Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, What would you do with yourself when you get restless?  What did you do? I suppose one would first need to be aware of the restlessness and give it a name--not the name, for there is no generic, collective state of human agitation.  I could feel for another person's unrest and find in it a way to speak about my own, but heaven help me if I need to be Herzog to read Bellow. I would usually reach for a book, to answer my own question.  I don't know if that's healthy, when restlessness means I couldn't care less to rest on one book. And of course there's also writing, which can be downright self-defeating when the point I want to make is that of the Kohelet , how pointless any life-making can be. Modern life robs us of our emptiness, and we welcome it, hunger to be hungry no more.  God takes us to meet a strange creature and asks us to answer to our human vocation by giving it a name.  But we were too busy staring at one screen and then

Dear Eugene, This letter is not really for you but for you to pass it on.  If one day you happen to meet my dog Sumi in heaven, something I consider highly likely and probably within a matter of five years, I hope you will speak to her in a language she can understand, which I trust is a gift you're blessed with in heaven much like how you were on earth. Sumi again wasn't eating since this morning, and not drinking much either.  This has been happening more frequently since last fall.  So I took her for a longer walk after work, and subsequently she ate part of her dinner but not until I soaked the kibbles in water.  Now she is resting, with only me at home.  And I found myself mumbling to her and thought maybe I should write down my gibberish. So here it goes: My Dearest Sumi, You know I don't think I know you at all.  Never did, never will.  When I first toilet-trained you I thought it was pure luck.  For all I know you could change your mind and decide to s

Dear Eugene, I was vacuuming yesterday and the same fear emerged: that the powerful machine would sap all the electricity and darken my house for good.  I don't mean just the light but, really, no more electricity is ever going to come through my house because everything is used up, power grid overloaded and permanently damaged beyond repair. That would be sad.  That would be a big trouble.  But not insurmountable.  A caveman I will be, a Flintstones family, that's all.  I will be in solidarity with almost all human beings that have ever graced the face of this planet. But what if I am to realize such darkening happens only in my house.  I look out my living room window and see the rest of the world is still enjoying its merry way like before and will likely forever after.  Doomed and damned, just me, and no one else. Then I must wonder, What happened?  What happened to me ?  Did I do something wrong to deserve this?  Did I get the wrong machine, vacuum the wrong way

Dear Eugene, It's income tax season again, something I am thinking about, tax that is, and season, the cyclical turning over of life's pages to arrive at the familiar made new, expectations fulfilled but always gracefully more. The father of a Syrian refugee family who lost all seven of his children this morning in a Halifax house fire is not thinking about tax.  He is in critical condition, but nothing is important to him anymore.  Certainly not income tax.  The house was new too, I saw it on the news and liked it a lot, could see myself in it, happily filing tax. This morning, at around 12:30--no, not even yesterday, but this very morning, same day as today, a very present tense, and if you are to use your finger to forcibly move backward the hour-hand of a clock it wouldn't take so many as a few cycles for you to go back in time to 12:30 and ask yourself why you didn't do anything to stop the fire from starting.  You are with our Father now, Eugene.  C

Dear Eugene, I saw the leg of a colleague's trousers speckled by dirt and felt sad. It was a big blemish, no little fault.  Like a blob of tar on old black-and-white movie, the story would go on despite it, sure enough, but if it doesn't cost too much money or effort one would wish the film be restored and the goop be gone. I don't pretend to know this colleague well.  He's always alone, that I know.  I imagine if there's a person whose appraisal he cares deeply enough about he would have his trousers unspeckled and quite easily too. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  I wonder if this is a statement about beauty or the eye or the beholder.  Whether our longing for beauty is going to make us or break us is at the mercy of our beholder. Considering the "difficult gospel" according to Rowan Williams, Mike Higton asked a series of questions  about the loving gaze of God the beholder: "What difference would it have made if I

Dear Eugene, "You'd better move in; I am against the door already." The man at the door announced, generally to the air.  I don't think he was addressing me in particular, for I was not the only one trying to move in the light rail train that was already pretty packed. Of course I asked in my heart, as those who were trying to squeeze in likely did too, why the man would not move in himself.  Of course it's also apparent that he's trying to secure a position to move out easily and soon enough.  He's a big man in construction attire so I took that he's moving out not the next stop but the one after, where a big construction project is happening. I wondered when he made that announcement if he wasn't seeing it as some sort of public service for the common good.  It must have crossed his mind that someone else might also want to secure a position like his, someone else who might not have as secure a footing as a big construction man would h

Dear Eugene, This weekend I will begin my first volunteer shift as a "visitor" in a residential care center, talking and listening to people who would probably rather not be there, who would definitely not be in particular want or mood of my talking and listening if they are free to go somewhere else, like a dimsum restaurant, where I an unnamed stranger shall remain conveniently unknown. I've pulled up the volunteer position description just now and read it again.  I have a strange feeling I am going to embarrass myself. I know I've signed up for it to not get comfy with myself, but now it's getting hot under the collar even before it begins.  I am sure it'll get better after this weekend.  There's nothing but prayer on my lips. Secretly though I still wish I had signed up for something else (and there are many other choices), maybe hard labor, moving mountain with a shovel I can, learning how to grind an ax and hunt for discernible and a

Dear Eugene, I went to the first hockey game of my life last night, in heavy snow too, a man's idea of having fun and now I had it. It was fun indeed. A friend won a pair of tickets and invited me.  We called it an "experience" for the lack of any before this. The place was noisy, and the game violent as expected.   There're big screens with big images, all moving, and fast too, even a movie trailer to showcase the players grinding ax (literally) and sporting killer look, all to bump up an aggression that was intensifying itself with every step we took up the stairs to enter the sanctuary.   It's a pilgrimage, a gathering of the faithful and hopeful, a crusade, for the fulfillment of a prophesied promise.  No one came to know anyone one did not know already.  The demigods on ice were much smaller than rumor has it. All in all it's a standard church experience. I thought Leonard Cohen held his last Vancouver concert in BC Place back in 2012 but no,

Dear Eugene, Last night I watched a new documentary on "America's favorite neighbor": Mister Rogers . I needed to hold back tears for the entire 94 minutes.  Strange enough it was easy, to hold back tears, something that's often not very easy for me.  I think it's because, like Mister Rogers himself, the movie is not sentimental. I don't know if this comes as a small surprise to you, that I said Mister Rogers is not sentimental, and if the surprise becomes a little bigger after you had a chance to reflect a little and come to the same obvious conclusion: Yes, " Mister Rogers' Neighborhood " is many things but not sentimental. How we keep missing the little obvious things, that when words and impressions loaded with prejudice of the most simpleminded kind happened upon our lips we would let them come through unchecked again and again despite the nagging suggestion at the back of our head and somewhere beside our heart that things and p

Dear Eugene, “I’m not of a mind to record anymore.  There’s no point… In terms of recorded music, the pact’s been broken—the personal connection between the artist and the listener. [The] MP3 has dismantled the intended shape of an album.  And then everything is leaked, everything is stolen.” Elvis Costello said that more than a decade ago .  I am glad he was of that mind again and his new album was released last year .  I was listening to it this morning walking to work. Yes, the shape, it's beautiful.  You take a song out of the context of the whole album and it is impoverished for that.  This is classic Costello, every song a self-sustained chamber piece often with multiple speaking voices that echo beyond its own walls to find resonance in a cathedral of higher calling and deeper longing.  It is a true LP record , like the Bible, a very "long play" that rewards mindful and wholehearted attention and frustrates casual bystanders, distracted tin ears. Of cour

Dear Eugene, There was a time in my life when fear was prevalent, "insecurity" something to deal with on a daily basis. I don't think I was pathologically this or that; it's just how I took things from grown-ups, that life is full of threats left and right, and to live well is to keep addressing them.  One doesn't need to be ambitious to appreciate a healthy sense of precaution: just to protect your base is a call tall enough to engage in constant harm reduction and risk assessment. One time I was with my in-laws, grocery shopping, one place and then another.  It was pineapple season, and my father-in-law picked one from the first shop, reasonably satisfied.  (He's not a stingy person, but getting a good deal is more reassuring than most other things in life.)  Then at the second shop he saw each pineapple selling for 50 cents less and declared--actually, decried--that he's been cheated.  He was tongue-in-cheek, I could see, but not very firmly, t

Dear Eugene, November 23, 2000, that was the day I picked up Russell Banks' '' Continental Drift .''  Last night I gave away a short story collection of Banks, trusting his words will shake up the world of other(s) and for good I hope.  The historic internal movements of tectonic plates beneath our feet make the Earth, our home, singularly strange.  We are all drifting on shaky ground. I was 25 then.  Looking back 19 years, I suppose I could have done it without Banks and his words.  What difference does it make, life goes on, words are words?  I can say the same thing about the very words I am writing you now.  Do I truly believe my life today would have been lived any differently by sunset if these words, my words, are not spoken? God speaks creation into existence; Banks begins "Continental Drift" with an invocation: " This is an American story of the late 20th century, and you don’t need a muse to tell it, you need something more like a L