Murder at the Tudor

               Of course it was raining; what kind of murder mystery would this be if it were not?  My old Ford Fairlane dodged left and right, trying to avoid the potholes whose depths I did not know until I hit one, so I tried not to hit one.   It was already hard enough to see in front of me through the broken windshield without the heavy rain clouding my vision even more.  I didn’t even try to look behind me; I was used to the missing rearview mirror.

                The gate of Mrs. White’s Tudor mansion was already open when I approached, but then closed behind me when I cleared it.  The claxon sound of the two metal gates closing on each other was right out of Hitchcock, and I laughed at myself for feeling off balance.  This was only a writer’s group meeting, I reminded myself.  But whenever it was Mrs. White’s turn to host, unusual things just happened.  One night a dead cat lay at Mrs. White’s double doors, the beautiful mahogany stained with the cat’s blood.  Turns out one of the hounds had got hold of the poor creature and slung it at the door.

                Another night one of the group members, Melissa, choked on one of Mrs. White’s shrimps.  Every person there that night said they knew the Heimlich and attempted to help, but it was Mr. White that jumped in first and helped Melissa expel the offending shrimp.  But tonight was truly going to be murder.

                Mary-Elizabeth, a woman of about 70 with blonde hair that was obviously out of a bottle, read her piece, first.  It was long and personal, a lament about how she had neglected her children when they were growing up, and how it made them strong adults (One of her children became a famous movie star, for a while.  I guess that made Mary-Elizabeth feel better about the neglect.)

                After Barbara read the first chapter of her romance novel (why are writer’s groups always heavy on the female side?), we broke for cake and coffee (Mrs. White swore off serving canapes after that one, unfortunate incident I alluded to earlier.)  The cake was one of those fantastic lopsided upside down creations so popular these days.  It was made and brought by Terri, who apparently wrote and baked fancy cakes.  I hate people with more than one skill.

                Settling back in our seats to hear from our next presenter, Mrs. White called on Caroline.  Caroline was a large woman, widowed, and an endless talker.  If someone hadn’t killed her, I might have, myself.  (Yes, I know that’s redundant, but I’m trying to find my voice, here.)

                “Where’s Caroline?”, Mrs. White asked.

                “I think she went to the bathroom,” piped up Peter.  Besides being the only other man in the group, Peter was an observer.  I know, as writers we all should be, but Peter tracked everything and everyone.  It was Peter who discovered how the cat died.  And he got a great story out of it, as well.  That really pissed me off.

                Just as Mrs. White was about to choose another presenter, a loud, long scream pierced our ears.  Mrs. White turned white, I’m sorry to say, and we all ran to the bathroom. 

                There was Caroline, apparently standing over Mr. White, his body draped over the open window’s sill. 

                I grabbed Mrs. White to keep her from entering the bathroom, but I lost my grip and she went barreling into the room.

                Back in the living room Mrs. White was surrounded by the group, some holding her hands, others offering her a tissue as she continued to wail.  She cried and wondered aloud how she was going to go on without her “little Whitey”. 

                When the police arrived, we were certain we would all be there all night.  But Peter ensured we would be home and in bed by midnight.

                “Officer, if I might.  I’ve been observing everyone here tonight and there can be only one murderer.” 

                Peter turned to Mrs. White.  “Mrs. White, your husband has a twin, is that not correct?”

                “Yes, he does”, she answered.  “But how could you know that?”

                “Every month when we arrive at your house, Mr. White greets us at the door.  He always stands to the right of the door to open it because he is left-handed, is that not correct?”  God this guy was irritating.  He sounded like a sleuth from, well, “Sleuth”.  So smug.  I also hate people who are always right.  Not just the ones who think they are always right, but especially the ones who are always right.

                “Why, yes, he is”, answered Mrs. White.

                “The man lying in that bathroom is right handed.  I could tell because his car keys are in his right pants pocket.  That means that your husband, Ben White, murdered his twin brother, Bob White who was recently widowed and inherited his wife’s huge estate.”

                The police soon confirmed the hypothesis, including Peter’s presumption that Ben White had invited his brother to the house to talk business and lured him to the bathroom and the open window in an attempt to make it look as if an intruder had murdered Mr. White; Mrs. White abruptly fainted.

                Peter was right and I hated him even more.  He was going to get a best-seller from this! 

     Bastard.

Help!

I can’t help him.  I wish I could, but I can’t help him.

He walks the streets in thread-bare clothing that he, himself, has made thread-bare.  When he is given new clothes he spends all his time ripping them and tearing them until they provide barely any modesty.  He is usually without a shirt and rarely wears shoes.  I cannot help him.

A coin provides him hours and hours of fascination.  He kneels at the curb or on a sidewalk and picks up the coin, then tosses it down to the street again.  Then he “discovers” a coin on the street and the process repeats itself for hours on end.  He needs help from someone.

His hair gets very long and filthy until someone, I don’t know who, gives him a haircut.  At one point last summer his hair reached to his hips.  His frame is prisoner-of-war-camp thin; his skin is dark from the sun and often darker from caked-on dirt.  Clearly he is disturbed.  But he is friendly and says “hello”…always.  I wish I could snap my fingers and help him.

Others have tried to help him.  Whenever he is “taken away”, something that seems to occur two or three times per year, he returns to the streets a week later clean, shorn, and with new clothes that he immediately makes into his own special brand of rags.  He clearly should be on medication; perhaps he is but does not take it.

Someone, at some point in the past, helped him: He has a home.  It is a two-room house just down the street from us.  He has set it afire three times in the three years we have lived here.  He collects old newspapers and fills his house with them…until he sets them on fire.  I can tell when he has walked past our house as there is a telltale trail of old newspapers along the sidewalk.  One time I made him clean up the newspapers.  He did so cheerfully.  That wasn’t any help to him.

One day I was walking past Starbucks on a busy boulevard in my town and saw two policemen trying to coax someone up off the street.  It was him.  He was sitting on the street, three or four coins beside him.  The police didn’t help him.

I wish I had the magic.  I wish I could close my eyes and command his scrambled brains to be unscrambled again.  But I cannot help him.

Today, on my daily run, I passed him on our street.  As he saw me running toward him he bent over and did a little jig as I passed him.  “Hello”, he said in perfect English.  “Buenos Dias”, I said in return. 

I’ll never be able to help him.

Who's Your Daddy?

     You know how Oprah has her “Ah-ha” moments?  (Always mention Oprah anytime you want to get peoples' attention, and especially right at the start.)

     You know how Oprah has her “Ah-ha” moments?  Well, I have “duh!” moments whenever I listen to or read columns by Fareed Zakaria.  (Not only did I mention Oprah, I also related myself to her…see how I did that?!)

     There are few columnists I read.  Tom Friedman is one I frequently find myself agreeing with.  He just makes sense.  No one knows economics better than Paul Krugman (even though I believe economics is a false science - parse THAT.)  But Fareed Zakaria, I mean, wow!  Not only do I find myself always agreeing with his logic, I often have “duh” moments where I wonder why no one else has said what Fareed said.  (Fareed won’t mind if I use his first name; after all, he’s in my living room every Sunday morning.)

     Fareed obviously has a firm grasp on world affairs as evidenced not only in his intelligent thoughts about the world, but also based upon how often his prophecies have come true.

     Over a year ago, in June 2014, Fareed wrote about the Middle East, and Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan in particular.  He said that the region would continue to fracture because “Sunni, Shiite, Kurd (and other) sectarian groups, often Islamist, have filled the power vacuum.  He argued the problem is one of identity, not idealism (read “religious”).  People will fight for an identity (American, for example), not ideals.  The Civil War, for example, was fought not on a zeal to adhere to biblical teachings (although the bible was used as a weapon to justify slavery), the North and South waged war because the two groups saw themselves as different people who could not come together in thought.  This plays right into Fareed’s principle that people in Iraq will not fight for Islam, but for who they are as a people.

     Only a year ago, you say?  Fair enough. 

     In December 1997, Fareed wrote that although many countries across the globe are holding ostensibly democratic free elections, the resulting power structures are looking more like dictatorships.  And that, indeed, is what we have seen in the last two decades.  “Today the two strands of liberal democracy, interwoven in the Western political fabric, are coming apart in the rest of the world. Democracy is flourishing; constitutional liberalism is not”, he wrote.  Duh!

In January 2010 Fareed also wrote, “Iraq needs a stable power-sharing deal that keeps all three groups (Shias, Sunnis, Kurds) invested in the new country.”  He argued that if that did not happen, the country could be doomed to failure. 

     It seems no one else had this thought because just this past week (May 31, 2015), Fareed declared Iraq a failed country and proposed what might need to happen, next.  Duh!

     Although the majority of Fareed’s thoughts are on world political affairs, he also has an eye on the U.S., technology (which he sees as an important ally of world peace), and periodically writes a thought piece, such as his recent column that wonders how the world might be different if a certain asteroid had struck in, say, New York City instead in the frozen wasteland of Siberia.

     Okay, enough touting Fareed Zakaria’s insights and thought-provoking, uh, thoughts.  I just wonder why more people are not as thoughtful.  Why is Fareed Zakaria, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, and others like them the only ones out there making sense?    

If we had politicians who actually engaged in thoughtful consideration (okay, now, stop laughing!), I might more often be saying “Duh!”, instead of, “Doh!”

     Where are our thinking leaders?  Where are any of our leaders?  We are so hungry and starved for competent leadership that anyone who can make a good speech immediately makes us salivate for their election to office.  Anyone who comes along with a decent new idea garners a huge following.  

     But their ideas often peter out; their leadership exposed for what it is: hunger for more power (or money…or both).  Are there exceptions?  Of course there are.  But I’m not going to talk specifics; I’m speaking in generalities, here.

     So what do we do?  How can we return to a government of thinking leaders?

     I believe it is up to us.  To have thinking leaders we must become thinking people.  We must stop poo-pooing science (unless that science is about poo-poo).  We must improve our educational system so we churn out thinking graduates.  We should teach our children to think for themselves and not simply repeat what they hear at home. (I would say “at the dinner table”, but does that even exist anymore?)  We must get our information from varied information outlets, and not sit back and watch only Fox News or MSNBC.  We must listen to differing opinions.  We must welcome challenges to what we know and what we believe.  We should attend meetings and rallies of organizations with views that challenge our own.  We have to take the money out of politics – somehow.  (No, I don’t know how, I only know it has to happen.)

     We have to stop watching the Kardashians.

     Okay, stop sweating…we don’t have to stop watching the Kardashians.  But we have to know that it is not real life and that what happens on that “reality” TV show doesn’t matter to any of our lives; we should not make decisions based upon what Kim might do.  We have to be smarter.

     It’s up to us, and only us.  We have the power, but we don’t wield it.  When we demand better leadership, we’ll get better leadership.  Until then the Donald Trumps of the world will continue to make a mockery of our republic.

indulge me

I was moving in a slight daze and could feel the sun baking my skin, but it felt distant, as if someone was describing the sensation of heat to me rather than my feeling it, and I looked to my left as two skateboarding teens twisted and turned past bicyclists moving in the opposite direction, the boys moving with as much speed as they could muster and quickly disappearing to the fading sound of the skateboard wheels grinding on the pavement where I slowly turned my head forward and continued walking as I was intensely aware of my surroundings with birds singing overhead – with whistles, chirps, and cawls -  children passing on their bikes laughing and yelling for their parents as a young couple approached, hand-in-hand, her wearing short shorts and he wearing torn jeans and a Ramones T-Shirt, the aromas swirling around my head a mixture of their colognes – hers light and pretty, his solid and silky – and then quickly dissipating into the hot air as I passed a hotel on Paseo de Montejo and noticed the landscaping:  A wagon wheel propped among the shrubs and flowers, attempting to evoke an earlier era and, I suppose, soften the hard, cold contours of the 9-story marble-facade building with its ridge of dirt separating grass and sidewalk bricks, for what purpose I do not know and as I moved forward I wanted to close my eyes and allow my senses to lead me, but there were too many obstacles in my path and I didn’t want to take the chance I might disturb the dream-like state because I was doing my best to simply be in the moment and allow my senses to be vividly alive and I felt the blood coursing through my body, especially down my hands and fingers; my feet stopped aching and I glided along the sidewalk with so many sounds bombarding my ears at once that I could barely categorize them all: Along with the birds overhead and the families enjoying their Sunday morning to my left I could hear car engines to my right on the next street over, one being an older car, most likely a Ford, with its tell-tale water pump making that familiar click-click-click and all the walkers’ shoes made various sounds on the large red bricks under our feet - clop, clop, sshump, sshump, ping, ping, ping, ping, and I thought to myself that I must remember these sounds, these smells, these sights;  I must remember this feeling of being alive in this moment; my temples relaxed and I stopped grinding my teeth; I let go of my stomach muscles and the weight shifted forward as I met a tag of taxi drivers gathered around their vehicles parked along the side street, some of them idling, their exhausts spewing the venomous, piercing odor and threatening to catapult me back to reality as the men laughed, tugged on their crotches, and added to the acrid odor of car fumes were the waftings of burnt tobacco as the men sucked on cigarettes and I quickly wound my way between them to cross the street where ahead were numerous artists selling their paintings and as I strolled past their wares I tried not to judge their works, but only to allow them to have whatever effect they may have, feeling little in the way of inspiration or emotion, but very much feeling the weight of the artists’ labored stares desperately seeking my approval, and my money, and I felt uncomfortable and sad for them, not being able to imagine making my way through the world working on the streets and how lucky I am in my life to be able to indulge myself in this manner – to know I have some security – a thriving business – a future, when just ahead a woman stooped over to pick up her dog’s dropping as she expertly wrapped a small plastic bag around her hand, grabbed the entire mess, and almost magically turned the bag outside in as she arose and crossed to the trash can on the street as she’d done many times before and I came to the glorieta with the OXXO store, the area eerily quiet – as opposed to the clamor normally occurring here with traffic coming from all directions, fighting their way through the traffic circle - when I noticed the sun’s rays hitting the trees above and shattering into a million fragments, each falling to their place in line along the sidewalk and street and buildings as I walked under the trees and my skin stopped baking and the air momentarily cooled as a man sat on a bench awaiting a bus that would not come this morning and just beyond a couple of old mansions to my right were in the process of restoration as others sat and continued their slow, abandoned decline; one of the restorations only the façade of the old home remaining intact while a new, modern facility arose behind it, with the sidewalk rising and falling due to tree roots and heavy rains inundating the walk to the heavy iron fence to my right which protected the cars in the lot of the small shopping area from Paseo where a guard sat in a shack at the parking lot’s entrance, his small portable TV blaring some sporting event as I slowly began to return to the present and my final glorieta that would require all my focus to cross the dangerous intersection until I was pleasantly reminded that it was Sunday and there was very little traffic about so I quickly and easily crossed the street to the grass median and immediately continued on to step up on the far sidewalk and its carpet of bird doo that told me I had reached my destination and in that instant pulled myself back to reality as I looked up to see the patinaed stone front of my friendly neighborhood Walmart