Started the day in confusion, trying to figure out in the dim morning light which toothbrush is mine. Not that it particularly matters--it's hard to imagine Peg's carrying some germ I haven't already ingested. Our toothbrushes are identical, save for the fact that the handle of hers is trimmed in gold, and mine in silver.
Sort of a metaphor there, as I think of it.
Eventually I divined the reason for my struggle: she'd used my toothbrush at bedtime last night, and now it was so covered in lipstick as to present a sea of pink and red slathered over the silver.
I used it anyway. Why not?
Even before that, I spent a little time reading my book and trying not to fall back asleep. Kaplan quotes Spengler on the cycles of civilization, cycles in which we are trapped by our very humanity:
“The higher a Culture rises—Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque—the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time…. the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete—thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.” In other words, the more sophisticated and erudite the elite become, the more that the masses slip away beneath them.
Toynbee would be proud.
Peg suggested I steer clear of reading the news, characterizing it as "literally poison" for my poor old brain. I'm not convinced this book is a step in the right direction, although there's a certain determinist serenity in thinking this moment of mass stupidity in which we're living is something every advanced civilization experiences before it collapses into another dark age.
The Republicans tried to overthrow our democratic institutions, then doubled down by elbowing their way within reach of the levers of that democracy, then by judicial fiat decreed that whatever liberty interest you thought was your birthright as an American must give way to "Christian nationalism", an oxymoron to any pre-Constantinian Christian who saw the faith as a beacon of hope to the dispossessed. Stanley Hauerwas was right--the "Constantininianism" of the church, the moment when it became an arm of the state rather than a counterweight, was the beginning of the end we're still living into.
Now the Rs are about to wrest control of government from Congress to your local canvassing board, from New York to Florida.
I should probably quit reading Kaplan, and find some comforting old Florida detective novel by John McDonald.
But it's all sort of a distraction to the thing that's really on my mind this morning, the thing that left me surprised at my tears sitting here at my desk late yesterday.
My buddy Steve and his wife Cathy had mostly retired, splitting time between homes in North Carolina and on Sanibel Island. Steve and I were sworn in on the same day as new members of the Florida Board of Bar Examiners, now over sixteen years ago. Justice Lewis gave us a tour of his chambers that afternoon, pointing out the chunk of coal he kept on his bookshelf to remind himself of the coal miners from whom he was descended. A shared legacy, upon reflection.
Steve was a "public member", a non-lawyer educator with an interest in the law but no law degree, taking on this rather demanding position as an act of public service. But it wasn't all serious--Steve had a wry sense of humor, and he and I soon became the best of friends on those regular trips to spend three days cooped up in a hotel vetting bar applicants and making policy as an advisory body to the Florida Supreme Court. We had our fun back then--the board seems to have gotten a little stuffier and more conscious of its image, much like everyone else in the age of social media. Our little posse used to sit up in the bar and tell stories until the small hours, then unashamedly sit in a hearing with an applicant whose transgression might have been a bar fight or urinating in public after too much beer at an FSU tailgate, and ask with bleary eyes and boozy breath, "Son, do you think you have a problem with alcohol?"
Doctor, heal thyself.
Then there was the infamous Joe's Crab Shack dinner. They couldn't pay you to serve on the board, or pay your bar tab, but the Supremes would spring for one big dining out for the board and staff at a fancy restaurant wherever we happened to be holding our meeting that month. On this occasion we were in Coral Gables, probably my favorite FBOBE venue, and on Friday night they'd reserved an entire banquet room at Joe's for stone crab claws, fried green beans, and other south Florida culinary delights. We paid for our own wine, lots and lots of wine.
The wait staff figured out we basically had an open tab for stone crab claws, and bowls and bowls of them appeared in an endless stream from the kitchen. We ate until I felt like I was going to burst. We filled grocery bags with stone crab claws to eat back in the room later that night, and maybe for breakfast. It was a decadent evening of gluttony, at the public's expense.
And the public, personified in the staid justices of the Florida Supreme Court, was unamused. We received a curt note from the court reminding us of our role as public servants, shortly before they announced a policy capping how much we could spend at supper.
On one of those trips to the Gables, Steve--a native who still called the place "Miamah"--introduced me to Burger Bob's, a short walk from the hotel at the Coral Gables Country Club. Bob, it seems, had run a burger joint in Panama City Beach in the 1960s, but moved back to his native Miami maybe thirty years ago, delivering perfectly prepared, medium rare burgers on the patio next to the 18th green. It became a pilgrimage for Steve and me whenever we came to town, Steve in his manically extroverted way calling behind the counter to Bob to let him know Steve had brought his Bay County friend for lunch.
I left the board in 2008 when I joined the faculty at CSOL--the rules don't allow law professors to serve, although I gladly would have done so. Steve and I stayed in touch afterwards, particularly after I moved home in 2010. His family was from Blountstown, and his mother lived in that big Section 8 tower on Harrison Avenue across from what back then was our only gay bar, the La Royale. I heard from Steve whenever he was in town to check on his mom.
After Hurricane Michael and the pandemic, when our center of gravity shifted east to Wyldswood, Steve and Cathy came to see us over a weekend maybe a year ago. Steve was thin and on some sort of kooky diet. He'd also ingested a bad dose of kooky MAGA politics, which made navigating conversation topics a challenge. Still, it was wonderful to see old friends again, to introduce them to Peg, to live that rare occasion when someone actually accepted our invitation to stay at the farm and meet the cows.
On this particular trip, Steve brought with him an artifact of one of his distinctly weird Steve adventures. It seemed a lime tree in his yard took a fancy to a honeybell growing in a pot nearby, and the product of their union became an entirely new species of citrus tree Steve dubbed a "Lime-elo".
With his usual energy, Steve patented the thing, trademarked the name, and started creating lime-elo products for sale in the local area. He brought us some jelly, if memory serves. P and I pondered whether we should ask for a few cuttings to start a grove at Wyldswood, but convinced ourselves the freezes would probably doom the effort.
When Hurricane Ian hit a few weeks ago, I fretted over Steve, Cathy, their yip yip dog who'd visited Wyldswood with them, and the lime-elos. I sent Steve a text, offering Wyldswood if they needed a place to stay, but heard nothing.
Yesterday I sent another follow-up, checking to see if they were okay.
"Definitely not okay--will call later" came the reply from Cathy, who was carrying Steve's phone.
And the news was not okay, not at all. Cathy had driven to the mountain house ahead of the storm, while Steve stayed behind to ride it out for some reason. A stubborn native, I reckon. The house miraculously survived, albeit with a bathtub ring from the storm surge three feet up the walls, even as the houses around them on the island were swept away. In the weeks that followed Steve labored through the misery of cleaning up in the aftermath of a Category Four storm, clearing debris and hauling waterlogged household items to the curb.
Then five days ago he walked to a nearby convenience store in the dark to pick up a couple things. As he re-crossed the street, he was struck by a car and badly injured.
The trauma team managed to knit him back together, but then three days ago he aspirated and his sats sank so low that they put him on a ventilator, which is where he finds himself this morning.
But they had worse news for Steve and Cathy: a body scan taken shortly after he arrived in the ER revealed what appeared to be metastatic lesions up and down his spine. There would be another hard journey if he survives this one.
Cathy passed all this along with the chipper delivery I'd seen several times in my brief time as a hospital chaplain, the plucky optimism of denial. "It's one day at a time right now, sometimes one hour at a time," she explained as much to herself as to me. Let's get him off the vent, and maybe those blobs on the scan aren't what they appear to be. No use over-awfulizing.
After I hung up was when my face sank into my hands and I wept, surprising myself at the whole display. This is life. It just is.
But today I'm blessed with paying work to do, with the little joy and hope of looking forward to that moment when P walks through the door and we get to share these precious moments we have left, knowing the wolf is always at the door. Life just is.
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