. Decay.

And colored beer.