The Almighty and Pat Robertson, II

Compiler’s note: With apologies to The Divine Mother, I reprise in updated form a post from just over four years ago, 6 January, 2006. Some things never change.

Her radiance somewhat dimmed and the Divine Brow furrowed, The Almighty looked up as Archangel Michael hurried into the Celestial Chamber. “Yes, Michael, I know, I am feeling My Haitian children’s suffering. I see and hear and feel it all. Fortunately I also see and hear and feel the charity in the hearts and actions of others of My children, who are gathering all their strength to minister to their brothers and sisters.”

Bowing profoundly, the Archangel hesitantly said, “Yes, Your Awesomeness, many of Your creations are following your Son’s Word, and doing unto their neighbors as they would have done to themselves…but…”

With a dismissive wave, She of Infinite Love wearily interjected, “Yes, yes, I know, that man has jumped into the middle of immense suffering once again to claim knowledge of My purposes, with some nonsense about pacts with the Devil. My creation is compact both of good and evil. All My creatures with free will create their own devils, with which they may torment themselves, if so inclined. And may respond with  evil  – or with good – when events beyond their control visit suffering upon them. Where there is suffering, there may also be great charity, love and sacrifice that mirrors Mine, to the limits of human capacity.” Shaking Her Head, the Divinity sighed, “I keep hoping that this Robertson, who is my Creation, after all, may yet realize his error.”

“Not much sign of that, if I may say so, Your Radiance, although You have sifted the infinite variety of Creation far beyond my poor power. I am afraid such persons strain my patience and my belief in their capacity – a mark of my unworthiness, I know,” bowing his head, Michael looked chastened.

Smiling slowly until around Her, light rose strong and glorious, Her Mercifulness laughed gently, “Oh, Michael, Michael, you are too hard on yourself, just remember that you are only a little higher than these, My human children, but well-beloved of Me.” Rising from the Throne Celestial, Mother of Creation swept towards the Throne Room doors, which swung wide as Cherubim hastened to attend Her departure, “Let us go and hearten the orphaned, encourage the suffering and strengthen those who aid them.”

Modest Reflections on Poverty

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this city, or travel in the country, to see idle and poorly-dressed people, often with children equally furnished, shuffling into and out of homeless shelters and welfare offices and public medical clinics, purchasing their food with government-issued debit cards; is this the sign of neglect on the part of society in general? Should we provide for such people as a duty? Many would say so.

But my intention is very far from being confined to examine only the homeless and their offspring; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of those who have failed in the great competition for a proper livelihood, a failure which is excused many on the left as worthy more of pity than opprobrium. Were the economy of this country not in its present robust condition (the whining cavils of certain weak sisters notwithstanding), perhaps such a construction on the facts would be supportable.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and pondered on the true state of affairs, I must demur from my softer compatriots, and counsel a return to that vigorous and proper view of life that rightly blames human suffering on those who suffer, who rudely exhibit to the self-reliant these disturbing signs of poverty.

If those who have taken too little care to provide for themselves be always assisted out of the public purse, what motive will they ever have for assisting themselves, rather than taking from the more provident those blessings earned entirely by their own efforts? The rewards of full bellies, decent clothing and all the necessities of existence should fall only to those who have won in the just and worthy pursuit of wealth.

For those feckless wretches who affront decent sensibilities with odorous and ragged spectacles in public places, let them learn prudence, economy and self-reliance without the assistance of those who have that comfort and security earned solely by their unaided efforts.

Retailing Fun and Games

Once upon a time, my family owned a department store. Several generations of family worked there, along with a couple of hundred employees. I had no flair for merchandising, and when the store was sold I went on to other things without regret for the business itself, but I missed many of the people and the camaraderie of those days. Some of the memories are more humorous than others.

There was the time Joe Black Met the Manikin. Joe was an employee of the Display Department, which was responsible for all store displays, from the windows to in-store signs and department displays. Joe was a good sort, although devoid of irony or a sense of humor, and a little excitable. Naturally, he suffered at the hands of pranksters, and the display department was staffed with many who loved a good joke.

One day, while Joe was on an errand in the department van, a manikin was delivered from a display supply company. The guys in the department uncrated it and put it in the rack of manikins. Then they looked at the empty crate, just the size of a coffin, and the game was afoot. They put all the packing material back in the crate, and partly hammered a couple of nails into the lid, propping it up next to the crate. When Joe pulled into the parking lot across the street, one of the men got into the crate, and the others tacked down the lid.

As soon as Joe came into the department, the manager directed him to open the crate and put up the manikin. As Joe pried up the lid, the man inside sat up suddenly and hollered, “Hey, Joe!”

Joe didn’t stop running until he got to the first floor. Once he realized what had happened, Joe sulked for a week, only responding to direct orders or requests for information. He never would touch a manikin case after that, however.

Something about manikins seemed to inspire all sorts of mischief. One early morning I entered the store, and my path took me through the semi-darkened lingerie department. Passing a display of two manikins, something seemed not quite right. I stopped and looked. The manikins had been turned towards one another, and the hands adjusted so that one had her hand under the bra of the other, and the other had a hand under the other’s panties, in the crotch. I had a good chuckle over this, and admired the skill with which the display had been altered, but then duty reared its humorless head, and I went off in search of the floor manager to report this unseemly manikin manipulation.

Sometimes, retailing could be fun.

Smirnoff and Semi-Bad Girls

Growing up in the late 50s and early 60s was a tame existence for my generation. I lived on Lookout Mountain, a narrow plateau southwest of Chattanooga capped by the incorporated Town of Lookout Mountain. Property values and patriotism were king, Communists and immorality were the enemies. We aspired to the latter, though opportunities for cautious adventures were few. No Pill yet, so every boy with hopes carried a single condom in his wallet, over time wearing a distinctive ring in the leather. We smirked when we pulled out our wallet to pay for a movie or a drive-in hamburger, glancing slantwise to see if our dates with their circle pins on their blouse collars noticed. We mostly dated nice girls, so they never let on if they did see, or know. Probably they had a good laugh afterwards, amongst themselves.

Billy’s Door Prize

I have spoken of my late friend Billy, and his life entertaining friends and strangers, usually in some establishment serving alcohol. Among the many friends with whom Billy shared his evenings, Jack Gunn and his brother Malcolm the doctor were frequent companions in memorable encounters with Chattanooga night life at its most offbeat.

Fable of the Internet Tarbaby

Seems there was this internet surfer who wandered the thickets of many message boards. One day he arrived at a thread with a Tar-Baby squatting at the last post.

As soon as the Tar-Baby saw the surfer, an endless stream of banal, poorly phrased and constructed sentences began to pour from its sticky mouth.

Recognizing that commenting to such a formless troll was a waste of time, the surfer clicked on another topic. There sat the same Tar-Baby, who immediately began another weak and witless rant, which quickly devolved into a long complaint about how badly the Tar-Baby was treated.

Click, went the surfer, hyperjumping to another thread. There was the Tar-Baby again. The surfer was quick with the return key, but some of the endless rant trailed behind him to the next thread, where again the Tar-Baby was waiting.

Finding that silence was not helping, and scrolling past the Tar-Baby was taking more time than reading the worthwhile posts, the surfer unwisely flamed the tarry troll. Hot, sticky tar spattered back on the surfer, and it took a gallon of kerosense to clean off the disgusting ooze.

Having learned his lesson, the surfer never again paid the Petro-Troll any mind, content to scroll on by forever.

I’m Shrinking, I’m Shrinking!

…What a world, what a world…to coin a paraphrase of Margaret Hamilton towards the end of The Wizard of Oz. For ten years or so, my annual physical made me think about two things, my weight (way too heavy) and my blood pressure (controlled with meds.)

This spring, when I stepped up to the scales for the obligatory embarrassing moment, the nurse measured my height as well as my weight. I don’t remember when I last was measured for height. Nurse pursed her lips as she scanned the measuring rod, and pronounced, “Five foot eight inches.”

I choked. I stammered, I blurted, “But, but, but…I am five feet ten inches, I have been since I was in high school.”

“Maybe you were back then. But you’re 5′ 8″ now. People shrink as they get older.”

I have expected many of the indignities of growing older. Thinning hair, sagging flesh, shortened stamina and wind, arthritic joints. But I never expected to shrink. Sure, my grandparents shrank, but they were really old. My father shrank, but he had a stroke, and he was really old.

So now I step with shorter strides down the road to being really old myself.

“What a world, what a world.”

Maybe I won’t bump my head on car door frames anymore. Whatever.

Carpe diem.

How My Family Survived Prohibition

Alcohol has never been a stranger to my family. The gradual extension of the prohibition of alcohol production in the United States came early in Tennessee. The Volstead Act was voted in to be effective in 1920, following the ratification of the18th amendment in 1919. Tennessee had been dry under state law since 1912.

My various Great-grandparents and grandparents never missed one toddy due to these niggling legalities. In common with their coevals in the business and professional community of the day, each of them had arrangements with bootleggers and whiskey distillers scattered throughout the area, especially in the wooded fastnesses of Walden’s Ridge. Orders would be placed for quantities of corn whiskey, accompanied by charred oak kegs acquired by my family from various sources. The kegs would be returned full of distillate, to be stored in attics and cellars until age and charcoal had transformed the raw moonshine into passable whiskey.

An ironic note to those days furnished my Granny Phyllis with a story she loved to tell. She grew up on Vine Street in the Fort Wood neighborhood of Chattanooga, an upper-middle class area. A block down the street the proprietor of the formerly legal Deep Springs Whiskey Distillery lived in a large, comfortable house. This gentleman simply made other arrangements for continuing his business after Tennessee made whiskey production illegal. As a sidebar to this bit of history, seventy years later the same house was purchased to provide a rectory for the new rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the downtown parish I now attend. The new occupants of this house delighted in its history and made it a point to tell every visitor about their illustrious predecessor. Episcopalians enjoy irony as well as whiskey.

My grandmother had other stories about the nicieties of liquor consumption during these years. My great-grandparents, her in-laws, had a large, three story house on Walnut Street close to Fifth Street, about where one of the many UnumProvident parking lots is now located. Two black employees kept the house running, Andy, a man of all work and sometime chauffeur, and a cook whose name escapes me. My great-grandmother, Tennie, insisted that her husband and any guests drink only in the third floor sitting room she used as a sewing room. Her reason for this rule was fear that the servants would realize that drinking was going on in the house. Tears would run down my grandmother’s face as she told of Tennie’s naïveté. There are no secrets in a house with servants.

Then there was the time my father tried to Save His Parents From Jail. At the age of about nine, my father became aware of the illegality of liquor. He already knew of certain bottles kept in a cabinet deep in his parents’ house. One day, tormented by the fear that his parents would be busted by the revenue agents, Daddy took each bottle out of the cabinet and poured it down the drain. My grandparents were not amused. They installed a lock on the cabinet and my father lived hard for weeks.

Eventually, of course, prohibition was repealed, first at the federal level, then state by state, legalizing whiskey again in Tennessee by 1937. An old gentleman who refinished and touched up furniture in his retirement once told me that repeal was the reason there were no really large white oak trees in Tennessee. As the distilleries started up again, the demand for white oak barrel staves resulted in every sizeable tree in the late thirties being cut down. Ah, the environmental damage from misguided temperance forces trying to ram abstinence down Tennessee throats.

Thankfully, nobody in my family ever felt parched.

The Divine Right of the Fit

Any exercise taken as a mission, rather than a pleasant avocation, makes for uneasy relations with the physically indolent, like me, for instance. I walk on the Tennessee Riverwalk four or five days a week, usually relatively early in the morning. Lots of other people do the same, or jog or ride bicycles.

I walk, not power walk, just sauntering, strolling, looking at things, the river, plants, birds or animals. I listen to the various critters and the sound of the wind, and greet my fellow walkers, if they seem disposed to speak. From time to time I see a runner in deadly earnest, a rictus of strain and pain distorting their face as he/she sweatily chugs by me. I try to stay to the right side of the walk as much as possible, and get even further over when I see a runner approaching, or hear behind me the slapping sound of hundred-dollar running shoes.

I have more trouble keeping out of the way of cyclists. Many cyclists are very conscientious about calling out “on your left” or ringing a bell, or otherwise alerting me that they are approaching. Even with my ear tuned to the sounds around me, hearing a cyclist coming up from behind is difficult until they are on top of me, unless they are riding on knobby tires.

BUT…more than once I have nearly been clipped by a not-so courteous cyclist. Many of these are obviously not familiar with bicycles, riding old department store bikes like we all had when we were still too young to drive. No gears, or maybe three. Some of the cyclists, however, are serious riders, wearing technicolor synthetic-fiber biking suits, gloves and helmets, quite a few with little rear-view mirrors attached. These obviously know that other people might be approaching from the rear. Why do so many not make the mental leap from that observation to warning a slower person ahead of you that they are about to be passed?

Considering the thousands of dollars these serious bike folk have invested in their superlight, highly engineered multi-speed bicycles, surely avoiding collisions with the bulky, suety forms of old men like me would be prudent on simple economic terms.

I am going to buy a little rear-view mirror. I will clip it to my sweaty Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge cap, and dodge the Divinely Ordained Righteously Fit. Stroll on, old man.

Jack Gunn’s Girlfriends

Constraints of space, time and my own memory really limit what I can tell on the Gunn girlfriend subject. Jack had many girlfriends, three of whom eventually became his wife for a while. Something about matrimony always worked against domestic tranquility with Jack, as I mentioned in the tale of how his first marriage ended, with his wife and two young children catching him with eventual wife number two.

One difficulty with girlfriends and wives for Jack was not letting them overlap. Not every meeting was as dramatic as that one in Lenox Square Mall, “Look, Mommy, there’s Daddy with Mrs. Bailiff!” Jack sooner or later ended up in a domestic train wreck, however. One of the problems was that Jack genuinely liked his girlfriends, in addition to lusting after them. Inevitably, he went along with them when he should have known better. After two long sieges, for instance, he married girlfriends, converting them into wives two and three. I liked both girlfriends/wives, bright, attractive women with warm affections, and weaknesses for charming, witty and unsuitable men. They worked long and hard, both of them, to persuade Jack to convert cohabitation into marriage.

Mrs. Gunn number three, Miriam, who like number two lived with Jack for years before getting him to marry her, is my favorite. Much younger than either of her predecessors, she was twenty-two when she first caught Jack’s eye; he was sixty. This was shortly after Courtney Bailiff, wife number two, had enough of Jack, and his philandering.

Freshly divorced, Jack was making the rounds one night when at a local bar he saw Miriam for the first time. A daughter of a Scots-Irish mother, and a Lebanese father, Miriam was in the bar costume for waitresses, low-cut frilled blouse and short, flared skirt. The skirt showed off her fine legs, and the blouse barely contained a world-class rack. Miriam had a beautiful face, as well, with pale, opalescent skin and dark eyes and brows, under an abundance of silky, black curls. Jack cruised in for the first contact.

Smiling his lopsided, conspiratorial smile, giving Miriam a long, slow look up and down, Jack said, “I would really like to see you naked.” Shock value of this sort often worked for Jack.

Miriam gave Jack a long, slow look up and down, stared straight into his eyes, and said, “I would really not like to see you naked,” then turned and attended to another customer, ignoring him. Jack was nailed to the floor, he began to laugh, shaking his head and knowing that this was the girl for him. He made little progress that night, but there would be others.

Eventually Jack prevailed, as he often did, and Miriam moved in with him. In spite of their shared condo, Jack kept to his independent ways, and often went off on adventures of his own. Once committed to Jack, however, Miriam was not to be deterred by evasion. She tracked him down. The best example of her skill was the time Jack took off with some friends drinking their way across town, ending up on a houseboat belonging to one of them. On the spur of the moment, they decided to cruise upriver a few miles to a resort and bar complex on Lake Chickamauga.

Miriam was working that night at the bar, which relieved Jack, since he felt pretty sure he was beyond even her tracking ability. In the early hours of the morning Jack stepped off the houseboat onto the dock at the marina upriver, meaning to pee into the lake. He saw some movement along the dark bank close to the dock, then a bobbing white shape emerged from the darkness. It was a woman trotting onto the dock, heading his way. Jack noticed that the woman was holding her breasts with her hands as she ran. Although he couldn’t see her face, he knew her. Miriam, still in her waitress costume, had tracked him through all the bars and ten miles upriver. Given her abundance of endowment, Miriam whilst running had to support her breasts with her hands.

Eventually, Miriam wore Jack down, as Courtney had before her, and became Mrs. Gunn. Until the marriage, like the others, fell apart. After the divorce, and a little time, there came the Last Girlfriend. I capitalize her title because she was the last, and Jack’s undoing. The last adventure is not for this chapter. The story of How a Woman Did Jack In will have to wait.