A Jan DeOrio Moment

We always feared arriving in Detroit each summer because then the mothers would reunite, giggle-screaming over anything. Drew and I would demand to be in the dads’ van on the way up to Elk Lake, but our respective younger brothers would weasel and whine in first. So Drew and I would sit on the rear bench, planning the year’s moss buildup or jam session, but then it would, it always would start: “Free Willy!” my mother would squeal as she and Mrs. DeOrio carried some horrifying joke even further, here inventing embarrassing new sequels for the oversequeled kids film about a threatened orca. “How about…Free Willy gets a circumcision!” and there they went. We hunched down, lest anyone associate us with this maternally howling vehicle. “Oh, this is a real Jan DeOrio moment,” my mother would say then between her awful cackles, and would say anytime when trapped in Ohio with three men morally opposed to loathsome running gags. We each would have those moments that wanted to be shared — my Drew moments, Zack’s Scott moments, Dad’s Tony moments — but a Jan DeOrio moment remains both the most inimitable and most feared.

Dame Bays

Rex Terrace on Elk Lake was a loose confederation of independently owned houses that shared some amenities: the beach, a dock and a boathouse, tennis court. Each house had a quaint name (ours was the Dining Hall) as if a part of some nostalgic Michigan commune. There was even the Icehouse that really had been used to house ice. Point is, Rex Terrace was old, and this was the concern of one old lady, Mrs. Bays, when she saw Drew and I solving the issue of a wasps’ nest outside the Dining Hall by means of sturdy branches duct-taped together, terminating into a basketball-sized wad of newspaper, aflame. “This place could go up like a tinder box!” she exploded at us, then more at Mr. DeOrio whom she thought had permitted our incendiary eradication (which, one should know, continued unabated as she fumed). Telling the story at dinner for those who had missed the confrontation around the conflagration, Mr. DeOrio referred to her as “Dame Bays,” a moniker that subsequently applied to anyone calling for responsible living at the expense of great fun (and efficiency — we were blazing through those wasps).

Herr Suzie

After Dame Bays reported our pyroextermination, we were not invited back to Rex Terrace. Really, the place had been a dump — creaky floors, wood stove heating, snakes in the woodpile, leeches in the boathouse — so the trimmed lawns and centrally heated cottages (numbered, not named) seemed quite an upgrade. Other kids our age were around (nighttime lakeside flirtations ensued), and the greater sense of civilization meant our parents let us run a little more rampant (sans fire). The proprietress, a middle-aged tanned blonde named Suzie, disagreed with this liberation. We were only to whisper in the lodge’s breakfast nook. We were not to run in the game room. There was to be no music played above 50 dB. We all tolerated her militance for a few years — “Jawöhl, Herr Suzie,” we’d whisper after one of her injunctions — but when we found a nice, single-family house to rent on Glen Lake beneath the glorious Sleeping Bear Dunes, we left and began to call anyone acting officious “Herr Suzie.” An effective moniker, for no one wants to be a commandant in Michigan.

First, in narcissistic news, I’ve updated The Scriptorium with excerpts from some of my MFA Year 1 productions. The full versions are all freely available; simply remember that I always try to follow the word of the Lord. In this case: ask, and it shall be given unto you. That’s a promise and a warning.

Second, I will be posting real content weekly for the duration of the summer. That, too, is a promise and a warning, but mostly a way to ensure that I feel obligated to more than myself, which has too stony a heart to be bothered by broken vows. Being anti-politics, I’ll give you exactly what you expect.Not change, just more of the same.

Third, what was that?My way to do footnotes/asides. Fast, intuitive, and unobtrusive except for the link color (I’m still debating how to strike the right balance between subtlety and noticeability.) So yeah, I guess you can expect some change, but only in style and appearance, not substance. Here I am behaving politically.

Now, get ready for some thoughts on money as a root of all kinds of good before the weekend, whereupon you can choose to spread your cash (if you have it) for either dark or light.

Anyone sitting through an unabridged performance of Messiah probably spends much of the oratorio waiting for the famed “Hallelujah!” chorus. And why not? Its glorious strains resound so magnificently that they were deemed worthy to accompany Clark Griswold’s incomparable Christmas illumination. Each successive aria — “Comfort ye my people,” “All we like sheep have gone astray,” “Lift up your heads, o ye gates” — anticipates the choral explosion that drew the king of England to his feet in awe.

Advent was a time of preparation and anticipation, looking forward to today, waiting for this arrival. Here it is: the celebration of the birth of salvation. Hallelujah, indeed!

Handel’s “Hallelujah!” was not his finis; the show goes on. Hallelujah is not all that we are waiting for; it is only the triumphant beginning. There is so much more. After all, someone born today grew to proclaim a kingdom that was at hand but not yet in hand; he called for workers for the coming harvest.

Something wondrous this way comes, even greater than what arrived this night. But it is not yet here, and you might miss it if you simply sit in passive expectation. So awake, arise, or be forever fallen; prepare ye the way!

What are you waiting for, anyway?

He spoke in a heavy inner city drawl, asking for a cigarette, saluting my pipe, and offering to show me where to buy crack (right around the corner, to my dismay.) He wanted money, food, something to inhale, and also someone to listen, so I sat down and chatted.

We made a divergent pair of stepmates. His eyes were thin and his hairline frail; mine blaze deep and my locks are voluminous. He sought $17 — he’d get me back on Thursday, honest — to buy groceries: vienna sausages, peanut butter, a loaf of bread — and some cigarettes, knowh’imeen? — whereas I had come out to ponder the literary heavens I envy and grasp at. He coughed every other sentence; my lungs are clean (though I was adamantly polluting them as though I were competing in Beijing.)

Of course we could bring race into these disparities, but it has nothing to do with them. I sat where I sat and he sat where he sat because of economics and age. I am rich in youth if not dollars (though I am always provided for); he has weathered more than his 48 years and now relies on disability payments after being discharged from the army after being turned down while pursuing medicine. Now he’s stuck sitting on other’s steps because his complex has no open space, bumming a bent cigarette from a passerby, and asking for less than $20 from a kid full of idealistic questions about thriving not surviving and a vague benediction about getting where he’s going.

I, clutching my bag of cancer and a cup of liver cirrhosis, had stepped onto the porch with an intent to lasso what courage was to Hemingway, what freaks were to Flannery, what socialites were to Fitzgerald, and what disease was to Dostoevsky — that minor niche through which I could speak universally. I was looking up and out for what would move me to the point of shouting and then he sat down on my steps.

Malice in the Chalice (documentary on the evolution of communion rituals - intinction, the rail, closed or open, etc)

The Matrices (physicists try to explain the concept of a multiverse to Keanu Reeves who tries to explain kung fu. in slow motion.)

Strays of Our Lives (SPCA shelter profiles and stories)

The Field of Reams (where paper grows on trees. if you print it, they will come.)

The Sheepshank Redemption (Iron Chef losers get a second chance; secret ingredient always lamb.)

Schindler’s Lost (slowly scrolling list of the lives Oskar Schindler couldn’t save. very long, very depressing, very postmodern artsy.)

American History Y (racism replaced by chauvinism, main character resembles more or less every American male)

The Fifth Sense (documentary of police bloodhounds and body hunts: i smell dead people.)

There Will Be Bold (history of font decorations and the evolution of typeface weight)

- Writer writes.

- Writer edits. And some more.

- Writer feels satisfied with work.

- Writer gets crunk.

- Writer revisits and revises the work the following morning.

Now, if that final rereading finds the work engaging, energizing, and enjoyable, then it is clearly a masterpiece. If it can be enjoyed and understood while hungover, then it will be accessible to any audience, even jaded admissions officers.

This is how I knew my grad school essays were complete. A very collegiate method, no?

King lamented.

Mephistopheles never omitted pointed questions: “Relinquishing sanctity?”

“To ultimately vanquish worldly xploits, yet Zion awaits.”

I visited the Contemporary Arts Center down here for the first time recently. I found it all very engaging. A particular collection of works especially thrilled me, but I couldn’t shake a voice in my head saying, “This isn’t art.” I dismissed it as my conservative Cincinnati roots acting up again, but it was far more persistent than a mere inner fuddyduddy.

The various pieces had engaging form and content. They had aesthetic appeal (though obviously not in a classical artistic sense). They opened my eyes to new perspectives. One was an arrangement of baby food jars with phonetic approximations of infantile babble etched on each. One took marble slabs from various famous buildings and created a map that showed where the rock had been quarried. Very clever stuff. I liked it. But it really just felt like an innovative sort of Smithsonian History museum exhibit.

And that was it, how it felt. It had no emotional core. Fittingly, after browsing the levels, I sat down to write. I scribbled out a poem that tried to express a recent experience. Rereading it later, I realized that I had kept myself far too detached. I had even written in third person. So while I had successfully expressed the concepts I wanted to get across, I lacked that emotional depth that would have made it an affective/effective poem.

So, today I faced the music and submitted some of these creative efforts to various publications. I’m significantly more connected to these than to some of my other compositions (articles, devotionals), so I probably won’t sleep until I hear back, which could take a few months. 2008 will see a very tired Christoffer.

As I was clicking/licking send/stamps, I mused on an alternative meaning of submit: to yield. This definition fit my actions arguably more than the literal definition of sending something in. I didn’t especially want to spread my words, but, if I am to be a writer, I’ll have to yield to the need to present my work publicly.

Now, how rude would it be for me to send these compositions to strangers but deprive my friends of them? Quite rude, I think, and hopefully ruder than I am. This is just to say, if you want to read something, submit your request, and I’ll reveal a little piece of my heart to you.