jack is not dead

he is very much alive

in the hearts of those who knew him

those who loved him

he simply ran out of breath

as he rounded the turn and headed for home

with the finish line in full view

he gave it all he had

and he had so much to give

and that giving will continue

beyond the limitations of time

his race, his marathon, is over

yet the crowds grow larger

as his words fill new hearts

and his voice continues to be heard

ever so gently

he left this life with grace and gratitude

and an abundance of serenity and love

after a life well lived

after limitless love

jack mccarthy was larger than life

and now that the race is over

jack mccarthy is larger than death

his legacy is one of hope

of warmth and light

of love and compassion

jack dined at the table of plenty

and he shared his meals with us

his light will continue to burn brightly

in the hearts of those

who have been deeply touched

by his words

by his love

by his life

neil scott 021013

“Calendric savants,” they’re called,
a subset of idiot savants.
Usually they’re retarded,
frequently autistic,
but they have this one curious skill,
infallible.

How would their talent work?
I picture something
whirring in the mind
as in an old movie,
pages of a calendar flipping
to indicate passage of time
but calibrated,
abacus-like, till, “Saturday.
Pretty smart, aren’t I?”

“You sure are,”
and I can almost believe
that it’s just some weird skill,
like Professor Backwards,
except that in 1582
when the calendar went from Julian to Gregorian
ten days in October were skipped
arbitrarily–

and if you ask the savants
for a date in September, 1582,
they get it right,
they adjust for the missing days.
Explain that with your
flipping Franklin Planner.

What do calendric savants answer
when the given date
is one of the missing days?
Probably, “Never.”

How to explain their talent?
I think some laughing god
encoded a riddle in their DNA
for the rest of us to worry at.
I think the answer to the riddle is,
“Never.” We’re never going to
figure it all out.

Still and all, calendrics are no more
outlandish than our present crop of
politicians, who know intuitive
and speak upon request
precisely those half-truths
that fifty-one percent
of voters arbitrarily
want to hear.

“Tax cut. Welfare reform.
There is no class war.
First Tuesday in November.
Pretty smart, aren’t I?”

This was the same school where
they brought in some big names–
Oppenheimer, Robert Frost,
legends in their own lifetime–
to spend a week on campus in
the “Visiting Fireman” program.
They’d sit with us in class
and meet with small groups

of hand-picked students–
myself included–who,
with all roads open, asked
only the most general questions,
the vaguest of directions.
Frost was old, gentle,
white-haired, ever respectful
of us, but had an air as though

always holding back a laugh
at some constant running joke
as if his intercourse with us
was just a playful fragment
of an ongoing dialogue
between two lovers, the way
you’d sit a three-year-old
on your knee and tell her

in her mother’s hearing she
would be even more beautiful
than her mother, if only such
perfection were possible, and the words
are heartfelt appreciation,
the hyperbole is slight;
the lovers’ joke is in
the indirection.

Some people ask me today,
“Why do you write poetry?”
Sometimes I say to them
that it’s my Irish blood;
other times I tell them how I shook
the feathery, parchment hand of
Robert Frost when I was seventeen,
maybe something took.

But if I say that, they ask
why I lost so many years
before I started writing.
Sometimes I answer that I counted cost;
other times I tell the legend
of saltpetre past, highlighting
the fact that it and Frost
kicked in at last

about the same time.

We were ripe for intimidation
and the most inimitable intimidator
of all was Mister Hatch. He taught
Latin and his classroom was right
next the marble portal inscribed
Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis-
“Come this way, boys, that you may be men.”
The road to manhood ran past Mister Hatch.

He was the legend of legends.
To pass his room when Latin I
was getting out–the door bursts open
and fourteen boys of wildly various sizes
various amounts of ankle showing
explode into the corridor
some of them in tears.
There they mill

like survivors of a terrorist bomb,
oblivious to traffic patterns, and to
passersby who haven’t shared their
ordeal, comparing desperate notes-
“What did he say the homework was?”
“When do we have to have that memorized?”
“My brother–did my brother make it out?
HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY BROTHER?”

What was so terrifying about him?
He was not a big man.
Refereeing a lacrosse game
he looked a tough enough little guy
all bulbs and wire
but nothing out of Steven King.
Knobby knees and calf muscles, forehead,
but I doubt he weighed one-forty.

But put a sportcoat on him, close
him in that little room with us and he’d
bolt up and start to pace behind us
like a lion from the Serengeti loose
in a stableful of calves tethered
round an oval table unable to turn
their heads never knowing when
and where he might strike.

What was terrifying was his voice. Rumor
had it he’d been gassed in World War I.
In soft registers that voice was like
the whisper of a bullfrog, sometimes hard
to hear–which in itself was menacing–
inevitably, any uncaught word
came back to haunt you, and ask him
to repeat himself? Oh come now.

In loud registers, his voice was
lion’s roar, not challenge, but a feral
non-negotiable demand for submission
the assertion of one species’ absolute
power of life and death over another.
It didn’t trigger adrenalin but
paralysis. In its middle registers–
no, his voice had no middle registers.

Each class was like a Bach organ piece
that started soft, one hand weaving
gentle melody fraught with inevitability
promise that before we’re finished here
every key, every pedal, every stop
will have been exploited for maximum
dramatic and emotional effect, that
I am going to put you through

the wringer. Most terrifying of
all was the certainty that if
you had left just one thing undone
he would find you out
there was no place to hide
in that little room there
wasn’t enough cannon
fodder it might take almost

all of his allotted fifty
minutes but the undone task would
rise like a bubble to the surface
sit there calling, “Mister Ha-atch”
till he would wheel on you and you
would regret your oversight like
Troy regretted letting in that horse.
Once that door shut and locked us in

with him all that we could ever
be to each other was potential
decoys in this little herd
if he took you tonight
he might not get to me
so what if you were my best friend.
This was the optimum in training
for the corporate world.

I don’t remember so much
the content of what he would say
when he caught you out
but it felt like, gently, “Why
don’t you know
the present subjunctive of sum
Mr. McCarthy?”
“I don’t know sir.”

“We’ve already established that you don’t
know I was asking why you don’t know.”
“I don’t know why I don’t know, sir.”
“Wasn’t it the most important
thing in the world last night?”
“Of course it was sir.”
Then a little more forcefully,
“Have you ever in your life been asked to do

anything more important than memorize
the present subjunctive of the verb to be?”
“No sir.” Then bellowing,
like the Minotaur
thundering toward you
from every direction of the Labyrinth
“THEN HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE DONE IT?”
“I DON’T KNOW SIR!”

And I was one of the lucky ones.
I didn’t have Mr. Hatch till senior year
Latin IV Special. We were quam optimi,
as good as it got. We had learned our chops in
the less surreal classrooms of the Stuckeys,
and the Galbreaths, and the Coffins, and we
knew our stuff or we wouldn’t have been there.
And if he treated preps as barbari

for the simple reason they did not know
Latin, he respected us because we did.
Not that we didn’t at times disappoint him-
times his outrage was compounded by
knowledge we had come so far, that this
once-great school had fallen on such evil times
that Mr. McCarthy could arrive in this class
without knowing the meaning of vereor-

which means what, Mr. Gates? (wheeling).
“I am terrified, sir.” “Correct.”
Did Gates really know?
or had he gotten lucky?
We had Mister Hatch at 5:25,
after sports, at the end of a long day
when we thought we were almost home free.
I remember that room always being dark.

There’d be a lamp on over his desk
and a floor lamp somewhere
but I don’t think he ever
turned on the overhead light
and entering that room in the dark
months between October and April
was like entering the lair of a predator
who smelled like floorwax and old books.

But we were the favored sons
and whole classes could pass
without a spark catching his fuse.
Once even this: I was translating
a passage about the Cyclops, and the Latin
had alliteration, so I went for it
in my English, passing up the obvious
“His feet struck the grass,” for

the marginally more ambitious “smote the sod,”
and Mr. Hatch said, “You have…”
in that way he had of beginning a phrase
before he had really had time to gather
the entirety of his fragmented voice
and we all froze because we knew that
when he was moved enough to do that
the fasces was about to fall

and he went on
“…the nicest way of coming up
with just the right phrase in translation…”
and we sat there stunned.
I stammered, “Thank you, sir” and risked
a glance across the table at flabbergasted
faces, Barzun, Lenesse, and Marcus
their bodies rigid

their breath still indrawn
nobody knowing what to do with this
totally uncharacteristic lapse
somehow more frightening
than anything he’d ever done before.
It was probably from that moment I was
fated to teach prep school Latin
a few years myself.

II

That fall my mother died
and in adolescent bravado I
promised my father I’d get
Highest Honors for the fall term
something I’d never been able to do.
I worked hard, would have made it
except Mr. Hatch gave me a B-plus
instead of the A-minus I had earned.

I dared approach him and he told me
he’d deducted for some lines of poetry
I’d failed to memorize. I wailed,
“But that was extra credit,”
and he painstakingly explained,
like astronomy to a small child,
“You can’t expect extra credit if
there’s no deduction if it’s not done.”

Then, sensing the depth of my disappointment,
he surprised me, offered, “Is there some
reason this grade’s important to you?”
But I hadn’t come looking for charity
and I said no, left quickly so he wouldn’t
know I cried. In March, when my classmates
were deep into their Aeneid papers,
my father died.

Returned to school I tried to
weasel out of the paper, arguing
I couldn’t concentrate, I was
worried about things at home,
what would become of my brother?
But Mister Hatch didn’t buy it,
so I ended up throwing together
over two all-nighters

a collage of quotes
transcribed from impeccable sources
but too obviously selected
for their extravagant length.
He gave me D-minus, which let me graduate,
but brought me down to C-plus for the year—-
though it did not deny me
third place on the Latin prize exam.

The next few years got ugly fast.
I dropped out of Dartmouth, went
down a labyrinth or two of my own
devising. Maybe someday it will be of
benefit to remember even those things.
I came out the other side and at
twenty-five was back at Dartmouth
taking Latin and writing, finally,

an Aeneid paper good enough for
presentation to the Classics Club.
The central insight of that paper
was supported by my discovery that
in the first six books Aeneas weeps
fourteen times; in the last six, once.
A demonstrative, emotional Phrygian
becomes a stoic, Augustan Roman,

culminating in his Disce puer speech
to his son: “Learn from me, boy, about duty,
about doing the right thing always.
You’ll have to learn from someone else
about happiness.” Mister Hatch,
retired from Exeter and living in Vermont,
was at the Classics Club that night.
I introduced my paper with the story

of the Exeter D-minus, ending,
“Mister Hatch, this paper is for you.
I apologize for being eight years late.”
I had survived, and I had come to
love him. I’ve always felt that was
the year that I became a man, never quite
known why; having told this story I
suspect that might have been the night.

III

Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis.
What did it mean, really? Never
would we be men unless we came
this way? It frightened me
the first time that I read it,
as though I knew intuitive my way
to manhood would be terrible indeed.
I always preferred the side door

of that building, uninscribed,
unpromising, unthreatening.
But some read that inscription
and declined to enter at all.
Others came, but disappeared along
the way. For some the obstacle
was Mister Hatch’s class, to
“Did my brother make it out?”

the answer was No. Yet surely they
all came to manhood too. On different
timetables, by different routes.
If we survive the terrorism of
our very maleness, we arrive.
Sometimes working phonathons
I get a man confides, “I only
stayed at Exeter a month,

but I still like to give something,”
and I feel a special gratitude to him,
but at the same time embarrassment,
as though inadvertently I’ve raised
some ancient shame.
I want to ask him,
“Was it Mister Hatch?”
I want to tell him, “Yes,

we were a hard proud lot, who
came that way and who survived.”
Nobody called you a deserter
but neither did Latin have a phrase
for “conscientious objector.”
You took the road less travelled by,
and how much difference, really,
did it make?

Magnum iter is an idiom;
it looks like “great journey,”
but it translates “forced march.”
We were on a magnum iter.
Sometimes in the long dark nights
of those marches, we abandoned
our impedimenta, the softnesses
within us that were destined

not to serve us in the coming
battle with barbari who would
have every advantage over us except
virtus, the stuff of manhood. We had to
leave some of our comites to fend for
themselves by roads in enemy territory.
Today when we look back we see only
a great journey and a victory

not a forced march
never the casualties.
But the issue never was
that we be men, it was
the kind of men we should become.
And I want somehow to apologize
for all of us to the man
who left after a month.

And I want to ask if he
by any chance remembers seeing,
back beside the road
he didn’t take,
any of my impedimenta,
my brother, or the last
promise I made
to my father.

We died of pneumonia in furnished rooms
where they found us three days later
when somebody complained about the smell
we died against bridge abutments
and nobody knew if it was suicide
and we probably didn’t know either
except in the sense that it was always suicide
we died in hospitals
our stomachs huge, distended
and there was nothing they could do
we died in cells
never knowing whether we were guilty or not.

We went to priests
they gave us pledges
they told us to pray
they told us to go and sin no more, but go
we tried and we died

we died of overdoses
we died in bed (but usually not the Big Bed)
we died in straitjackets
in the DTs seeing God knows what
creeping skittering slithering
shuffling things

And you know what the worst thing was?
The worst thing was that
nobody ever believed how hard we tried

We went to doctors and they gave us stuff to take
that would make us sick when we drank
on the principle of so crazy, it just might work, I guess
or maybe they just shook their heads
and sent us places like Dropkick Murphy’s
and when we got out we were hooked on paraldehyde
or maybe we lied to the doctors
and they told us not to drink so much
just drink like me
and we tried
and we died

we drowned in our own vomit
or choked on it
our broken jaws wired shut
we died playing Russian roulette
and people thought we’d lost
but we knew better
we died under the hoofs of horses
under the wheels of vehicles
under the knives and bootheels of our brother drunks
we died in shame

And you know what was even worse?
was that we couldn’t believe it ourselves
that we had tried
we figured we just thought we tried
and we died believing that we hadn’t tried
believing that we didn’t know what it meant to try

When we were desperate enough
or hopeful or deluded or embattled enough to go for help
we went to people with letters after their names
and prayed that they might have read the right books
that had the right words in them
never suspecting the terrifying truth
that the right words, as simple as they were
had not been written yet

We died falling off girders on high buildings
because of course ironworkers drink
of course they do
we died with a shotgun in our mouth
or jumping off a bridge
and everybody knew it was suicide
we died under the Southeast Expressway
with our hands tied behind us
and a bullet in the back of our head
because this time the people that we disappointed
were the wrong people
we died in convulsions, or of “insult to the brain”
we died incontinent, and in disgrace, abandoned
if we were women, we died degraded,
because women have so much more to live up to
we tried and we died and nobody cried

And the very worst thing
was that for every one of us that died
there were another hundred of us, or another thousand
who wished that we could die
who went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up
because what we were enduring was intolerable
and we knew in our hearts
it wasn’t ever gonna change

One day in a hospital room in New York City
one of us had what the books call
a transforming spiritual experience
and he said to himself

I’ve got it
(no you haven’t you’ve only got part of it)

and I have to share it
(now you’ve ALMOST got it)

and he kept trying to give it away
but we couldn’t hear it
the transmission line wasn’t open yet
we tried to hear it
we tried and we died

we died of one last cigarette
the comfort of its glowing in the dark
we passed out and the bed caught fire
they said we suffocated before our body burned
they said we never felt a thing
that was the best way maybe that we died
except sometimes we took our family with us

And the man in New York was so sure he had it
he tried to love us into sobriety
but that didn’t work either, love confuses drunks
and he tried and still we died
one after another we got his hopes up
and we broke his heart
because that’s what we do

And the worst thing was that every time
we thought we knew what the worst thing was
something happened that was worse

Until a day came in a hotel lobby
and it wasn’t in Rome, or Jerusalem, or Mecca
or even Dublin, or South Boston
it was in Akron, Ohio, for Christ’s sake

a day came when the man said I have to find a drunk
because I need him as much as he needs me
(NOW
you’ve got it)

and the transmission line
after all those years
was open
the transmission line was open

And now we don’t go to priests
and we don’t go to doctors
and people with letters after their names
we come to people who have been there
we come to each other
and we try
and we don’t have to die

I was Jackie, the firstborn,
the apple of every eye,
gratuitous meanness bewildered me,
and as soon as she’d hit me,
I’d bawl like a baby.

I knew that boys were not supposed to cry,
but they weren’t supposed to hit girls either,
and I was shocked when my father said,
“Hit her back.”

I thought it sounded like a great idea,
but the only thing I remember
about that girl today
is the look that came over her face
after I did hit her back.

She didn’t cry; instead
her eyes got narrow and I thought,
“Jackie, you just made a terrible mistake,”
and she really beat the crap out of me.
It was years before I trusted my father’s advice again.

I eventually learned to fight–
enough to protect myself–
from girls–
but the real issue was the crying,
and that hasn’t gone away.

Oh, I don’t cry any more, I don’t sob, I don’t make
noise, I just have hairtrigger tearducts, and always
at all the wrong things: Tom Bodett saying, “We’ll leave
the light on for ya;” I cry at the last scene of
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

In movies I despise the easy manipulation
that never even bothers to engage my feelings,
it just comes straight for my eyes,
but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it,
and I hate myself for it.

The surreptitious noseblow a discreet
four minutes after the operative scene;
my daughters are on to me, my wife;
they all know exactly when to give me that quick,
sidelong glance. What must they think of me?

In real life I don’t cry any more
when things hurt. Never a tear at seventeen
when my mother died, my father.
I never cried for my first marriage.

But today I often cry when things turn out well:
an unexpected act of simple human decency;
new evidence, against all odds,
of how much someone loves me.

I think all this is why I never wanted a son.
I always supposed my son would be like me,
and that when he’d cry it would bring back
every indelible humiliation of my own life,

and in some word or gesture
I’d betray what I was feeling,
and he’d mistake, and think I was ashamed of him.
He’d carry that the rest of his life.

Daughters are easy: you pick them up,
you hug them, you say, “There there.
Everything is going to be all right.”
And for that moment you really believe
that you can make enough of it right

enough. The unskilled labor of love.
And if you cry a little with them for all
the inevitable gratuitous meannesses of life,
that crying is not to be ashamed of.

But for years my great fear was the moment
I might have to deal with a crying son.
But I don’t have one.
We came close once, between Megan and Kathleen;
the doctors warned us there was something wrong,

and when Joan went into labor they said
the baby would be born dead.
But he wasn’t: very briefly,
before he died, I heard him cry.

We had people in that group were
always trying to trap him into heresy.
Father was a Vatican II person,
all about forgiveness, reconciliation,
disciple of John XXIII’s aborted attempt
to open the windows of the Church.
He had an air of sad sanctity, as though
wearing a hairshirt under his cassock and collar.
I remember somebody saying of him,
“For one who has no darkness in himself,
he has the best understanding I’ve ever
come across of the darkness in other people.”

I also knew Father from CCD,
the longest hour of my week,
trying to pass on what few nuggets of
truth I had picked up along the way
to a handful of hormonal public school boys
who saw my classroom as a holding cell.
The only way I could maintain
any illusion that learning was taking place
was by sending my discipline problems
to Father What-a-Waste.

One night when they were giving me
a really bad time, I gave them an ultimatum,
the next kid who opened his mouth
would be sent to Father’s office.
And of course the next kid that did was
the best kid in the class, John Fernandez,
all the hard kids had the street smarts
to know I wasn’t kidding.

John didn’t want to leave my room,
I had to haul him out physically.
Father happened to be patrolling the hall
at that moment, took custody of John from me
a second before I might actually have struck him.

Another time Father was visibly upset
when he arrived at our Bible discussion group.
One of the women prodded him gently,
and finally he admitted that he’d just caught
a boy to whom he had entrusted his keys
borrowing quarters from the Coke machine.
He felt deeply betrayed. Someone asked—
with only the slightest hint of taunting—
if Father had forgiven the boy.
After a long pause he said,
“Give me three days.”

In one of these Bible sessions
we talked about the forgiveness of sin;
how could murderers be forgiven, rapists?
Father saw their crimes as products
of a long string of decisions
where maybe the only decision on the string
that involved free will was the first one,
and maybe in God’s eyes
that first decision had no moral content,
yet made, determined everything that followed.

Somebody demanded to know
what Father What-a-Waste’s definition of sin was,
and I wrote down his exact words,
because I had a vague but urgent sense
that something important had been left out.

I went home and studied it and came back
the next week primed to nail Father.
I asked, “If that’s your definition,
then what’s the difference between a sin
and a life-mistake, like taking the wrong job,
or marrying the wrong person?”

As I look back it’s apparent
that both of those examples were issues I was just
beginning to deal with in my own life.
And I know this story would be so much better
if I could only reconstruct his definition,
but you’re going to have to trust that my logic
was ironclad, I knew I had him,
his definition didn’t allow for any difference
between a sin and simple wrong turning.

But apparently I didn’t have him,
because he’d obviously thought this through before,
and he answered simply, “There is no difference.”
That shut me up real quick, plus gave me something
to wonder about down all the years since.

Father What-a-Waste got his picture in the paper
recently over a report that the institute that deals with
pedophile priests had discharged him as
an untreatable sociopath, and that set me thinking again
about him and the difference between a sin
and a bad life-decision.

I know he must have done
the kind of things he was accused of;
there’s no room for any mistaken identity,
no legal technicalities
to compromise my judgment.

I know my church was guilty
of a hideous and hypocritical mistake
in handling this and other cases like it,
a mistake and an institutional sin
and a crime against nature.
I’m thinking it’ll take about
a hundred years of penance and mortification
and amending its ways,
confessing that it doesn’t know
fuck about human sexuality
before this church can presume to
any moral authority whatever.

But I also know that Jesus
is still Jesus, and this is still my church,
that wrong in one thing doesn’t make it
wrong in everything—though this one’s
going to take take a lot more than three days to forgive.

And I still believe that Father What-a-Waste
was a good and maybe even holy person
when I knew him, though the reason he was
so understanding of the darkness in others was
he did indeed have a darkness of his own,
growing very slowly, like a prostate
cancer he’d been told that he could heal
with magical thinking and organic foods,
a cancer that eventually consumed
his entire beautiful spiritual being.

And I wonder what that first
and almost innocent decision was
that sent him down his terrible road
to untreatability.

I pray for him every day.
I pray for all the priests, especially all the many
who never laid a hand on anyone,
so humiliated, so unjustly.
The worst kind of guilt-by-association,
yet the most natural.

I pray for the victims;
it must have been as if
God himself was abusing you.
I hope you get enough out of the Church
that you never have to worry about money again.
I hope you may be able finally to forgive,
because only then will you know yourself healed.

And I say a special prayer for John Fernandez
whom I had to drag out of his seat,
and for all the discipline problems
I handed over to Father What-a-Waste
from my CCD class.

Most prayers are aimed at
things we cannot know about the future;
this one is for things that
I don’t want to know
about the past.

Kathleen, when she was eight years old,
started coming with me to AA meetings on Friday night.
That meeting had really good coffee,
and as Kathleen made her way time after time to
the coffeepot, I’d lose sight of her because she was short,
but I could follow her progress by watching heads turn
to bless her with their eyes as she passed,
beautiful child that she was, and I knew that she was
beaming back with a beatific expression that said,
“I know I shouldn’t be drinking coffee,
but I’m getting away with something here.”

At the break they’d raffle off a Big Book,
and when the meeting broke up, Kathleen
would go from table to table collecting
all the discarded raffle tickets, which she would
bring home and store in a shoebox.
Why? I never figured it out.

Up came my AA anniversary, and I asked
Kathleen if she’d be willing to say a few words
in front of a roomful of adults and she was game—
Kathleen was always game. She had to stand
on a chair to reach the microphone, and if I remember
right, what she said was, “It is always an occasion
when someone celebrates their eleventh anniversary. Jack?”

If that was a little less—what? personal? than I expected,
still, it was a good beginning of a ten-year run.
Next year she didn’t need the chair,
and she wrote a poem that began,
“My dad is the best/he’s been that way since birth/
It’s a shame there’s only one of him/on the planet earth.”

Year three she brought Annie with her, and she said,
“Last year I read a poem for my dad’s anniversary.
This year we’re here to explain the poem.”
Oh, would that every poet might acknowledge
that responsibility.

Kathleen’s presence every Friday night lit up
that big gymnasium, and a lot of people in that AA group
who never got to watch their own kids grow up
came to look forward to those presentations
as a highlight of their year.

I remember Tom D., who couldn’t go
with us when we put on meetings in prisons
because he always set off the metal detectors
because he had a police bullet imbedded
inoperably close to his spine—
Tom said to me one night, “That kid is the best
advertisement for AA that anybody could ever see.”
And Billy G., a former three-hundred pound biker,
told me that he had a daughter Kathleen’s age
“somewhere,” and that every year he cried at
Kathleen’s presentation—but it was the good crying.

It’s my turn now to say some words for Kathleen—
although she tied my hands a little,
made me promise not to make her cry.

So my words will be directed to the groom.
Probably most fathers of the bride, if they were honest,
would admit to feeling that there isn’t a young man
in the world who’s worthy of their little girl—hey,
we were young men once, we remember.

But I want Mark to know
that I don’t feel that way—particularly.
But what I do think is that Kathleen and Mark have been
extraordinarily lucky to find each other.
It’s crazy out there, and maybe dangerous,
and it seems like it’s getting crazier every day.
Most of us feel fortunate to find anybody willing
to cast their lot with us, let alone the right person.
Today my heart is telling me that this is right.

Now, Mark, about the dowry;
I’m afraid I have to ask to be dispensed from that
archaic tradition; I’m not ungenerous, just unemployed.
But somewhere among Kathleen’s belongings, in a cellar
or an attic or at the bottom of a closet, there might still be
a shoebox full of raffle tickets that didn’t win anything.

If you find it, Mark, hang onto it.
A lot of hopes went into that box,
the hopes of people whose last names I never knew,
people who didn’t win life’s lotteries,
didn’t dodge all of life’s bullets,
who once looked at Kathleen and took heart,
who loved her and left their tickets on the tables for her,
and wished that they might be for her
tickets to a better life than they had had.

And if you don’t find that box, imagine
that you’ve got it, and in your mind,
whenever you feel that life’s too hard,
and you’re too much alone,
open up that box and run
your fingers through those old raffle tickets.
Mix them up real good, and think how much
luck it takes to find the one person in the world
that we were meant to find.

Then go to the kitchen and put on a pot of some
really good coffee—and make enough for two.

And I remember as that fateful season neared its end
almost hearing tears in the announcer’s voice
as he tried to describe the sight of you
careering around second on your two
terribly damaged legs
stretching a double into a triple.
“Gallant” was the word he used
and gallant is how I remember you.

But we live in a time
when Nike erects a billboard
in sight of the Olympic athletes:
“You Don’t Win Silver,
You Lose Gold,”
and so it is that some remember only
the nightmare tenth inning of Game Six
the big bouncing grounder
that found its way
between those gallant legs, condemning you
to the underworld of those who made it to
within a whisker of the top,
who beat all the competition
except one.
The inmost circle of that underworld’s reserved
for the Fred Merkles, and Roy Reigelses
Denny Galehouses, and Mike Dukakises
for those second-place finishers
destined to be remembered particularly
for their hammartia
that one error in judgment
the base untouched
the photo-op in the tank

Oh, Billy Buck,
why did it have to happen to you?
I once saw a music video
that began with a long string of clips
of athletes looking foolish-
stone-fingered tight end
juggles ball five times
before linebacker demolishes him
and ball drops harmless out of bounds;
runner trips over second base as though
surprised that it was there;
tall Caucasian butchers slam dunk,
comes away bleeding.
Then suddenly it changes-
wide receiver soars in the end zone
gets one hand on the ball
but it sticks
and he cradles it to his belly
surrendering his body to the furious crash
of the cornerback he just burned
in a moment of such violent airborne beauty
such conspicuous gallantry
that you thank God videotape exists
and you pray that long after we’ve destroyed ourselves
aliens will land and find this tape
and wonder at the mad grace
of such a race.
And the soundtrack sings
“You do the walk,
you do the walk of li-hi-hife…”
I was surrounded by children
when I saw that video
my daughters and their cousins
and like someone suddenly filled with the spirit
I stood up and began to preach
the brilliance of what they were watching:
that if you want to achieve
anything spectacular in life
you have to risk humiliation
and this one time they all listened to me
fascinated like…
pigeons in Assisi.
And I can still see you
standing stiff and tall,
the ball bouncing toward you big and slow
and I know you’re thinking,
“Thank God, at least we’re out of the inning,”
but then it’s a little too slow
and the batter is tearassing down the line toward you
faster than anyone named Mookie has a right to move
so you reach deep into
the gallant center of your soul
and you will the ball to get there
a little quicker
because now it has to
and there is one tired instant in there
when you believe that you can do this,
that you can will the ball there-
it’s believing in yourself too much…

[long sigh]

I guess what bothers me most is our dishonesty.
We know this happens to a thousand people
one way or another every hour of every day.
But we can’t live with that knowledge.
So we joke, we say,
“Like Bill Buckner, ho ho ho”
fostering the pretense we’re too good
for this too happen to us
when what is spectacularly obvious
is we’re not even close to being good enough
ever to be exposed to anything this bad
our errors go unnoticed
because we go unnoticed
and we like it that way….
If we were honest, your name would be spoken
only after the lights were out
and then only between two persons
who had achieved the deepest intimacy
who knew that they could turn to one another
in the darkness
when the fear was on them
one of them might gently brush
the shoulder of the other
and the other one might
swim up from the depths of sleep and whisper
“What is it, my darling?”
and the one might sigh,
“Bill Buckner,”
and the other might
caress the one and whisper

“Shhh. It’s all right.
Sleep will come,
when you’re not looking.
Morning will come, and breakfast,
and things that should be easy
will be easy once more.
It’s the Walk of Life.
You’ve walked it before
and you will walk it again.
Shhh now beloved.”