“Sunshine”

Before I write this blog, some recent news. In June, Pif Magazine (online), Derek Alger, editor, will publish an extensive interview with me. A local newspaper in Green Valley also interviewed me and that will appear later in June. I will keep you apprised. The reporter grew up on the East Coast, so we understood one another, here in this geriatric Disneyland.

When my son , Jordan, and I watched “The Elephant Man” in 1980, at the age of 4, he asked me why this poor creature (this man) was being dealt with so cruelly by his fellow human beings. You give it words, for a four-year-old can say it very tersely. I answered. I told the truth to him. As I see the movie again this afternoon, as the doctors objectify him, point to his deformities, I realize that my son saw through all this societal (The Emperor Has No Clothes) crap. I worry about my son, as any father should, but I am honored to know him. His persona, the great crap shoot, is made until he ends his days. And so is mine. My step-daughter, half-jokingly, half-seriously, calls this gloomy Gus who married her mother (divorced in 2006), “Sunshine.”

The secret of “Sunshine” is that I am a very hurt human being — and so what. We are all very hurt human beings, riven by life, death and dramatic loss. And unlike our “healers,” the self-help shamans, I will not accept nor abide their “cures,” their glib bromides. Life is much too hard to be “cured” so easily. Sadly I like my life hard; it is all I know and have. Unlike the Elephant Man whose deformities hid a grand soul, a kind essence, I wear mine within. “Sunshine” is an apt name for me with all its negative connotations. I am not a moonbeam caught in a jar.

So I bear my crabbed personality, knowing within it is a shell, my pretense for my pain. It is so long in growing, so comfortable in fit, that I fear I could not do without it. Ah, the defenses we construct for ourselves! The way to my heart is a love serendipitous, for all of us need — with word, especially — to be cradled. Hold me with words and it is as if you actually touch me. Ah, and then the choice of words. One needs to be a poet to help the suffering, a poet without rhyme or meter, but a poet nevertheless. I have searched all my life looking, unwittingly, I must say, for the poet. Isn’t this in some way why we ask that words be said over us when we come to die?