The Hermit (Happy Birthday CTJ!)

The Hermit came up in a spread yesterday and so I started thinking about it and wanting to write about it. But, my stepfather Tom's birthday is approaching and I wanted to celebrate that, too. Then it hit me--Tom was The Hermit! I say was because Tom is, technically, dead, or at least, the body he used from 1933-2001 is now reduced to ashes and sitting in a shoebox in my mother's closet. She says she can't think of what to do with them.

Tom is, of course, alive and well and living in Paris, like Jacques Breil, or somewhere equally nice. Tom was a leg man--I believe that's what attracted him to my mother, although he later claimed, with his Irish blarney, that what he liked best about my mom were her kids--and he would appreciate the legs of les Parisiennes. In this, his most recent life, he didn't like the French. I don't believe he had a great deal of contact with French people. It was just a guy thing. Real guys don't like the French, and Tom was a real guy.

He liked football, and baseball, or should I say, he liked the Bengals and the Reds, just like my father. And, like my father, his athletic "preferences" were responsible for his being almost constantly in the grip of a depression that was as deep and real as it was incomprehensible to those of us who don't care a damn about televised sports. This latter category, worldwide, comprises mostly women, although of course there are plenty of exceptions to prove the rule, so ladies, don't get your fur ruffled. But I think it is fair to say, with my pith helmet firmly in place to ward off the vicious attacks of Female Sports Fans, that although women might find TV sports a fun pastime, they do not allow their team's record to interfere with their sense of self.

To illustrate: when I lived in California, I found that the only way to get anything done was to hire people from New York to do it. California people always wanted to enter all your data in their computer and have someone call you with an estimate, possibly next week, or not, if you even got through to a real person at all which was rare. The New Yorkers, almost always Brooklyn natives, would say something like, "Two-fifty. Tomorrow ok?" and the job was as good as done. Now I can honestly say that I am not a big Cali fan. My favorite parts of living in Oakland were the weather and being able to wear flip-flops all the time. So having that contact, however tenuous and far-removed, with New York, was Balm in Gilead for me, and I always enjoyed getting Dick and Ben and whoever to shoot the shit for a while, which, being New Yorkers, they were more than happy to do. And, when asked why they had left Brooklyn, the guys of a certain age always mentioned the Dodgers, as in: "There was no point in living in Brooklyn once the Dodgers left." They said this in perfect seriousness.

And so I want to say, as a woman, and let the chips fall where they may, that this is a part of the male psyche that women just cannot penetrate. It's like men cannot understand the horrors of cellulite, or why women have so many shoes.

And for Tom, and my Dad both, the fact that the Bengals and the Reds used to be real teams and then they just sucked, worse and worse every year, was pretty devastating. I think the worst thing was getting their hopes up, every year, and then having them dashed, again and again.

Tom had more or less the same star-crossed love affair with golf. When he played a decent game, life was worth living, but when he had a really bad streak, he would retire into a brooding silence. Several times, he gave up golf, and gave his clubs to charity. Then, after a year or two, a particularly lovely spring or who knows what would fill Tom's breast with hope again and he would go out and get new clubs, and the cycle would start all over again.

Through it all, alcohol was his constant companion and best friend. The men of Tom's generation drank hard liquor, not beer or wine, and Tom had a preference for vodka. Tom was already an alcoholic when he retired, a little early, and his retirement proved to be his undoing, because there was no longer any reason not to drink all day long. He wasn't a violent drunk, or abusive in any way, except to himself. He just sank deeper and deeper into himself, his recliner, his TV and his apathy, until nobody and nothing could touch him, which I suppose was the point.

Before retirement, Tom was a protestant minister, for the United Church of Christ. We moved back to Ohio in order for Tom to accept the position of Head Pastor at the local campus church. Some people may be shocked at the seeming discrepancy. What? An alcoholic minister? There were a few who criticized. One of Tom's successors, a female interim minister with a tight perm and the facial expression of an asshole just barely holding back diarrhea, remarked pointedly, at a meeting in which my mother was present, that "an alcoholic can't serve God." Ah yes, of course, it's only the perfect who can serve God. All, uh, mm, I confess I lost count--how many perfect people are in the world again? To my knowledge, out of approximately seven billion of us, there is not one whom God has made perfect, or even close. And if God depended on only the perfect to get His work done, it would be more or less like Alitalia depending on only the honest and hard-working employees to get their planes in the air. As my Hapkido instructor used to say, "You fight with what you have." And just as Alitalia has chosen to keep flying, somehow, with ancient planes and thieving employees, it is my belief that God has chosen to fight with what He has.

Tom fought, too, a daily battle with his demons, not all of which were found at the bottom of a gallon bottle of cheap vodka. Many of those battles, he lost. But he was the best preacher I ever heard. He had a way of making a point with gentle humor, with humility, with infinite tolerance for the human frailty that is called, by some, sin, an odious word. I always hated church before Tom came along, and I hate it now, mostly, because it's boring and because it is my considered opinion that many preachers are full of shit. And the worst thing about them is their insistence on preaching. I usually leave a church feeling bored, depressed, or like I've been attacked. That's why these folks become ministers, probably--a chance to really let that supercilious, holier-than-thou attitude fly. But it is one of life's contradictions that a preacher who preaches will fail in his mission. Because what is the mission of a pastor, if not to bring some measure of comfort and joy to his flock? What better way to teach love and forgiveness than to let that same flock practice it on their shepherd?

Several years after Tom's death, I was on a bus in Tunisia, which passed what to me was an unusual sight--a shepherd, swathed in dark robes, sitting with his back to the lone sheep of his flock, which hovered anxiously and jealously nearby. Just in that brief flash as the bus drove by, it was clear that there was some degree of role reversal in that relationship.

When I think of Tom and his congregation, this image comes to mind. Tom ministered to that congregation as best he could, and he did a good job. Everybody said so then, everybody says so now. He played backgammon with shut-ins, charmed the old ladies, served on hospice committees, performed weddings and funerals, and the countless other tasks that make up the job of a minister. And it was, to Tom, a job. It had been a calling--he said he had been undecided whether to be a baseball coach or a minister until he "got the call" but he treated it with the work ethic of any other job. He was in the office from 9 to 5, with part of Friday afternoons spent at home agonizing over his sermon. He wasn't one of those who treat the ministry as a Sunday-only job.

But as his alcoholism became more pronounced, both before and after his retirement, it was the congregation that ministered to him. Not overtly, perhaps, but in their unfailing love, and compassion, and protection, and forgiveness. I actually went to the church last Sunday, and after the service, fell into conversation with a man who must have been in his sixties. He asked who I was and I explained my connection to the church, and told him how hard I find it to sit in a church where Tom is not preaching. Because, and I know this sounds ridiculous, I keep hoping that he will, somehow, materialize, and tell a couple of jokes, and preach a 20-minute sermon (he kept a very strict eye on the time, so that nobody would have to miss any part of whatever game was being televised), every time I walk into a church, and he never does.

"Tom had his failings, everybody knows that," I said to the gentleman, wanting to ward off that uncomfortable moment when you know people want to say something but don't, out of politeness.

"But that didn't make us love him any less," is what the man said to me, and it was so obviously heartfelt that I couldn't speak any more. I just sat there gulping, glad I had worn my glasses, which dam up the tears, somewhat.

Tom died in 2001, the inevitable end of an alcoholic diabetic, a few months after the attacks and a few days before Christmas. I was sad, and most of all, angry, because I had wanted to save him, and I failed. I hate failure.

But in my head, I know that Tom is at peace. Whatever his mission was on this earth, God saw fit to release him, from his body, and what God has put asunder, let no man join together. It will seem blasphemous, I'm sure, to some, to compare Tom to the Christ, but there are many ways to be crucified. I don't think anybody chooses to become an alcoholic. "Take this cup from me," Tom might have said, and maybe he did say it, but it did about as much good as when Jesus said it. That cup was his to drink, and if it held vodka and not vinegar, it didn't make it any less bitter.

Or maybe I'm just kidding myself, and there really are Perfect Ministers and Perfect People, and Tom is sitting in the drunk tank in one of Dante's more unpleasant rings of hell. But I don't believe that, with my head or my heart, and if a God that permits so much suffering on earth would continue to torment us in the afterlife, then fuck it all anyway.

Anyway, Tom's 75th birthday would have been this November 24th, putting him smack dab in the beginning of Sagittarius, the sign of preachers and partiers, saints and sinners, enlightenment and mortification. Sajj is a sign of extremes, of hot and cold, ups and downs, irresistible charm and psychological isolationism.

And this is, in a nutshell, the energy of The Hermit. The Hermit runs off into the woods, fleeing from his most frightening enemy: himself. Whither he goes, none can follow, and The Hermit fights his inner enemies alone, with God at his right hand. The Footprints in the Sand parable, which you will see on refrigerators and bookmarks, describes the energy of The Hermit. Always lonely, yet never alone. Ever straying, never lost. And after a lifetime of trudging through the sand, a wave comes and the only traces of a life are erased, as if they had never been. Except in our hearts, where the footprints of The Hermit will always remain.

Happy birthday, CTJ.