Bullets Over Birthdays

Listening and dodging

Last night I dreamed that I was near a Trump rally. Near, but not in, because no way would I ever be in a Trump rally — not even in a dream — but in these days of pop-up everything, you never know what might unveil itself as you try to get coffee, walk your dog, or buy some local peaches.

Maybe it wasn’t even a rally, but everyone in front of me proclaimed their favor and fear for the donald.

All of this un-dreamy dream substance was likely motivated by a graduation party my wife and I attended last night. It’s been a long-time since I attended a Protestant picnic after an equally Protestant church service, but that’s what it all felt like. All very homey and white, with sweet tea and artichoke dip.

A retired educator sitting across the picnic table from us (we had assigned seats) asked how we knew the graduate.

“I taught her courses in Holocaust Literature and Creative Nonfiction,” I said.

She stared at me blankly.

Then, she said she had taught the graduate’s older brother but had retired a few years back.

“Why?” my wife asked.

“Why what?” she said.

“Why did you retire?”

“Oh, the Lord told me to.”

“The Lord and me,” her husband said.

He was retired, too, but he made no case for anyone telling him what to do.

“How did the Lord tell you?” my wife asked.

“You’re pretty bold,” I said to my wife later as we climbed back into our car.

“Well, I wanted to know.”

In these ways, we’re pretty different people.

The educator looked a bit stunned, almost as if you had asked her about her views on attempted assassinations. Maybe no one had ever asked her before how the Lord had spoken to her and how she heard his urgings. Turns out, the educator was told by the Lord to retire via her course evaluations.

The Lord spoke to her through her students. They all told her, in so many words, to leave.

To her credit, she listened. And as we munched on delicious barbecued pork and low country boil, so did we.

A portly bald man across and to my left kept looking at me, no discernible expression on his face. He knew we didn’t belong here, and though I tried softening him by talking of weddings and anniversaries and Alabama football, he still knew. I kept waiting for something else to happen, but it didn’t (except for that soon-to-be-dream). And so we left before dessert, which was a vanilla cake, as if you couldn’t figure that out for yourself.

Someone else last week claimed to have heard from the Lord. Apparently, it was the Lord who caused Trump to turn his head just before a bullet would have scored a direct hit to his life source.

Did you ever watch All in the Family? Do you remember the episode where Archie was almost killed down at the loading dock when a forklift dropped its load of bricks (or whatever lethally-weighted substance it was holding), and if it weren’t for one of his co-workers (and here I can’t remember if it was “Black Elmo” or “Stretch Cunningham”) pushing him out of the way, Archie would have been crushed to death.

When he comes home — and if it’s possible, Archie was even whiter than normal — he tells his story to Edith, Mike, and Gloria, proclaiming again that “God saved me.”

To which Mike asks,

“Hey Arch. Did you ever think that maybe God was trying to get you, and he missed?”

So there’s always something else to consider in times of stress or Trump rallies.

I was at a birthday party when I got the text, because as you know, I’m one of the privileged people to be the first to know anything of this nature. Our party included our new in-laws, and we had just been served our cocktails when the news hit. Should I tell or not? Should I stay or should I go?

I’ve read so much in this past week about what this moment means, should mean, or doesn’t mean. I can’t tell you how this makes me feel. I mean, I literally can’t because I don’t know how I feel. Not sad, not relieved, not much of anything. I’m for gun control and against mass shootings. Violence is never the right way, I think.

People have told me that we should be glad that the bullet missed its mark. That we should be glad Trump survived, and these are people who wouldn’t vote for him under any circumstances. I want to say to them:

“Have you ever dreamed you were at a Trump rally? Did you see firemen and policewomen and new moms and pajama-clad dads descend on the street below your house crying for Trump and pushing you to get with the program?”

Well I have.

While I was trying to make up my mind to say something or not to the party-goers (Did I say it was me and my daughter’s new father-in-law who were the ones being celebrated?), my new son-in-law and his father blurted the news out at the same time. Seems like I’m not the only one to receive the latest intel.

For maybe five seconds, the mood became sombre.

And then our double smash burgers arrived.

We ate, drank some more, and I gave my new in-law his birthday present:

Vintage copies of Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.

Read in whatever you want.

He gave me a Yankees’ t-shirt.

We had a lot of fun that night, drinking and eating (the cake my wife baked was an Amaretto Pound Cake) and playing Sequence. I had a playlist going in the background, nothing so much about birthdays as about dreams. From Mazzy Star to The Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno, and Portishead.

Occasionally, someone would get a text alert telling us that “he’s alive and well.”

It’s a funny thing that when a former and perhaps soon-to-be-again president gets part of his ear blown off and is almost killed, I have virtually no visible, virtual, or visceral feelings about it. What does that mean?

The reality was that I felt so very numb to it all. So rather than misspeak or get into anything more politically contentious, and since no one in my mind or hearing was telling me what to do, I kept playing DJ, moving into the 70’s, the decade when someone tried to kill our only un-elected president, twice. From Madman Across the Water to Tina Turns the Country On!, to this bit of wishful wisdom:

It’s next week finally. No convention or conventional wisdom to watch. Only the mind-melt that is the Blue Party (though perhaps the melting has ceased now). Maybe we’re all dreaming because I still don’t know how to feel, what any of this means, or what will happen tomorrow or in the next five minutes.

What I do know is that for my birthday, my wife took me to the record store and bought me three albums:

Dummy by the afore-mentioned Portishead; X’s, Cigarettes After Sex’s latest; and I’m Still in Love With You, by Al Green.

I am the only person in the world, now, and before, and ever, to have received these three albums for his 68th birthday, from his wife. And that is something I know what and how to feel about.

First published in The Riff.