Dad, Peggy, and morality

For most of my years under his roof, my father did building maintenance and remodeling for a wealthy businessman who was a First Baptist deacon and Lions Club member. Dad worked 55-plus hours a week for this man for low pay, no sick leave, and a five day a year vacation, while feeling trapped in his job because of my mother’s unwillingness to leave the small town where we lived. When I was in junior high, a hardware store owner offered my father kickbacks for giving him his boss’s business. Dad told his boss of it and wouldn’t shop there anymore. The more I came to know and despise his boss, the less respect I had for my father’s ethics.

Then I married a woman with that same degree of unyielding morality. Her Catholic employer’s public commitment to treating everyone with “Christ-inspired” fairness and compassion often runs counter to how it behaves behind the scenes. If I had worked for this hospital for many years, and it had shorted my paycheck more than half the time, I would have kept my mouth shut when the day came that it overpaid me by $1,500. “Ah,” you say, “but you’re an atheist, and therefore have no compunction against doing any lowdown thing.” While it is true that I spend my every waking moment raping dogs and kicking women, Peggy’s an atheist too, so go figure.

A major difference between Peggy and my father on the one hand and me on the other, is that I’m unaware that either of them ever struggled over issues of morality because the right direction was always obvious to them. This leads (or led in the case of my deceased father) to a consistency in their behavior that I often lack. They would say I rationalize, and they would sometimes be right, but the result of my uncertainty is that I am reachable whereas people whose morality is instinctual often are not. Peggy didn’t struggle for years before deciding that gay marriage was wrong or that capital punishment was right, whereas I switched back and forth repeatedly. Sometimes, I would agree with her that we should consider a return to public executions, and sometimes I would agree with her that gay marriage was oxymoronic, but then I would reverse my positions. Through all my inconsistency, she never wavered, and I would envy her that because, after all, isn’t consistency a mark of intelligence and maturity, and inconsistency the opposite?

Likewise, in regard to religion, Peggy never wavered. She believed as a child, but when she became a young adult, it dawned on her that she no longer believed, and she never looked back, whereas I went back and forth through four decades and three churches (not counting the Unitarian) before I made peace with the fact that I really and truly did not, and never would, believe in God.

I eventually lost my envy of people like Peggy and my father because even if my struggling means that I look flaky and am prone to rationalization, it also means that I am less dogmatic, tend to learn more through studying issues, and am better able to change my thinking. Because Peggy’s morality is instinctual, she isn’t prone to reflecting upon matters of right and wrong; she isn’t given to studying them; and she dismisses contrary opinions like water off a duck’s back. For instance, I finally came down on the side of gay marriage because I concluded that it doesn’t matter what makes people gay or that marriage has historically been for heterosexuals only; it only matters that society treats everyone compassionately and equally. As I see it, I progressed beyond her on this issue because while I was learning and reflecting, she remained stuck on two thoughts only, thoughts which are so obvious (regardless of their accuracy) that they surely occurred to her within a minute of first hearing about gay marriage: homosexuality is an evolutionary mistake; and that which has been the practice always and everywhere should continue to be the practice always and everywhere.*

In the final analysis, people like myself are probably more prone to evil than people like Peggy and my father because our lack of a strict moral code really does make it appallingly easy for us to rationalize, and because, far from honoring either the law or traditional morality, we often consider obedience undesirable. Peggy doesn’t always respect the law, but she nearly always obeys it even when she disagrees with it, that is unless she thinks its evil. Her heroes are people who live quiet lives, perform unheralded acts of goodness, obey the law, and honor tradition. My heroes are Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, none of whom Peggy has the least interest in, and who my government and millions of my fellow citizens would like to draw-and-quarter.

One thing for sure is that I think a lot more about the ethical implications of Peggy’s actions than she does about my own due to her tendency to instantly classify everything I do as morally good, morally bad, or morally indifferent, and to hold to that opinion forever come hell or high water. In my eyes, she’s something of a mule, and in her eyes, I sometimes fall short of being what a good man should be. Herein lies much of the charm of our marriage, at least for me. Having a spouse is like having an exotic animal. It gives a person the chance to observe an interesting creature whose life is—like all our lives—a shooting star, from up close and personal for many decades before one of you falls alone into the bottomless pit of eternity. 

The photo of Peggy and my father was taken July 9, 1994, and he died on the 12th. He loved her like a daughter, and she deserved it. Naturally, she never questioned whether taking this troubled man into her home was the right thing to do.

*Peggy read this after it was posted, and said my implication that she regards homosexuality and/or homosexual marriage as a moral issue was incorrect. Rather, she regards homosexuality as an inescapable way of being, and she supports complete equality for homosexuals except when it comes to using the word marriage to describe their unions. As I see it, gay marriage is very much a moral issue, and I can't even imagine how, to her, it could not be, but such is the gulf between us on many issues. 

Stoned ponderings on recurring themes: one after another after another

I

I would say that I have a good marriage, yet Peggy is a serious disappointment to me in some ways. For example, she’s a procrastinator who often expects me to help her with one project or another at the last minute when she’s under pressure, and I have something else I want to do. I don’t do pressure, and I become testy when someone rushes me, so it’s a bad situation that I blame entirely on her because she’s the one who’s doing the imposing. However, I finally had to give up trying to change her. Not that I don’t bitch and moan from time to time, but I would be an idiot if I expected anything but broken promises to come of it. The sad truth is that EVERYONE is like Peggy. Instead of expecting another person to be all but perfect and to love you forever, put your emphasis on deciding whether you even find them tolerable.

II 

When I was in my teens and twenties, I would ponder all these heavy religious and philosophical questions, but my half-sister, Anne (my elder by eleven years), was the only person I ever knew who wanted to discuss them. I assumed from this that everyone else must already know the answers but for some reason wouldn’t share them with me. I made this assumption because I couldn’t imagine that questions which were so compelling to me could have escaped their notice altogether. When I finally—after many years—concluded that they had, I started to think less of other people and more of myself. I pictured everyone else as being like dogs or cats, nice enough in their way but sadly lacking nonetheless.

III

I was embarrassed to be a Mississippian long before I moved to liberal Eugene, where Mississippi and every white person in it is considered a joke. I would get mad when I heard people trashing Mississippi, not necessarily because I disagreed, but because they couldn’t have named the major towns, or pointed to The Delta on a map, or identified kudzu and fireants. They were simply relaying to me, a lifelong Mississippian, all the bad stuff they had heard. For awhile, I joined them; for awhile, I kept my mouth shut; now, I demand to know their sources because theirs is usually a case of prejudice based upon hearsay. It doesn’t even matter to me that a person is right; if his reasons for his beliefs are unfounded, he’s still a bigot.

 IV

Foolishness that is at least understandable in the young becomes inexcusable with age. I'm very aware that I'm a "senior" now and, except for the physical pain and limitations, I rather like it because at no time in my life have I experienced more of wisdom or contentment.

 V

I just finished Hell in the Pacific by Jim McEnery. It wasn't the best war book I've ever read (that would be With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge), but I'm glad I read it. The following passage will stay with me more than most: “I’ve never lost sleep over the enemy solders I shot or bayoneted or blew to bits with grenades—not even the wounded ones I put out of their misery…. I did it the same way you’d chop off the head of a poisonous snake that was about to bite someone.” I would call that a pretty good example of the dehumanization of war. Of course, the Japanese military went out of its way to earn such hatred (just as we did with our “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad), but still… About three years ago, I heard an old man say with tears in his eyes that he had recently hugged a Japanese woman, her being the first Japanese he had touched but didn’t kill.

VI

Someone wrote that I put unnecessary limits on my openness to experience by labeling myself an atheist. This ignores the fact that I used to be a believer, and that I don’t consider any of the experiences of God that I had back then to have been worthwhile. I went from being scared shitless of God when I was young, to hating him when I was a teenager, to not believing in him when I was in my twenties. That said, I should think that a person who is committed to believing in a particular version of god might be at greater risk than an atheist of limiting his experience of the divine. For example, what if God should come along but not look or act the way a person expects him to look or act; might not such a person fail to recognize God? Because an atheist wouldn’t be so committed, he might be better able to experience God than a lot of theists. After all, few atheists categorically say that God's existence is impossible; they simply say that they can't find a reason to believe in him.

VII

Old times seem to look better with age when the sharp edges have eroded somewhat, and everything has been interpreted and reinterpreted so many times that reality is forgotten.

Photo by Manfred Brückels

Why she turned out like she did, I just don't know

My pet name for Peggy is Fluffy after a squirrel that was in a Little Golden Book that my aunt got me when I was four. I personally hated the book and loathed the squirrel (I wanted to cut its tail off and hang it from a car antenna), and I even told Peggy this, but she said I had damned well better call her Fluffy (she says it reminds her of how cute she is), so naturally I call her Fluffy in order to make her shut-up already. If she’s looking the other way when I say it, I sneer at the back of her head in order to prove that I’m not some little woozy-man who’s going to let a woman push him around. I have to be careful that she’s not looking at me in a mirror when I sneer because she often stares at me through mirrors as if she thinks I’m too stupid to notice. It’s like she can never let me out of her sight. I don’t think she trusts me, probably because she has a guilty conscience. You’re no doubt wondering how she got this way. I'll tell you what I know, but it's not much.

After Peggy and I got married in 1971, everything went great for about two weeks. After those two weeks, I noticed that Peggy would still do what I told her to do, but that she wasn’t doing it with any enthusiasm. At first, I figured she was just sick, but I didn’t say anything to her about her sickness because it weakens a woman to give her sympathy—or appreciation, for that matter. It also encourages her to pretend she’s sick when she’s not sick in order to get out of work and to force you to treat her nice. Women are devious that way, so it’s best to play it safe and only talk to them when they screw-up.

After another two weeks, Peggy’s behavior was no better, but it was a lot worse. She had deteriorated to the point that she wasn’t just slow about getting things done, she wasn’t even doing them. It was like I had married a really sweet and sensuous dog (an Afghan maybe), but then a mongrel cat from Planet Bad-Ass had crawled into the dog’s brain through its nostrils. It got to where I would tell Peggy to fetch me another beer, and she would look at me like, “Yeah, right, when hell freezes over.”

I finally spoke to her about how I was the husband, and she was the wife, and the wife is supposed to do what the husband tells her to do because it says so in the Bible. When I said this, she got really mad, so I never brought it up again, and I finally gave up trying to make her do anything—her or the cat for that matter because I knew they weren’t going to do it anyway. Now that the dog is deaf, blind, arthritic, and hard to wake-up, I don’t even get the satisfaction of telling her what to do, although, god knows, she would obey me if she could. I feel like a captain whose ship sailed right out from under him in shark-infested waters.

When Peggy and the cat sleep until noon (which is pretty much every day), she makes me bring them breakfast in bed along with a small vase of yellow roses and a large vase of fresh catnip. I hate doing it, but I hate it worse when she yells at me. We’ve been married for forty years, and I don’t know how much longer I should give her to get her act together.

Things I love everyday that I live

I love Peggy. On the wall over my monitor is something she wrote on yellow scrap paper 20 years ago, which is but half as long as we've been married. It’s as true for how I see her as for how she sees me.

“I love Lowell 100 million billion trillion times over. I love him sooooooooooooo much. He is the best man, and I love him.
Peggy
Love Love Love Love Love”

I love plants. I feel more life emanating from plants than from people. My delusion probably comes from the fact that plants are fully here and fully now. They are blessedly free from even as the possibility of deception. Rocks are also our superiors in that regard. So it is with nearly every being that our species looks down upon (which is to say every being but ourselves). If Peggy loved them too, I would fill the house with plants. I’m especially drawn to potted plants during the winter when most outdoor plants are homely, and when it’s too wet and cold to enjoy sitting on the ground. It’s as if I inhale their essence when I’m among plants and, unlike mine, their essence is pure.

I love to dig holes. I love the beauty of the tools; the changing colors and textures of the earth; the feel of the work inside my body; the odors and the coolness; my unusual vantage point of the world; the occasional pebble, fossil, earthworm, or human artifact; and the knowledge that I might unearth a treasure of one kind or another. When I lie in bed at night and fantasize that my pain is gone, the first thing I want to do is to dig a hole.

I love habanero peppers, which are the hottest peppers I can find (sixty times hotter than jalapenos). They’re so hot that they make the top of my head sweat, and my hands hurt all night and into the next day if I don’t wear gloves while cutting them. I started eating habaneros years ago as a treatment for Raynaud’s Disease, overcame the agony of the heat enough to enjoy the high—they go especially well with marijuana—and found that they helped the Raynaud’s so much that I’m rarely bothered by it.

I love caps. Hats look better, but they don’t shade the eyes as well; you can’t pull a hood over them; most of them can’t take rough handling; they’re a nuisance when it’s windy; and, last but not least, the brim hits the headrests in cars. The only thing caps don’t do well is to keep rain from running down my neck, but it only rains here in the winter, so I just raise my hood over my cap, and the cap keeps it from coming down over my eyes.

I love rocks for their beauty, their stories, and their antiquity. Even here in the geologically young Willamette Valley, it’s possible to find rocks that go back 40-million years. These youngsters are 400,000 times older than a 100-year-old person. I study the strata in cliff faces; I dig charred wood from pyroclastic flows; I pry globe-like concretions from roadcuts; I try to feel the story of the fossils that lie buried in my backyard. Sometimes, I even sleep with rocks because—in my imagination anyway—they emanate a force. I had once hoped that force would heal me, but it couldn’t, although, as with plants, rocks can bring the joy and comfort that allows me to live despite the pain.

I love shopping at Goodwill. Half of me goes nuts over secondhand bric-a-brac, but the other half hates a cluttered house, so it’s an anguished love, but an inextinguishable love nonetheless. Besides, everything is so cheap that I figure I can always buy something to replace something I already have, and then pass on what I replaced. I can also buy things for other people, enabling me to enjoy Goodwill while dumping the curse of clutter onto them, but also giving them something that I love, that I hope they will love, and that I purchased with thought and affection.

I love my room—see photo. The walls are pink, and I have lots of plants, though not so many as I want.

I love marijuana. One-fourth of a small sugar cookie, and my world is born anew. Music and language swim in the periphery of my vision; colors assume such depth that I become disoriented. I feel thoughts well up as if from depths unimagined. I am overcome by the knowledge that trees, dogs, cats, potted plants—all the things I love—have an immediacy and an intensity that is beyond expression. I become so enamored of the history and creativity behind the fifty-year-old kitsch at Goodwill that I want to buy it all in honor of the people who made it and loved it all those years ago. I become more patient and tolerant; I see my worries from a realistic perspective, and they’re always less scary than I imagined.

I love writing. I live through the written word just as a photographer lives through a viewfinder. This makes it very hard for me to be close to anyone who really and truly has no interest in what I write because what I write is the deepest part of me, at least the deepest part of me that I can touch.

I love reading because it teaches me things and it allows me to visit other people’s worlds. I read about plants, geology, and home repair. I also like biographies, Westerns and books of cartoons—especially Gary Larson. My taste in biography tends to run to people who were hated like Benedict Arnold or Bonnie and Clyde. My only problem with reading is that I never seem to do it as much as I would like.

You might think that I’ve expressed a few surprising thoughts for an atheist, yet I couldn’t love these things nearly so much if I believed—like many do—that they are flawed forms of a once perfect reality. If I have a religion, it lies in nature because nature is all there is, and we’re each a part of it, and therefore a part of one another, and of everything else too.

Things I love—a sequel to “Things I hate”

I love Peggy. She is kind and wise, and the best thing that ever happened to me.

I love baking crackers, cornbreads, and biscuits. I also love making soups and pancakes.

I love to write. I also love to read but not nearly as much as I love to write.

I love my new cat, Brewsky—aka Fuckface when Peggy isn’t around (“Isn’t that just like a man?” she would say.)

I love it when Peggy massages my shoulders each day.

I love the fact that, although I am in pain, I can still see, hear, and get around.

I love it that pain has made me stronger.

I love it that modern medicine has kept me alive when I would otherwise be dead.

I love camping with Peggy in remote areas.

I love learning about rocks and native plants.

I love oatmeal and mayonnaise but never together.

I love it that age has enabled me to give up most of my idolization of women. I love it that Peggy stayed with me during all the years before this was true.

I love having Ellie for a neighbor.

I love to dig. If I had my health back, and if digging didn't make such a mess, I could do it everyday simply for the joy of it.

I love living in the city instead of in the country.

I love it that I bike more often than I drive.

I love Peggy’s room, especially her “rabbit shrine” and her glass crystals that catch the sunlight and throw hundreds of rainbows.

I love PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).

I love a lot of Western movies and TV shows from before 1960 and a few after 1960.

I love it that I’m mostly unconcerned about what people think of me.

I love being able to do almost anything to a house that needs doing.

I love how much Peggy enjoys her button collection. I also love how much she enjoys her music collection and her Christmas ornaments.

I love my blog buddies.

I love Busby Berkeley dance numbers.

I love the beach, the desert, the forest, and the mountains.

I love keeping my house clean, orderly, and in good repair.

I love dark chocolate.

I love the bliss of narcotics in the middle of the night when pain awakens me.

I love the taste and the warm glow of hard liquor.

I love Baroque music. I also love cowboy music, both old and new.

I love the sound of an electric guitar.

I love my dog, Bonnie Blue, and I love my memories of dogs that have died.

I love cuddling in front of an old movie with a bowl of popcorn on a cold night.

I love having gained in prudence, knowledge, and wisdom over the years.

I love spring, summer, and fall.

I love coffee, strong and black.

I love making my yard look nice.

I love going to the nursery with Peggy to buy plants for our garden. I also love it when we go to Costco and say we’re having a “date.”

Peggy becomes ever more unreasonable

Peggy went to bed before I did last night because she had a migraine, so I put the dogs out to go potty just before I went to bed. I forgot to let them back in because I’m not used to letting them out, and they froze to death. Of course, I didn’t know this because I was asleep. Anyway, Peggy got up first—having gone to bed first—and couldn’t find the dogs. After she had looked all over the house, it finally occurred to her to look outside, and there they were, two little pupsicles, right by the front door.

Since I could hardly bring them back to life anyway, and since I certainly don’t believe in the “power of prayer,” she could have let me sleep, but, no, not Peggy. She was upset, so, by god, she wanted me to be upset too. Putting that aside, I tried to comfort her in my usual compassionate manner by pointing out that they were old and sickly anyway, so their deaths probably saved us a lot of vet bills and carpet cleanings, but that just seemed to make her madder. I’m really tired of Peggy getting pissed-off over every little thing. To hear her tell it, she never makes mistakes. Yeah, right, when she’s asleep.

That was our second fight this week. The first occurred when she found out that I had invited my EOAWSGI group (Embittered Old Atheists Who Spit on God and Innocence) over to smoke dope and watch porn the same night that her VYCWEEEV group (Voluptuous Young Christians Who Eschew Evil and Embrace Virtue) was supposed to come over to bake brownies and look at pictures of a church they built in Haiti last summer so that all those starving people would have a place to pray for food.

I suggested that we bake the brownies with the dope inside and then watch the porn together, but she said that my idea was asinine because my atheist friends are all foul-mouth jerks who only want to make god-fearing Christians look stupid. She then said that my friends are all idiots, just like me; to which I replied that it takes one to know one and that all her friends are all idiots twice over, just like her. Things went downhill from there. I don’t know why Peggy can’t treat me the way she did when we had our first date in 1971. When you get married, you don’t expect your spouse to go all to hell this way.