Because the world, it turns out, always takes you by surprise. It’s always one step ahead of you. If you look away for even a minute, and often even if you don’t, you have to be retrained.
They didn’t want me near sickrooms. Or doing my hovered-buzzard number in any dayrooms or otherwise, in nursing or retirement homes where this twenty-four-hour service or that twenty-four-hour service, or any damned service you could think of, including the one I was prepared to render, was constantly on call. I had no access to an official list of telephone numbers of even the merely widowed or widowered or bachelored or spinstered elderly, people living on their own who got called every morning by concerned volunteers ringing up just to see if they could still get to their telephones. They didn’t, I mean, want me where I might, even reasonably, become unctuous.
And had other plans for me altogether.
There are these seminars conducted in motels, sessions on tax shelters, positive thinking, how to get rich in real estate with no money down. Experts advise on ways to increase your word power, build your memory, bulk up your portfolio, and offer instructions on avoiding probate. Any number of transcendental arrangements take place in these ballrooms, hospitality suites, and private, sectioned-off dining rooms of the country’s leading motels. This — motels were only rarely the venue — was the aura — places where Kiwanis met, the Lions’ Club, the Jaycees. The scrubbed and neutral geography of profit and community service, some vaguely fraternal sense of the benevolent and secret.
Halls I mean. The card and game rooms of great condominium structures on the Palisades. Chambers of the hired-out and interchangeable. Though occasionally in the auditorium — never full — of a Jewish Community Center, and sometimes in an actual temple on an actual Friday night. These were the places that usually booked me, Lud Realty’s designated speaker. And where I came to them, Lud Realty’s booked and bookish man.
“Shalom,” I’ll begin. “Good yontif to you,” and sweep into my theme, speaking, except for the commercials, much as I might have spoken to them at their funerals:
“ ‘We owe God a death,’ says the poet, ‘He who pays it this year is quits the next.’ Yet we dassn’t rush to die, ladies and gentlemen, but must take our turn, and wait till the last minute.
“But you know something, friends? We are owed to earth, mortgaged to dirt, in debt to the very ground we walk on, up to our ears in arrears to the planet. God holds our note. This is the reason for sickness, this is the meaning of pain, why He duns us with sniffles, eczema, germs. Why He claims us with rashes and toothaches. Why He forecloses with tumors and strokes.
“We must never forget obligation. This is why it’s all right to smoke and stay up late, de rigueur to dance and carouse. Yet we must never forget obligation. It’s good God ties a string round our finger with troubles. It’s good He favors us with envy and ambition and plants needs in us in perpetual shortfall to our means. Thank Him for cancer and kidney disease, for our preoccupation with money and the kids who break our hearts. He gives us our renewable thirst and programs our hunger. He sets up our lives like a memento mori. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.
“Is this harsh?
“We must never forget we’re gifts He gives to Himself, that it’s His right to move us about like lead soldiers, to run us around like a set of toy trains. The world’s only this box where He puts away His things. Is this harsh? This Nutcracker view of Creation? Is this harsh? No, in thunder, says the Sugarplum Fairy. It’s delightful to be God’s bauble, this human doodad knickknack of the Lord’s.
“And that’s why we mustn’t get too big for our britches, mustn’t forget what’s what. Prepare to die. Let’s just get it over with, I say. Make our arrangements, I mean. Turn our thoughts to the time when we have to get back in our boxes, fluffed up in our deaths like pillows, mounted in our caskets like jewels or bright gewgaws. Never put off till tomorrow.
“Hey,” I’ll tell them, “I’m selling cemetery plots here. It’s your duty to ground yourselves in ground, that obligatory seven-or-so dirt feet by four-or-so dirt feet by six-or-so dirt feet — just those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet of clay and dimension, that closes out your indenture like a valedictory ‘Yours truly’ above your signature in a letter.
“Is this harsh?
“Because the alternative to Nature is Nature — flora, fauna, beauty, geology, corrosives and temperature. Floods and avalanches, forest fires, tidal waves and the Richter scale. We’re human beings. Is this harsh? We’re human beings and weren’t raised to be salvage. We’re human beings and weren’t created to become party dip for the vultures and buzzards. Or lie about on the lawn like the Sunday paper. Is this harsh? We’re human beings, and He didn’t make us to bob the high seas like flotsam or, random as jetsam, wash up on the shore.