DOWN WITH UP AND UP WITH DOWN

Or can it be that we are not taught sufficiently about the need of having time to visit the human soul living in there? Are we afraid of the questions our soul may ask of us? Like, why have you spent these years striving to excell your brethen or sistren, to put them down so that you can get more of whatever it is all the rage to get..? Striving to get your kids into a ‘better’ school than they need, and study something that they may have no desire to actually know, and to eat and drink of that artificial life, until a treacherous ‘retirement’ time comes. Retirement from what? Do you ever ask yourself just what you want to retire from? If it’s so stressful or boring that you have had a smoldering hatred for it, all this large hole in your life, then might it not have been better for you to do else? Better for you and your soul, sitting there in a rocking chair looking out of a small window upon what I presume is the real world, and wishing that you and the wife and the kids would come in and spend some time with visiting. Get to actually know one another.

Don’t you sense the air of that spirit in early morning when the little shop shutters of life begin to open and you try to catch the aroma in a cup of fresh brewed coffee? Of course it never can be quite brewed as the air of it promises. All of this sort of thing which you have been trained, ‘educated’, into excluding from your life, for sensitive spiritual stuff is not the stuff that executives are made of. Not the stuff of fortunesk. Not the stuff of RECOGNITION!

Have you never?

No? Too bad. Too bad. There’s so much that begins with the rejection  of what is called ‘material success’. We hear of ‘the measure of success’. But I feel suspicious of any success which can be measured, for this calls for camparisons and none of us can accurately measure the relativity of individual development. Individual success.

Success in one’s general character used to be important. I recall one modest success which rested upon common sense. Since it combined training of character by common sense, it remains in my mind.

Smoking. I tested that one Sunday afternoon when I was fifteen and several of us boys were walking along a wooded stream.  I bought a cigarette from the older, seventeen year old boy who had left school to work and could now enjoy the freedom of smoking. Probably not because he liked to pull smoke into his lungs instead of clean woodland air. Air was then apparently clean. He had his reasons for smoking, that is why he smoked. I suspect defiance was a major with him for it was a noticeable trait.

While I knew by observation and information that smoking ‘cut your wind’, and I knew that I had no excess of wind to encourage cutting any of it,  I don’t think that this alone would have kept me apart from cigarettes. So, I gave this smoking boy one cent for one cigarette. This netted him a modest profit for cigarettes were going at twenty for fifteen cents. He was suspicious about my assurance that he gained in the transaction, which may give a clue to his mathematical acumen. So I lighted it. He didn’t charge for the match. He hadn’t been charged for it. Fortunately.

I state openly now, for I’ve grown above some common levels of shame, that I expected to experience some manner of sexual stimulation from the cigarette. Without inquiry, I had assumed that the probable enticement to draw a man into the cigarette habit would be linked to sex. The billboards had been slowly bringing a lovely female into the thing of smoking, so this fed my conviction that sex lurked in there somewhere. The lovely female had advanced to the bold stage of holding the cigarette, sort of handing it to him, and if that didn’t reek of sex then we boys didn’t know what sex did reek of. I think one lovely female was lighting the thing as it hung from the too-handsome seducer’s face and we boys looked at it and said ‘if she smokes, she will go all the way’. We were cheated by her for we had quite loved such a lovely female just out of a protective sense. As for the seducer, we would have smashed his face in. His kind were not good to have hanging around. We had one such fellow in town who would fit that billboard. We had seen him on a Saturday evening standing on the street waiting for the trolley. And he wore a suit which was strangly suited to that kind of fellow and a soft gray fedora hat and his smooth face had patches of white talcum on it and you could see that he wanted it to be in patches to show off his tanned pink cheeks and believe it or not he was leaning on a cane and we knew he was not lame. He wore one gray suade glove on his right hand, but the glove for his left hand was draped over the curve of the cane. His bare hand kept the arrangement together. We looked at him closely as we walked by and you would swear he came out of a magazine. Which, of course, he did.

We were just boys but not every one of us was still pure. We knew things about life. And now, as I purchased the cigarette from this older boy, I could see he had some tentative patches of talcum on his tanned and pinkish cheeks.

I smoked that cigarette down to the hilt and there was no sensation in any degree sex rousing. Maybe one cig didn’t do it. Again the transaction and down to the hilt. Nothing. A treacherous deception. A lesson stored with others that combine to suggest that you do well to trust business men only as far as you could throw them. But I tend to be thorough. Three cigs and three cents would cinch it.

So I did it and then I took stock. This was common sense in action. My mouth and nose had been used for a chimney and they tasted like it and smelled like it. My hand stank. I had wasted three cents. But I had gained. I would never need to carry that little pack of cigs in my shirt pocket, and the matches, and be uneasy and nervous if they ran out. I would not have to earn that fifteen cents per pack, per day. Not ever. Grandmother had taught me well to always consider an expenditure by the times you would renew it.