tales of copper city

Listening

Listening as a discipline and practice came up at our church here in Bisbee, last Sunday, and I decided to post again a piece I wrote on listening back in 2009.  I need to read this frequently, maybe once a week, to remind myself of how poorly I listen, and how much I need to change that. Listening can become a practice, much like meditation is a practice to Buddhists and others. Perhaps that's my New Year's resolution.  Here's the piece:

 Yesterday, on the Fourth here in Bisbee, 2009, we had a large crowd at our house, watching the parade, eating, and talking. It was a fun day all around and the fireworks last night were spectacular. 

Our house is on the parade route in Warren, one part of Bisbee.  When we lived in Bisbee for 10 years before, from 1996 to 2005, we lived in "Old Town" or old Bisbee up the road and on the canyon walls. Now we are down in the flatlands, still at 4000 feet or so in the high desert.

The opposite of trust

In reading about the latest dust-up over the President's address to the nation on the problem of unemployment, and the Speaker's refusal to accommodate him, I was tempted to descend into my usual partisan rant.  But in truth, this looks to me a lot like a poor piece of staff work, at the least, and at the worst, yet another sign about how far we are from coming together on anything.

Coincidentally, my class on policy analysis and public health has just read an essay, "Sixties Civics" by Hugh Heclo, one of our leading political scientists, included in a terrific reader on the Great Society, The Great Society and the High Tide of American Liberalism, edited by Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur.  The book is a re-assessment, a generally favorable one, about the accomplishments of this unique period in our political history that most date from 1965 to 1972.

Mexican food

Bob Shear, a friend from my days working in alcohol and alcoholism policy, and the person who prepared me for what I might face as we were getting ready to move to New York, turned up in my inbox, out of the blue.  This is another reason why the Internet is so wonderful---connecting up again.

Bob is coming to Bisbee from California, on his way to see his daughter in New Mexico.  And somehow, as we wrote back and forth about his coming I happened to mention Mexican food, and how I found it difficult to get good Mexican food here in Bisbee, so close to the border.  And when I wrote about "good Mexican food" I remembered that, for me at least, "Mexican food" means "Mexican food I have eaten in the past and have come to love a lot."  

And if you live in the Southwest or in California, you may have learned to love different Mexican food in different places and states.

The passion of waiting redux

As we waited for Senator Joe Lieberman (or Senator Ben Nelson or Senator Blanche Lincoln) to see if we would have  a chance for health care reform, I almost daily get up on my soap box and rage on about the perfidy of "sectional politics," about the anti-majoritarian Senate, and about the egos of the Blue Dog Democrats.  And now, we will be waiting to see how the president and the Democrats do with the House in the hands of a very conservative Republican majority. As far as I can tell, despite its disappointments, we have had our victories.

And once again I remind myself, as 2011 approaches, that I cannot allow this horrendous mess in Washington to haunt my life and blot out the life that is in front of my eyes.  And so I re-publish a piece I wrote about the passion of waiting, in April of 2009.  

At St. John's this Friday, Christmas Eve, we have our annual community service, and people from all over town will be there, the churched and the unchurched, all join together in this season of waiting.

 I have been re-reading Henri Nouwen's The Path of Waiting. I think it is among the best of the many books that I have read on waiting, a kind of brief, succinct summary of how large waiting does loom---should loom---in our life.

Nouwen relies on an Anglican priest, W.H. Vanstone, who wrote The Stature of Waiting, also a wonderful book that reminds us that, beginning with the trip to Jerusalem, Jesus "handed himself over" to the Judeans and to the Romans, and knowing very likely what would be done to him, surely hoping to be surprised.

Two strangers alone together

This is a blog entry I posted last year, near our 43rd wedding anniversary.  Number 44 is coming up in a few more days, and this is still my love letter to my wife Carole Ann Long Beauchamp. Happy Anniversary to Us!

"It's a bloody miracle!," she said, shocking him a little. "Two strangers thrown together forever, for years, and expected to make it!"  

He had just remembered that in two weeks they would celebrate another anniversary, the 43rd, as a matter of fact. And they both looked at each other, somewhat in surprise, discovering each other for the very first time yet again, still together and yet still a little alone.

Compassion as waiting

I've told this story too many times before, the story about when, as a young boy, around four or five, we lived in Tyler, Texas. It was Christmas, and my mother had bought a pair of house shoes for my father. She showed them to me a week before Christmas, and to this day I can see them in the box with the tissue paper around them. She said,  “This is a secret. Don’t tell your Dad. This is a surprise.” One night as we sat in our small living room, my father reading a newspaper and me sitting beside my mother on the couch, I suddenly shouted out, “house shoes.” At first my mother scowled, and then she started laughing, and then so did my father.

I made it for about four days. The waiting finally got to me.

Ghost state

Last week I drove 545 miles to Riverside, CA to help my oldest friend.  He's in serious trouble. He has a terrible case of cellulitis; his lower limbs are hugely swollen. His feet are the size of footballs.  He has to wear post-op sandals, the X-L size, and you can barely get the velcro over his reddened, swollen, cracked feet. He lives alone and his bank account has been looted twice to the tune of $10,000, and his reverse mortgage company stopped his monthly payments of almost $800 a year ago because he hasn't paid the subcontractor. My friend hasn't paid the subcontractor because the contractor's work was done without permits and was unbelieveably shoddy.  The subcontractor is a termite company strongly urged upon him by the mortgage underwriter in Riverside. I smell a kickback scheme, but what do I know?

I love New York

In two weeks, we will be returning to New York, to the 25th anniversary convocation of the founding of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany, SUNY. This is part of what I plan to say.

This school was the dream of Dr. David Axelrod, then the Commissioner of Health for New York, and Dr. David Carpenter our first dean and his staff turned that dream into reality. Carole and I joined that effort three years after the school began, in 1988.

My wife and I are so grateful to be asked back to speak at this important celebration. This is an incredible honor, an opportunity to say once again, we love New York.

Losing your life

I am always amazed—and that is precisely the right word—that when I need to hear it, the Word comes to me, again and again.

I have been really spinning around, constantly dancing from one scenario to the next, wondering how I will make my new life here in Durham, a life which seems so very different than my life for the past nine years in Bisbee, AZ.

More teaching? Writing fiction? Publishing another book, one more, one last word about public health?

Or shall I take up golf or even bowling? Should we spend more time traveling or playing Scrabble?  Is it time for amusement?

Should I live this stage of my life with some sense of the grim fatefulness of our disastrous course in national politics?

Should I pay more attention to the bizarre turn of Bisbee politics of the past 18 months and the rise of the Usual Suspects?

Fiction (and movies) are my refuge

Part of the reason I moved to the Southwest and the border was to hide out from the evening news.  I stopped watching network news decades ago.  I have watched the MSNBC lineup from time to time, but frankly they only remind me of how crazy things are getting.

My true refuge is fiction and movies. I know, I know, who am I kidding? Still I am at the stage in my life where I can choose to sit around and stew at the state of things or I can enjoy the worlds others create that wake us up to life, wake us up to the wonder that is life itself in the midst of our brief twitch of time.

I mentioned the worlds that Jonathan Carroll creates in his novels in my last post, and he was so kind to send along a comment, from Vienna.  I am grateful for that. Carroll's fiction is a whole other thing,  a kind of magical realism that is totally refreshing but also demanding. Jonathan Lethem can sometimes go to the worlds that Carroll creates. I am particularly fond of As She Crawled Across the Table because it is situated at the University of North California at Beauchamp, and Lethem makes sure the reader knows to pronounce it "beach'-em."  Given my name, how could I resist it?