The Rusty Bucket

I like the water from the rusty bucket best. It tastes like something.

It tastes like the earth. I can feel it. I roll it around in my mouth and it’s like the magnetism of the poles is in it. The world and everything in it is in the well.

I love that baby. I want to bathe him in the water from the rusty bucket. I want to baptize him myself from the font of the world. I want his bones to sing with the vibrations in the earth. Not clean, exactly; anointed.

That boy’s father carries him like a package. He isn’t anything to him yet. He loves him, sure, but in a potential sort of way. At least he carries him like there’s something breakable in that package. His love is purer than mine – because it is all in his mind, and still he loves that baby. Me, I can still smell the musk of my own womb on his soft little head. And the taste of the rusty bucket.

I didn’t know what to think when they strung the power lines across the horizon. Whatever is in those wires is not a person, but it trespasses just the same. But then I felt it. There was power in them, coursing through them. It was everybody and everything going everywhere all the time.

Sometimes I take my boy out in the cool of the evening, the clank of the final fork on the last plate still ringing in the house behind us, and we drink from the bucket with the rust in it, and I hold him up in the air so he can be washed in the power of those lines.

He was born to live in that power. I was born to drink from that bucket.

Marriage Is Holsum

There will be no statistics.

Look, I’m not in the mood to decry anything. And I have no intention of doing the heavy intellectual lifting required to make a footnoted case for anything. And I have no ulterior motive for writing. I’m not even sure I even have an ulterior. Is that like a coccyx?

So I’ll just shoot my mouth off, if you don’t mind. Being married is great.

I’m going to double down now. Being married with kids is even better than great. There, I said it and I’m glad.

I’m not sorta married, either. I’m atomic level married. I don’t give a fig for anybody or anything else. I think the penalty for having two women is they should give you a third one. Happy now?

Though we didn’t have any money to stand barefoot in an ice chapel built on a tropical beach on a private island having an Elvis impersonator reading the banns for us in a Buddhist/Vegan/L.RonHubbard/Survivalist/Wiccan/Gaian/Druid/ Crypto-Episcopalian mode after proposing on a jumbotron during a guerrilla marketing stunt while shooting a viral video, it was still pretty good. We just got up in front of everybody she knows, and everybody I know, and pledged to stick with one another until we’re dead.

We didn’t release doves for world peace at the climax of the ceremony that I can recall, either. The more I think about it, not only couldn’t we afford any doves, I think we ate pigeons at the reception. Tastes like chicken. Chickens that eat cigarette filters out of the gutter, I mean.

I’m pretty sure we didn’t have any children adopted as political statements present at the ceremony, either. Like I said, we were poor. We were in such straightened circumstances that we had to make our own children using only Al Green records and two mixed drinks. We couldn’t even afford to leave the lights on.

I can heartily recommend marriage to anybody of a defective character. You know who you are. I can’t guarantee it’ll work out as well as it did for me and mine. You may not marry someone like my wife, but still be someone like me. That would be bad. You should not own sharp things in those circumstances.

Anyhow, we are the perfect combo, my wife and I. We’re the only two people in the world.

Me And Figaro Are Still Married

My wife and I and a couple of friends attended The Marriage of Figaro at the local theatre —The Zeiterion— last evening. It was really, really good. Why is that a surprise?

I dunno. Maybe it’s less of a surprise after we took a flyer a year ago and saw La Boheme staged there. We had no idea what to expect then, so we practically had tears of joy rolling down our faces halfway through. We were sitting close enough for Mimi to cough on us. It cost $43.00 Think of that. A real opera company, with a real pit orchestra, best seats in the house; forty three bucks.

Forty three bucks will buy you a foam finger and a round of cokes at a preseason football game. I think I paid forty three bucks to park once in Boston, never mind hear Mozart. It’s not really like I bought a winning lottery ticket. It’s more like I found a winning lottery ticket lying on the ground.

Anyway, last night it was the Bulgarian State Opera bangin’ away at Mozart. We sat in the fifth row on the aisle. It’s as close as you can be and still read the supertitle projector over the stage. The singers were looking right at us when they sang. That’s the sign you’re sitting in the right spot.

I know enough about the music to hear when the orchestra misses. They’re pretty good, so a miss is not a big hairy mistake. It’s just you hear them here and there a little slow or too quick to come in; things like that. I didn’t notice any singer falter over even one word, or miss a mark. It’s a testament to the unlikelihood of finding really good performances in such an out-of-the-way place that I was looking for signs of amateurishness. It wasn’t there.

It’s a modest theatre, The Zeiterion. New Bedford, its home, is a hundred and fifty years past being anywhere of consequence. It’s pretty much a dump. It’s interesting here and there, but a really small vinyl sided warehouse for people for the most part. Whatever “vibe” it’s got is leftover — or bad. And the Zeiterion is conspicuous for its lonesomeness, mostly. There isn’t an intertown rivalry between New Bedford and Fall River for who’s got the best opera house.

It’s not gaudy like most theatres; it’s really very spartan. But to people who’ve been watching B movies in a concrete block mall moviehouse closet with your feet stuck to the floor while surrounded by people yammering into a cellphone or yelling at the screen the whole time, it must seem like an Elysian Field.

The opera company is from Bulgaria. It’s telling that it’s not home grown. Every kid in New Bedford that takes music or dance lessons is learning to screech like Celine Dion and dance like Britney Spears. Mozart ain’t happenin’. My own son plays a brass instrument in an orchestra in school. That sort of a program is considered as a kind of enormous luxury in public schools these days, and I’m immensely grateful for it. But you can tell it’s kind of ashamed of itself, because the kids are given lame versions of rock music and pop movie scores to play, mostly. They’re afraid, I think, to pursue excellence in music because there’s no future in it.

As if there’s a future in playing school brass versions of Frankenstein by Edgar Winter.

Le Nozze Di Sippican Ossia La Folle Giornata

I have a long-suffering wife.

We’re going to the opera tonight. We never go anywhere.

That’s not exactly correct. We rarely go anywhere. We don’t do what other people do, much. It’s not stubborn oppositionalism or sloth. No offense; do whatever makes you happy that doesn’t panic the horses in the street. We’re just not all that interested, and I’m a little strange.

They’re getting preachy at my son’s grammar school. They’re meddling in things that are none of their affair. They have decided to outlaw almost any form of bridled or unbridled physical activity for the kids, as someone might sue. No tag. Then they harangue the kids endlessly about mostly imaginary obesity due to inactivity. We just let our kids run around.

They obsess endlessly about food. They made the lunches so “wholesome” at school that no one purchased them, and so they don’t even offer them any more. Me, I would have complained about the rations they offered if I was in a concentration camp. They expected kids to eat it. Message to teacher: you are the only Vegan involved here.

The kids were faint with hunger, so the teacher let them bring a snack. He complained to the parents that the students were eating foods he didn’t approve of. I answered him politely that he had overstepped his authority. He told me he wasn’t talking about my kid, so not to worry about it. I explained that it was still a problem, as it is the parent who decides, and not only if he decides correctly according to the teacher. Deaf ears.

The children are lectured that they watch too much TV. TV is evil, they are told. We don’t have a TV. We have a screen on which we watch entertainments, but it is not hooked up to cable or broadcast feeds. I guarantee you that we are the only house in town of this sort, including the teachers. Especially the teachers, now that I think of it. I’m sure their low opinion of television comes from watching it every spare moment of their lives. Our ambivalence about it springs from our amibivalence about it. It was wry to note that when we tried to discover if school would be delayed or cancelled due to snow this week, we were directed by the school system to turn on the television to find out. Website? Why would we put it there? The website is for preaching about the evils of… television.

We don’t go to sporting events much, as they are very expensive, and the athletes are disinterested and thuggish now as a rule. I’d rather go to our son’s little league games. We eat out rarely, as it is expensive generally, but mostly because the food is rarely better than we can make for ourselves. It’s a colossal time waster, too. I hate traveling, as it is so rare to find a place half as comfortable as our home.

But my wife is trapped in here with three boys. She needs to get the hell out of here. She’s not strange, like I am. So where would we go? What would we do? Why, we’d go to the opera.

And real singers will stride to the front of a real stage, and their clarion voices will carry over a real pit orchestra’s version of Mozart’s incomparable melodies, and pound them into our very hearts. My wife will glow like the moon in the summer evening’s sky. We will sit in rapt attention — a kind of awe, really — as the story of a sublime and humorous attempt at marriage will twinkle in front of us like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

It costs less than two weeks of cable. You guys all talk a good game. What the hell are you doing tonight?

Pleasant Snow

It snowed last night.

This is the time of year it snows in Southcoast Massachusetts. The ocean has cooled, and it’s really winter now. Occasionally we really get bombed late in the season, while the rest of the winter we’re barely touched. But all we got was fat, fluffy flakes sifting down in the early morning. Marvelous.

The little guy usually wakes up and stands in his footie pajamas at his door and announces himself in a tiny man’s voice: Gud mowahningg! We went looking for him this morning –getting late– and found him with his nose pressed against the pane in his room, silently considering the big jolly flakes as they passed by.

It takes the edge off everything. softens the harsh edges of the dormant landscape. Throws back the wan sunlight and gets light all the way into your house and your soul for a change. It reminds you of the turning of the earth and march of life. It could get you down, if it was all there was. But if you’ve got your mind right, in the summer you can remind yourself that you don’t have to scrape the heat off your windshield, and in the winter you can remind yourself you’re busy not scratching the bug bites you don’t have. It’s all good. Or a respite from bad. Or something.