Hallowed

The poem used the word
Hallowed
And I asked them
What it meant.
A couple hands shot up.
To be made empty.
To have nothingness at the center.

No.
That's hollowed with an O
I say.

I mention casually -
With a disclaimer
That I am NOT
Proselytizing -
That if you are a churchy sort,
You have probably been saying
"Hallowed"
All your life.
You know - The Lord's Prayer
The Our Father.

If so, I ponder internally,
Have you thought all this time
That God's name was
Hollow?
Nothingness at the center?
Empty?
And you never questioned it?
Never thought,
What an odd and disturbing
Description for God's name.

Empty is your name.
Nothingness is your name.

Of course,
Some branches of theology posit
That it might be
Accurate to call God nothing
In that he is so Mysterious, Other, Unlike
Anything we know as
Something
That he is not a thing
Like other things
In the same kind of category
As things at all.
Grammatically he's a noun.
Existentially, he transcends nouns.
He is nothing.
He is like
No thing
We know.

But this is not the time
Or the place
For such theological musings
Or sophistication
When a moment ago they
Were back at Hollow.

So I move on,
Explaining that Hallowed means
To set aside as holy
To revere
To respect or honor greatly.

Hallowed.
Not a bad concept
To be aware of, I think
As I move on
To the next activity
In this space where we meet each day
On the hallowed
Linoleum.

Endings

I often wonder,
More often as of late,
When I reach
The end
Of the story,
Turn the last page,
Fade to the end credits -
What happens next?
What is the moment like
After the final moment?

Of course,
Sometimes they answer that question
With a scene
During the end credits
Or after them
Or a sequel.
And in the cases of sequels,
I sometimes wish they would
Leave those poor characters
Alone.

But what I find myself
Wondering about
Is that moment
Just after the end of a story.
It's over.
We're done.
But what about the characters?
What do they do next?

Take a nap?
Get a snack?
Go out for dinner?
Sit and contemplate
How well everything turned out
Or ruminate on the awful fate,
The daily, tragic misery that now awaits them?

Do they go and do the dishes
To take their mind off
How awful everything turned out?
Do they have a sense
That some momentous
Sections of their lives has ended
With a resounding period
Or blackout,
With a stunning final sentence
Or an indelible image
Stretched across a screen?

Or does the final
Page or frame
Flash by
Without them noticing,
And they are off
To use the bathroom
Or mow the lawn?

More to the point,
Are there moments
In our lives
Where some momentous
Episode or epoch
Of our existence
Has ended in our lives?
Where a conflict is finally resolved
Or a theme in our life finally plays out
Or we achieve some goal
Or realize some tragic truth?
do we notice when one of our stories ends?

Or do we shrug it off and go read a book?

Here and Now/Not

We find ourselves complaining
About all the kids endlessly on their cellphones
(Although, really, the "adults" are just as bad).
Those little rectangular boxes are a drug
That causes them to miss the world right before them.
Some people argue that the phones
Are just another information and entertainment delivery system,
No different than reading a book
Or listening to a transistor radio.

And it made me ponder:
Ever since cave men and cave women
First started painting pictures on walls,
Ever since we starting imagining where we came from
Or where we are going,
We have been paying attention to both
The world right before us
Here and Now,
And to this other world made of pictures and words and dreams,
Made of interpretations of the world
And imaginary things that never existed.
The Not Here and Not Now.

On some level it seems absurd.
We need to appreciate the sights and sounds and people right in front of us,
Instead of always being
Immersed somehow in that other world,
Distracted from the people closest to us,
Missing out the trees and sunrises,
The ordinary life around us.

The other world
The imaginary world
The second-hand world
Is a distraction that steals away our lives
Bit by bit.
Whether it's a painting
Or a novel
Or a game show
or a slasher film
A play
Or a game on our cellphones
(Even ones that sends us outside to find digital critters)

Be. Here. Now.
Right?

Well...

There's a problem with that.
The other world,
The second-hand world,
Has its virtues.

When I think of the confining nature of here and now
I get a little claustrophibic.
Here and now
Has some pretty
Tight parameters
Walling
Us
In.

If had only Here,
We wouldn't know about other places
People
Ideas
Technologies
Geographies
Galaxies
That aren't here in front of us,
Places that we only get to see
Through other people's words or pictures,
Indirect. Not Here, Not Now.

If we only had Now
We'd be unable to look forward to the future or appreciate the past
We'd have no history to give us wisdom to help us make now worth living
We'd have no imagined futures to work toward.
The past and future belong to
Not Here and Not Now.
In fact, the more I think about it,
The whole world of thought
Is really Not Here and Not Now.

And yet it is thoughts from this other world
That have helped us create the world we live in.
The Here and Now we need to pay attention to
Only exists
The way it is
Because it is built from elements of that other world
Of Not Here and Not Now.

So perhaps the question isn't
"Is the Here and Now good
And the Not Here Not Now bad?"
Perhaps the real issue is this:
Making choices about
Which world to pay attention to when.
Because not everything in that other world
Is worth your time.
But neither is everything Here and Now.

And of course, it's really more than one world.
My vantage point on Right Here Right Now
Differs from yours.
And there is more than one kind of
Not Here Not Now.
A book is different from a movie
Is different from a cellphone
Is different from Twitter
Is different from Instagram
Is different from a talk show
Is different from a theme park.

What exactly are theme parks?
Not Here Not Now - or Here and Now?

We all live in a multiverse
Housed within our heads
Must these worlds collide,
Deforming and ruining each other?
Or can these universes we dance between
Coexist
Enrich
Inform
And bless
Each other
And ourselves?

It depends on how we look at it.

Those Troubling Tuppence - Symbolism in the Mary Poppins movies

As a fan of Disney movies from an early age, I have always loved the movie Mary Poppins. Even before I finally saw it at the movies in re-release a bit late into my childhood years, I knew the most popular songs from Disney records I listened to until they crackled and snapped with scratches.

I am going to admit that while I almost always like the book better than the movie, Mary Poppins has always been movie experience for me. When I read  some of the books to our children when they were young, my daughter Alex, who had seen the movie, kept asking, "When does Mary Poppins get nice?"

When I finally saw the movie, I don't know if "Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)" registered much. I later learned that it was Walt's favorite song - he would ask the Sherman brothers, who wrote the songs, to come to his office and play it.

As I began to get more of a knack for literary analysis, which extended to my movie viewing, I began to realize that the song "Feed the Birds" was central to what the movie was about. The night before Jane and Michael are to accompany their father to the bank for the day, Mary Poppins sings it to put into Jane and Michael's heads the idea that using their tuppence to buy bird seed from the bird lady to feed the birds would be a very, very good idea. She notes that their father won't notice the bird lady because sometimes someone we love, through no fault of their own, can't see past the end of their nose. The song is almost a hymn to generosity, and its melody plays over key moments of the film when characters are struck with awe: when Bert, Mary, and the children watch the sunset over London, and as Mr. Banks, their father, looks at the steps of St. Paul's on his way to the bank late at night.

Mary Poppins seems very much to want the children to give the tuppence to the bird lady. Or does she?

What follows the next day is a conflict at the bank. Mr. Dawes, the bank's president, tries to take the tuppence from Michael in order to invest them. When Michael tries to get them back, yelling that he wanted to feed the birds, his shouts cause a run on the bank, which leads to Mr. Banks losing his job.

At home that evening, Michael gives the tuppence to his father to try to make everything right. His father takes them to the bank when he goes there to be dismissed. But as he's being fired, losing his job leads him to realize that he was too obsessed with work. He realizes that his children matter more than his career, but before he dances away from the bank singing "A Spoonful of Sugar" he plants those "fateful, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious tuppence" in Mr. Bank's hands, saying "guard them well." He goes to to mend his children's kite, becomes the father his children need him to be, and, incidentally, win back his job.

So Mary Poppins says to feed the birds using the tuppence, but they wind up going to Mr. Dawes, back to Michael, to Mr. Banks, and back to Mr. Dawes. The Bird Lady never sees those coins. This is a thematic conundrum. If feeding the birds was so important, why did the tuppence never end up in the Bird Woman's hands? Was Mary Poppins just messing with the children to cause a run on the bank when she sang "Feed the Birds"? Why is the music so soaring, the sense of symbolism and meaning so strong? But by the end of the movie, the tuppence go to the bank - and that's the last word.

Or it was - until now.

In last year's 54-years-in-the-making sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, we find that Mr. Dawes Jr. has invested those fateful tuppence and in the end they save the adult Michael and his three children from losing their house. So is the message pro-capitalism, anti-Bird Woman? Is it saying that Mary Poppins was wrong about giving the tuppence to the bird lady? Was she using reverse psychology?

If the tuppence are symbolic, they represent a troubling bit of symbolism.

When I love a work of art, I wanted to work on all levels, and I really wanted the symbolism to work out somehow. I loved the original movie and liked the new one a great deal - but those tuppence just didn't make sense. So I started thinking - what do the tuppence, and the Bird Woman really represent? It may be a sin to kill a mockingbird, but the novel isn't about mockingbirds. It may be a good thing to feed the birds, but the song is not really about the birds. Or the tuppence a bag.

The song seems to be about charity - and about how little an investment is needed to make someone else's life better. The Banks children need their father's time and attention - but he is withholding it from them in his oblivious obsession with his job and his orderly life. Mr. Banks himself is, as Burt says to the children, caged in at the bank by all the "cold heartless cash." Perhaps he himself needs some "investment," which Michael offers him in giving him the tuppence. And perhaps even old Mr. Dawes himself is a charity case for all his money. When Mr. Banks gives him the tuppence, he also gives him a joke he learned from his children - a joke that sends Mr. Dawes flying up to ceiling in laughter, and to a happy demise. Being rich in money doesn't mean being rich in joy.

So the tuppence aren't just about giving specifically to the bird lady, and they aren't really about the money. They are about the ways we invest in each other every day to bring more joy into each other's lives. It doesn't take a lot. It's a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down - not a whole pot of it.

We tend to be stingy with our time and attention. "Feed the Birds" reminds us to be generous. And with this symbolism in mind, when we innocently invest in trying to help someone else, as Michael does when he gives the tuppence back to his father, we never know when such generosity may be returned to us many-fold just when we need it most.

Mr. Banks wants his children to know that "life's a waging battle to be faced and fought." But in the end, he realizes that life is also going outside to fly a kite. Investments in joy are never lost.

Now about all those "Don't Feed the Birds" signs at the Disney theme parks...

Batman and the Babysitter

There's the Bat-signal,
Shining a giant spotlight on the clouds,
The shape of a gigantic bat at its center.
I must have seen the Baby-sitter signal instead.
I've been called into duty,
And I am babysitting a four year old boy
Who thinks he's Batman.

Which means we're playing Batman.
Which means I get to sing the theme song -
Nananana Nananana Nananana - BATMAN! -
Loudly as he runs around the room
Squinting his eyes, scowling -
His Batman face.

He stops running in front of me.

Which means I am Commissioner Gordon.
The Batman '66 version, not Gary Oldman.
But I am also the Joker.
and the Riddler.
And Egghead.
I am versatile.
But the four-year-old calls the shots.
What he really wants to do... is direct.
And he does.

But what's fascinating are the plot twists he introduces.
The Joker turns good
And works with Batman.
He goes to school to learn to be good, not bad.

And soon all the super villains are good
And they are all working with Batman.
And I'm kind of liking this whole idea,
I ask the four-year-old,
"What does Batman do
Without his bad guys to fight?"
What is his story about
Without someone to fight?

The four-year-old seems unsure,
And then turns the Riddler bad again
And threatens Gotham City with slime.

But I still wonder if the four-year-old Batman
Was on to something-
Was wise beyond his years.
What would be our reaction if everyone
Turned good?
What is our story about
Without someone to fight?