“THE LONG GOODBYE, PART FOUR: FINAL TEARS”

For Mark King Schwartz, 1960-2020

They call dementia “The Long Goodbye” because it is an agonizing and protracted death of the souls who love the victim.

For many years now, I have grieved a man who was still alive, trapped in an earthly vessel which, at its best, was never able to accommodate his indomitable spirit. 

 But now he is unshackled, free to be my friend again: buying a round of Cuba Libras at the “Lunch Counter” at that big “Bucky’s” strip joint in the sky, commandeering the DJ Booth at The Veranda and singing a medley of Sinatra tunes, and driving the “Great Red Shark,” his candy-apple red 1973 Olds ’88 convertible, the engine of which I burnt out on the way to Houston in the summer of 1980.

He might even finally be able to dribble a basketball.

He is free now and so am I.

I would like to be able to say that his illness made me a better man: to appreciate the things I have, to love more deeply, and to cherish the new friends I have to replace the ones I’ve lost.

But it did not. It stunted me and made me bitter. I felt vaguely guilty about my undeserved good health, my law practice, my beautiful new granddaughter.

And I was angry. Angry at God. Angry at myself for letting our friendship diminish in the years before his illness. Angry at him for not being there when I needed him.

But when I heard the news he had died, I felt an exceedingly undramatic sense of relief, like his beloved Longhorns beating Kansas in football, a desired but wholly expected result.

I am through crying now.

 

The last time he suffered a setback and we feared the worst, I hustled to Austin and sat silently with him for a couple of hours, not knowing it would be the last time I would be in his physical presence.

Later that day, I got the rare pleasure of sitting with two of his children, children who I had thought I would know as well as my own. But by historical accident and fateful cockup, I did not. Had it not been for that day, I would still feel that.

It was that day they learned I had written the three prior segments about his illness in my blog. I was able to hear his eldest daughter, an aspiring stand-up comic who inherited her father’s great voice and comedic timing, read my words.

It was the first time I had ever heard anyone read my words aloud and it frightened me, fearful I would offend them by not doing their father justice. I feared I might lose the next twenty-five years of their lives.

As she read, she would falter and her eyes would well up with tears, but then she would find her voice again and even laugh through her tears.

I will always remember every minute of the day I was married, the day my son was born, and the day I walked my daughter down the aisle.

But I will also remember the day I listened to little Kitty Schwartz read my words about her father for the first time, reading them like she wrote them, as if by anointed process, her father’s voice all I could hear.

You don’t get many days when you can look up and say, Ok, Big Guy, You can take me now, because this is about as good as it gets.

 

This blog has always been about transition and spiritual growth, how a dinosaur ex-fraternity boy from deep East Texas found spirituality and enlightenment in an unlikely place: a yoga mat.

Ironically, he too had found solace and peace on a yoga mat. In the early stages of his illness, he would take classes at a studio in Tarrytown. With a wandering spirit and soul, he could live without traditional norms. I can completely see how yoga would provide a centering place for him, where he could find comfort in its repetition and traditions.

His mother is a yogi of emeritus status and I believe his practice was also a way to seek her out and hold her close in a mind that had begun to haunt him from within.

His mother was also a brilliant professor of German at UT and has forever scared the living shit out of me, but we all sat at her dinner table one wonderful afternoon and talked yoga. For the first time in her presence, I felt a heretofore unimaginable sense of metaphysical equality. Together the two of us even attempted a tandem tree pose.

While I do regret we never got to take a yoga class together, I do imagine him on his mat in those early stages of his illness, going through the poses by rote, struggling to maintain safety and stability in his life against the tide of uncertainty he must have felt on a daily basis.

So, in the end, somehow our friendship persevered across time and space, on yoga mats two hundred miles apart, whether we knew or not.

 

 

In the early 1980s, there remained at the SAE house in Austin the surviving tradition of inviting the members of the senior pledge class, at the final chapter meeting of the year, to stand and provide their reflections on four years of life at the fraternity. The Eminent Archon would call your name and bark, “tears” and you would stand on your chair and share those memories nearest and dearest to you.

We called it: Final Tears.

It is not lost on me the irony that I would have to be “invited” to share my innermost feelings or that I would do so only in an insular environment, but please remember I am the product of an certain era -even as I try not to be a prisoner of it.

It is perhaps even more ironic that “tears” was actually not an invitation at all, but rather a command, held over from our pledgeship, where an active member would scream, “tears” and the pledge would immediately jump up on a chair and await instructions, such as a demand to recite John Walter Wayland’s “The True Gentlemen” (worth a read) or the entire Greek alphabet while holding a burning match.

If you made a mistake, you started over again, without blowing out the match.

Tears.

The depth and genuineness of the revelations might surprise the uninitiated. Hulking ex-jocks crying like babies expressing their undying love for their pledge brothers. Cynical future lawyers choking up when recognizing that this would be the last meal they would share together. Good ol’ boys from deep East Texas describing unlikely but enduring friendships with the sons of Yankee civil rights lawyers.

The stories had only thing in common: Tears.

So, it is somehow appropriate, as I sit here in quarantine suffering my fifth day of frank symptoms from Covid-19, that I would receive the news that my best friend, Mark King Schwartz, had died.

So, these are my final tears for him.

 

© Thomas C. Barron 2020

THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

            I was a cardiologist's wet dream: a fifty-one year- old white male, twenty-five pounds overweight, with a high stress job and in a torrid love affair with fried foods. To be fair, I was also a runner with five marathons under my ever-expanding belt, even though I now competed in the spectacularly unflatteringly- named "Rhino" division, having somehow leap-frogged the somewhat -less- insulting- but -still -unflattering "Clydesdale" division altogether.

            But after over thirty years of relentless pounding, I was now face to face with the specter of my own running mortality. Plantar fasciitis gave rise to chronic runners knee, resulting in the only protracted injury-related layoff of my extraordinarily average running career. Joints ached under the additional strain of the extra bulk and it took two Advil, a knee brace and a back support truss just to get me out the door.

And then one day I just stopped.

            Over the years,  I willingly accepted the abuse of running as part of some battered, psychologically mutated protestant ideal that Texas boys of a certain era absorb on the bristly brown grass of August two –a–days. Please forgive me as I may have failed to grasp the gentle wisdom of my high school football coaches but I was too busy watching the heat rise off the ground like amoeba. Most all of it essentially carried the same general theme in any event: If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not doing you any good.

No pain, no gain.

You ain’t hurt, get back in there.

Water? You don’t need water. That’s why you have salt tablets.

But they didn’t tell me what happens when you quit.

In my junior year in college, I was sixty pounds overweight, smoked two packs of menthols a day, hadn’t eaten a fruit or vegetable other than a Frito in three years and polished off a bottle of rum before sundown most days.

But in late May of 1981, I had the Austin Flood Epiphany. On May 24, 1981, I rolled all the dope I had into a joint the size of a panatela, which I smoked during the worst flood in Austin history, not knowing until later whether or not I actually dreamed up the white Volkswagen microbus floating down South Lamar carrying four old hippies and two cases of contraband Hawaiian shirts.

During the previous semester, I had lost one girlfriend, several critical GPA points for law school and, in general, touch with the bounds of propriety. On the other hand, I had rediscovered Taco Bell and marijuana.

It was when my roommate found me nude on the floor looking under tables, mattresses and stereo equipment that I had my very own personal moment of clarity.

He asked, innocently enough, what I was looking for.

To which I replied: April.

Whether it was an epiphany or whether I had simply run out of dope, I can’t be sure.

Armed only with the Socratic teachings of my high school football coaches, I unwittingly took my first steps to yoga. It was, to be sure, a circuititous route.

The next day, I quit drinking, dope and eating red meat. The Over and Under among my dearest friends was anywhere from six to fifty-seven hours. (For those of you keeping score at home: Drinking- 120 days. Grass- 180 days. Red meat- 18 months.)

I also found myself on the track at Memorial Stadium at 3 o’clock that next afternoon with the sun throwing daggers at Austin, Texas even though priests and nuns might be outside. The amoeba patterns emanating from the synthetic track, while different from those of my scorched high school football field, were somehow comforting. 

That day I made it almost a lap before I had to stop and retch.

I was twenty-one years old.

Every step on that track that summer was simply a step. I required of myself only one more step, not daring to think beyond that lest the attachment of performance poison the otherwise pure process. All I wanted was that calm feeling at the end of my run when my heart rate subsided and all I could feel were the toxins pouring out of my body. It was utter self-containment. That was enough. There was no thought or distraction- not even a sense of commitment.

In retrospect, even my running wardrobe seemed almost obstinately anachronistic: white tee shirt, gray gym shorts and brown suede (yes, I said suede) Adidas Samba soccer shoes- perhaps the worst possible thing a human being could put on the their feet in order to run. In the seminal age of polyester Dolphin running shorts and New Balance shoes, I needed only the act of running, not the accoutrement. As ever, I felt enough of the interloper as it was without trying to take on the airs (and thus the responsibilities) of a real runner.

Six months and sixy pounds flew by.

            Thirty years later, the idea of not running terrified me. What if I could never run again? It was far more than the fear of inactivity or the aging process- it was the fear that there would be no escape-  no sublime catharsis- for me against the monumental pressures and petty indignities of my daily existence. I feared I would grab an Uzi and start looking for a McDonalds inside of two weeks.

            Other than my rather unnatural fascination with thrift store shopping, running is the only remotely Zen-like experience of my day. There is just something about a loop around White Rock Lake late on a fall afternoon with the crisp air, the smells of Fall in my nose, the leaves crackling beneath my feet, and the sun sneaking below the treeline which somehow majestically transforms me into a larger, more worthy, human being.

            What would happen when that went away? What other passions would I be deprived of? And how quickly? The softball which was now my left knee simply appeared out of the void. It frightened me in a way I was not prepared to be frightened. Is this a sore knee which it swollen or is this a queen of-diamonds kind of tumor? Remember, you’re getting to that age, a little voice was telling me.



NEXT TIME: “OM. Really?!?“

(c) (2013)

“THE LONG GOODBYE, PART THREE: OHM COMES TO THE SAE HOUSE”

            It took only that marvelous laugh- that deep rumble that started in his stomach and made its way all the way up to his bright eyes- and the hand that had been squeezing my heart for a year unclenched.

            And for one brief, shining moment, my friend was back.

            I was telling the Alligator Story -for perhaps the three thousandth time in my life- when it started. It was like the sound of thunder in the distance at first, but when it found his full throat, his laughter seemed to begin a miraculous process of reanimation: his eyes bright, his face no longer slack, and his posture upright.

            And he looked at me in the eyes and laughed in recognition.

            He was laughing at something he remembered.

I swear, I half expected him to say, “Let’s blow this pop-stand and get a cocktail, T.C.”

It was almost as if he simply reappeared from one of his infamous walkabouts in college, which could last anywhere between two hours and three weeks, depending on the severity of whatever existential freak-out he was undergoing at the time.

He would re-materialize, no worse for wear, bum a cigarette, and regale me with tales of his sojourn. In those absences, time did not so much stand still as it seemed to just good-naturedly wait on him, like a limo driver with the car door open for a favored but absentminded celebrity.

For the record, the Alligator Story goes something like this:

In the late 1970s, the SAE Jungle Party at the University of Texas was the Met Gala, the Academy Awards, and Caligula combined, seven days of round-the-clock work by forty pledges turning the E-Hut into, well, a jungle. There were thatched- roof huts, a flowing river, and a series of interconnected elevated bridges leading to the most potent trash- can punch in the history of trash -can punch, a patented concoction which once sent my pledge brother- thereinafter nicknamed “Chilly Billy”- to Seton Hospital for hypothermia.

Sorority girls would miss their grandmother’s funeral to go to the SAE Jungle Party.

But before the actual bacchanal, there was the nightly stealing of bamboo, whose purpose was not so much aesthetic but practical, as it formed something of a battlement around the entire perimeter of the SAE house, blocking from view the more major perversities and allowing for about fifteen feet’s worth of plausible deniability.  

Now on one such night, I returned to the fraternity house from my bible study around 2:30 a.m., utterly exhausted from my almost monastic academic and religious regimen, and fell heavily into sleep, as only the truly just can.

In a fog, I awoke to hear slight giggles and became vaguely aware of an alien presence in the room.

I rolled over and found myself eye -to -eye with Charlie the Alligator from the Holiday House on Barton Springs Road.

The consequence of this would not hit me for a few more seconds, when I saw Charlie’s tail wagging a good two feet beyond the end of my bed. My best friend was slouching up against the wall behind him, a malicious grin on his face.

It was then that the consequence hit me.

I am told that, in on one smooth motion, I bounded from my bed toward the bathroom door, which was a good two feet past Charlie’s still-wagging tail. While still in the air, I opened the bathroom door, grabbed the inside door handle, pulled the door to behind me, and locked it, after which I did a full-on Mark Spitz racing dive out the tiny bathroom window, through the huge bush just outside the window- losing my boxer shorts in the process- and headed east on 25^th Street, buck naked and bleeding, whereupon I apparently ran smack -dab over some hippie, neither stopping nor slowing down in the process.

They caught me somewhere near the corner of 25^th and Rio Grande.

Apparently, I had lost my habitual nonchalance along with my boxer shorts.

I screamed at my best friend like a banshee: “You know, Duke, I don’t mind when you come in late and wake me up, I don’t mind when you steal my cigarettes, I don’t even mind when you drink my booze, but YOU PUT A FUCKING REPTILE IN MY BED!”

It was at that point in the story that he laughed, as if he remembered it all. Actually, I think he may have used the word “naked” at some point, confirming for me that he was, in fact, present. Several other times throughout the hour he was totally engaged, even asking about my brother by using his nickname, without prompting.

It was a day worth remembering.

At best, our life is an interconnected and overlapping collection of stories- sometimes sequential, sometimes utterly random- but uniquely and steadfastly ours. The importance of our stories is not just in the telling, but with whom we share them.

Our lives are shared with those whose stories intersect or border our own, like some mildly perverse LinkedIn. Our stories reaffirm that we were here because others remember we were here.

I have been terrified for over a year that since he didn’t remember these stories, they might cease to exist or, worse yet, may not ever have happened at all.

I feared that since he would not be there to remember us, to hear our story, then we would cease to exist, and, as he is a large part of my own story, then I cease to exist.

In yoga, we often end classes with a breath together or a series of ohms, a thunderous sound which begins in deep in the belly by inhaling deeply, then constricting the throat and pushing all the air out of your lungs.

The class takes a breath together and we chant Ohm. In fact, it sounds much less like a chant than a growl, giving me a rare leg up on my classmates.You cannot hear the individual voices around you, but you hear and feel the collective sound rise up into a crescendo and then fade into the distance.

Like thunder.

It is a reminder that the light in each of us acknowledges and respects the light in those around us. We recognize not only the space that separates us but also that which connects us.

It is more than metaphor- it is an existential act, a sharing of our humanity even if only for one shining moment.

As we get older, the space between my friend and I grows wider. It is harder for me to get there to see him and it is harder for him to recognize me.

Our life together seems destined to end sooner rather than later.

And yet at the end of class last night, I heard the rumble of his laughter in an ohm- right at the end, just as it drifted away. A massive tear rolled down my cheek, off my chin and onto my shirt, but a wave of contentment overcame me as I remembered the Alligator Story. 

            So here I am, existing again.

(ATTENTION: No animals were harmed in the making of this story.)

© Thomas C. Barron 2019

THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“FAMILY REUNION”

(TO THE ROBERT E. LEE CLASS OF 1978)

“And if grandpa was here,

you know he’d be smiling from ear to ear,

to see what he had done,

from the offspring of his daughters and sons.”

-The Ojays, Family Reunion

            In a time not so long ago in a place not so far away, black kids and white kids went to separate schools.

            And while my generation did not invent integration, I would like to believe we perfected it early on.

In retrospect, it is almost inconceivable that I began my education in a segregated environment, not because of the historical abnormality of it, but because it simply does not jive with my own personal experience.

My memories and experience were borne out last weekend at my fortieth high school class reunion, where cowboy hats did the “Bump” with (albeit much shorter) afros, and we celebrated our lives together.

For many of us, those lives together began almost literally in the womb: Bert Taylor Pfaff and I were born hours apart in the same hospital and on the same floor in April, 1960. John Wayne Wickware’s grandmother grew up in Rusk, not so far from my own grandmother. Our families knew one another long before we were born. The Justice of the Peace there is another classmate, the Honorable Rodney Paul Wallace, whose first trip to Rusk was to spend the weekend with my grandparents.

            And while that does not make us appreciably different from any other graduating class, we were, in short, not at all like any other class.

            Because time and fate foisted integration upon us.

To which we basically said, Okay, watch this.

Because in the fall of 1973, a very short four years after the riots over court-ordered integration, my beloved Hubbard Huskies won the city championship in football, the first integrated team in school history to do so.

That night, the rafters of the school gym shook as together we whooped, hollered, hugged, cried, and danced our way out of the darkness into the light.

From that point forward, we were never the same. The subsequent victory party was obviously integrated, perhaps one of the first to be so. There would be so many others that it became routine.

After that, other traditional barriers began to erode. Even as we awkwardly navigated our way into our teen years, we managed the uncharted waters of integration and assimilation with remarkable speed and admirable poise.

As we spent time in one another’s homes, our mothers began trading favorite recipes. Sports teams were coached by both black and white fathers. Mothers commiserated over the utter funk of fifteen year-old boys of all colors.

And, of course, boys of every conceivable size, shape, and color had a crush on Cheryl Cicero.

Our tastes in music naturally converged. As much as I cringe at the word disco, it now seems a joint enterprise between black and white cultures, seemingly designed to incorporate both equally. It was a form of dance we learned together, did together and one which, ultimately, brought us together.

Whatever it was, it was ours.

Although I could have done without the polyester.

I watched as the blood, sweat, and tears of sports helped forge a high school class that was too busy trying to win to be preoccupied with color.

So, for those who would like to quit keeping score in kid’s sporting events, I call upon that experience to say, oh, hell no.

So two years later, when the Robert E. Lee Red Raiders made their run at the state 4-A basketball state championship, we were ready.  We traveled together, rooted together, agonized together, and, ultimately cried together as the great Virdell Howland and our Raiders came up just short.

            Just as the Huskie’s win consolidated our common hopes and dreams, the Raider’s loss annealed our common frailties and failures.

            And while you may think that sounds a tad melodramatic, those are your hopes and dreams when you are sixteen years old.

            Hopes and dreams have to start somewhere.

I have coached basketball for almost twenty-five years, not only because I love the game but because of what the game has given me, the insight that people tend to play basketball the way they live their lives.

Some are selfish ball-hogs, others know their role as part of the team. Some play better than their physical talents, while others don’t live up to their potential. Some do the dirty work of rebounding and playing defense, still other others play only for the adoration of the crowd.

I offer it as my humble opinion that these character traits transcend sports and may offer deeper insight into the human condition than all those Russian novels put together.

Those traits are also color-blind.

Basketball taught me that.

That’s why you keep score.

Thirty years later, my daughter and her friends took pictures at our house before her junior prom. I watched (no, positively beamed) with pride as her inner circle of friends posed in their prom dresses with pimply-faced boys in ill-fitting tuxedos.

It looked like the United Nations, except that their interaction was seamless and without any recognition whatsoever that there was any difference in skin tone.

They took it for granted.

Her picture from that night is –and will remain- on my desk. It is not only my favorite picture of her, it is a constant reminder of how far we have come.

My son’s best friend happens to be black. He is not my son’s best friend because he is black, he is my son’s best friend because he is my son’s best friend.

I could have hoped for nothing more and would have accepted nothing less.

Last night, there were not one but three interracial couples who beat me at Monday night trivia at my local watering hole.

They were lovely and natural and seemed completely unaware that forty years ago it would have been absolutely impossible to sit together holding hands in a public place.

Believe me, I know.

But last night I saw a future for my country that was no longer black and white but multiple shades of beige and brown, offering the best we have to offer, without unnatural boundaries.

I wanted to say to them: On behalf of the Robert E. Lee Class of 1978, you’re welcome.

My, how far we have come.

Or have we?

I offer this preface to the following words not out of snowflake timidity but out of genuine respect for all of my friends who might read this, whose friendship I cherish and whose own attitudes and outlooks deserve that respect, especially if they may differ from my own.

            By historical accident, we were on the front lines of integration. As a result of that experience, I do not fear the seismic shift of social change.

Because forty years ago, I watched a bunch of pimply-faced kids grow out of puberty with one hand, while pushing aside the historical tides of two hundred years of race relations with the other.

And look good in doing it.

            It seems extraordinary that we were able to pull this off in one generation.

            And I see that slipping away. All our hard work. All our memories. All our love.

            And I don’t want to waste that.

© Thomas C. Barron 2018

THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY”

            She was the only daughter of the richest man in a small town, a uniform success by the standards of any age. Double-promoted twice at Rusk High School, she graduated as Valedictorian well before her seventeenth birthday.

            The day she was married, she had a nineteen -inch waist and her wedding dress had to be taken up three times. It was a size 2.

            The guy she didn’t marry was the runner-up for the 1955 Heisman Trophy.

            She helped put her husband through the University of Texas, living in Quonset huts built for the Navy in the 1940s. She held a young family together in the sixties, while her husband was on the road half the year. She often did it without benefit of air conditioning or a car. Neighbors would simply baby-sit each other’s children while they went to the grocery store.

            When asked about it, she would shrug and say, “That’s just what we did.”

            She was a Cub Scout den mother, a field trip chaperone, and the undisputed champion of the bake sale, all the while never missing a sports event for three very active sons.

            To return home from school was to find to find her exquisite apple pie, her heavenly banana pudding, or her no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, timed perfectly to be warm and gooey for my return home.

            Every day.

            Some of her happiest moments were watching the hordes of hungry boys in her kitchen, devouring her creations. She loved to tell the story of watching Pat Hightower and Bryan Forman finish one of her patented banana puddings in one sitting. With serving spoons. She coaxed drunken fraternity boys to go to sleep with promises of biscuits and cream gravy the next morning, God’s own cure for common hangover.

            She presided over her dinner table like the prime minister of a particularly bad European parliament, raising not one but three lawyers under the same roof.

            She entertained governors and congressman, planned charity balls, and was as comfortable in a honky-tonk as she was at the country club.

            She essentially ran a small oil company when my grandfather was incapacitated.

            She had a shoe collection that Imelda Marcos would have admired.

            She has never missed a Dallas Cowboy football game. Ever.

She got her bachelors degree in her late sixties, her masters in her seventies, and was admitted into a doctoral program at 73.

She is fiercely protective of her family. “Territorial” only begins to describe her. She would throw herself in front of a bus before she let something happen to “one of hers.”

She can be imperious, easily bored, and does not suffer fools gladly. You can tell that by the fixed smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Had she been born in any later age, my mother would have been the dean of an English Department, making graduate students cry and sending professors scurrying to their cubicles, having unleashed the wintry gales of her wrath.

 Or general manager of the Cowboys.

And then there’s the hair.

In her ninth decade, the hair remains …formidable. It is as thick as it has always been and only now are there hints of gray. And while do feel a certain guilt that my mother’s hair may have contributed to that hole in the ozone layer, her hair is somehow comforting, sitting there like a crown on her head, regal and steadfast.

It is the Mount Rushmore of Hair. Mountains will crumble, seas will dry up, and glaciers will melt into puddles before my mother’s hair goes.

            But this is not what I will remember about my mother.

            What I will remember is Parent’s Day at Andy Woods Elementary School in the winter of 1970.

            It was a Friday. I saw her arrive through the window of my fifth-grade classroom, the midday sun shining down on her so that she appeared to be positively sparkling. Fresh from the beauty shop, her hair was elaborately (but not too elaborately) coiffed with the tips frosted just so. Her nails were red and her she was wearing her jewelry, which did in fact sparkle in the sun as she strode from her Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight to my class.

She was wearing a brown mid-length accordion -pleated leather skirt, knee-length shiny boots, and a camel jacket over a jewel-toned paisley blouse that tied at the neck. Over it all was her sable, which anchored the entire outfit. 

As I watched her stride toward my classroom, I felt a tremendous rush of pride as I was certain that, nowhere in the world, could there be a more beautiful or glamourous mother.

I remember her entrance into the classroom distinctly. Our desks faced the door of classroom and when she entered, she seemed to glow, bringing light and energy into the room.

When she stepped into the class, I sensed my classmates felt the perceptible need to rise in her presence, as if royalty had arrived. She became the immediate object of fascination and one could hear the murmurs of approval throughout the room. For her part, she felt obliged to smile an apology to the teacher for the interruption, who somehow sensed that long addition was done for a moment.

As she made her way back to my desk, she smiled at familiar faces, her absolute pleasure in the moment returned with the incandescent smiles of my classmates. A wink here, a ruffled head of hair there, she owned the class with every step.

My mother was a straight-up rock star.

When she got to me, I did something no ten -year old boy has ever done: I hugged my mother in public. Even more interestingly, there was no male-pattern teasing to chronicle it.

They knew.

Lunch with Jackie Kennedy could not have generated more political and social in-fighting than that day in the Andy Woods cafeteria, as my classmates fought and bickered to sit at the table with my mother.

She charmed them all. She held court. She laughed and smiled and told stories.

Oddly, I didn’t seem to mind sharing her but, every now and again, she would smile and wink at me- only at me -and I felt the way a son is supposed to feel in the presence of his mother.

I can only remember thinking this is the way it is supposed to be.

Madre, I could have gotten you another bottle of Chanel No. 5 or taken you to lunch at El Fenix, but this is my gift this year.

This one was always for you.

Happy Birthday.

Love, Me

© Thomas C. Barron 2018

THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“AMERICA’S PACT WITH THE DEVIL”

It has been said that the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his otherworldly guitar mastery. Johnson died at twenty-seven, the victim of an angry husband who poisoned his whiskey. One of the greatest guitarists of all time, he is buried in an unmarked grave, whereabouts unknown.

Dr. Johann Georg Faust’s preoccupation with the occult allowed him to summon the devil, with whom he bartered his immortal soul for twenty- four years of pleasure. After sixteen years, Faust reconsidered and tried to re-negotiate the deal. As every high schooler knows, it didn’t go well for old Johann, either.

It went only a little better for St. Theophilus, who in his desire to become an archdeacon sought out a wizard to connect him with Satan. In a contract signed in his own blood, Theophilus agreed to renounce both Christ and the Virgin Mary. Theo too rethought his whole deal and repented. After forty days of fasting, the Virgin Mary appeared to Theophilus, chastised him for his blasphemy and most assuredly busted him across the knuckles with a metric. After much begging and thirty more days of fasting, Mary granted him Absolution and promised to intercede with God on his behalf.

It took another three more days of negotiation with Satan and a full confession to a bishop before Theophilus was unburdened from his contract, whereupon he died.

In this most recent and rarest of all presidential elections, we as Americans made our own pact with the devil, bartering our immortal soul for a peek up the skirt of the Statute of Liberty to see if she’s wearing panties.

We have witnessed a political race like no other in the history of our country. It is the ultimate cautionary tale- an election to establish not who we are but -hopefully-  who we are not.

It is beyond my understanding how the American electorate can pretend to be all shocked and shaken that we could not find in all this great land- from north to south, east to west, from sea to shining damned sea- two more likeable candidates for the highest office in the country?

Having peeped through the open window of our neighbor’s bedroom for years, how can we now possibly claim to be appalled that our presidential election has devolved into a reality show?

Rather than conducting a grand national debate on the issues which could serve to better us all, we had a peep show, where we hungrily gorged ourselves in real time on an endless loop of dirty laundry.

And why not? We have greedily leered as others have sold their souls to the devil for their Faustian fifteen minutes of fame. Given our collective attention span, that fifteen minutes is now closer to three so you have to cash in while the window is still open.

We have blithely watched as mothers cash in on their children’s porno movies, turning Kim Kardashian West into a national monument.

We are amused to have the anchor of a major news channel and a former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in an argument reminiscent of Vikki Gunvalson and Tamra Judge of the Real Housewives of Orange County.

All that was missing was the smiling and smug but utterly delightful Andy Cohen.

(It is hard – if not downright gross- to imagine Tip O’Neal or Sam Rayburn saying to Walter Cronkite, “You’re obsessed with sex.”)

It is certainly the first election in which a major candidate has bragged he has a large penis. Not exactly Webster’s Reply to Calhoun.

Friends are lost because of political Facebook postings.

We’ve viewed emails, both public and private, heard about Donald Trump’s hands, Hillary Clinton’s ankles, and otherwise witnessed a shit show the likes of which makes the Hamilton- Burr duel seem downright genteel.

There is nothing off-limits. Sex. Religion. Race. There is nothing too personal to share or reveal.

Our national obsession with the profane is neither new nor even uniquely American, but we do have a new wizard of the occult, the twenty-four hour news cycle, whom we summon to conjure up demons big and small.

 We have relinquished our ability to know that some things are inherently wrong for a glimpse up the teacher’s skirt.

We have surrendered our license to think.

          I have seen the devil and it is us.

          As for me, I’ve got my own damn demons to dispel. So ninety- one days ago I decided to reset, to get back to First Principles, to try and calm the turbulence in my own small mind and soothe the unrest in my own unholy soul.

          While I cannot change the acrimony I see, I can change me.

 For I am the devil I know.

Whether as my own personal protest or perhaps as penitence, I decided to do ninety yoga classes in ninety days.

          It has forced me to discipline not just my body but my mind, reminding me that to transcend requires not only transcendence but, in fact, a starting place, a benchmark from which to transcend.

It is this part of yoga that has always held a mystical allure for me, not because of the transcendence but because it stabilizes me, it gets me back to myself- even when I’m a real asshole.

          The first principle is you have to be there- you have to show up. I have to make the time to go to class very day and I have to actually show up -because history gets made by those who show up.

          The next principle is that I have to start at the beginning, not in the middle. I have spent a lifetime starting in the middle. Whether from birth order (I am the youngest of three brothers), a nasty competitive streak, or a preternatural cosmic impatience, I have always simply wanted to be farther down the road than I deserved to.

My life before yoga was a high-wire act without a net, more style than substance and more balls than brains. It requires daring- and profound arrogance- to teach college at twenty-two and run for the legislature at twenty-three, particularly considering the fact that I was an utter fraud in both.

But on my mat, I have to start at the beginning; indeed, I have to start with my shortcomings. Not only do I have to show up every day, I have to be prepared, never one of my strong suits.

I have to get there early- not only to stretch and warm my creaky old muscles and joints but to prepare and open my mind for the challenges ahead.

To start class, I root my feet on all fours corners, grounding myself into the earth with a genuine stability I have never known. I lift and open my chest, place my hands in my prayer at my heart, and raise my head to the heavens.

All things considered, not a bad place to start for a dinosaur ex-fraternity boy from East Texas.

Throughout class, I have to remember to stay within myself even as I try to push beyond my limitations and realize that the power of a particular pose always comes in overcoming my own weakness of mind, body or spirit, not in flinging myself into them.

I have spent a lifetime flinging myself into poses, allowing momentum to propel me forward even when I was not remotely ready. But that only cheated me, depriving of discipline, focus, and, alas, genuine satisfaction.

As a result, I often find myself actually angry during class, almost always in those poses which make me fearful or uncomfortable or for which I am unprepared. Balance poses which combine any forward folding or twisting seem to positively wring anxiety out of me.

A simple half-moon can send me so far into the throes of terror and frustration that I can almost feel myself falling deeply into the abyss. A revolved half –moon can send me into years of therapy.

On my mat, I have nowhere to hide because no one is looking but me, so the demons are where they always were.

But at the end of each class, there is rest. It is more than physical recovery. For about three minutes, I lay quiet and still on my mat. The physical exertion has loosened the death grip that my fears have on my thoughts, allowing them to roam untethered, free of intent, purpose, or meaning.

In these moments, it is not simply the absence of motion but the actual presence of peace. Oddly, it is here where the yoga begins. If I transcend in these moments, it is from my own demons.

As a profoundly imperfect man, God knows that it enough.

There is no dealing with my demons. There is no minimizing them. There is no distraction from them through sleight of hand.  So I must accept it and surrender. Or get pissed off.

I have spent a lifetime dancing without a net on the wire, trying to prove my own worthiness to others even when I did not believe in it myself. A poor man’s Don Quixote, I tilted at windmills and slashed away at my demons with my wooden sword.

I cannot eliminate my demons but I can control myself- my breath, my focus, my patience, and my discipline.

This is my mastery. It may not be transcendental or pretty, but it is mine.

And I didn’t have to sell my soul for it.

           

           © Thomas C. Barron 2017