Monk In The Cellar

203. Helping Out

2012-03-01T21:23:00.002-05:00

“So, there’s really a town where a county jail inmate can walk the streets?” I said. “Did you wear prison stripes or an orange jumpsuit to identify yourself?”

“Prison denims,” he said. “Everyone recognized them. Orange suits were just for court. Sunday Best we called them.”

“May I ask why you were in jail?” I said.

“Because the State of Oklahoma put me there,” he answered.

There was an awkward silence and then Harpo spoke.

“Can I see your first chapters?” asked Harpo.

“I’d rather clean them up before I show them,” said Larry.

“But that’s what I can do,” said Harpo, “I can edit them.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Larry.

We soon said our goodbyes. We left the letters with Larry.

“I thought you wanted to read them,” whined Bert.

“We can see them whenever we want, according to Larry,” Harpo said , nodding his head to Larry. "Besides, this is Larry’s project. I’ll just be helping him.”

We turned to leave, but Larry stopped us. “Take this,” he said to Harpo, handing him a hand written sheet of paper. “It’s January first. Let me know what you think.”

Help Me - Sonny Boy Williamson

202. Delicate Question

2012-02-29T23:46:00.000-05:00

“I didn’t know what the word meant.” said Larry. “Here I am reading a letter and Jesse is making what sounded like a great point about not following the crowd, but I couldn’t quite get it because I thought circumcision was what the planets do around the sun.”

“You understand now, I assume.” said Harpo.

“Yes, thanks to Nurse Stephanie,” said Larry.

“Oh!” said Harpo. “Was she the prison nurse?

“She was the county nurse across the street from the jail. I asked Lenny, another trustee who worked in the car pool with me what the word meant and he said he thought it was a medical procedure. So I told the guard I wasn’t feeling well and I walked over to see the nurse across the street in the county office over the Ford dealer’s.”

“That sounds like a very permissive prison,” I interjected.

“Not a prison, a county jail,” said Larry. “Pushmataha County in Oklahoma. I was there a year.”

“So, I said Nurse Stephanie,” he continued, “ ‘what is a circumcision?’ and she told me to drop my pants.”

“And did you?” asked Harpo, sitting back waiting for the punch line.

“Of course not,” said Larry. “I didn’t want another year added to my sentence. Stephanie is the judge’s daughter.”

“So she got a book off the shelf. Well, was I ever embarrassed. I told her I wasn’t trying to have fun with her. When I got back across the street, Lenny says, ‘so what’s a circum whatever you call it?’ But I didn’t tell him, ‘drop your pants.’”

“Good decision,” I said.

Zucchero w/Clapton

201. Followers

2012-02-28T11:03:00.000-05:00

Harpo and Larry continued to discuss the book project. Bert got up and went to attend two more biker customers who arrived hot and thirsty, which I guessed by their appearance would be the case even if they arrived in February. They were a couple, both in black leather road jackets, she taller than her escort. They took stools way down at the end of the bar and when Bert turned the switch to add a little more light on the bar, they persuaded him to leave it off. I thought to turn my attention back to Harpo and Larry when it occurred to me that the Biker Couple had acknowledged us when they came in and passed our table, but no surprise registered on their faces to find two monks at a table opposite the bar.

I was tired and could not fully tune into the conversation taking place here at the table. I’d had a long day and wanted to get back to that terrifically comfortable hotel bed.

“Three,” I heard Larry say while I watched Harpo’s eyebrows rise every so slightly.

“It’s a start,” said Harpo.

“I’ve spent a lot of time reading and waiting for that opening line, if you know what I mean,” said Larry.

“Still, with only three pages written,” said Harpo, “you do have a long way to go.”

“I started with the first of the year,” said Larry. “So I’ve written January first, second and third. Well … most of January third. It took a while to get started because January first is the Feast of the Circumcision.”

“De-emphasized in 1960 in the Western Church of Rome,” said Harpo. “It’s now the Solemnity of Mary.”

“Huh!” said Larry. “Shows you how long since I’ve been in church.”

“I wonder if it matters all that much for the Devotional you’re planning,” said Harpo, who had just demonstrated his value as a consultant. “Do you plan to track Catholic tradition?”

“No, not really,” said Larry. “But Jesse thought the Circumcision of Christ was important.”

“First blood shed for mankind,” said Harpo.

“Actually, he took circumcision as a lesson,” said Larry. “Don’t follow the crowd.”

Face In The Crowd - Tom Petty

Don't Follow The Crowd - Frank Strozier

200. Lost In The Woods

2012-02-27T14:04:00.003-05:00

Larry pulled a bill from his wallet, passed it to Bert and said, “For my beer.”

“You don’t need to pay, like I told you,” said Bert. To Harpo and I, Bert said, “Larry works around here most days. Does all my maintenance chores. Won’t take a dime from me.”

”Don’t need it, Bert,” said Larry. “I got a pension.”

Bert snorted. I could see Harpo twisting himself in his seat and getting impatient. He didn't want to lose the thread of the conversation so far.

“I’d like to help you with the book,” he said to Larry. “I’m quite good with grammar and would make a decent editor. In fact, I often edited the work we did at our monastery.”

“I don’t think my book is going to look like anything you’ve seen in a monastery,” said Larry.

“All the better,” said Harpo. “Jesse was spiritually sensitive, and probably not what one might expect from a monk. Would you agree with that, from what you’ve seen in his letters?”

“Yup,” said Larry. “He wasn’t the Baltimore Catechism, that’s for sure.”

“But he must have made references to monastic concepts and customs that would be helpful to prisoners, if they were understood,” Harpo continued. “I might be able to help with that.”

“Well,” said Larry, “there is a lot of stuff in the letters that I didn’t understand that you probably could help me with. And I don’t mean just the Latin.”

“Plus,” said Harpo. “I spent years with him at the monastery. I was his spiritual director.”

“Do you identify Jesse as a monk in your book?” I asked. "I’m wondering why a prisoner would want to read something from a monk, who wouldn’t have had the same experiences, necessarily. Of course, you could just say Jesse was a prisoner.”

“Oh, sure, I say he’s a monk,” said Larry. “I wouldn’t pawn him off as a fellow prisoner. Do you know how many spiritual books have been written for prisoners by prisoners? Lots. Any prisoner I’ve known would ask why he would believe anything from another prisoner. He’d be more interested in what a real monk had to say. If the monk was like Jesse.”

”And how is that?” asked Harpo. “What do you believe Jesse was like?”

“I think a prisoner would identify with Jesse," said Larry. "Jesse was a screw-up, from what I can tell. He was depressed a lot. He was afraid of everything. He was suicidal. He had an overactive imagination and ... he was lost."

“Lost in the woods,” I said.

Larry swung his head in my direction and looked at me. I wondered if I'd said something wrong.

“Exactly!” he almost shouted. “Lost In The Woods!”

"Lost in his own mind," said Bert.

In My Own Mind - Lyle Lovett

199. Prisoner

2012-02-26T09:42:00.004-05:00

“I began reading the letters while I was a guest of the State,” Larry began, after he accepted our invitation to join us at table. “Bert sent them to me.”

“I finally found a use for them,” Bert chuckled.

“I wrote Bert and said I needed some reading material and had no money, so …”

“I batched bunches together and stuffed them in a business envelope and sent them off to Larry each week for I don’t remember how long.”

I now noticed that on the box was printed, "Oklahoma State Department of Corrections – Official Use Only – Use of this container for unofficial business is proscribed by law – Penalties enforced,” and elsewhere on the box someone had written, “I Love New York.”

“How many letters have you read?” asked Harpo

“Maybe half,” came the answer.

“I have to tell you,” said Harpo, “that I am very interested in reading Jesse’s letters. I have thought since I heard of them that if they somehow contain the same spirit I knew he had as a monastic Brother, there must be a lot of wisdom in them.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it wisdom,” said Larry, “but there is enough material for the book I want to write for prisoners.”

“For prisoners?” I interjected.

“Yeah,” Larry said. “I want to write a 365 day Devotional. Something a prisoner can read each day of the year. You know, page one is January 1^st, the next page is January 2^nd.”

“Why for prisoners?” said Harpo, expressing some confusion.

“Because that’s what Jesse was,” said Larry. “A prisoner.”

There was a moment of quiet while Harpo and I digested that thought.

“I always thought,” said Harpo, “we were more like soldiers.”

“Same thing,” said Larry. “I’ve been both and I don’t see much difference.”

A Soldier In The Army of The Lord – Lyle Lovett

198. An Open Book

2012-02-25T09:49:00.000-05:00

Burt stood up and walked past the end of the darkened bar and through a door beside it. Harpo gave me a quizzical look and I raised my eyebrows and shrugged in answer. The front door to the bar opened and a small man with a white handle bar mustached walked in. He wore a motorcycle jacket similar to Bert’s, but with not the same degree of richness. He ignored us and walked to a cooler behind the bar and retrieved a bottle of beer, then came back around and sat on one of the stools. Bert came back out the door carrying a box and they grunted to each other.

The open box Bert placed on our table might have held a toaster oven, but was heavily stuffed with letters.

“There are 2 more,” said our host as he squeezed back into the booth.

“There must be a thousand letters,” said Harpo as he pulled the box across the table.

“I’ve never counted them,” said Bert, “but one came every week.”

Bert turned and raised his voice to the patron at the bar who sat with his back toward us.

“How many letters, Larry? he said to the man.

“Oh, I’d say maybe 1200,” he replied. “I haven’t read them all yet.”

“You’ve read Jesse’s letters?” Harpo asked, as he stood up and walked across the small space to the bar.

“Yeah,” said Larry, “I’m writing a book about them.”

“We should talk,” said Harpo.

My Heart Is An Open Book - Dean Martin

197. Fools

2012-02-20T10:13:00.001-05:00

“I came back here from our meeting this afternoon, “ said Bert, “and realized I would no longer see my brother’s letters after tonight.”

I didn’t know how he might come see them in the future, or even where we would be for sure, so I didn’t offer anything, instead remaining quiet. But Harpo has a larger heart, although sometimes he doesn't think ahead.

“You can come and see the letters anytime,” said Harpo, magnanimously. Of course, the very, very dry white wine may have been hopping around in his brain, flipping on little brotherly love switches. For all I knew, Bert may have indeed poured a little vodka into Harpo’s glass. In fact, expecting even a dry white wine would still have some color, I noticed the liquid in Harpo’s rather large wine glass was quite clear, as if he was drinking either plain water or 180 proof Russian jet fuel. It occurred to me that if Bert had poured vodka in a wine glass as a joke, Harpo would probably not object. It never occurred to me until later that I might be the only person at the table who didn’t know what the phrase, “very, very dry white wine” really meant.

“And so I’ve been reading one letter or another,” said Bert. Just before the two of you arrived, I read his first missive from West Saugerties. He was quite disappointed.”

Again, I said nothing. I could sense Bert leading somewhere and I wasn’t going to help him. If he was preparing an insult, I would not hold his coat for him. Harpo, on the other hand was now ready for convivial discourse.

“Oh, I’d just love to hear his first thoughts of our home in the woods on that glorious mountainside,” said Harpo, and I thought I detected a slight slurring of his speech. I had never before wondered if vodka might affect an older person’s Pacemaker.

“My brother didn’t think much of any of it,” replied Bert. “He said he felt he had landed among a company of fools.”

“That he had, certainly,” said Harpo. “It is our tremendous fortune to be fools for Christ. Who are you a fool for, Mr. Robert Gaffney?”

“I am a fool for no one,” archly replied Jesse’s brother.

“Then you fool yourself as badly as your very, very dry potato wine,” said Harpo.

Bert smiled. “But the imposter warms your belly, if only for a while.”

Not my belly, I thought. All it did for me was almost ruin my life.

Sunday Morning Coming Down - Johnny Cash

196. Out Broad Street

2012-02-19T21:53:00.002-05:00

The sun was setting as we traveled out Broad Street east of Utica on a thoroughfare that according to a history book I’d found that afternoon in the hotel’s small library was one of the oldest in the city. It could have at one time even been an Indian path, but by the 1700’s the road carried goods along the side of the river in the winter when the Mohawk was frozen over. Trade took place when the beaver and otter pelts were ready for harvest, not just when transportation was the easiest. Men who want to make a fortune seldom wait for sunny days.

The industrial buildings we passed looked old, but most had one business or another operating within them. There wasn’t much late rush hour traffic to contend with, however. Following Bert’s directions, we slowed down when we saw the high tension wires loom up on the right and soon spied a low squat building surrounding what at one time had probably been a substantial home. The entire assemblage was painted a dark brown, or so it seemed in the waning light, and a neon sign blinked “Far E t Club” in a manner that appeared to not be purposeful.

“Bert is missing his “as,” remarked Harpo.

“He seems to be,” I agreed.

The parking lot had a kind of surface at one time, but now was marked by deep undulating pot holes and rounded over ridges as it returned to simple dirt. Our rental car bobbed and bottomed as we careened in from the street and I tried to quickly slow down and swerve around the deepest of the craters. We parked next to the front door. Ours was the only car in sight.

A wave of stale beer odor and cigarette smoke greeted us as we pushed open the door and walked into a barroom. The door scraped against the concrete floor as it reached the end of its arc and stayed open. I had to pull hard to get it to close.

Bert sat behind the bar.

“Welcome to the Far East,” he said, without a hint of humor in his voice. “Why don’t you fellas sit down in the booth in the corner and I’ll bring us mugs of beer.”

“None for me,” I said quickly.

“Do you have a very, very dry white wine,” asked Harpo, surprising me a little.

“I’m not sure how dry it is,” said Bert, “but I can squirt some vodka on top of it.” His huge laugh filled the room.

Margaritaville - Jimmy Buffet

195. Money, Money

2012-02-15T22:47:00.004-05:00

The rental car had a luxurious new smell. I drove while Harpo held on to the arm rest and the seat belt strapped across his chest.

“Do you have to drive so fast?” he asked.

I slowed down to 45 as we headed east over Oriskany Boulevard.

“I have a secret to tell you,” I told him.

Harpo sighed. “I already know it. We’re rich.”

“You don’t sound happy, but I can guess why,” I said.

“I didn’t become a monk to get rich,” he said. “Any inclination in that direction could eventually turn us into a St. Anne and his ilk.”

“It’s a lot of money, Harpo,” I said.

“I know,” he answered. “Lance told me so you wouldn’t have to bear it alone.”

“He doesn’t trust me, probably,” I said.

“A hundred thousand? Two hundred? I don’t remember the amount,” said Harpo, “but it’s a windfall. And Lance says there may be something from Agnes’ estate.”

“I didn’t know that,” I admitted. “Should we tell anyone else?”

“We're Brothers, Bouncer! How could we not tell them,” he said. “We can only hope that as a group we do the right thing.”

"If you were to become our abbot," I said, "then you could simply edict what is to be done with the money."

Harpo sighed again, this time more deeply.

"The same is true for you," he said. "The Abbot Bilhild would be totally free to dispense with the money as he sees fit."

I looked over at Harpo and he was smirking.

"You know I'd build the most monastery I could with the money," I said.

"And lose your peace in the process," he said. "Poverty, dear Bilhild, is a very underrated state of bliss."

Side By Side - Martin & Lewis

194. Shovel Ready

2012-02-14T15:05:00.000-05:00

We decided Harpo and I would travel to the Far East after supper to retrieve the letters. I then apprised the Brothers of Lance’s offer. I told them all I knew at the moment. We would have a house to use as a monastery, we would be field and barn help, guided in our chores by a professional herdsman who would run the show.

“So our jobs,” I said, “ will NOT be to correlate the protein content of the feed against the rolling herd milking average, but rather to move a pile of cow shit from point A to point B when so directed.”

“Sounds like our previous work,” said Raiser.

“This will be a good deal for Lance,” said Izzy.

“Maybe true,” said Cat, “but only after the first year, while we’re getting ourselves back into good physical shape.”

“And none of us will grow younger,” said Harpo.

“We get a house and food,” I said, “and most of us will have to work half days. I think we’re not being cheated.”

I believed what I said. Lance wasn’t cheating us by any means. But I wondered if we would be cheating ourselves. I didn’t know if this venture would take us away from our spiritual purposes or not. But we had little in the way of an alternative if we wanted to stay together and not starve. For mendicants with vows of poverty, I realized none of us were quick to suggest we just go out begging as Francis and others would have.

Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace, The Prayer of St. Francis.

A different melody. I like this, by Sarah MacLachlan

And by someone who herself is different, Sinead O'Connor with the standard melody.

193.Everyman Monk

2012-02-12T20:46:00.001-05:00

There were ten of us, nine from the original eleven with Julio now added to our number. We assembled into a group, most sitting on the floor, in the small sitting room where Raiser and I had spoken to Bert. The well appointed interior was easy to get used to. I could feel like a bishop surrounded by the pomp of my office as my toes dug into the thick lush carpet. Country scenes of the English variety with lots of pale women and muscular horses hung on the wall in ornate golden frames. A wide striped wall paper ran from the ceiling’s egg and dart molding to a chair rail deep enough to hold a goblet of wine. A lot of money had gone into the restoration of this hotel, but I’m sure profits were maintained through ransom-like rates.

Yes, I took charge and frankly I’ll tell you why. I think I’m the only one with enough wits to lead these men. I don’t mean to imply they are stupid. Far from it, most have wonderful powers of logic and intuition. But they’re not street smart. Of course, one could argue that neither was Jesse, but that man was blessed, as though someone followed him around and fixed his mistakes before they were noticed.

I brought the Brothers up to date and announced the existence of Jesse’s letters to Bert and the latter’s offer to us to come and get them.

“As the senior member of this group,” said Harpo, “and as your priest, my dear Bilhild, I respectfully request that I might retrieve Jesse’s letters at the Far East Club.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he’s never been to a titty bar,” laughed Izzy.

“Oh,” said Harpo, visibly embarrassed. And then he laughed, “I thought it was a Chinese restaurant and I haven’t had sweet and sour pork in ages.”

“From the way Bert described it to me when he left here,” said Raiser, “it’s not a titty bar.”

“That’s too bad,” said Cat, “I have this vision of ten monks entering and asking for a table down front.”

“In all seriousness,” said Harpo, “I thought possibly another face might surprise Bert into revealing more about Jesse.”

“Look, folks,” I said. “I am not speaking ill of our late Brother when I say we need to get on with our existence here on earth. I’m not even sure we want the letters.” I looked around the room, waiting for someone to give me a reason why we should spend any amount of time reading Jesse’s lifetime of letters. I was open to procuring the letters, but idealizing a Brother is certainly not monk-like. And making a saint can be dangerous. Dead saints are tough to get rid of.

“I think,” said Harpo, “Jesse represents what many of have felt and what we have dealt with as religious brothers. He is not unique, certainly, but his provision of a written record could be an important legacy our little band might leave to those who also pursue the spiritual path. In fact, his words might be more readable to laymen than anything we might write. I have been thinking about this since Raiser mentioned it to me earlier. I would like to read the letters and possibly edit them into a book.”

Harpo appeared quite serious. And since he would have little physical labor to do in whatever became our new life, I saw no reason to dissuade him.

“Have you thought of a title?” asked Izzy.

“No, I haven’t,” said Harpo.

Lost In The Woods - Taproot

192. Belles-Lettres

2012-02-11T18:09:00.004-05:00

Bert stayed to visit another ten minutes. He gave us directions to the Far East Club on Broad Street out past Culver Avenue and said to drop by any time we wanted to pick up Jesse’s lifetime of letters.

“What kinds of things did Jesse write about?” I asked.

“I really don’t remember,” he answered. “I tired of them and stopped reading them some years ago. Must have been when he was in Africa, because when I happened to notice an American stamp on a letter one day I read it and realized he was in Saugerties, which I believe is down around New York?”

“In the Catskills, on the river,” I said.

Neither of us had much of anything else to discuss. I was puzzled over why he dropped by, because I doubt if his reason was to thank us for organizing Jesse’s memorial service.

Raiser walked down to the lobby with Bert, a gesture I thought odd. When he returned to our living room, he again seated himself on the floor.

“You may rise, oh little one,” I chuckled.

“Oh, no. I like sitting at your feet, master,” he said.

“Did you call Bert a cab,” I asked, “or were servants waiting with his sedan chair?”

“I asked him for a job,” Raiser said.

“You vocation is to pray for us,” I continued in a sarcastic vein. “Not tend bar at the Far East bar and grille. Why the hell did you do that?”

”I asked about employment at O’scuggnizio’s, too,” he said. “Bouncer, we’re going to need to do something about income and I’ve broached the subject with every business owner I’ve run into since the fire.”

“We need to get the Brothers together this afternoon,” I said. “We have an offer of employment from Lance we need to discuss. And Raiser, since we are a group of monks, don’t you think we should do this as Brothers?”

“I’m glad you want to keep us together,” he said. “I wondered if you did.”

Momma, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys - Waylon Jennings

191. The Far East

2012-02-10T09:11:00.004-05:00

“My younger brother was always going to grow up and do something better than anyone else,” Bert continued. “He was the most over-confident knucklehead I have ever met. The schemes he dreamed up as a teenager would put Thurber’s Walter Mitty to shame. And the stories he came up with!”

“But,” I interrupted, “you’re speaking of Jesse as a boy. After all, he did grow up and from what I knew of him he was a man who reached a good portion of his goals.” As limited as they might be, I thought.

“I wasn’t about to dally at home to find out,” Bert said. “I left for the Barbary Coast at the tender age of 18.”

“I thought Jesse said you went to the Far East,” I said.

“The Far East is a bar down on outer Broad Street,” he said. “I manage it. Have, for some years.”

There was a moment of silence while I considered what I wanted from this man, other than possibly the letters. I could not think of anything.

“That’s a nice jacket,” I finally said.

“Kangaroo,” he replied.

“A shame,” I said.

“Yes, but he died of old age, so … “

“You knew him?” I said.

“How can anyone really know a kangaroo,” he said, airily.

“Or a brother,” I added.

"Yes," he said. "It's sad."

“Well, maybe ….” I began.

“Willie,” he said. “The kangaroo. He was like ... a brother to me.”

Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.

190. Hero

2012-02-09T15:22:00.003-05:00

I waited a moment, hoping Bert would expand on his judgment of Jesse. But he offered nothing.

“I suppose,” I finally said, “younger brothers appear that way and …”

“No,” he interrupted, ”he really was a pain in the ass.”

Clearly, Jesse’s brother Bert did not think much of his sibling’s abilities. I wondered what he thought of his choice of vocation.

“Were you pleased your brother joined an order of monks?” I asked.

Bert looked down toward the floor at Raiser as though the young monk was a child in need of supervision. Then his eyes came back up to mine and he smiled. “Of course,” he said.

Certainly this wasn’t the first time I or any other monk had had to suffer a presumptuous know-it-all who felt we were wasting our lives.

"So, I'm afraid I can't help you ... with my brother's childhood."

“Wow,” said Raiser, “I know everything about MY brother and sister.”

“So you evidently think, young man,” said Bert, glancing down at Raiser as he addressed him. The large man crossed a leg and shifted his weight in the chair. He then made a stunning announcement.

“Jesse, as you call him, was an inveterate letter writer and in fact wrote me incessantly.” He brought his gaze back up to me.

“And you kept them,” Raiser piped, “because you knew he was a genuine hero.” I never realized Raiser felt that way about Jesse and I was surprised.

“He hasn’t been dead long enough to be called a hero,” said Bert. “I kept his letters from the time he left for college because our sainted mother asked me to take care of him. I was unable to do that, of course, and so I saved his correspondence for whoever might come along in the future to take care of him. Alas, he joined the Ardent Brothers and I was no longer needed. I offered your Order the letters from college some years ago. They declined. And of course there are those he wrote afterward from Africa and from West Saugerties.”

"The letters," I said. "Do you still have them? Could we see them?"

"Yes, you certainly may," said Bert. "You can have them."

We Need A Hero – Bonnie Tyler

189. Don't Know

2012-02-08T18:53:00.001-05:00

“I didn’t recognize you in that get-up,” Raiser began. Bert’s eyes darted down in Raiser’s direction for a split second, as if he noticed an unruly pet on the rug and decided to ignore it.

“I haven’t thanked you for arranging the service,” he said to me. “I had to leave immediately afterward. Pressing business.”

In truth, Bert had left just before it was over.

“I wanted to meet you,” I said, meaning it. “We Brothers seldom know much about each other’s lives before living together in the monastery and I hoped you could tell me a bit more about Jesse as a child and …”

“No,” he interjected, “I didn’t know him very well.”

I was at a loss as to how to respond to that. They were brothers, after all.

“I thought you grew up together,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “but we seldom spoke. Different interests and he was … well … he was different.”

“How so?” I asked, willing to try this angle.

“He was a pain in the ass,” said Bert.

You Don't Know Me - Michael Buble

188. Bert

2012-02-07T21:38:00.002-05:00

Not an exact likeness of Bert, but coat is close.

There came a knock on the hotel room door and I looked up from my copy of The American Handgunner magazine to see Raiser twist the huge glass knob. As the door swung open, my normally stalwart Brother flinched and stood looking out the doorway for a moment before I heard a voice from without say, “I am Robert Gaffney, you may call me Bert.”

Jesse’s brother! I jumped up and crossed to the doorway, wondering why Raiser appeared speechless. He had good reason. Bert was no taller than an average man, but his chest and shoulders stretched broadly from one side of the doorway to the other. The jet black leather motorcycle jacket he wore had to have been specially made for the man, not only because of its huge size, but the supple and creamy leather fairly dripped with elegance that is typically unavailable at the common retail level. Here and there chrome buckles shined like baubles as they lay back on a bed of what was probably Kangaroo skin, the new fashion in road warrior protective leather. Here and there across the landscape of the jacket’s little hills and valleys were tiny silver creeks of zippers darting this way and that.

“Please come in, Robert,” I said while pushing Raiser out of the way and reaching out to grab our visitor’s hand.

“And have a seat,” I added, indicating the chair Raiser had been in when the knock sounded. There was only one other chair in the small room and I meant to indicate to Raiser he should get lost. Such a brusque disregard for a Brother is not necessarily common among us monks, but Raiser has a habit of taking us away from any conversational topic and I did not want to have him remark on the weather just as Bert was about to recall something important from Jesse’s life. When Bert and I were seated, Raiser sat down on the floor between us.

I love this woman!
Tell me something Good - Chaka Khan and Rufus

187. Proposition

2012-02-03T00:43:00.003-05:00

In the evening, Lance called our rooms and asked to meet me in the lobby. I assumed he wanted to discuss something with me privately rather than in front of the other Brothers and I wondered if it might relate to the fire. It didn’t, directly.

We found two comfortable chairs off in a corner and sat down.

“You seem to know Lieutenant Panzierone,” I said when a waiter from the bar had brought Lance a white wine and myself a cup of coffee.

“Yes, I’ve been up here a number of times in the past 6 months,” he said.

Surprised, I said nothing.

“It’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Do you and the Brothers necessarily want to stay in the Saugerties area? The reason I ask is that I'd like to help you guys and if you were willing to move you'd have more opportunity."
"What did you have in mind?" I said.

"I bought am old dairy farm about five miles from here, just outside of Utica,” he said. “I had planned to raise thoroughbred horses like a few well known breeders do down our way in Dutchess County, but on much cheaper land up here on the Mohawk."

"I've heard some of the Amish moved here because of land prices," I said,

"Unfortunately, my trainer got a better offer elsewhere and now the farm is just sitting up there," Lance continued. "So I plan to hire a herd manager and start a dairy farm."
"But I've read dairy farming is a losing proposition these days," I said.

"Not for the large operations," he said. "And I plan 500 head in the first stage of the operation.”

I was impressed. Lance was probably one of those businessmen who was always trying out one idea or another.

“Cheap labor would help my balance sheet,” he said. “Like a crew of monks.”

"I don't think any of us know anything about farming," I admitted.

"That's why you're cheap labor," said Lance with a laugh. "I've given this some thought. A couple of the older monks wouldn't have to work. Maybe two more would be on light duty and the rest would be regular farm hands. You could live as a group of Brothers. The herd manager can live off the farm in town if he turns out to be a married guy or if he's single he could live in a separate apartment in the house. It's a huge house!"

"I could talk to the Brothers about it," I said. "Near here?"
"Yes," he replied, "at a place called Mucky Run."

Lance shifted in his chair.

"All of this assumes, of course, that you are in need of a place to stay and to carry on your contemplative practice,” he said. “But you have other options.”

“If so, they’re not obvious,” I said.

“I have a rather involved story to tell you, but the basic idea is that Sparky made provisions for you by working a financial deal and arranged for the Brothers to have about $200,000 dollars.”

I was floored by the news. Here we had done nothing but worry about our finances for I don’t know how long and Sparky comes back from the dead with more money than Croesus.

“This ‘financial deal,’ was it legal?” I asked.

Lance laughed. “Of course, Sparky wasn’t a criminal.”

“Poor Jesse,” I said, “he never knew our salvation was at hand.

“He knew,” said Lance. “He didn’t tell any of the Brothers because he was still trying to decide how to use the money when he died. You should think carefully about the money and how you’ll put it to use.”

The next song is inevitable. I liked the comment appearing with another of the Boss' songs on YouTube: "I wish I was alive in the '80's .... everybody was ugly, but that was acceptable." And a comment beneath this video, "If the Boss wants to put his leg up, the Boss is going to put his leg up." With that .... Bruce Springstein - Glory Days!

186. Lance's Treat

2012-02-01T09:11:00.001-05:00

Lance realized we Brothers seldom had good food and wanted to treat us to a sumptuous lunch at the hotel the next day, but frankly we felt uncomfortable in such surroundings. We finally found our way over Bleecker Street to the O'scugnizzo Pizzeria when I remembered Jesse had recommended it. On our drive up, he said he hoped we would get there for a pizza. I was surprised to find a relatively modern informal restaurant, because Jesse said the place was quite old, with potted plants in the tall windows overlooking the sidewalk and booths marching down a long dark room to the kitchen.

The helpful staff set us up in the back room. As we were being seated, I was surprised to see Seargeant Mort and Lieutenant Panzierone come in. Mort looked around the room and when he spotted me came to sit with Raiser and myself. He shook my hand as if we were old friends and I introduced him to Raiser and to Kickstart at the next table, when he leaned over to listen in, no doubt assessing any potential for trouble. Kick is our usual spokesman to any police official. He evidently has a lot of experience in this area and speaks like a jailhouse lawyer. Not that we are rousted that often, because we seldom leave the monastery as a group. But we were noticed by the police often enough when the eleven of us came down off the mountain. It doesn’t surprise me that a group of less than a dozen oddly dressed men would in our society today attract attention. But it does speak volumes about our society when such a group always attracts the attention of the police. It tells me our world is getting more fearful.

When I looked up from the menu I noticed Lieutenant Linda had sat down next to Lance and by their apparent ease with each other, it appeared as if they’d known each other for more than 24 hours. They had.

Sorry I couldn't embed this video.

The Pizza Song - The Bouncing Souls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoE7dUoL_9U

185. Betrayal

2012-01-30T22:05:00.000-05:00

George picked up the phone and spoke loudly to Sergeant Carmodelli.

“Sir !! My associate tells me that a Russian MiG 15 is in the air over Utica. Intentions unknown! Sir !! What? No, sir, my associate has perfectly good eyesight and he thinks you should scramble a squadron of fighter jets, pronto! Sir !!”

An obviously angry voice squawked on the other end of the line. George listened intently and then he spoke into the phone.

“How much?” he asked. He nodded and put the phone back in its cradle, a serious look on his face.

“Well, what did he say, George?” Jesse asked.

“The sergeant says you’re to be court martialed and hanged in the morning,” George said.

“What!? Well, what about you?” Jesse cried.

“I’m getting a reward for bringing you in to the Air Base,” he said. “I’ll split it with you, if you get your father to drive us.”

I guess bureaucracies never die and they seldom get it right. A year later each boy received a large envelope from Washington with a letter inside saying the Ground Observer Corps was now and forever a scrubbed mission. Attached was a scroll that announced President Eisenhower’s appreciation for their 10 years of devoted public service. They were 14 years old.

Cascada - One More Night

Give Phil his due, Phil Collins - One More Night

184. Eagle Eye

2012-01-28T21:14:00.000-05:00

The man at the Civil Defense office gave them a condescending smile, but he signed them up. He explained the Observers’ duties … report any enemy planes they might see. While on duty Jesse and George would be in telephone contact with the Strategic Air Command in Syracuse, 50 miles away. Evidently, the SAC guys would be hunched over their big radar screens and scanning the skies for “bandits,” but they needed help. The two boys saw themselves as the men on the scene, able to call out the tail numbers, or something. Jesse asked Mr. Holcomb if enemy airplane tail numbers would be in Russian, but the man appeared to not hear. Instead, he handed the boys a clipboard and told them to fill their names in any time slot they wanted to work. The schedule was empty. They were the only volunteers for that month and may have been the only volunteers all year. George and Jesse may have been the one last gasp by the Ground Observer Corps in Central New York.

Undaunted in their enthusiasm, the two walked out on the roof of the Hotel Utica the next day after school. The wind whistled around and blew stray leaves and scraps of paper up against a dangerously low wall that ran around the perimeter of our gravel surfaced aerie above the town. If not careful, they could easily trip and plummet to their deaths in the street below. They used the key from Mr. Houdini to open a grey box mounted on a pole next to a skylight glazed with whitened glass and frosted with fresh bird poop. In the box were binoculars, a booklet of silhouettes for identifying airplanes and a grey colored phone with a label above it reading “Report.”

As they discused what to do first, George picked up the phone and spoke into it with the officious voice of a junior grade lieutenant.

“Reporting for duty … Sir!! What? OK, thank you. Sir!!”

A Sergeant named Carmodelli had just said he wanted the kids to behave while up on the roof. Kids? Official government plane spotters!

Utica is ten miles from a former US Air Force base and five miles from the county airport, so the sky was quite busy with aircraft. But soon, among the commercial DC3’s and the Air Force F-86 Saber Jets engaged in training flights, they spotted a Russian MiG 15.

"We were pretty sure of it," said Jesse. "Of course, now that I reflect on the odds, it seems unlikely that a Russian MiG had penetrated the North American Air Defense Shield and was flying around the countryside unnoticed by the American F- 86’s. But George was certain the bogey he was peering at through the old binoculars absolutely matched the silhouette in the booklet. In fact, he was thoroughly convinced of it. Also, he pointed out that as duly sworn plane spotters we were not to question procedures or to analyze likelihoods, but just report our findings. And he was sure we were looking at a Russian MiG 15 fighter jet."

Trying to stall the inevitable, Jesse asked, “Does it have bombs on it?”

“Would it matter?” asked George.

“Well, yes,” said Jesse. “After all, it might be a peace mission or they might be surrendering.”

“I don’t see a white flag,” said George.

“Well, at that speed a MiG 15 can’t just hang a flag out the window, George,” Jesse whined.

“Are you refusing to perform your sworn duty as an official Ground Observer Corpsman?” George asked in an intimidating voice.

“No, of course not,” said Jesse. “I just think we should give this some thought.”

“You think about it,” George said. “I’m going to take out an enemy plane before it hurts somebody.” (Continued.)

Rascal Flatts - Stand

Background info on Ground Observer Corps

http://www.radomes.org/museum/documents/GOC/GOC.html

183. Assignment

2012-01-25T22:42:00.001-05:00

When Lance rented the mini-van to cart the brothers from the Mountain Meadow Inn up to Utica, he also made arrangements for those of us from out of town to stay in the Hotel Utica. It’s quite a nice place, surprisingly, given that it sits in the middle of a declining business area of the city. I was told it had been renovated and was now a “destination,” but I don’t know what visitors would find outside its luxurious rooms, restaurant and facilities to entice them to leave the building for any length of time. Maybe that’s the point.

I had half a mind to ask the concierge if it would be possible for one or two of us to briefly go out on the roof the hotel. I remember Jesse’s story of being a plane spotter up there when he was a youngster. In fact, it’s one of his stories that stuck with me, because I could identify with it. I didn’t have a similar experience when I was 13 years old, but I can well remember that age when life is just opening up and anything that mimics adulthood is very, very important.

During the second world war, which was of course before Jesse’s time, everyone in America mobilized for the conflict in one way or another. Jesse had heard if you weren’t fighting in the skies over France or slogging up the boot of Italy, you were back home dealing with rationing and black-out shades and air raid drills. You could have been climbing fire towers or standing on the roofs of tall buildings waiting to spot enemy airplanes if they chanced to come over U.S. territory. In Utica, the citizenry felt especially vulnerable to air attack, he said, because they were only a hundred miles from Canada and you couldn’t trust those damned Canadian Frenchies to do anything right, much less shoot down an enemy plane before it flew down the valley and dropped a load of bombs on them.

Fear from the skies persisted into the early days of the Cold War as folks continued to climb tall buildings and watch for menacing aircraft. But by 1957 damned few citizens thought it worthwhile to sit perched atop a water tower to watch a supersonic Russian bomber scream by overhead with an atomic bomb hanging from its belly. Better to be high-tailing it out of town. However, bureaucracies never die and the Civil Defense Department continued to enroll anyone interested into the Ground Observer Corps. Jesse and his boyhood friend, George, were two 13 year olds who were definitely interested. They figured a U.S. Government assignment would be much more exciting than working on their Boy Scout merit badges. (continued)

I Am A Patriot - Jackson Browne at Glastonbury, 2010

182. Dearly Departed

2012-01-20T13:23:00.002-05:00

”In our Order of monks we seldom speak about each other,” I began after the Deacon read the Gospel and I climbed up four stairs to the pulpit. “And so I have to admit I’m not used to doing this. But I thought you might want to hear from one of us who shared our brother’s life for the past …. well, in my case, thirty years."

OK, I thought, that was a pretty decent introduction. Now for the meat of my remarks.

“Uh … he was a good monk. He was always on time for prayers and … uh … never took too much of our ration of rice and Lima beans for himself and … was easy to talk to when we were allowed to talk and as long he wasn’t up on the roof, where he spent a lot of time when he wasn’t hiding out in the cellar. I mean, he worked in the cellar … doing …. something. Printing! Jesse was our printer and he printed … all sorts of stuff.” At that point I drew a blank, then an inspiration.

“He was a great person to send to the store for toilet parts! Well, for anything really. He was a great gofer. And there is probably a lot more I could say, but I can’t bring to mind anything at the moment. I just wanted to tell you about Jesse’s life for the past 40 years since you saw him last.”

I sat down. The dozen and a half people in the church were very quiet. Harpo then stood and mounted the pulpit.

“Brother Saint Jessica of Gallilee left you 40 years ago and became dead to you. What he did with his life may or may not have been noble in your eyes. He would not have cared what you thought. And in our eyes, his brothers, Jesse did what he believed God wanted him to do.”

Harpo sat down. I could hear uncomfortable stirring in the pews behind me, but it soon settled down as everyone waited in anticipation, wondering if the service would get worse. I heard someone behind me get up, but he or she did not move toward the pulpit. I turned to see Lance facing the small assembly while standing in his pew.

“I have a home down the road from the monastery where Jesse lived before it burned down," he said. "I cannot tell you much about your brother or cousin, except that he was an honest man who tried to do the best he could. I suppose there is not much about the life of a monk that you would relate to, as the Brothers have said, but I believe we are here to remember a good man who in his own way loved us.”

Lance looked down at the floor, as though thinking seriously about something. Finally he looked up at those assembled and his furrowed brow relaxed.

“I think it might be nice,” he continued, “to just share anything we remember about him today. Anything on our minds.”

After a moment of silence, Jesse’s older brother Bert spoke up.

“I remember the time he borrowed my best Bill Haley record and tore a scratch all the way across it.” No one said anything. Then Bert laughed. Everyone laughed. It was over an hour before we all left the church, some still laughing at childhood exploits, theirs or Jesse's, old memories shared and grown sweeter by the retelling of them. Jesse would have enjoyed it.

Against All Odds - Phil Collins

181. Tongue Tied

2012-01-19T20:44:00.000-05:00

I don’t think I’ve ever given a eulogy before, but when it came time for the memorial service and no one else volunteered, I took Lance aside and asked him if he wanted to say a few words.

“Yes,” he said, “I think I’d like to do that after you and Harpo speak.”

“Eulogies are not part of the Ardent Brothers tradition,” I said.

Lance just nodded and looked away.

“I’ll ask Harpo,” I said.

“Eulogies are not in our tradition,” said Harpo, “but I think Jesse’s family would appreciate us saying something at what they consider his funeral.”

I found the younger brother outside of the church.

“Micky,” I said, “would you care to say something for your brother?”

“I haven’t seen him in forty years,” said the man. “What would I say?”

”Some childhood incident, possibly?” I was trying very hard to get out of doing this. Were I the type of person who enjoyed speaking to crowds, I would not have become a contemplative monk.

I needn’t have worried about a crowd. Once inside the church it became evident the congregation would be quite small.

The Three Bells

180. Hanging Around

2012-01-18T21:47:00.000-05:00

Filled to capacity by the hot dogs and two rounds of ice cream cones (two for me … Mort had only one cone), we wandered back to the police station and sat for at least two hours in another small office where the tiny desk this time was olive drab. I had no means of getting back to West Saugerties and Mort said he was working on that, so I sat around the tiny office until early evening and was asked for my blessing by one coke head or another each time I went down the hall to use the bathroom.

Just as I was about to do something desperate, like open my gym bag and fish out the little portable Chaucer, the door opened and they came into the office followed by Mort. I have to say that even Mort agreed later that they made a handsome couple.

“How are you, my Brudder?” asked the shapely amazon, Liutenant Panzierone. Next to her stood Lance, surprisingly just a hair taller.

“I am so sorry, Bouncer,” he said. “I feel terrible about Jesse.”

We spoke about our mutual friend for a few minutes, but I did not recount the awful details of the shooting.

“I hate to bring up practical matters,” said Lance, “but would you and the Brothers want Jesse’s funeral here in Utica or back in Saugerties?”

“I hadn’t thought of it,” I replied. “Does he have relatives here? I’m not sure he knew anyone close in Saugerties, except of course …”

“I’ve spoken with Sally,” Lance said. “She’s heartbroken and says she will attend wherever it is. Alfred is coming, also.” I wondered about Maria, but thought better of asking about her.

We would get a little advance notice of her anyway. Her orange jasmine scent would no doubt arrive five minutes before her.

Scent of A Woman - Al Pacino

179. Angels

2012-01-17T18:30:00.001-05:00

It may not have been until I came to the end of civilization as I knew it and arrived at the plumbing purgatory of Our Lady of West Saugerties, that I realized P.P. was right. And of course, Jesse had a hand in my realization that everything God wanted me to be was already inside me. My Brother Jesse seldom spoke words of wisdom … not out loud in any case … but his behavior was often … well, bizarre. I could recognize myself mirrored in him and therefore see my shortcomings more clearly. That may be wisdom at it’s best.

I shouldn’t speak ill of the recently departed, but it’s true that Jesse offered negative examples as well as positive. Take, for example, his supposed secret of wanting to jump off the roof. An affront to Agnes’ sensibilities it may have been, but it was no secret. You could be anywhere on the property and look up to the peak of the Chapter House and if you DIDN’T see Jesse mounted up there you’d wonder if he were down with the flu. If he really had wanted to jump, he certainly had ample opportunity to do so. What I think he wanted was to stare into a fear (of falling) and from it derive some lesson wholly unique to him. What he taught each of us was unique to each of us. And what he taught me was to stare into my fears without jumping into them. Now, what’s interesting is that I may have learned more from all his time up on the roof than he did. But who knows for sure? Are we not each other’s angels? Do we need to know it when we are?

Angel From Montgomery - Bonnie Raitt

178. Disappear

2012-01-16T12:43:00.002-05:00

Oh, I nearly forgot. St. Bilhild of Thuringia founded an abbey and became its abbess somewhere near Mainz in Germany around the 8th or 9th century. Of course, she was the daughter of a nobleman and his wife. Who else would have the ready cash to found their own abbey? Sit down next to a worn out lady on the bus some day, a black or white woman who cleans others' homes for a living, and suggest she found an abbey instead of scrubbing toilets. See what she says! Have an exit strategy in mind before you broach the topic.

When you think of it, because of the economic structure of society, most of the canonized saints came from money and probably all of our historians did. You should bear that in mind when reading the opinions of others, especially all academics born and educated before World War II and most since then.

At age seventeen Bilhild was married to a Duke of Thuringia, probably an old lecher. When he was killed while out warring on his neighbors in that part of Germany, my patron saint fled to her uncle's place and became a nun. Unkie was a bishop.

Using money saved from her husband's estate, Bilhild began her work helping the poor. With additional help from Uncle Rigibert the Bishop, she formed her convent a few years later and gathered about her like minded woman who no doubt had tired of the good life in those times when the sons of the rich were expected to advance their careers by rape and pillage and the daughters were forced to do nothing productive outside of child bearing.

Of course, many legends surround Bilhild, including the story she bore the child of her dead Duke, but the baby died soon after she arrived in secret at the Bishop's residence. Bilhild's grave has never been found, unusual for a noblewoman. No records indicate where it was. Sometimes reports are made of an eerie glow on a piece of ground at night where she may have been laid to rest in peace.

"So, you've taken my suggestion of the name of Saint Bilhild, I see," said my Novicemaster, “P.P.” (Brother Saint Lydia Purpuraria of Philippi). He was looking at the roster of new graduates from my class of Brothers, holding the sheet of paper no more than 3 inches from his face, so bad had his eyesight become since he passed the 80 year milestone of residence in this Vale of Tears.

"I like the fact that her grave disappeared," I said.

"And what do you find so interesting about such an unfortunate occurrence?" he asked.

"That she completely evaporated ... no trace, nada, zip," I said.

"You can never do that, John, although I'm sure you'd like to," he said.

"I just want to disappear into the Ardent Brothers," I said. I meant it sincerely, but was too young to appreciate the woof and warp of my motivations.

"You can't hide from life, yourself or God," he said.

"But P.P.," I said, "I don't want to be John, I want to be what God wants me to be."

"Well, so far he has wanted you to be you," said my Novicemaster. "He has no reason to change his mind about who you are. The work to be done is yours, to discover not who you will be but who you already are."

Here's a typical Irishmen's Sunday afternoon. A good reason for restricted beaches.

Hide It Away - The Retribution Gospel Choir

177. Whatever Works

2012-01-15T12:19:00.002-05:00

So, a little about me. I am assuming most of you have asked yourselves, “Who was Bilhild of Thuringia? No? Well, I wanted to know where the hell Thuringia was when my Novice Master first suggested the name to me.

You’ll remember Jesse started out as an African Missionary Brother, a mainstay occupation of the hearty and hard working Ardent Brothers of the Holy Varlet. I should say hardworking except for their betters who sat on their backsides on an estate in the west of the Emerald Isle while counting all the money coming in and sending very little of it out to workers in the vineyards. Vineyards! There’s a joke! From what I saw on a thankfully short 6 month stint, even the best parts of Africa are like the worst I’d ever seen on the downside of Dublin town. Yes, yes, I know, I don’t have much of a brogue. Although I was born in Ireland, I was schooled by the American Brothers who were the only nationality joining the Ardents after World War II. Oh, it’s a long story, but Europe was decimated and the Order got a bad name in its own country and only Americans would join after The War. The Priestly Chieftains as we called them would send out envoys all over the world looking for recruits, but only American college boys like Jesse were gullible enough to take an offer. Pretty soon all we had were Americans in our ranks, except for our Order’s royalty in Fermoy and a dozen or so of us Irish bad boys from the streets of a once fair city. So, in the typically efficient fashion witnessed so often among religious communities, the Ardents sent young men with college degrees in engineering and finance and accounting to dig latrines and save souls in hell-holes like Malawi while Irish boys with little more than elementary grammar school educations were assigned to manage our finances and plan more recruitment campaigns. While young men who began college with a desire to become marketing reps for IBM were shoveling sh*t in Chiradzulu, kids like me who got a D in Algebra were attending planning conferences and contributing our lame ideas on the future of Africa.

And playing with the money. Before I got a conscience and exiled myself to West Saugerties 30 years ago, I remember deciding which equities the Order should purchase on the New York Stock Exchange by calling up a psychic woman in Clondalkin and asking her to arrange ten corporate names in order from lucky to unlucky. I heard later she was read out in church by her Pastor for making book on the Sunday races.

Rock Me On The Water - Jackson Browne

176. Supply And Demand

2012-01-14T17:03:00.001-05:00

Sergeant Mort’s unmarked car was in reality well marked by a paucity of any redeeming aesthetic value that could have been provided by even the most minor of options. It’s a wonder the UPD had ordered motorized windshield wipers. No trim, no chrome and certainly no sex, I wouldn’t be surprised if the dark blue vehicle cost more when all the conveniences of modern transportation were removed before delivery.

We sat in the parking lot of a popular carry-out diner and munched on hot dogs. Sergeant Mort had lectured me on the advisability of remaining in the car and not leaving it when he left me to get our late lunch. I was surprised he didn’t cuff me to the arm rest. I hadn’t realized I was starving until I smelled the food when Mort brought the sauerkraut covered dogs back to the car. After I devoured what tasted like manna from heaven after rice and beans, I begged him for money … easy for a mendicant … to go get us ice cream for dessert while he watched my progress through the windshield to ensure I didn't run off.

Returning to the embarrassingly cheap vehicle with a double dip Chocolate Fudge Swirl Peanut Butter Cream for me and a boring vanilla for Mort, we settled down to leisurely eat our ice cream cones. I didn’t take long to finish mine.

“What’s up with your boss?” I asked as I sat wondering if I could talk Mort into buying a second round of cones.

“A very dedicated professional,” he deadpanned.

“Not the cute-as-a-kitten type,” I said.

“That isn’t really a requirement for most police work,” he said.

A few moments went by while Mort passed the half way point of eating his ice cream and I sat waiting for him to finish so I could ask for more.

“We’ve had a spike in murders in Cornhill,” he said. “The Utica Police will never be able to change the bottom layers of society, but we can make a difference by removing their guns.”

“I wonder if even that is possible,” I said.

“If Linda can nail the guy who shot your abbot and bust into the gun supply chain, she’ll be a hero. Again,” he added.

“I’d never seen a weapon like that,” I said. “The last time I read a gun magazine they were talking about them coming in the future, but not even an advance picture.”

“These are modified with smooth bore barrels so a .410 load is deadly over a longer distance than what you see sold for personal defense,” he said. “Of course, if you put in a .45, it can go anywhere. How did you get gun magazines in a monastery?” Mort asked.

“From Mrs. Pace,” I said. “She lived about a half mile down the road. She walked up every few weeks and brought us vegetables from her garden in the summer and other goodies around Christmas time … razor blades, soap, that kind of stuff. And her husband’s old magazines. There was a guy named Lance who looked out for us as well, but he was rich. Mr. and Mrs. Pace were barely making it on her pension from her school cafeteria job.”

“Somehow I can’t visualize a monk in a monastery kicking back and reading gun magazines,” said Mort.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d appear more intellectual if I said I enjoyed Chaucer in my spare time after the chores, contemplative prayer, chapel and what we called our scholarly work. But I like gun magazines.”

I did not mention that I was the keeper of the monastery’s illegal .357 Ruger Security Six, the first object I grabbed that night when I awoke in the fire.

Love Will Keep Us Together - James Taylor Quartet

175. Sprinkles

2012-01-13T11:36:00.002-05:00

The policeman motioned me up the stairs and, oblivious to the guard’s admonition, “No! Don’t open that door again! The alarm …” he reached for the large brass escutcheon (I know my hardware!) and pulled on the handle to open the door. Once inside he motioned me down the hall to a meager little office where we sat on either side of a small grey metal desk.

“I thought I was allowed out for recess,” I told Sergeant Mort.

“Maybe in a little while,” he said. “I want you to meet my boss. The Lieutenant will be here in a moment.”

“Then can we go get ice cream?” I asked.

“You’re pretty chipper, considering what you’ve been through,” he said.

“I wasn’t kidding,” I replied. “I never have ice cream and right now I’d give everything I own … which is what I’m wearing … for a double dip chocolate.”

“Maybe …” he began.

“… with sprinkles,” I said.

The door opened and in stepped Lieutenant Linda Rossfaber Panzierone, Syracuse University 1995, captain of her basketball team, six feet 3 inches in height, platinum blonde hair and built like she could be Merlin Olsen’s sister, so said Mort afterward. She did kind of look like the FTD spokesman, if you visualized her in shoulder pads and jet black skid marks under her eyes. Without even a nod to Mort, the woman took two strides to my side and stared down while restraining any movement by me with a firm hand upon my shoulder. A lady might have said, “Please, don’t get up.” Linda did not need to verbalize her total physical control over me since her steel-beam arm kept my head from anywhere higher than her belly button. So, I may be forgiven for thinking about her belly button.

“How are you doink, Mr. Dempsey,” she asked with no indication of warmth. Her scent was that of dinner in a wonderful restaurant.

“I’m fine and you may call me Brother,” I said, a little piqued to have my habit so easily dismissed.

“You need to tell us more about why you were on Steuben Street this afternoon,” she continued.

“Not unless the United States Constitution was just abrogated,” I said.

“Ah Hah,” she said with no surprise at all in her voice, “a liggel biggel.” Linda had a strange accent. It might have been eastern European.

“We NEED to know each of all the details,” she said in a more reasonable voice, “so we could successfully aid in the prosecution of the person who killed your brother.”

“He was my abbot,” I said.

“Even so, the more,” she said, but I wondered if she knew the concept of an abbot.

“Even so, the more,” was all I could think to say in response, as I gazed upward over the front of her uniform into her grey eyes.

The Beatles - Long Tall Sally

174. Wanted

2012-01-12T10:51:00.003-05:00

When he asked, I told him my “form of identification” was the robe I was wearing, admittedly now muddy and already crusting with the rusty color of blood.

“Are you a priest?” asked the uniformed guard. I noticed he was wearing a holstered gun.

“No,” I replied, “I’m an archangel and I just clipped the earth on my way to Uranus* and got a bit dusted up.” Maybe I didn’t say it with sufficient levity, because he didn’t laugh.

“Sir, I think we need to go to the Emergency Room,” he said.

“I just left there," I said. "Oh! Here’s the paperwork they gave me.” I quickly reached under my robe, but slowed my movement down when his hand moved toward his pistol, a Glock semi-automatic, probably a nine millimeter by the size of it.

"Is that a Glock 17?" I asked.

"No, a 19," he said.

The man seemed unfamiliar with the forms and took a few moments to look through them.

“Mr. Dempsey,” he said, glancing up from the 5 or 6 pages, “it says here you were involved in a shooting? The police will want to talk to you.”

“They did,” I replied.

“When did this happen? Just a couple of hours ago? I think they probably want to spend some more time with you.”

”We do, yes,” interrupted a voice from behind me at the top of the stairs. “Brother Bilhild, we’ve been looking for you,” said the plain clothes detective I’d spent the last couple of hours with in the Emergency Room. “He’s not my brother, I do not know this man,” I had explained to various doctors and nurses who tripped over him while attending me. Even "He's my husband. Isn't he sweet? We plan to adopt," didn't drive him from my side.

“Master Sergeant,” I addressed the guard, “meet Detective Mort Schecter of Utica’s Finest. He is impossible to lose.”

* I pronounced it the way God intended when he named the planet, before Carl Sagan and a few silly twits at NASA got all giggly about "Yer Anus" and gave the planet's name a British cachet by mispronouncing it as Urine ess.

Allison Kraus - Missing You (I think that's John Waite.)

173. Grief

2012-01-11T13:21:00.000-05:00

I still wake in the middle of the night while rubbing the blood off my hands. Jesse's blood. I've never been squeamish ... when I was a kid I always wanted to wring the neck of a chicken just like Grandma did, like she was wringing out one of Grandpa's old blue workshirts ... but Jesse's blood keeps coming to me. I remember laying there next to him in the dirt on Steuben Street, thinking I'd be dead in a few minutes, as soon as the asshole on the porch figured out how to get another round off.

But the shot never came. The police came. It seemed as though they had been waiting around the corner on Louisa Street, but I have to believe it took them probably ten minutes to arrive.

The ambulance crew was soon pulling me up off the ground and out of the way as they tried to save Jesse, working on his lifeless body. I later wondered why I wasn't sitting in the ambulance waiting for some sign that they had his heart started, that he would be OK, that maybe in six months we'd be sitting around a kitchen table again, farting and laughing about living on rice and lima beans. But I knew he was dead. I just knew it.

I cleaned myself up in the small bathroom adjacent to the examining room at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Now, what? I remembered when I had been on my way out the door of the motel room we called Gryfyndor, after Harry Potter's living hall and also after Jesse's late Uncle Billy The Traffic Cop, Harpo stopped me and said, "Don't let anything happen to our abbot."

I thought that was a strange comment and when a week later I asked the Harpo about it, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "I had a feeling. It's not your fault, Bouncer. It was his time."

But as I made ready to leave the hospital on the day of the shooting, it occurred to me that I knew absolutely no one in this city and had no way of getting back to Saugerties. I didn't even have a dime for a telephone call, the cost of a a public phone the last time I had used one. After a walk down one hall and then another, I saw a door to the outside and walked through it, exiting what was probably the old front door of the hospital and evidently kicking off a silent alarm. I stood looking across a great swath of grass that reminded me of a cemetery. When the armed rent-a-cop found me, I was sitting on the stairs silently crying.

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor - Crying In The Rain

172. Addicting

2012-01-10T21:26:00.001-05:00

Starting early can worsen an addiction.

Having made only a few posts, I can now well understand how addicting this must have been for Jesse ... posting his thoughts to people he never even met throughout the world.  I have received a few emails addressed to Jesse's old email ... BrotherJesse@ windsweptpress.com ... inviting me to take up the story of the brothers and continue the path.  I don't think I have Jesse's abilities to tell a story, but at heart I know I too am a fan of telling a tale or two.  So I can at least tell you how it has gone for me since the brothers were decimated by Jesse's killing.

As I mentioned earlier, we eventually wound up together in Saugerties in the old farmhouse in Blue Mountain, a hamlet of that small town in the Hudson Valley at the foot of Platt Clove.  That took some time while we tried out dairy farming up in the Mohawk Valley.  Then Raiser and Headless left the brotherhood and Harpo died and Cat .... well, Cat just kinda disappeared.

But so did I for a while, earlier. I'll try to tell the story as well as I can.
- Bouncer

Tell Me A Story - Frankie Laine and Jimmy Boyd

171. End Notes

2012-01-06T22:03:00.002-05:00

I find myself the keeper of Jesse’s Legend as I ruefully call it, but I cannot explain why a man known to so few during his lifetime has generated so much interest since his death. I must get five or six calls each week from one person or another who knew him slightly or well. People often call to reminisce about a past conversation with Jesse. I’m amazed when they typically remember only being with him and laughing with him, never anything significant he might have said. A caller will spend twenty minutes describing the weather on an afternoon when he or she sat with Jesse and never mention my brother monk having said anything helpful. I suspect he may have, but more memorable to the caller was simply Jesse’s company.

We’re still listed in the phone book as Our Lady’s Monastery of West Saugerties. No more Ardent Brothers, St. Anne and M&M were shut down by a Dublin commission and now live in England. They are lucky to not be sitting in a Dublin jail. I haven’t heard from either of them and such may be part of their agreement with County Cork’s prosecution solicitor.

I do stay in touch with those who knew and loved Jesse. Sally Prendel married a man from Woodstock who stole her heart and gave her babies. He is a fairly successful musician in the area and the two manage a small recording studio while she continues to sell real estate occasionally. Sally spends a good deal of time with her children and often takes them with her on walks in the woods. Sally told me she passes by the two old stumps from time to time, but has never seen anyone seated on them since the afternoon she walked by, heard a noise and turned to find Jesse sitting there. She sometimes wonders if indeed their meeting was her dream or his, or if it in fact was a dream. For two strangers to happen upon each other in the woods and be moved to confess everything about themselves, the minute details of their joys and worries, is indeed miraculous. Sally walked back down the mountain trail that day, troubled but convinced she had met her guardian angel. She has since decided such a notion is too complicated or too simple, maybe both.

Not long ago on a soft summer afternoon, as Sally passed the stumps she heard a small sound and turned to see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. She sat down on the damp surface of one stump while her little boy knelt on the forest floor twenty feet away and scooped up armfuls of leaves, tossing them into the air. Her four year old daughter climbed up on the other stump.

“Mommy, there’s a word here on the seat,” said the girl.

Sally stood, took a step and looked down.

“Where do you see it, Jessica?” she said.

“Over here, near the back,” came the answer.

Crudely dug out with a knife was one

word, “Immanuel.”

“What does it say, Mommy?” asked the girl.

Sally was unable to respond for a moment. Then she said, “It says He is with us, honey.”

“Who?”

Sally said she remembered Jesse’s phrase, “a manifestation of God personalized for my feeble mind,” but told her daughter, “your guardian angel.”

Is a guardian angel real or someone we’ve made up? Maybe it is woven into the fabric of who we are to each other as humans. Or could it be a manifestation for our feeble minds? Does it matter? Maybe it’s just part of the dance.

Julio turned legitimate and joined the Xaverian Brothers, finished college and taught high school in Malden, MA for three years before joining a mission in Kenya, where he remains today. I asked him a year ago if he remembered the smell of orange jasmine. He laughed and said he tries not to.

I was named executor of Jesse’s estate and I administer the money discovered in the accounts on the day we drove to the bank in the village. We’ve changed banks.

The third letter Jesse mailed for Agnes before the fire, the envelope addressed to a solicitor in Fermoy, named Jesse the sole heir of Agnes’ personal estate, a portfolio of bonds from the original Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, purchased by his grandfather and later held in trust for Agnes (Michael John Moriarty) by his family’s law firm when he entered the Ardent Brothers many years before. It’s market value at the time of his death was somewhere in excess of $4,000,000 USD. For this money, Lance and I were named co-executors and within five years Lance doubled its value. The fund is run as a charity and benefits a wide variety of those with temporary financial needs.

The fourth and final letter from Agnes arrived at the office of a local attorney wrapped in a note requesting the woman send it to Jesse after Agnes’ death. She promptly forgot it until reading of Jesse’s killing in the newspaper. She gave me the letter 3 weeks after the fateful trip to Utica.

Agnes wrote:

My dear brother in Christ, Jessica. I am not sorry for what I’ve done, despite your fretting and whining. I have harmed only myself. As for your uncomfortableness with my opinion of your behaviors, I was only the light shining on the person you had become. I am about to saddle you with more responsibility, this time financial. Perhaps you feel I should let you alone and leave you to your old age, but it’s precisely because you are coming closer to death year by year that I intend to goad you even from here, wherever I have wound up. Before you die, you need to amount to something. I’m sure that was your intention when you were a young man. It remains His intention for you to this day. I have come to believe that God requires nothing heroic of us, let alone saintly. He wants only for us to leave the sidelines and to join the dance. This may be your last invitation. Don’t refuse as I did.

Aside from your proclivity to run and hide, a trait so remindful of myself, I thank you for being a splendid abbot to me. Your Brother in Christ’s Love, Agnes.”

The brothers decided to remain in Saugerties. We bought an old farmhouse in Blue Mountain and four of us still reside there today: Izzy, Beep Beep, Kickstart and myself. Harpo died a year after the fire and the other brothers drifted off to one mission pursuit or another. Two, Headless and Raiser, are no longer religious brothers. Both are married and have children.

Modern chemistry has saved Beep Beep in the form of effective new drugs and as long as he takes them he is fairly normal. He hasn’t taken his clothes off except for showers and bed in the past three years. He works part time at the little market in Blue Mountain. He tells me his favorite customer is a trucker named Sally who stops occasionally.

Terd entered the Capuchin Monastery in France and was never heard from again.

And me, I’m just getting older. Sometimes I miss our monastery, but not the plumbing.

Bouncer

F I N I S

170. Never Again

2012-01-06T21:50:00.001-05:00

My grandfather lived a few doors down the street, and I remember the first summer morning my mother let me walk to his house by myself. I started just after breakfast. The Katydids were still asleep in the trees, and cool air had settled overnight on the grass and wrapped the neighborhood in a cloak of moist smells. The early sun cast my shadow on the sidewalk up ahead, pointing me toward my destination.

At age four these were the first important steps of my life. I hadn't slept the night before, excited to be on my way when the sun came up. I knew the route to Grandpa’s … straight down the street until I stood in front of the old brown house that could be seen from our front porch a block away. I had been allowed this far from home only with my older brother or parents. Now, like a novice swimmer paddling farther away from the dock, I felt a nervousness in my gut just short of fright, and I almost turned back to where I knew my mother would surely be waiting. But I looked down at my feet and willed them to keep walking. I kept going.

When I raised my eyes again I could see someone I presumed to be Grandpa deep inside his doorway, waiting for me, watching me. When my courage began to falter, he could tell. He stepped forward out of the shadow to show himself more clearly just when I was about to turn back a second time. It was my father, not Grandpa, and he wore a shirt in style that year with large panes of pastels, blue and pink and yellow and green, colors I would for the rest of my life associate with safety. Dad would be late for work, but he stayed home to provide a little encouragement on my first trip out into the world. He knew me well. As I grew older, I sometimes wondered if he could read my mind.

My father never pushed me. I wasted much of my youth in a manner that would scandalize a modern parent, intent as they are in ensuring their child's efficiency and productivity. When I look back on my high school days, I see misty mornings and lazy afternoons, with time on my hands during the long stretch of summers. The early hours of a day held so much promise, but my young fires burned hot and quick leaving me most often listless. There were myriad mornings in July and August when the hours lay before me full of interesting tasks … things to write, to draw, to plan, to accomplish. But I most often squandered my time as the day warmed and the Katydids raised their whining voices in praise of the hot sun, and the time drifted away until I burned with disappointment. And then having wasted the morning, I would fritter away the afternoon, first in self pity and later dreaming about the wonderful day coming tomorrow and all the projects I would finish. I was fifteen before I wondered why my father never complained about my lethargy. Perhaps he remembered his own youth and knew I would survive, that inside me a small clock was set to ring at the right time. And it did, although by then my father was gone.

After Dad’s grave-side service, workmen stood by ready to roll up the fake grass and lower the casket into the earth. I didn’t care if they waited all afternoon, I wanted a few more minutes with my father. I needed to say things to him I had neglected, because he would never be here again. But when I walked up and stood by the casket, I had no words. I could think only of that early morning when he watched as I walked to Grandpa’s house, and how he had stayed in the shadows until he was sure I couldn’t go on without a little help. To me it was the most caring thing he ever did for me.

A chilly spring wind blew through the cemetery as I became lost in myself. I placed my hand on his casket. To the east, the clouds broke on the horizon and scattered into pinks and warm greens and golds. Inexplicably, I heard my father shout and I swung around to the west where his voice had come from.

In the distance, over the roof of the little chapel and beyond the tall pines that circled the graveyard, he met his death in a sunset emblazoned on a sky of deep indigo blue. A majestic bank of purple clouds rolled up and away from the fiery sun into the blackness of the snow clouds above me. The harsh, dark colors spoke of thunderous danger, power, birth and death. Long overdue, my nativity as a man flooded me with exhilaration from head to toe. A strong feminine spirit beckoned me away from the safe skies behind me to an inevitable life ahead. I could have refused, but my psyche was bursting out from my soul and my head spun with delirium at the possibilities to be lived. A chorus in my mind was howling, “Go! Go!”

Born in that moment was each day of the rest of my truly adult life, bright mornings of promise and afternoons when the slanting sun would tell me the hour was getting late and there was much left to do. The days rolled on and on and seemed not to be numbered, but they were.

My life has now reached its evening and someday when the purple sunset rolls up to crown the day, thundering upon me as a great cloud of blackness, I will dread it and I will have no words. But I will have to accept it is finished. It will be time to leave and I will never be here again.

I carved that last sentiment into the wooden plaque we stuck in the ground in our Brothers’ cemetery that Lance and the State of New York allow on the mountain at West Saugerties.

It reads:  “Brother Saint Jessica, Abbot and imperfect man. 1943 – 2011.  He will never be here again.”

I used the knife Jesse borrowed from me years ago.

 - Bouncer 

169. Trail's End (continued)

2012-01-06T21:28:00.004-05:00

We stopped the car on Steuben Street in front of Jesse’s grandfather's small bungalow. The man had died there in 1948 and his wife then went to live with Jesse’s family. A black man sat on the front porch. I saw him reach his hand under his jacket and leave it there as the two of us got out of the car.

"Hi, we're religious brothers," Jesse said unnecessarily, since we were wearing our robes. "We stopped to look around. My grandfather lived in your house," and he waved his hand to indicate the house.

The man on the porch said nothing, but continued to look from one to the other of us.

"Many years ago," Jesse continued. "They lived here back in the 1940's. And Thirties and Twenties ...."

No response came from the porch. I looked up and down the steet and wondered when was the last time it was filled at mid day with children playing. Girls drawing hopscotch diagrams on sidewalks and boys darting in and out of driveways and down the sidewalks on their bikes.

"What do you want?" the man finally spoke.

Under my breath I said, “Gun, Jesse.”

"Uh huh,” he answered me. Then louder to the man on the porch, “Nothing, Thank You." I was watching where the man’s hand disappeared under his jacket and I didn't plan to take my eyes off that spot.

"Well, Thanks," Jesse said. “We’ll be going now.” Jesse turned around and headed back to the car, saying to me, “Let’s go.”

It was then I heard but didn’t see a large tractor trailer accelerate its engine and an air horn blast three times.

“Take this with you!” screamed the man on the porch as he stood and fired the contents of a shotgun shell into Jesse’s back.

I had never seen a pistol that fired shotgun shells. It was huge. Luckily, when the man next took aim at me, the gun must have been empty and I got only a click instead of the load of shot the man tried to fire at me. Jesse was down on his knees, rubbing his chest as if it was itching. God knows what the asshole on the porch would do next.

“C’mon, Jesse,” I shouted. “Go, go ,go!”

Jesse fell forward on his face. I glanced up at the porch and the man was gone, where I didn’t know. Probably to get another gun, but I would not leave my Abbot. We would die together. This man who had tried so hard to do the right thing. This ordinary man who so often did the wrong thing. This man who could be afraid of his shadow sometimes and as brave and courageous as an archangel at other times. This very ordinary man, my Brother and Abbot.

I rolled Jesse over on his side. I could see the hole in his back and hear short, sharp wheezes come from it. I grabbed his head and twisted his face toward me. His eyes were rolling up into his head, but he was trying to bring them back down and speak to me. Finally, he seemed to give up the fight and his eyes went white as they rolled up and didn’t come back down. He stopped gasping and his face relaxed. I don’t know how he managed the breath for it, but he said two words, “so dark.” And then he was still.

The police came and set up roadblocks at Louisa and Square Streets. They found the killer in his bedroom, under his bed, still clicking the trigger of his gun. He had been released from a local psych ward two days before he killed my friend Jesse.

In a front pocket of Jesse’s jeans we found one more entry destined for his Blog. I always thought Jesse somehow sensed his end approaching.

Chloe Agnew - Brahm's Lullabye

168. Trail's End

2012-01-06T15:29:00.000-05:00

Brother Saint Jessica and myself, Brother Saint Bilhild of Thuringia,  or Bouncer as I am called,  got off the Thruway at the Utica exit and proceeded south to the Cornhill section of the city.

“The first place I want to see is my grandparents house,” Jesse said with quite a bit of enthusiasm.  His mood had lifted tremendously since leaving Saugerties a little over two hours before and he talked with some excitement about also seeing the houses he lived in as a boy.

But what a tragedy Utica has become.  We scooted south down Genesee Street and promptly got lost somewhere over Bagg's Square, which isn't really there any longer, according to Jesse.  It's somewhere beneath a traffic ramp that flies over a few hundred years of history and lands at the foot of John St. You get dumped on John St. only if you aim at Genesee St. and vice versa. Jesse wondered if that was the city’s self constructed omen.

We drove up through an empty intersection that my tour guide said was the  Busy Corner with the Hotel Utica off to our right a few blocks away. Jesse said he wanted to stop the car in the middle of what used to be a very busy thoroughfare, get out and shout, "It's OK, everyone can come out now! We won't hurt you! We bring greetings from another planet."  But I talked him out of it.  

We continued up Genesee St., Jesse driving.  I realized a tractor trailer had been following us since we left the Busy Corner and when I scrunched down in my seat to look back and see the driver, I noticed she was an older woman, which I suppose was odd enough for me to remember it.  At the top of the hill, we turned left on Eagle Street and that's when I began to realize the Cornhill before my eyes in no way resembled the Cornhill that Jesse had described to me over the past two hours.   Half of the homes were gone, burned down I was later told, some by residents and some by the city.

How does that happen? An entire section of the city that once housed working men and their families, church goers for the most part who kept regular hours, who took vacations in the summer, bought books for their kids as well as movie tickets and tried to raise them to be responsible adults. How did it all disappear, to be replaced by poor families, many of whom accepted social welfare benefits as a right rather than a loan? What rights did the current residents possess that men and woman of our parents’ generation did not have?  What society or government had allowed it to happen? And why?

Back In The USA

167. Stand

2012-01-06T14:50:00.000-05:00

I’m glad McDonald’s no longer charges for the use of their WiFi. As I sit here with Bouncer on his second large chocolate shake and me typing away, I’m happy to be able to enter my thoughts on the laptop within an hour of my having them. That’s kind of scary and not necessarily useful to anyone reading this.

I feel moved to continue to pour out my thoughts on the theme of being a player. There came a time when I withdrew from life’s battle and it coincided with my arrival in West Saugerties. I thought I was enacting a grand sacrifice by living a life of total obedience, but what I really did was refuse to follow my unique path. Even an obedient monk has to live his own life. But I wanted to sit back and let an abbot lead me. Sparky knew how to lead a man, but he also knew I was still an adolescent in my early thirties. He died before he could finish raising me.

I think Agnes saw me for what I was, and still am on many days. Despite his own problems ... or maybe because of them ... Agnes saw a soul wasting himself well into his sixties. He did not let me get away with much, I remember. He put me in the crosshairs of situations needing action a number of times. His final act of coaxing was his plea to let him die the night of the fire. One last time he asked me to stop hiding my head deep inside the cowl atop my monk's robe and to instead just be a brother. To do what I knew to be right without anyone's approval. To stand alone and be a man.

166. The Trail

2012-01-06T14:25:00.000-05:00

By the time our SUV descended to the river and was passing through Canajoharie where the Beech Nut Baby Food factory used to be, I was busy thinking nostalgically of the valley and remembering my time growing up within its borders. Only a few Brothers were aware, if they remembered my mentioning it, but Utica is my home town.

The visit seemed like a good idea when I awoke this morning, but as the sun climbed higher in the sky I began to wonder what good would it do to visit Utica and bring up all those old memories that couldn’t possibly matter worth a hill of beans. Lima beans. We had no real business there, after all. Utica to me was simply a figment of my past.

When I live in the past, I attempt to force fit myself to a reality that didn't exist. I have visited Utica as an adult two or three times since I left it for good in early 1960's. Like most people, I've gone back to the neighborhood of my younger years, found all the dimensions much smaller than I remembered and then sat and read the local newspaper and wondered why I didn't recognize any of the names printed anywhere in its pages.

It came to me that the Utica I knew no longer exists. It never existed. What I remember is a small city as seen through the eyes of a child, where I thought I knew or at least had heard of almost everyone and had been down every side street and byway and heard all there was to hear and knew all there was to know about the town. But in truth, I knew very little about the city, existing as I did in my tiny child's world. And to be honest, as an adolescent my attention was focused down the railroad tracks that ran through our neighborhood as I thought of the wide world out there ripe for the picking, of growing up and driving a convertible and dating pretty girls. Utica may have been happening all around me, but my head was in the clouds. It's a wonder I saw anything at all while a movie constantly played in my mind of a young man climbing his mountain and reaching the top.

Somewhere up the trail I found challenges to overcome and later realized there were some I would never surmount. Sometimes I would back down a hill and find another route around it. Other times I would not accept defeat and would bang my head against a rock trying to move it out of my path. Sometimes I learned from my experiences. Other times I didn't. The revelations of my limitations were thankfully parsed out to my awareness slowly by a kind and loving God.

165. Homeward Bound

2012-01-06T09:05:00.000-05:00

I woke this morning with tears in my eyes. From a dream my conscious won’t let me remember, except my head was full of colors, pinks and sky blue and golds and spring greens. But these colors of my salvation somehow seem too close and I am afraid. I feel like a small boy and I want to go home. But home and Mom and Dad are no longer there. The house is, but that section of the city is now a ghetto and I haven’t driven through there in years. I would today, however. I knew I had to go home and at least drive by the house before I took one more step forward in life. I took Bouncer with me. A week out of the hospital, he wouldn’t have let me go alone.

If one zips along the New York State Thruway at a speed somewhat below 80 mph, the trip from Saugerties to Utica takes a little over two hours. The Thruway has been around a long time but the magnificent roadway still strikes me as a modern wonder. More than a half century later the interstate highway still handles increasing amounts of traffic quite well as it runs for 570 miles from New York City to Buffalo.

We weren't going quite that far. After the hills west of Schenectady, the four lane highway dropped back down into the valley of the Mohawk and gradually rose again on the south side of the river where one looks out over what is left of the small city of Amsterdam, famous in the first half of the twentieth century for carpets. Far away to the north one can barely see the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, a beautiful tract of almost ten thousand square miles of wilderness, considered virtually worthless before minerals and timber began to float down its twisty rivers in the 1800's to welcoming markets along the Mohawk River where processing and manufacturing industries blossomed.

I could see the faint outline of the Adirondacks when we were high above the Mohawk Valley and I thought of those days in college drinking beer in the hundreds of summer bars for twenty year olds that closed down on Labor Day and reopened in November to slake the thirst of deer hunters. Some of the businesses insisted on calling themselves restaurants, although a Slim Jim might be the only food item on their menu. The Chambers of Commerce in the little towns pointed to the many attractions and ice cream shops and didn't mention the huge percentage of profits in alcohol. On one small lake to the northeast in Carthage, NY a popular beer joint overflowed the tiny island it was built upon and continued another 40 feet out over the water. When the local assessor insisted the island had to have a name for his official maps, the owner's first reaction was, "What island?" The woman was told pretending it was a barge would involve an inland salvage license. She was at least honest enough to call it what the locals had always called it, Beer Island. Evidently scandalized, a mapmaker in Albany added an initial so that it's official name is now J. Beer Island.

164. Delivery

2012-01-05T19:18:00.000-05:00

The ambulance arrived at the McDonalds and through the tall window I saw the lights flash as the vehicle rolled up to the side door. A uniformed man and woman in their twenties entered the restaurant and walked over to us when Mary waved to them. While the woman EMT spoke with Mary, the fellow guided me outside and helped me up into the back of the ambulance with a little shove at the small of my back. He helped me onto the stretcher. After he started an IV line he attached little stickies to my arms and chest for the instrumentation. Then he clicked a button on the radio and called my vitals into a nearby hospital. The person in the Emergency Room made no comment about my condition.

The woman EMT arrived and I was disappointed not to see Mary. I wanted to thank her.

"Where's Mary?" I asked the woman EMT.

"Who?" she replied.

"The truck-driving nurse you were just talking to," I said.

"She said she had to get back on the road," said the woman.

"Oh," I said. "I should have said goodbye and thanked her."

"Had to get the truck to New York by midnight, she said."

"Yeah," I said, "a load of medical supplies, she told me."

"Did you call her Mary?" asked the EMT.

"Yes," I replied.

"The name on her Nurse ID was Sally," said the woman.

"Sally?" I asked, not certain I believed my ears.

"Sally Guardelli," said the woman. "I thought you knew each other."

"Yes. Well, not really," I said. "I may have met her once before."

"Sally said you'd been nothing but trouble," laughed the EMT, "since the day you were born."

Declan Galbraith - An Angel

163. The Road

2012-01-05T14:35:00.000-05:00

I don't know why I expected the big truck to have a smooth ride. Just because the cab was larger than a yacht didn't mean it would be comfortable and it wasn’t. We jolted along the highway and the hot coffee Mary had bought me spilled on my hand and shirt cuff.
Mary guessed I was flat broke and she was right.

“I‘m a monk,” I said.

“How long has it taken you?” she asked. I was surprised she put her question that way, and realized it was exactly the response my statement should elicit from someone familiar with the contemplative way.

“Almost forty-five years,” I said.

"That's a long time," Mary said.

"I'm a slow learner."

Mary gave her attention to passing a slower truck in front of us as we started up a long hill. The directional light clicker was the loudest I've ever heard, no doubt designed for noisy environments. She glanced over my way, checking the rearview mirror. I presumed she was watching the end of her trailer dutifully follow her out into the passing lane. From my seat I could see nothing but the running lights down the side of the trailer.

"Where ya headed?" she asked after a few moments.

For some reason I was having trouble with the word. I couldn't say the name of the town. Then I realized I couldn't remember the name.

"Sausage," I finally said.

"Sausage?" she asked.

"Sausage and cheese," I said, knowing that wasn't right.

"Are you saying Saugerties?" she asked, a note of concern in her voice.

"Yes," I forced a laugh, "just a nickname."

And as this conversation took place, I hoped I'd feel better in the next two hours before we sped down the Hudson Valley to my destination. My left arm felt dead asleep and I was getting dizzy.

We sat high up off the road, probably a good six to eight feet in the Freightliner's cab. A couple of hours later the sky began to darken in the east, and the outline of the Catskill Mountains loomed ahead of us up against a lighter sky to the south and west. Darkness was creeping across the valley that lay before us on either side of the endless strip of four lane highway, lightly crowded with cars and trucks and buses. Where are all these people going, I thought? They can't all be commuting home from jobs. Maybe the New York State Thruway these days was used as a local expressway in the Hudson Valley.

Mary seemed unusually quiet. True, I'd only known her for two hours and most of that time she had appeared lost in thought. I suppose truckers aren't very talkative, until they reach a point where they talk to themselves from sheer boredom. And then I suppose they tire of listening to themselves and quiet reigns in the cab for many hours. And then they're bored again and ....

"What?" she said. "I can't hear you."

I looked away from the side window I'd been gazing through and
brought my eyes around to her.

"You were mumbling something," she said.

"Oh, sorry," I answered.

"Are you OK?" she asked.

I gave her question about 3 seconds of thought.

"Well," I said, "I'm not sure, but I think I'm OK."

"Uh huh," was her only reply.

"I've been feeling a little spacey lately, but I think I'm OK now," I said.

"We're ten minutes from Saugerties," she said. "I'll pull off and
take you into the McDonald's where I can get a good look at you."

"Are you a nurse?" I asked, ready to start an argument.

"Yes," she replied, "for forty years before I became a trucker.

Just my luck, I thought. Help when you don't want it.

Mary walked behind me as I entered the McDonalds. As I aimed toward the counter to order another coffee, I felt her grab my elbow and pull me hard to the left toward a booth in the back of the restaurant. The place was practically deserted at this hour after dinner, before kids began to drop by for a mid-evening hamburger and a milkshake.

My new nurse sat me down at the end of a booth with my legs facing out into the aisle. She pulled a backpack from her shoulders and plopped it on the table, then unzipped it and brought out a what appeared to be a huge wrist watch.

"Blood pressure," she said. "Roll back your shirt cuff and put it on. I'll show you how to hold your arm." Out of the bag came a stethoscope and small bug-like device that she clamped over my finger.

“Look, just call my Brothers down the road at the … at the modal, the motor, and they’ll come and get me.

"Open the neck of your shirt," she said.

I complied. "With such low overhead here, you're not going to charge much, are you?" I asked.

She ignored me, placed the stethoscope inside my shirt and when I made to speak again, told me to shut up. I complied.

She took a good look at my eyes and then put her tools away, motioned me to slide deeper into the booth and sat down next to me. I had no doubt she was blocking me from leaving.

She began to ask me questions a doctor might, but I made light of them.

"Listen, Bub," she said harshly, "I'm trying to save your life. Don't give me a hard time."

"It's my life," I replied. I did not want to be sick or to die, but I had convinced myself I'd get over whatever was ailing me. Don't we always get over it? I suppose there will come a time when I won't get over it.

Mary reached in her pocket and retrieved her cell phone. She dramatically placed it on the table for me to see.

"I have cards in my wallet identifying me as a nurse. I don't need to be wearing a uniform to call for an ambulance and have you taken to the ER, with or without your permission."

"Oh, come on," I said, hoping to stall the inevitable.

"If you give me any trouble, I'll have the police come along and I'll tell them to take you to a psych ward for your own protection," she continued. "Either way I'm going to get you medical attention," she said. "You're either having a stroke or you had one."

I thought she was lying. I could tell the policeman I didn't know her. She's crazy, I'd say, I never met her before she walked up to my table and stole my French fries. I don't think a nurse can walk into a McDonald's, pick out someone and have the police take them off to the loony bin. I didn't buy her threat. But of her sincerity I had no doubt. She thought I was in serious trouble. I probably was.

A believable episode.

162. Travel

2012-01-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

And then not long ago I found myself sitting in the hot dog place in the village. But it didn’t look like the hot dog place. It was way too large. I got up and walked around and realized I was in a New York State Thruway rest stop, complete with gas station, rest rooms and five different restaurants. But I didn’t really know where I was on the road that runs from New York City to Buffalo. I asked the woman in the gift shop the name of this plaza and when she replied, “Westmoreland,” I knew I was near Utica in the Mohawk Valley.

I didn’t know how I got there, but at least I was on the southbound side of the Thruway and could hitchhike home.You don't see anyone hitchhiking anymore and the reason is it's all but impossible to get picked up. Nobody wants to take the chance anymore. So you hang around truck stops or jump the fence to get in a Thruway rest stop and ask guys for a ride.I walked around the truck area to the rear where the big tractor trailers pull in at an angle so that each is 15 feet or so ahead of the other and the driver can see more than just the trucks on either side of him when he parks. I looked up through the cab windows for drivers ready to go. One fellow was checking out something under his trailer and I approached him, but he said he wasn't allowed to take a rider.

As I walked away a woman said, "You looking for a ride, Bub?"

Behind me stood an elderly woman and I wondered what she was doing in the truck area.

"I'm hauling to the West Side docks, she said, “12th and 23rd."

I knew she meant New York City and therefore she was headed down the Thruway, but it seemed unusual she might be a driver. She had to be 70 if she was a day.

"I'm 72," said Mary, later when we were up to speed and out in the lane.

"My husband, Walter, drove all his life as an owner-operator. I took over when he died."

"You've got more stamina than I do," I said.

"I can see that," she said. "You were sort of tottering when you climbed up into the cab. And I bet you don't have much road experience either."

"'Fraid not," I said.

"You stick with me, Honey," she said. "I'll get you where you're goin."
I wondered if I should tell her I was a monk.

161. What?

2012-01-04T19:30:00.000-05:00

Dr. Harry Bunch is a man in his fifties with a boyish face and an open manner.

"Hey," he said as he came in the examining room while the nurse took my blood pressure, "you're the guys from up on the mountain!"

I admitted we were indeed, but were no longer there because of the fire.

"Yes, I know. Sorry to hear it. So what can I do for you, Abbot?" he asked, surprising me.

"How did you know I'm the Abbot?" I asked.

"Your bodyguard caught me as I was coming down the hall a moment ago. He snuck in from the waiting room. I threw him out. I hope you don't mind ... or would you prefer to have him in here with us?"

"Not at all," I said. "Brother Bilhild can be annoying at times."

"So what's the problem, Abbot ..."

"Please, call me Jesse ..."

"Ok, what's up, Jesse? And you will please call me Harry."

"I guess I just need a check-up," I said, "and Bouncer thinks I'm getting too forgetful."

Harry poked and prodded me, asked a lot of questions, sometimes going back to earlier questions to see if he got the same answer. He finally pronounced me physically fit, although out of shape.

“You don’t need to worry about being forgetful. You’ll probably find it comes and goes,” said the doctor.

"Some of us get that way early and others wait till their nineties. It probably wouldn't hurt to have someone to check with, just so you don't get to be a danger to yourself. Should I call him in?”

“Who?” I asked.

The doctor looked at me. "The man waiting for you," he said.

"Oh .... OK," I said.

"Who's waiting for you, Jesse?" asked the doctor.

I remained mum. For the life of me, I couldn't follow what he was saying. Why would anyone be waiting for me?

"Where are we, Jesse?" the doctor asked.

"In town," I answered.

"What's my name, Jesse?" the doctor asked.

A long time seemed to pass. Then I said, "I don't know."

Sorry if I used this before. I still like it.

160. Growin' Milk

2012-01-03T15:19:00.002-05:00

(This story is

mostly true.

OK, it’s probably

all true. – Bouncer)

Bouncer is tired of the Mountain Meadow Motel and he wants to leave, he said. When he mentioned it, I first tried to avoid his feelings with some levity, a bad habit I wonder if I'll ever conquer.

“You need a hobby,” I said. “We could get a cow for you and keep her on the meadow out behind the motel.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe all of us could run a dairy farm!”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “we’d hardly have time left over for prayer and meditation.”

“Hell, Jesse,” he retorted, “think of all the self-supporting monks on farms the world over. Shoveling cow poop is almost a monk’s tradition.”

"Don’t you miss all the old toilets?” I said. “Can’t you just wait to get back in time to see the front porch fall off?"

"It burned down, Jesse," he replied, as his eyes squinted at me. “Our monastery burned down.”

"I ... I know," I said, "but you just said you were … and I thought you meant ...." I stopped, confused for a moment.

"You didn't remember the fire, did you?" he said. He stood keenly watching me as I sifted through a pile of papers.

I didn't want to lie. "I don't know," I said "I wasn't thinking anything in particular. I wasn't thinking the monastery was actually still there."

"Jesse," he said, "did you have your annual physical this year?"

"No," I said. “We didn't have the money.”

"I think we should call Dr. Bunch and get you in to see him. You're our leader and we have a lot of trust invested in you."

"Well, thank you, thank you very much," I said in my best Elvis imitation, anchoring the tip of my tongue against the back of my lower teeth.

"I'm serious," Bouncer said, "We don't want to follow you off a cliff. You could do a lot of damage if your head is screwed up."

"I appreciate your subtlety," I said.

At the doctor's office later in the week I was reminded of how Terd had handled Agnes when he was alive. Bouncer acted like my servant as he stood with me at the check-in window. Referring to me in the third person as "The Abbot," Bouncer explained to the receptionist that we were mendicant monks and had no money, but would be happy to share the first fruits of our harvest with the doctors and office staff.

"And what would that be," asked the sweet lady, “your harvest, I mean.”

"Why, Ma'm, we're gonna grow milk," he said, launching into his best imitation of Professor Hill in The Music Man. "Yes, we are. Through cows, don't you see, but soon we'll have quarts and gallons and 2 percent and 5 percent and 40 percent and ice cream and cheeses and ..."

"Bouncer, stop it," I interjected.

"Excuse the Abbot," Bouncer quickly said, "he needs the doctor to look at his head."

You get the picture. Traveling anywhere with Bouncer is like accompanying an acting troupe. I filled out paperwork and sat around in the waiting room for an hour, but finally Dr. Bunch finished his schedule for the day and had the nurse bring me into the examination room.

Sometimes, this group took itself way too seriously.

159. Brother Student Lance

2012-01-03T06:21:00.000-05:00

“I met Roger Kumminski today,” I said to Harpo when he and Cat returned from the Chinese restaurant with take out lunch.

“Don’t know him, do I?” said Harpo.

“He’s the fireman who tried to save Agnes in the fire,” I said. “His sister was married to Lance before she died. You taught Lance how to fish.”

“Yes, I did,” said Harpo, looking uncomfortable.

“How did you come to meet Lance,” I asked.

“He lived at the monastery,” said Harpo. “He’s the only boy from the school we ran who stayed around Saugerties when the State Ed Department shut us down.”

“Harpo, are you shitting me?” I almost shouted.

“Language, my dear abbot, is a mirror to the soul,” Harpo said.

“How can it be that I’ve been dealing with Lance for the past few years and you never admitted you knew him. And which other Brothers knew him from his school days here?”

“No one,” said Harpo. “They’re all dead. Took our secret to their graves.”

“What secret?” I asked.

“That when the State closed down our school, we hid the boys and didn’t send them home.”

“What?” I almost shrieked.

“They were all 16 and 17 years old at the time. We had five boys then and we worried greatly about their welfare if they returned to their … sick families. Maybe we couldn’t have students, but who says we can’t have private guests? Ask Visiting Scholar Julio.”

“I’m sure the state would object to that logic,” I said.

“We thought so, too, so we didn’t tell them,” Harpo said.

“What did their families think?” I asked.

“All the parents eventually opened their mail from the state to find the boys had been liberated, but only two families bothered to seek them out here,” he said. “When we lied and said we didn’t know where they were, neither family pursued it, evidently believing the boys had struck out on their own.”

“This is all hard to believe,” I said.

“Well, as time went on, the boys did strike out on their own. Most joined the armed forces. Lance joined the Army, got scholarships, became an officer and did quite well. Did you know that Lance is a wealthy financier?” asked Harpo.

“No,” I said. “Why doesn’t he just give us a hundred thousand dollars a year and take care of us?” I said, half seriously.

“He’s offered,” said Harpo, “but I have explained to him the meaning of our vow of poverty. We wait upon no man. We wait upon the Lord, who provides what we need, Jesse. He’s never failed us.”

He Will Provide - Georgia Massed Choir

158. From The Dead (Continued)

2012-01-02T22:35:00.000-05:00

Roger Kumminski had been looking down at the ground in front of us, concentrating as he told his story. Now he turned and looked at me.

“What did he mean?” asked Roger. “Did you jump out a window to escape the fire?”

I didn’t think it would be helpful to explain my past fits of depression.

“Agnes had been my Abbot,” I said. “It was his job to worry about the welfare of each of us. I used to climb out on the roof and enjoy the view. Agnes always worried I’d fall off. He was confused when he spoke to you. Maybe he ran up to the third floor chapel looking for me during the fire and couldn’t find me.”

Roger gave me a strange look.

“Brother Jesse, I’m a good Catholic,” said Roger. I don’t believe in lying to the cops or the D.A. I told them all I knew. But I can’t testify against a religious brother either. I told the D.A. that and he said he didn’t need me to testify anyway.”

“Look,” I said. “Agnes had cancer. His liver was shot. He wanted to die. I was his abbot, Roger. He asked me to help him to die. I will live every day with that, but I did what I thought was right. I guess eventually the D.A. agreed. No one sent me to jail.”

“You thought you were risking jail? They didn’t let you go because of that,” Roger said as he turned to look at me.

“You did what you thought was right,” he continued. “But me, I’m a fireman. It’s my duty to save people whether they want that or not. I tried to bring the Brother out because that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

“What do you mean, you “tried to bring him out” of the fire.

Roger leaned back in his chair and stared up at the mountains across the road and off in the distance.

“I failed. Failed my duty,” he said very quietly. “I didn’t bring your abbot out of the fire. I left him there just like you did. I was running out of air in my backpack and he kept dropping to the floor like dead weight and pleading with me to let him go.”

Suddenly, I felt sorry for this poor man who had no reason other than what he believed to be his failure to explain why he had let Agnes die.

“The fire was getting worse,” he said. “I could hear the structure creak and the smoke and was starting to blow around like a whirlwind. I knew we didn’t have much time left.”

Roger was looking at the ground again and he spoke in hushed tones, almost reverently.

“I got thinking about my wife and kids and …. you know, I just wanted to take them all out for a pizza when I got home. That’s all I could think about. Just a goddamned pizza! And then I ran.”

In my mind I was there with Roger, running for the exit. Out into the snow, running after the life I wanted so badly to hold on to. To hug those I loved, to live life, to eat a pizza.”

“But Agnes got out,” I said. “I saw him brought to the ambulance on a stretcher.

“He jumped from the roof,” said Roger.

“What?” I almost shouted.

“I don’t know how he got up there,” said Roger, “but somehow after I left he got out on the roof and jumped. That’s why we could hear his scream. He was outside on the roof.”

My abbot, the man I had felt so sorry for after his death, had either been forced off the roof by the flames or decided to embrace eternity as I had often considered. If the latter, Agnes had stolen my final act of self-glorification. For only a person who truly cannot get over himself ends his own life.

“But that was never mentioned by the D.A. or the newspapers,” I said.

“Well, they knew. So did the Coroner. I guess the newspaper didn’t print it because of me. I’m the local hero,” he said with irony.

That was true. I had read of Roger’s exploits saving hikers from the depths of ravines they’d fallen into, as well as one other extraction from a fire, that particular one successful.

So,” I chuckled, “the D.A. was ready to hang my ass for leaving Agnes in the fire, but not you?”

“You would have never been charged. Maybe you could put this in your blog,” said Roger. “I’d feel more honest if it were public.”

Roger leaned his head back and took a long final swig of coffee from the paper cup he had brought.

“It was nice to meet you, Brother Jesse. If you guys find a house and fix it up, give me a call and I’ll try to help out. I’m a pretty decent carpenter,” he said.

“I appreciate your offer, Roger,” I replied. “We’re not sure about what we’re doing at the moment.”

“Well, knowing Lance,” he said, “I’m sure he’ll help out with a few dollars.”

“Do you know Lance?” I asked, a little surprised.

“He was married to my sister,” he said. “She died a few years ago, before he moved up your way. He loves that property. When he was a kid he used to sit on that rock cliff the whole day long. Brother Harpo taught him to fish!”

“Harpo taught Lance to fish?” I was incredulous.

157. From The Dead

2012-01-02T10:51:00.003-05:00

I sat outside our room at the Mountain Meadow Motel the next morning, enjoying the very early bout of spring weather. The temperature would climb to 60 today, according to the weatherman, who said so this morning on the small black and white TV in one of our rooms, the one we call Gryffindor. I tipped back in the cheap plastic chair against the wall of the building and felt the rear legs begin to bend under my weight. As I leaned forward, a small green station wagon turned in from the main road and proceeded down the drive to the office, located off to my left in the center of the motel. A short man with a mustache rolled his ample body out of the car and began to walk toward the office. When he saw me sitting in my work robe, he changed course and walked over to me.

“I’m looking for Brother Jesse,” he said.

“That’s me,” I said as I stood to shake his hand. He took it … I thought reluctantly … and then asked if we could sit and talk. When we found two chairs that would hold each of us, he began.

“I’ve been following your blog,” he said. “I’m Roger Kumminski, the fireman who went in after your abbot.”

I felt fear well up in my stomach and said nothing.

“The brother was alive, you know, when I found him,” he continued.

I knew that, of course, and I knew Agnes was dead when they got him into the ambulance.

“I heard what you testified at the courthouse,” the fireman said. “When I found him, he talked to me, too.”

A silence ensued. Unable to stand it, I asked, “So what did he say? Could you understand him?”

“Yes,” said the fireman, “I could understand him. The first thing he said was to leave him. He wanted to die. I didn’t want to leave him, so I started dragging him out. He fought me. I stopped for a breath and then I tried to put my air pack mask on him again so he could get some air. He knocked the damned thing away from his face and then he said, ‘I’ve got to get to Jesse before he jumps. He’s up there.’ He said, ‘He’s in his chapel. He’s in his chapel.’”

Roger Kumminski had been looking down at the ground in front of us, concentrating as he told his story. Now he turned and looked at me.

“What did he mean?” asked Roger. “Did you jump out a window to escape the fire?”

I didn’t think it would be helpful to explain my past fits of depression.

Roger gave me a strange look.

156. Bank On Us

2012-01-01T12:05:00.004-05:00

I had not paid a single bill since becoming the abbot, nor had I deposited either the $10,000 check from Alfred or his last check for $2,000. Bouncer and I drove down to the bank to make the deposit into our account.

I honestly don’t know why we have always used this bank in town. The tellers are the slowest clerks in the world, I sometimes think, mostly because they’re always catching up on the latest news from their customers who are also their neighbors. You’d think they’d do that over the back fence on their days off. They’re just out of high school and very friendly, except to those they didn’t grow up with. If you’re not part of their set of people, they are barely cordial. Another customer once told me she thought the teller-kids were afraid of anyone they hadn’t gone to school with because their teachers had warned that outsiders could read their thoughts, so better to keep one’s mind blank when dealing with them. She seemed quite serious. When it came my turn, I was lucky to get a real woman instead of a girl-child who was nice to everyone.

“I’d like to deposit these,” I said, “but I no longer have any deposit slips for our checking account.”

“That’s no problem,” she said with a smile. “If I can see some identification I’ll look up your account on the computer.”

I endorsed the back of the checks totaling $12,000 while she clicked away at the keys. I envied her typing speed, especially with numbers which always slowed me down.

“Here they are, she said. “You have two accounts. Which account do you want to deposit into?”

A light bulb clicked on in my head. “The one with less money,” I said, “and then I’d like to know the balance of each account.”

“Sure,” she said. The little printer next to her whirred and spit out first one slip of paper then another. She handed both to me.

“Have a nice day!” she said with beautiful smile.

I nonchalantly accepted the slips and walked outside the bank and got into the SUV with Bouncer. Then I looked at each slip of paper. The first showed an account with $12,009.87 in it. The second showed a balance of $199,584.98.

“Are we rich?” joked Bouncer.

“As a matter of fact,” I answered, “we are.”

155. Coming Clean

2011-12-31T22:34:00.000-05:00

Lance first called my new lawyer and then connected by conference call to the District Attorney. He put them all on the speaker phone after Bill Reed cautioned me to give only short answers, yes or no if possible.

The call didn’t last long, just enough for Maguire the D.A. to confirm what he was hearing and to set up a meeting in his office for two days hence where he would take a deposition each from me and Lance. I stated only what I knew to be fact. I skirted around what St. Anne might have known or not before the fire. I did not feel it was my place to say I had heard he wanted to cheat the insurance company. The head of the Ardent Brothers never said that to me. If he had truly stated that intention to my neighbor, Lance did not offer that information during the telephone call for his own reasons. What he said during his deposition later that week I do not know.

154. Scheme

2011-12-31T09:38:00.001-05:00

While I read the letter, Lance took the phone, told St. Anne he would call him back and hung up.

“Does the insurance company know about this?” I asked.

“No,” he repled. “And this is all news to me today.”

“I mailed this letter for Agnes the day before the fire,” I said.

When I finished, I sat with it in my hand, staring out at the mountainscape.

"The arson is a problem, of course,” said Lance. “But if the insurance company doesn’t know of ... or can’t prove ... Agnes’ claim, they could pay the full value of the monastery building," he said. "If the monastery and acreage were worth $500,000, they will say the land, the building's foundation, the water well are all undamaged and not reimbursable. The net will probably be about $200,000 to $300,000 and it will be paid to the owner of the insurance policy."

"I guess that would be ..." I said.

“You,” he said, “according to Agnes’ letter.”

“St. Anne wants you to not tell anyone we know this,” said Lance. "He wants you to collect the insurance money and give half to him. In return he will burn the letter so that the authorities don’t know of Agnes’ ... claim.”

“Lance, you’re also involved ... a co-conspirator or whatever youi’d be called,” I said.

Lance didn’t respond directly to that commnet, but said, “When we find the $199 thousand which Agnes supposedly left you, added to your half of the insurance money you’ll have upwards of a half million dollars to take care of your Brothers,” he said.

I looked at Lance, trying to read his face. “Or run off to Tahiti by myself,” I said.

“Yes, you could do that,” he said. “Everything is in your name.”

“Lance,” I said to him, with what I hoped was an earnest look on my face, “what do you think I should do?”

“What you think best,” he said without blinking.

I laughed. “Who should we call first,” I said, “the insurance company or the District Attorney?”

Lance relaxed and sat back. A smile formed on his face.

“You’ll be disappointing Agnes,” he said.”

“Not as much as St. Anne,” I laughed.

153. Agnes' Letter

2011-12-30T16:13:00.001-05:00

My Provincial St. Anne,

Aside from my drunken escapades on both sides of the Atlantic, I have not in my memory disobeyed my superiors, including you. I am unsure what I planned to do when you dispatched me to America to place the Brothers in other housing and/or jobs and sell the monastery. But when I arrived here, I realized I could not follow your instructions to the letter. There is something you did not know, in any case, and that is Brother Saint Florian of Linz (Sparky) before he died signed the monastery over to me. And he had already sold five acres of monastery property to a neighbor and spent a portion of the proceeds. What’s left, $199,584.98, was also signed over to me shortly before his death when he revealed all to me and asked that I be a part of his scheme. I have since signed the bank account over to Brother St. Jessica, although he is not aware of it.

I also signed the deed to the monastery over to him. And I am going to burn the monastery down tonight so that Jesse and the Brothers will have the bank account just mentioned and the proceeds from the fire insurance too. So you see, as you requested, the monastery will go up in flames, but you will receive no benefit. The Brothers will be disappointed to lose their home, but they need to throw off their useless menial activity and desert this God forsaken shebeen before someone is injured. And you, Brother St. Anne will have none of the equity, nor do you deserve any of it. I have been witness to your wasteful and neglectful ways with the Order’s money for too many years to be part of any scheme to enrich you further. You need not pray for me. Wherever I wind up will be like heaven compared to this awful life I’ve been given to live.

Brother Saint Agnes

152. Overseas Calling

2011-12-30T14:58:00.001-05:00

The phone on the end table next to Lance's chair rang and he picked it up. It soon became obvious he was speaking with Saint Anne and Lance looked at me and raised his eyebrows. After a minute or two of trans-Atlantic conversation, he passed the phone to me.

"Jesse, Jesse, I don't know what to say," began Saint Anne. "I am so sorry the monastery burned down. And the loss of Agnes .. such a tragedy." I had nothing to say to this man. Had I wanted to be funny, I would have asked Lance for a barf bag. Instead I remained quiet.

"I don't want you to worry over any of the particulars." he said. "You shouldn't be bothered by details now. I'll work with Lance to see what has to be done about the ... about the details and particulars."

I couldn't resist. I asked, "Where are the Brothers and I to go, my Abbot Provincial."

"Ah, well yes, Jesse. And Lance tells me he is working something up for you."

“St. Anne,” I said, “did Sparky send you the money from the sale of five acres to Lance? You might use some of that to help us out.”

There was a silence at the end of the line before St. Anne answered me.

“Jesse, your Abbot did not send us one cent of that money.”

“Well,” I don’t know where it is either,” I said. “Unless Agnes

took it with him somehow.”

“I don’t think so,” said St. Anne. “Frankly, he sent a letter to me saying he was giving it to you.”

I was shocked and couldn’t speak.

Lance handed me a sheet of paper as St. Anne said to me, “I’ve faxed over a copy of Agnes’ letter. Perhaps Lance will to show it to you.”

Please Read The Letter - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

151. Intercession

2011-12-29T08:09:00.000-05:00

"I've spoken to Saint Anne," Lance announced a week after the fire. The two of us were sipping coffee, enjoying the stupendous view from his Rock. Harpo and Bouncer and Cat had walked up through the woods to sift through what was left of the monastery.

"I told him I bought this piece of the property,” said Lance. “But he already knew it. He would like you to call him in Fermoy."

"I imagine he would," I replied. "Maybe I will someday ."

"He interceded for you with the county district attorney when there was a possibility you'd be charged with leaving Agnes in the fire," said Lance.

"How the hell did he do that?" I asked. "I can't believe the D.A. would pick up the phone to find a Barry Fitzgerald sound-alike leprechaun on the other end of the phone line and take him seriously."

Lance chuckled, "It was the Governor's office of New York that called the District Attorney, not Saint Anne. Your superior is well connected."

"I'd bet the D.A. didn't prosecute because he knew he wouldn't get a conviction," I said. "I'm no lawyer, but I can't imagine being found guilty at a trial by my peers. Of course, I can't afford a defense and I do have better things to do than sit in the prisoner's dock waiting to be exonerated."

Lance looked at me closely. "You really don't feel guilty, do you?"

"Of course I do," I answered. "But it's what Agnes wanted."

"But if I pulled out a gun here and now," said Lance, "and made as if to shoot myself, you'd stop me wouldn't you?"

"Absolutely," I said, "but you're not dying from something else. Look, I took the responsibility for a Brother. It was not easy for me to leave him," I said.

"Not easy to leave a burning building?" Lance asked.

I looked at the man to see if he was accusing me.

"That's what Saint Anne told the Governor," said Lance. “That you're a foolish old monk scared silly of fire who ran from the building and left your superior behind. And was afraid to admit he was still alive and in the building."

By now I was angry. I could not find any words to speak that would have been fair to Lance. I wanted to lash out at him for the accusations he was bringing to me, though I knew ... or at least presumed ... they were not his.

I did not run from the Agnes. When I went back into the building for him I could see a path in and out, and the fire was farther down the hall. I was not terrifically scared at that point. I looked at Lance finally and after taking a few breaths, I said, "That's not the way it happened, Lance."

Lance shrugged his shoulders, as if to say it didn't matter to him. Maybe he had seen men react in all kinds of ways, and valor or cowardice didn't surprise him.

"I thought you should know how you've been described to Dan Maguire, the D.A., " he said. "It might be important for you to choose a demeanor you want to affect in his presence, since you may see him again. Appearing like a frightened old man might be useful. Or maybe not. You'll have to decide."

"I hope I didn't appear that way in court at the inquest. And why would I see the D.A. again?" I asked.

"I've retained a friend as your counsel," he said. "Bill has spoken with Maguire and there's a concern about arson. The county forensic team thinks the fire was started."

"Started?"

"On purpose," said Lance. "Their analysis found advanced fire damage in a room near the print shop in the cellar. It looks like the fire was started in a travel trunk in the storeroom."