Philip Schultz

My ocean town struggles to pick up leaves, offer summer school, and keep our library open. Every day now more men stand at the railroad station, waiting to be chosen for work. Because it’s thought the Hispanics will work for less they get picked first, while the whites and blacks avoid the terror in one another’s eyes. Our handyman, Santos, who expects only what his hands earn, is proud of   his half acre in Guatemala, where he plans to retire. His desire to proceed with dignity is admirable, but he knows that now no one retires, everyone works harder. My father imagined a life more satisfying than the one he managed to lead. He didn’t see himself as uneducated, thwarted, or bitter, but soon-to-be rich. Being rich was his right, he believed. Happiness, I used to think, was a necessary illusion. Now I think it’s just precious moments of relief, like dreams of Guatemala. Sometimes, at night, in winter, surrounded by the significant silence of empty mansions, which once were cottages, where people lived their lives, and now are owned by banks and the absent rich, I like to stand at my window, looking for a tv ’s futile flickering, always surprised to see instead the quaint, porous face of my reflection, immersed in its one abundance.

Sometimes, mystified by the behavior of one of my sons, my wife will point out if   it’s age-appropriate, making me wonder why I still shout at ballplayers on tv and argue with the dead. Last week, my oldest son, with a wild pitch, turned my left ankle into an eggplant. I didn’t yell at the doctors who refused my insurance, or get angry with a friend who told me to soak it in bourbon and garlic. No, I read Montaigne who said self-revelation is the purpose of discourse, which, in his day, meant knowing whether to be flattered if a friend didn’t use a food-taster, or amused if a witch cast a spell of   weeping on an in-law. Blaise Monluc, the king’s lieutenant general during the civil wars, Montaigne says, threw so many hanged Protestants down a well you could reach in and touch the top one’s head. Yes, Monluc, who was fond of saying “When the scaffolds are full, use trees,” knew what was appropriate. On occasion I’ll run into a lobby to avoid greeting a friend, not because my mind vanishes and I can’t remember his name, which is true, but because I must flee what is darkest in me. In other words, when evicted from a strange lobby into a stranger street, where every scaffold is full and bodies dangle in the long blue sorrow of the afternoon, without context, explanation, or sympathy, it’s good to know, even momentarily, how to live, among the relevant, the passionate, and the confused.