What Happens After You Die

-- By Tom Phillips 

Back in the day when Walter Cronkite was America's Most Trusted Person, he sat for an interview with talk-show host Dick Cavett.  After a couple of warmup questions, Cavett leaned in with an impish grin, and asked:     

"So Walter, what happens after you die?"   

Cronkite brushed it off as mischievous flattery. He was sixty-something at the time, and lasted a couple more decades.  

At 80, the question is harder to dismiss.  Here's what I'd like to know: Do we have any say in what happens? 

Maybe I do, and you do too.  

House on the Water

 -- By Tom Phillips 

It was hard to leave at the end of our annual family vacation on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. On the last day, my sister-in-law Linda and I have a tradition of walking down to the shoreline wearing pure white robes.  

This year we got up at dawn, and sat at the high-tide line watching the surf roll in as the sun emerged from clouds on the horizon, lighting a spark and then a fire across the waves, practically into our laps. We chanted OM three times, took some selfies and shots of each other, and then just looked out into the distance, as dawn went down to day. 

On vacation, I don't read much. I prefer to sit and stare at the ocean, watching people in the water, thinking about nothing in particular. Normally my mind is busy, but by the ocean it rests---in the natural trinity of sky, sea, and sand. If I have a mental focus it's the shifting line where the water rolls up on land, then flows back, sometimes rippling sideways, sometimes just slipping back under the next wave.  

On the verge of 80, life's a beach. It's the borderline between life and death, the known and the unknown, being and nothingness, the light of day and the darkness of the deep.  

John Lee Hooker wrote a blues about it, "I'm Going Upstairs."  It's about an old man, unwanted, with no place in the world to go.  

I got a house on the water, I don't need no land.
When I'm dead and gone, bury me in the deep blue sea.  

--  Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

 
  

Blow the Man Down

 -- By Tom Phillips 

    Come all you young sailors who follow the sea ..
    Way, hey, blow the man down---
    Please pay attention and listen to me, 
    Give me some time to blow the man down.

Midway through a two-week vacation on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, this sea chantey is stuck in my head, along with the crash of waves on the ocean beach across the road.  The waves are strong and steady -- kicked up by Tropical storm Henri, hundreds of miles out to sea in the Atlantic.  And they are crashing much nearer to our door than just a few years ago, when the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the shoreline and rebuilt the beach, vastly multiplying its height and width. That was the official response to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy, which overwhelmed the island in 2012.    

When we showed up for our annual vacation the following summer, the battered pathways through the dunes were festooned with American flags and signs declaring New Jersey "Stronger than the Storm."  This bore the trademark of then-governor Chris Christie, pumping himself up for a presidential run.  That ended quickly, but the illusion of supernatural powers endured. 

Since the floods of 2012, billions of dollars have been spent on new beachfront homes.  The local mayor -- a real estate developer -- boasts that his customers are now venture capitalists and hedge fund managers.  And indeed, I listened to one high-powered bicyclist out for his morning exercise, yakking on his mobile phone to a conference call of investors.  Apparently they're in it for the short term, comforted by federally-subsidized flood insurance which protects their investments.   

It doesn't protect their houses. Henri won't get us -- it's passing by at a safe distance.  But with rising seas and monster storms already baked into our future, eventually the sea will bury this sliver of sand and everything on it. 

Vacationing in such a place -- even as a renter -- is a peculiar experience.  Do you identify with the foolishness of :"stronger than the storm," or do you prepare to mourn the loss of a fragile barrier island?       

My answer is neither -- I'm with the ocean.  Just "give me some time to blow the man down." 

I welcome the victory of the sea, even though it's the end of my vacationland. In time the waves will be rolling over a drowned island and breaking onto the mainland, driving its inhabitants inland, just as the first European settlers claimed the shoreline and drove indigenous people into the western wilderness.  The Lenape, who camped on this island for thousands of summers, ended their trail of tears on a reservation in Oklahoma.  Where we we English wind up?  

 -- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips                                         

On Turning 80: First, You Cry

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash 

--- By Tom Phillips 

First, you cry. 

Lying in bed, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, I would suddenly start to cry.  Nothing dramatic, just a few deep, soft waves of sadness that came and went, with few or no tears shed.   Still, it felt like a good cry. 

My mind went back to senior year in high school.  I'd been determined to goof off and take a minimal academic load, so I could concentrate on basketball and girls.  But my guidance counselor told me that wouldn't look good on college applications. So I  reluctantly signed up for a fourth year of Latin.  And along with a handful of fellow scholars and goof-offs, we read the Aeneid of Vergil, an ancient epic that mixes Gods and humans, history and mythology to tell the story of the founding of Roman civilization, by wandering refugees from the Trojan War.      

With the very first phrase, you know you are in the presence of a great writer: Arma virumque cano, writes Vergil -- "Arms and the man I sing."  A hero, a war, a song -- all promised in three words.  And delivered, in thousands of lines of dactylic hexameter without a false note or a misplaced syllable. 

And somewhere in the middle, I came upon a phrase that stayed with me forever:  

Lacrimae rerum.  "The tears of things" is the literal translation -- but rerum means more than things.  It means what all things have in common, the common ground of existence.  

At the ground of existence, we cry.  

At 80, I hit the ground and cried.  I cried for everything I loved, everything I had lost, for life from beginning to end.  I saw my life and all lives flashing into emptiness and uncertainty.  I began to prepare for my own epic journey.  

First, you cry.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

  

The Strangest Dream

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to see my new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared en route, probably somewhere in the TSA security gauntlet.  I went to bed, prepared for a rough night.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase "forty years" kept echoing in my head, like an anvil chorus, like an indictment, like a sentence imposed by a merciless court.   There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror.  Trained to see dreams as an extension of myself, I thought -- can this be?  That drugs to help me sleep have been repressing the real me, a sadistic wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

And I saw this was only partly true.  The real me was a bystander, one who has stood by and watched for forty years as men with purpose took sledgehammers to a civilization -- deliberately destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.  

In brief:  

The bursar began with a blast:  "No one's entitled!"  

Money replied -- God Bless the Child!

A burning Bush stormed the desert -- read my lips, read my lips.  With a giant sucking sound, he was consumed by a clown.  H. Ross Pierrot said I told you so.   

In came Billary, a two-faced monster.  Not asking, not telling, ending "welfare as we know it," defending, defining, defiling marriage as we knew it, signing a bill of rights for bankers to do it.  The Bill came due.  

An archfiend had been laden with a plan to attack America.  It worked even better than he dreamed. 

Another Bush took arms against a sea of troubles, an Axis of Evil with heads in three directions.  Mission unaccomplished, the Bush was consumed.  Exit Axis, rising sea.  

Enter Mr. Noh Drama, with "greatness thrust upon him."  He purred, he demurred.  Single mothers took third jobs, fathers were hounded to Honduras. The archfiend was shot and thrown into the sea.    

Finally came the Beast, slouching through Bethlehem down the Capitol stairs.  A mob seized the palace.  Four years later, "the carnage ends here." 

In comes an old man, been Biden his time. Joe and Jill run up the Hill, to fetch a pail of oughta.  

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

In the Nursery 

   

Sis-Gendered

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Portrait of Thoreau attributed to his sister

Most men, wrote Henry David Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation."  I read these words as a teenager, and immediately resolved not to be one of those men.  I was desperate, haunted, frustrated, insecure, confused, irrational and contradictory.  But quiet?  Not while I could draw a breath.  The world soon began to hear my complaints against injustices large and small, personal and political, real and imagined.  

There was just one subject that cowed me: sex and gender.  I participated gingerly in what was called the sexual revolution, but couldn't bring myself to speak out for sexual freedom.  Quickly and prematurely, I slid into a lifestyle of a heterosexual, cis-gendered, homophobic husband and father.  I opposed same-sex marriage on linguistic grounds, telling my children that you couldn't just change the meaning of a word that goes back to biblical times.  But of course, you can.  

Trash Talk of 2020: The Year in Quotes

-- By Tom Phillips 

 America survived the Civil War with the gravitas of Lincoln's speeches and the caritas of  Whitman's poetry to bind up our wounds.  We fought World War One -- "The War to End all Wars"-- egged on by Woodrow Wilson's visionary slogans.  We slogged though the Great Depression and World War Two heartened by Roosevelt's radio chats, and First Lady Eleanor's newspaper columns.  Kennedy and Reagan pictured castles in the air, and Obama could be stirring, when stirred.   

In 2020, we were on our own.  Rhetoric was barely a memory, giving way to the grunts of combat:   Curses and challenges, defiance and dares; trash talk, mayday calls, last gasps and pleas for mercy.     

What they said:   

"It is what it is.."  Donald Trump on August 31, downplaying US deaths from Covid-19 ".. because you are what you are."  Joe Biden, blaming him in the first presidential debate September 29.

“I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd, as he lay dying under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin May 25.  When Biden was declared president-elect November 7, CNN commentator Van Jones broke down on camera, weeping for his children and friends.  "It wasn't just George Floyd," he said through a flood of tears.  "A lot of people …felt they couldn't breathe."

 "Kill me!"  Luis Vasquez, a neighborhood resident who fired gunshots into the air in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, following a Christmas concert on the Cathedral steps December 12.  Police shot him dead.  The gunman's sister said he'd been "damaged" by prison time in the 1990s, and his mental state had worsened in the pandemic. 

"Please, call the cops." Spoken and recorded by Christian Cooper, a black man birdwatching in Central Park, on the same day George Floyd was killed in May. Cooper had asked a woman to put her dog on a leash. She responded by calling 911 and telling police that an “African-American man” was threatening her. The birdwatcher knew such white lies have meant prison or death for many black men.  Still he challenged his accuser and was vindicated by the video.