by Michael Finley
Copyright © 2001 by Michael Finley

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A Master of the Wired World?

I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.

What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.

To order, click here. Discounted price is $18.87 from Amazon.

The Color of Cardinals

I'm at a lunch over the weekend with some dear old friends, especially an old roommate I'll call Carol, because that is her name. Carol and I go back 30 years, living in a commune together, all that. She has what we used to call an interesting head –so competent mentally that she could play championship bridge when she was stoned. Bridge is so meticulous and detail-oriented and being high is such a splattered intellectual mess. It was an absolutely amazing feat.

When I talk to her today, I see she still has a crazy gleam in her eye. Not that she's crazy; she's super competent. But there's an edgy-daring-thrill-seeking part of her that I can relate to. Always on the lookout for action. Carol is like my sister.

And she is telling me about her brother Don, who shared a house with me and several other guys near the University in 1970. Don has had severe MS the past 20 years. He lives in a nursing home, he can’t do anything, he's unintelligible, and staying alive and not suffocating on his own saliva every day is a great adventure.

I am worn down by people's difficulties, and I asked Carol, is it worth it to Don? Isn't it just cruel to be expected to live under such constraints? But Carol stands up for the quality of Don's life. Never mind that he eats through a tube in his stomach, is prone to severe respiratory infections and bed sores, can't speak except in sighs and moans (which only Carol can decipher), and appears so demented that his own kids stopped visiting him years ago.

Carol explains her view of Don's situation.

"Don has figured out, against all odds, and from the depths of suffering, how to have a life," she says. "Do you know that he lived at the nursing home for five years with a roommate who also couldn't talk? Can you imagine sharing that much time with another person, unable to say anything?

"Yet when the roommate died, Don was disconsolate -- he loved him so.

"Don is really into Jesus, and that puts people off. But if you ask him, he describes himself as utterly happy. He loves getting phone messages, which he plays and replays until he's sucked the marrow from every morpheme.

"He reads a book a day by audiotape. He can still beat anyone at cribbage. He can’t play bridge any more. But he can still be extremely keen mentally whenever a situation is competitive. He loves, loves, loves to beat people – especially people who feel sorry for him."

I sit in silence for a moment. All day I have been feeling crabby and low, and Carol's description of Don is a kind of gift.

I want to do something about it, and my first instinct is simply to tell her to give Don my best. But damn, that sounds remote. So I asked for his phone number instead -- I'll call him myself.

Calling my bluff, Carol smiles and dashes off the nursing home number. "Just leave a message," she says. "He loves to listen to it live, then play it back, over and over again, savoring each word."

When I get home I summoned the nerve to dial. Yes, I'm scared of the weirdness of calling him up after so long. Truth is, we were never very friendly. I remember Don as a kind of sanctimonious guy, a camp counselor at the core. And I was the kind of brat camp counselors drive crazy with their sanctimoniousness.

My plan is to call and leave Don a voice message, read an inspiring-sounding thought into the tape, then cut and run. No actual conversation will take place. I'll feel good about myself, and maybe Don will have a slightly more interesting day.

But it doesn't work out that way.

I dial, expecting his machine to pick up. Instead, after perhaps a minute of fumbling and voices in the background ("Here, let me get that up for you") I know I have a direct line to Don. I can hear him gasping into the receiver.

I accept that I have to do all the talking. "Yes, Don, this is Mike. Mike Finley, your old roommate? I was talking to Carol earlier today -- we still see other from time to time -- and she was telling me how you are doing, so I thought I'd call and say hello."

It's a little strained.

There is silence on his end, except for the broken sounds of him breathing. I press on.

"So here's what's happened to me since I saw you last -- what has it been, eleven, twelve years? I'm still a writer. You remember I was always writing something. I wrote a novel about my seminary days. You might be interested in that, cuz we both went to seminary. Boy, was that a long ago or what.

"Mainly I write articles about business and stuff now, you know, to make money.  I wrote a book about working on teams that was pretty successful, with a psychologist I know.

"I think you met my wife Rachel at Carol's once -- it was her fortieth birthday party. We're still together. I have a daughter, Daniele, who's 14, and a son, Jonathan, who's 10. They're both sweet kids. I think they were running around Carol's house that day, too. Do you remember that day?"

I can hear a kind of throat-clearing sound, and some rapid breathing that makes me think Don is grinning sort of ferociously.

I'm second-guessing myself now. Why did I tell him all that? I just inventoried, as if it were nothing special, the casual treasure in my life that I know has been stripped away from his.

I am suddenly at a loss what to say. My mind races, thinking about what Carol had told me. His exhalations were insistent now, as if wanting me to fail here, so he could "win" our little entracte.

Grasping at straws, I tell him Carol told me how important Jesus is to him and if it's OK, I'd like to read him a favorite poem. I pull a paperback book from the shelf by to the phone and begin thumbing through it, looking for the poem in question.

"I apologize because this poem is a difficult one. The words pile up on you a bit, like logs in a river. But that might make it more fun to play the tape back, and let the different levels go to work in your head."

The poem was Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur." Hopkins had been, like Don and me, a seminarian.

And as I read to Don on the phone, my crappy attitude, the same attitude I have been writing about here, starts to melt away.

I have a trick when I read poems, I stop in the middle and reread lines that need more time to understand. I did that with Don:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

And all the time I am reading I can hear Don's gasping and sighing. It has a different sound than when we first started talking. Before it was regular and monotonous – now it seems excited, engaged, out of rhythm, as if he's reacting to certain images and ideas with surprise and agreement. Or maybe he's letting me know he already knows the poem by heart.

I think he is trying to tell me when a phrase or moment work for him. His sighs are like exclamation points. I get the drift.

And for a second I get a powerful impression, like a dream. In the dream Don and I are both serving at Benediction. He's in charge, and I'm taking my cues from him. We are boys again, and it is a major feast, Pentecost perhaps, and we are decked out in the red surplices, the color of cardinals.

And at the moment of change it is Don who grasps the brass-plated altar bells and rings them out in threes, crying out to every corner of the cathedral. He is so fervent and so strong, and my head is as clear as those bells, like foil shaken till the light spills out, like in Hopkins' poem, and we are no longer weary or lost, but we exult in the grandeur that peeks in on us from everywhere.

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