Marfa Potter Goes Shredding To Meet A Guy - Whatever It Takes, A Marriage Made In A Parking Lot

Getting to Parking Lot 8 of abandoned RFK Stadium in Southeast Washington was not easy, especially for Marfa Potter, a young woman who had grown up in a secure, privileged family, gone to the best schools, and now lived in Georgetown, one of Washington's most exclusive residential neighborhoods. 

The trip required GPS and because a wrong turn could take her deep into the heart of the inner city, she doubled and tripled up - Garmin and a highly recommended Space X geo-satellite app.  Shades of the Tom Wolfe book about a white couple who get off the wrong exit; or Cousin Benny's Milwaukee wedding where Hyman Frank took a wrong turn and stopped for directions at a Seven Eleven, deep int the nastiest city ghetto. 

 

'They don't like no white folks up in here', a black cop who  happened to stop for donuts and coffee advised, but Hyman, deeply committed to civil rights and the black man's righteous scaling of the social heights, kept on taking wrong turns, stopping for directions and by another stroke of good luck - no dope should have been so lucky -  made it back to the hotel 

In any case Marfa decided to make the trip to Anacostia and RFK.  Her lawyers and accountants handled all the heavy lifting when it came to taxes, investments, and trust management, and just about everything these days was online, but she managed to stuff a few boxes full of scrap paper and incidental memos to justify a trip to the shredding center, and at the appointed hour, she headed off. 

Why, you might ask, would she even bother with such a penitential trip to the ghetto?  It was certainly not for privacy and financial security, nor to clear the basement of clutter.  It was to meet a man. 

As unseemly for a woman of her pedigree as it might seem, it was her last hurrah before resigning herself to spinsterhood.  She had cruised the National Gallery, the Philipps, and the Corcoran; had canvassed the intermission crowd at the Kennedy Center assembled for Swan Lake; had joined runners clubs, skiers events, and even joined the Potomac Rowing Club - all in the hopes of meeting a man. 

When she looked in the mirror that Thursday May morning about to undertake the journey to RFK, she didn't like what she saw.  Despite her relatively young age - forty wasn't that old - she was getting saggy, a bit jowly, lined, and a bit pasty looking. Nips and tucks were so bourgeois, and all-day luxuriant spa treatments were simply too Hollywood, so the face looking back at her from the mirror was hers to keep for better or worse. 

'The inner woman', she kept telling herself as the days and months went by without a single serious suitor; but most men were never bothered with looking beyond T&A.  Her inner rooms were to be forever closed if the key were to be in their hands. 

Last week it was the Gardner lecture on T.S. Eliot, the week before a DAR tour of Winterthur, the week before that owling on the C&O Canal, but nothing came of it. A wash, a sexual no-show, an idle venture, a total waste of time. 

The problem was this: the sexual dynamics of the day being what they were and not much evolved from a thousand years before - men, as ugly as sin, because of wealth, family, and professional promise could get the girl while women had to scrap for purchase - were still in play.  

Ever since the catty, claws out, bitchy days of high school when women were their own enemies, women had to marshal and assemble resources men had no idea about and no time for. 

The men on these tours, looking interested at Delacroix, or listening intently to talks on the spotted owl and snail darter were leftovers.  Men who despite the fact could have any woman they wanted if the price were right, were on the mating trail, pretending sexual agency when they had none at all. Pitiful. 

So why Marfa even bothered to make it down to RFK for the twice a year shredding jamboree was surprising even to her; but a woman who feels at the end of her rope, has to cling to it and try to pull herself up no matter how tenuous the haul. 

According to her friends who had ventured across the Anacostia to Indian Country and the shredding bonanza at RFK, it was a great opportunity to meet men.  The hundreds of Washingtonians who lined up for shredding were not from the ghetto. 

The Washington inner city was off payroll. None there had any investments to speak of, were not registered on the tax rolls, and lived day-to-day.  Their basements were cluttered with dilapidated baby carriages, Chevy manifolds, and empty malt liquor cases - not IRS forms, trust fund records, or business contracts. 

So the drivers of the Lexus, Mercedes, Volvo, and Infiniti SUVs snaking around the pilons to the shredding trucks were all of a higher order, and many of them marriageable. 

This time DC's classic inefficiency, disorder, and completely chaotic management was a boon for Marfa, for while she was standing around waiting for her files to be shredded, she met interesting men. These were not the pretentious intellectual wannabees at the Corcoran but working professionals who were their own men, confident, secure, and always on the lookout. 

At first glance - this chaotic, undisciplined, poorly-organized and -managed affair - would not seem to be the ideal meeting place for prospective sexual partners, but to assume so one would be guilty of social myopia and preconceived notions.  Amidst the clutter, mayhem and spilled cartons of paper were great guys, only waiting for the opportunity to meet women. 

And so it was, Serendipitus Victor!, that Marfa Potter met Lincoln Addison.  'Over a bin of trash', they both laughed over glass of Moet Chandon. 

'The ghetto has some advantages, after all', said Lincoln, happily alone with Marfa and planning their live together, 'Who would have thought that the slums and shredding would have given us this?'    

                    

When The Warranty Is Up And Your Pull-By Date Has Passed, You're On Your Own - The Honorable Badge Of Courage

When Bill Baxter went in for his yearly physical - well, not exactly yearly since at his age what ails him would either improve or do him in, so why find out before the time came? - Dr. Sherman said, 'You're in fine shape, Bill, heart of an athlete and prostate of a young man'. 

'Numbers don't lie', replied Bill, a man who ordinarily never paid attention to actuarial tables, IRS life expectancy projections or Treasury Department expectations for bond maturity.  He had always been a come-what-may kind of guy, taking life as it, mining its treasures, putting up with its frustrations, and accepting tragedy; but now, suddenly, someone had flipped the channel.  He was no longer looking at the future with any enthusiasm and was spending more and more time dwelling on the past. 

What bothered him most was his sexual insignificance.  God's greatest irony was to create men with a lifelong interest in sex, but to afford them only a few short decades to do something about it. 

'Stop thinking about younger women', said the doctor. 'Recalibrate your objectives' which meant someone like Sadie Birnbaum, a woman with a leathery Miami Beach tan, a relic from the old days of Collins Avenue, mink coats, and the Fontainebleau who greeted him warmly and invitingly in the elevator every morning. Yes, sex with Mrs. Birnbaum might be in the cards, but the thought of lying next to, let alone on top of this antique was shuddering, a waste of Viagra, and a hundred elevator trips later staring at the engineer sign-off card. 

The problem was that Bill had had a younger woman - an early Christmas present he called her, a brand new tricycle under the tree.  What could be more jubilant? 

The affair went on until the ornery bits showed up - his wife, the girl's biological clock, the rumors in the typing pool - and they parted one tearful Saturday morning in May.  He remembered the date and time because it was all downhill from there. Pull-by date long passed, God's irony in full swing, and the long slog until the end before him. 

'Get ahold of yourself', said Dr. Sherman, shaking hands with Bill and escorting him out the door.  'It happens to the best of us'. 

Cold comfort from a young man, thought Bill as he made his way onto K Street.  What did he know? and all the way home in the taxi, he tried to sort things out.  Recalibrate? Hah! Sadie Birnbaum?

After many years of service, a colleague was offered an emeritus position - a pleasant although smaller office, an honorarium instead of seven figures, and an invitation to all board meetings.  It was the company's way of reducing the payroll, freeing up corner office space, but acknowledging fidelity and fellowship.  

The colleague, like an academic on sabbatical at a lesser university, had only to produce a few desultory papers, an to focus on efficiency, corporate management, human resources, and workflow, his bailiwick when fully employed. 

The man never realized that he was being put out to pasture - the tiny windowless office should have done the trick, or the no-response to the weekly policy papers he produced, or the infrequent invitations to backend, insignificant meetings of board 'adjutants' - and so he kept at it, coming in at 9 every morning, taking a short break for lunch, and staying on until the Salvadoran cleaning crew came in to mop up. 

This continued for many month, a year or more perhaps, over which time he was completely forgotten. 'Who?' was the best recognition he could muster, but he kept at it.  The job was his whole life, his justification for being, his raison d'etre. 

And then one late morning, an errand boy with a delivery who mistook the man's office for that of the intended recipient, found him dead as doornail, slumped over an array of papers on his desk.  Apparently he had died sometime the day before, but no one noticed, and the cleaning ladies assuming he was snoozing, mopped around him. 

'He died in his traces', said the President of the company at his memorial service, and went on to cite his many notable achievement in office management.  The few mourners gathered nodded in agreement, but looked at their watches, and hoped that the ceremony - already short and peremptory - would soon end. 

'Is that my fate?', Bill asked himself when he heard the tale.  Certainly not that particular end.  No, his existential conundrum was far removed from his colleagues unusual perplexity.  

Yet the image of the poor bugger slumped over papers no one would ever read was a metaphor. 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?', wrote William Butler Yeats in his poem The Second Coming. Perhaps that was what it was, thought Bill, until he remembered the words of his Yale professor who explicated the text saying 'Yeats envisions a monstrous, exhausted figure emerging from the cyclical collapse of history' not exactly Bill's situation, but he needed something heady to grasp on to.  

'The warranty period on your I-phone has expired, Mr. Baxter, but don't worry, we can get you to an agent as soon as you provide us with some supplementary information', said the Apple representative who was sugar-coating the steep charges for anyone foolish enough to let their warranty lapse. 

Metaphor again, though Bill. Not only has my pull-by date passed - that's bad enough - but my warranty period as well.  'I'm on my own'. 

Now, many years ago when he was a young man, this is the way life was.  Before employment, job security, investment portfolios, and trust funds you were on your own.  No net if you fell from the high-wire, nor did you ever want one.  Life was to be taken as is.  Risk, impossibility, danger were all part of evolution - growing up - and Bill was ready.  

What had happened? Where had all the self-confidence and logical positivism gone? How had he turned into a weak-kneed Nellie before he knew it? Yet here he was, just like himself as an adolescent facing the unknown, tethered by nothing now that warranty and pull-by were long past. 

'I don't feel anything like the old me', he said. 

Old age was a matter of dribs and drabs.  T.S. Eliot had it right:

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?

 

'I deserve a medal', said Bill. 'So do we all', referring to that generation nearer to the end of life than its beginning.  

He eventually righted his emotional ship and sailed on, captain of the barque at least.   

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep - After 'The Horror...The Horror' A Bedtime Prayer

Emily Sparing grew up in a solidly Catholic family, one which observed Holy Days, went to Mass on Sunday, fasted on Friday, and tried to remain in a state of grace.  The Church was not exactly the center of their lives, but it was far more than the peripheral affair it was for most residents of New Brighton.  They took Jesus seriously. 

Father Brophy was an impressive priest, and when he began his sermon, the rustling and squirming stopped, and all eyes were front and center. Everyone knew that they were in for fire and brimstone, and if they had heard it all before, they still welcomed the opportunity to hear it again. 

'Sinners', began Father Brophy, pausing to adjust his chasuble, centering the Bible on the pulpit, and looking out over the congregation - his congregation, the one he had nurtured, instructed, directed, and brought closer to the Lord.  

His many years at The Church of the Redeemer had been good ones.  The building fund, so generously endowed, permitted the renovation of the school which had stood unattended since the day it was built.  He had been considered for promotion to bishop, but chose to remain a priest and complete the work of his calling. 

'Sinners', he repeated, and the communicants in the front row looked up expectantly, waiting for the full bore of his intent.  Brophy was an old-style priest who although faithful to Vatican II and the church reforms that came with it - structural, liturgical, and canonical changes aimed at creating a more inclusive church - he champed at the bit, waiting for the pause in the sacramental offering of the mass and to begin what was really on his mind, sin. 

For a good half hour at times, he, feeling the divine retribution of God, his anger at the perpetual ignorance of those still residing in darkness, and the need to wake them from their impious slumber, he harangued, hectored, and caviled, invoking the celestial beauty of a place at the right hand of the Father and the perpetual fires of hell.

As a young girl Emily had no idea what all the fuss was about.  She was too young to understand the priest's invocation of sodomy, prurience, sexual deviance, and infidelity, and so leafed through her missal and looked at the pictures of Jesus ministering to the poor instead.  She wished she didn't have to be there, in church with this beery lot of parishioners on hot summer days; but she knew it was part of the family routine, necessary somehow to complete some kind of obligation.

As she got older, she began to see Father Brophy as the old windbag he had become, banging on about the same sins that had preoccupied him for decades but which were apparently as still common, perverse, and insidious as ever. 

Finally, when she went away to boarding school, she stopped going to church, felt relieved that her Sunday mornings were not the penitential miseries they had been back home, stretched her legs on the deep, carpeted lawn in front of Hadley Hall, and had not a care in the world. 

She couldn't have gone to Mass even if she had wanted. Fielding Academy was located in the foothills of the Green Mountains, deliberately remote and isolated, a place of hermetic learning said Isaiah Smith, founder and first principal in 1888.  Her parents, worried about her growing indifference to her religion but pleased that she had been accepted into an elite preparatory school, the equal of Andover, Exeter, or St. Paul's, demurred.  She would have to find her own way. 

Religion is many things to many people.  Perhaps the most important of which is that of spiritual home.  No matter what happens in the outside world, no matter how depraved or threating, the church would always be there as a refuge.  God loves you if no one else does. 

After Fielding Emily entered Harvard and there was fully sensitized to the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized.  The university prided itself on having moved from the restrictive, disciplined redoubt of the white privileged students of wealth to an open place of social justice and racial communalism, and the indoctrination of its students was as telling, intimidating, and complete as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Year Zero. 

 

That this new ethos had such a hold on the young Emily was not surprising to Prof. Lombard Freeman, Dean of the Duke University medical school and leading scholar on 'transnational idolatry', the willing suspension of disbelief in social reformers. Prof. Freeman was particularly struck by the elision from traditional religious faith to secular faith. 

The human individual cannot do without religion, whether Biblical or down-to-earth.  It is no surprise nor no coincidence that the true believer whether in God, Jesus, and the hereafter or in social reform share the same faith and fidelity.  They both have canon, liturgy, litany, evangelism, and a profound belief in the coming of another, better world.  Without either faith - celestial or earthly - the individual is adrift in a miasma of uncertainty

In Emily's interregnum - the period after leaving the church and before full adoption of progressivism - she felt as adrift as speculated by Lombard Freeman.  She missed that clerical certainty, that absolutism that the Catholic Church afforded. Harvard had begun the process of transition from religious to secular faith, but the old ways were so deeply embedded, four university years were not enough to complete the elision. 

Emily remembered her Catechism class.  'Who made the world? God made the world. Where is God? God is everywhere? Who loves you? God loves you', a childish litany evocative of the Agnus Dei. 

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

dona nobis pacem.

These words, both those enunciated in clear, unequivocal tone by Sister Mary Joseph and those recited by Father Brophy on the altar were especially resonant and meaningful in this interregnum.  What had she done, abandoning the church as she had? And as much as she now embraced the heady world vision of progressivism, was membership in such a temporal movement only secondary to real belief?

Nevertheless, she persisted and became one of The Movement's most ardent advocates. Taking a page from Father Brophy's prayerbook and his incendiary, accusatory, and threatening sermons, she became well-known for her clarity, singularity and absolute mastery of the progressive faith. 

In a similar vein and one also noted by Professor Freeman, she became a missionary.  The podium/pulpit was too removed from the real world of the oppressed, and she was bound and obliged to evangelize amongst the poor and disassociated. 

'Whatchoo doin' up in here, bitch?' were the first words she heard as she stepped out of her car in front of the Lincoln Douglass Homes, one of Anacostia's biggest, most crime-ridden, drug addled projects where she was to meet LaShonda Adams, a community organizer and political activist. 

When Emily paid no attention to the do-ragged, grilled, blinged, shirtless black man who shouted at her and started to walk up the steps of Bloc B, the man blocked her way and was joined by three others who surrounded her.

'I said, Whatchoo doin' up in here, bitch?'

'Yeah', chorused the ring around her. 'That's right. We gonna run a train on yo' ass.'

LaShonda came running out the door, down the steps, shouting, 'She's with me...She's with me' and got in the face of Pharoah Jones who started the whole affair. 'Don't you be messing with my white girl, fool'. 

And so it went, call and response, another litany, this time street liturgy until face had been saved, bitches all went home, and Emily walked with her to an area where men were playing chess on cement chessboards. Soon, and one by one, the men got up from their game and walked over to Emily and LaShonda, grinning, jacking their pants down a notch, fingering the Glock-9s in their waistbands, and chiming in with the same bullying swagger of Pharoah Jones and his crewe. 

OK, Emily said to herself on the way home.  I shouldn't have gone first into...Here she stopped herself, pursued by a very racist, unkind metaphor...The Heart of Darkness. 

Yet there was no way to avoid the comparison.  Kurtz, Josef Conrad's hero in The Heart of Darkness, lives and works deep in the African forest.  Tribalism, primitive barbarism, and human sacrifice form the culture which he was supposed to address, a European colonial reformer out to mine ivory but to bring civilization to the natives. 

Instead he is taken by the raw power and beauty of the tribe's primal savagery, and desires it.  If he can become as primitive and unattached to any developed moral code, he can become king. 

Of course the story ends badly, and on his deathbed, Kurtz can only manage these last words, 'The horror...the horror' a final understanding that the primitive savagery he sees in the natives around him, the complete lack of any moral code, the lack of any evolutionary promise, is universal.  The horror is everyone's. 

Of course she stopped the thought before it proceeded into nastier territory.  The excursion was her fault, that of a naively optimistic woman who simply wanted to bring the word of progress and social reform to a deserving community.  She had misjudged, misread, and completely misunderstood the ethos of the inner city.  It was little different from Conrad's Congo. 

Seminal events, minor epiphanies, 'Aha' experiences, eye-openers are common in those who are prepared to have them, and despite her secular commitment, her deep avowal of progressivism, and a profound faith in something, she woke up.  The horror...the horror...was not for her. 

That night, she knelt before bedtime, and repeated the familiar childhood prayer - 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take'. 

Nothing could have been more comforting. 

Sometimes it takes a one-off event to reverse one's fortunes.  If it hadn't been her evangelical desire to leave the academic posturing of official Washington and to descend into the real world, she might never have returned to true faith. If Kurtz had not participated in unholy tribal rituals, he might never have seen the truth. 

'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic', say those who can never understand the nature of faith and assume patent indoctrination, nothing more.  

Father Brophy might have been an old windbag, but behind him was the cross, the altar, the tabernacle and the miraculous presence of Jesus Christ.  She was back.