Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
The conversation this morning went something like this: I told my best friend Tito that he shouldn’t weigh more than I do, for I was four inches taller than him. He responded with a smile that he was heavier than me because he is so much more muscular than I am. He always was. I may never catch up to Tito, but I love catching up with him.
Seeing that film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood yesterday, I couldn’t help but think about my late father. The film itself is about loss, but it’s also about an incipient loss, for everyone in the theatre watching knows that Fred Rogers, the televised child therapist we didn’t know we needed, isn’t with us anymore. Some of us remember how Mr. Rogers came out of retirement briefly after the events of September 11th to reassure the children of America, and maybe all of us, that we would be OK. He said, “Thank you for whatever you do, wherever you are, to bring joy and light and hope and faith and pardon and love to your neighbor and to yourself.”
My dad used to talk that way, about the abstract positives that we can bring to bear on any interaction, even though my dad, also a TV personality, was not a fan of Mr. Rogers’ slow and patient delivery. Seeing this movie (and the documentary about Mr. Rogers that was released last year during Father’s Day weekend) made me wonder about the sort of father-son conversations that would result if he had had the chance to see these films. As a film buff and a film critic, my dad probably saw something like 10,000 films during his 71 years, but he did not live long enough to see Mr. Rogers on the big screen. I remember discussing films with my dad, even catching up my dad on new films, in my dreams after he passed away, often realizing before the conversation was over that I was dreaming.
Dreams become more lifelike when we find ourselves acting on decisions in the dreamworld, perhaps the first step into lucid dreaming. In dreams, as in life, we will find stimuli to be positive, neutral, and negative, and we must decide how to respond to such stimuli. Usually we don’t decide, but are swept up by the reported 60,000 thoughts we have a day. And because, some psychologists say, 80% of those thoughts are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive, a life of uncontrolled thoughts might seem like some of the darkest scenes of the film Groundhog Day: futile, dispiriting, and dauntingly familiar.
We tend to repress these negative stimuli and thoughts, to deny them, to pretend they don’t exist, or to run from them as if they were monsters in a nightmare. Doing so, we end up feeding and empowering these hungry monsters, and thus we invite them to accompany us. This morning the Dalai Lama called this process “a source of trouble,” tweeting, “A source of trouble is that our minds are unruly. We need to effect an inner transformation, to understand that love and affection are a real source of joy. It’s important to be warm-hearted rather than selfish. We’ll be less sick, live longer and have more friends here and now.”
The American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön suggests that we sit determinedly with the distracting thoughts and emotions that gallop up to us, noting that they could be labeled as positive, negative, or neutral. This practice might help us stop from reacting to an unpleasant or even terrifying emotion in an automatic or habitual way. Our habits sometimes numb us to our own experiences, especially when we don’t stop to notice that we are responding without thinking about how or why we do what we do. We have so many seductive and unhelpful habits to choose from!
Meditation can help us to become more mindful, for meditation allows us to step away from the repeated and thus memorized narratives that package up and skillfully present to us our least favorite emotions — perhaps including regret, fear, or grief. When we meditate, returning our attention to the breath or to an object, we give ourselves a means to sit with something other than our anxious narratives.
I’ve been trying to engage in this difficult but necessary process, and it has left me more mindful and aware, but also a little raw. When one is heartbroken or grieving, the heart is tender, maybe even tenderized, and thus more receptive to empathy and compassion. In the theatre yesterday, I was probably not the only one to become emotional when Tom Hanks has Mr. Rogers ask us to spend a moment with our beloveds, reminding us, as Rogers once did in real life, that “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are?”
This brings me back to Tito, the constant companion of my entire childhood. For Tito, I have great love and compassion, mixed with the sort of longing that comes with grief. Tito died in a plane crash 26 years ago, and I will always be grieving that loss. Perhaps because his funeral will always be one of my life’s missed opportunities (we didn’t have the money in 1993 to fly me back to DC), in my dreams I still find myself writing up my prepared remarks for a celebration of Tito’s life.
Meanwhile, Tito visits me from time to time, reminding me of our private jokes, and of how strong he is. When I dream of Tito, lucidly or not, I remind him how loved he is. Some bonds, such as those with the people who have “loved us into being,” are so strong, stronger especially than our ephemeral bodies, that they can’t be broken. In our dreams and in our memories, we can revisit these beloveds with warm hearts.
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s Pub Quiz will give you an opportunity to reflect upon the following: autodidacts, Star Wars movies, minority-owned firms, short titles, the direction of a life, the Associated Press, dropouts, a time for old men, monkeys, pizza, female artists, sports decades, colorful trees, friendliness, natural disasters, care packages, geometry, college majors, TV psychologists, New York borough exports, cameos, Montana, Christmas timing, third in a trio, countries of the world, majorities of voters, geology, anagrams about friendly fog visors, climate change, avengers, and Shakespeare.
We had a full house last Monday because of the Thanksgiving break. Tonight I suspect that we will have room for you. Join us!
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Current Events – Names in the News. In 1947, the same year as Jackie Robinson, Wataru Misaka broke the color barrier in what sport?
- Sports. Who did the San Francisco 49ers beat 37-8 yesterday?
- Shakespeare. Who provides the prophesy in Macbeth?
P.P.S. Thursday’s Poetry Night at the John Natsoulas Gallery will feature readings by Frank Dixon Graham and Len Germinara. Check out the Facebook event, and plan to join us. We start at 8.