José María & María José
Saturday, December 21, 2013
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| Bronwen Marsden & Michael Unger |
Having no photography business left to
worry about I can safely say that as Christmas Eve nears (Nochebuena) I can
already feel that Christmas feeling of not having to take off sleep wear during
the day to replace it with go-outside kind of stuff. Those wonderful lazy days
between Christmas and the day after New Year’s have begun early for me. I have
no urgent slides to scan for a client or worry about finding contacts in the
New Year to justify the keeping of my studio (long gone). In short I am doing
nothing and feeling quite smug about it. I am a photographic version of that
fading general, Douglas MacArthur.
But I would like to be clear that I do not
hold Richard Nixon’s attitude that you will not have me to kick around anymore.
I will be around in this world of instant communication that is not. The phone
will not ring and no Argentine Spam, only the other will clog my email program.
In short I can stare at my wife and be happy that she is there instead of my
reflection on the mirror.
With these long night days where nothing
much happens I have time to listen, full blast, in this very living room where
I am writing this, four of Bach’s Toccata & Fugues for organ including
D-minor MWV 565 or to think about such useless fact as the one I am sending your way.
This is that one of the most manly names a
man can have who comes from a country where Spanish is the official language,
is José María. The same applies to
women. One of the most feminine of all names is María José. Those names come from a world that is disappearing.
I would like to divide
the world in two. There is the world of those who were mature enough to
understand the April 8, 1966 Time Magazine cover, Is God Dead? And there is
that world of people born long after who would not understand the shock wave
that one cover caused around the world. Perhaps the only other shock wave of
similar comparison was the introduction of the birth control pill. Men no
longer had to worry so much whose offspring his wife’s child was. A great chunk
of the world’s religious morality rules were no longer applicable.
I will not reveal to
anybody reading here what my views on God are. This is personal.
But I decry that with
the loss of the magic of religious “magic”, all its pomp and circumstance, a
film like The Hobbit and stupendous special effects cannot help a child mature
into a human being of some worth. I believe you have to believe in order to
then not believe. If you do not believe how can you believe in anything?
In 2010 my wife
Rosemary, our two granddaughters Lauren, now 11, Rebecca, now 16, and I drove
in our Malibu all the way to south Texas. On the way we
stopped to visit Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. in Austin. We saw him at St. Joseph Hall across
from the large Neo-Gothic Old Main in which I boarded and went to school in the
50s. As we were entering St Joseph Hall I spotted the campus priest, Father
Rick Wilkinson, C.S.C. I have no idea why at that moment I heard myself say to
Father Rick, “Will you bless my granddaughters?” I was able to corral Lauren
but Rebecca insisted on going inside to get on facebook in the St. Joseph Hall computer room. Father Rick placed his
right hand on Lauren and uttered beautiful words while with his index finger he
gently touched both her eye lids.
Since that day I have
regretted not being more forceful with Rebecca. I even wonder if her terrible
16s might not have been ameliorated by Father Rick’s gentle hand.
I don’t believe in
Santa Claus. I don’t believe in special effects and I eschew Tolkien, magic
swords and rings.
What I believe in I
won’t tell you. You will have to guess. And that might have something to do with Father Rick's hand.
