It
was a scene from years past. The toddler was fearless, and I saw no impropriety
as he slipped onto Andreas Bauernsohn’s lap. Although in his late eighties,
he remained big-boned after decades of heavy labor, clutching the arms of his
chair with fingers as round as hammer handles. His fingernails, trimmed with a
jack-knife, were nicotine stained and thick as a leather belt. I appreciated his
sturdy plainness. As a
great-grandfather to the little boy among that gathering of children, parents,
and grandparents, he smelled of kindness, bath soap, and . . . mothballs.
Mothballs! By the gods of
the ages. I was there to judge his worth and he assaulted me with mothballs.
Holy oracles with stone tablets! Other than house flies and mosquitoes,
mothballs were one of my few failures; they pained my ethereal nose so much I
wanted to go old-testament and smite the old man dead. Hellfire and damnation!
Sometimes my job was tougher than being a Presidential spokesperson.
Smite? Don’t smite? Those
were my choices. Had I not controled my ire, I could have issued a subtle sign
of my anger, made the lights flicker and crackle over their heads, and perhaps could
have caused their hair to stand on end. I grieved it wasn’t Super Bowl Sunday;
no message would have more keenly directed their thoughts to a supreme being
than the words Loss of Signal. I
admit I’m not always a benevolent or an unbiased God. It depends who’s playing.
And kneeling. Politics aside, I like the kneeling part. Especially without
padded benches. It demonstates more sacrifice.
Yes, I am omnipotent. I would
have smitten him—note my enjoyment that the phrase would have smitten is known as the Conditional Perfect Tense—yes, I
could have smitten him into a pile of
mothball-scented ash, but on that day I was a mellow God practicing laid-back omnibenevolence.
I was wearing velvet, in the rainbow pattern, which matched my cool
omniscience, a kind of unlimited or infinite benevolence. Californians still dig
it, though like so many things they’ve exported, it is so often misused. Humans
can be so disappointing. Imagine God frowning; it’s not a good look.
Enough dallying.
On that day—it was in the nineteen eighties during the big-hair era—I was
running a weekend special on old-geezer judgments. I wanted this mossback on my
spiritual scales while he was still warm—before his big dirt-nap could
interfere with my cosmic electronics. My sensors told me it was the embalming
fluid that sent everything haywire. Should you wonder, even the Egyptians
didn’t know as much about the afterlife as they claimed. Morticians still
don’t. But they play a good game.
As I was saying,
Gramp’s clock was ticking at a ferocious speed, so I ignored mankinds’ puny
laws of metaphysics as I tuned in the conversations in the room, reacquainting
myself with his role in life and his family. I wanted to assess his offenses.
Two teenagers sat near the
old fellow, a girl and a boy. You know, I’m sorry about teens. I created teens
in a fit of pique when I realized parents had grown too prideful about their prepubescent
children. Looking back, having created teenagers almost embarrasses me as much
as reality TV.
The girl spoke to the boy
while paying as little attention to the old man as she did an adjacent door
jamb or a length of wallboard. She spewed some nonesense about “the cute guys”
on the Dukes of Hazzard and Three’s Company, while she repeatedly wrapped
a strand of hair around her finger and stared at the floor. “My parents hate
those shows. They think Catherine Bach and Suzanne Somers are hussies.” She blathered
on, and I checked my electroencephalogrammic
brain scanner. Blank screen—not even a dead person’s flatline. Version
53x105
had been giving me trouble, so I rebooted. Vindication! The problem didn’t reside
in my software. Just no brain activity. Still, I felt a little guilty. Teens
were my fault. Omnipotence comes with responsibility.
“Give me The Gong Show,” said the old man’s
grandson. “I like that Jaye P. Morgan. Heard she does sexy things between
takes.” The boy was a vat of testosterone, but no one in the room was fooled.
He was preoccupied with the girl’s body—first cousin or not—so I placed my
standard watch-symbol on his record: 666. Who says God has no sense of humor?
Realizing
the boy might have been a victim of hereditary influences, I cued up the old
man’s TV favorites and found Gunsmoke and
Paladin. Old guy was a grain-fed
traditionalist, loved westerns. A smile of recollection brightening his face.
Momentarily cajoled by his display of warm rememberance, I considered bonus points for wholesomeness when
I recalled the true nature of Mr. Dillon’s and Miss Kitty’s relationship.
Fornicators! And the scriptwriters—they sold their souls for a contract. I
scratched Gramp’s extra points and stamped a purgatorial notation on his file:
Mortal Awaiting Judgment. Capital letters for capital punishment, I always say.
While I contemplated
whether Dillon’s deputy, Chester Goode, actually had been good and his coffee
“. . . stout enough for shoe leather,” the old man’s brain stumbled through a
scattering of memories, as the girl babbled about the most stimulating scenes
from the latest airing of CHiPs. What she did in her mind with Erik Estrada caused
more teenage blindness than staring at the biblical desert sun in 2000BC.
The old man and
the kids proved a tough case. I weighed whether the future of both teens lay in
inevitable perdition and overheard the old man’s inner voices screaming, “Pay-Per-View!
More Pay-Per-View!” Was he talking TV porn? Maybe he’d just been
an avid boxing fan who liked Sugar Ray Leonard over Hitman Hearns. In the midst
of his musings, and beyond my control, his personal mental censors screamed his
wife’s name, “Meg, Meg!” Age is so
conflicting: the prurient pleasures of Pay-Per-View battling memories of his
long-dead wife. I concluded, “This man is old, not dead.” I was like an
academic researcher: further study was required.
Born Andreas
Matthias Bauernsohn in 1893—the fourth of eleven children on a poverty-plagued
farm in northern Wisconsin—his life had offered many opportunities for death:
small-pox, scarlet fever, measles, the great Peshtigo fire, WWI, prohibition.
The list was tedious. I hit the escape button. He could have become be a serial
killer, if for no other reason than being bullied for a weird immigrant name. But
he had endured. Did his life contain redeeming qualities?
The
scene with the toddler, offering no moral challenge, told me little of his
character. His contest at that moment was physical. His stomach muscles battled
against the boy’s fidgeting, the inadequacy of his bladder, and the mechanical
whims of the Lazy Boy chair in which he sat. The chair’s design intent tingled
through the atoms of its springs, hinges, and fabric. “I am a Lazy Boy; I was made to recline.”
But I decided to
not let him die or recline. He was a man with time remaining; and I saw he was
never a lazy boy. Or a bad one. And it was my day for omnibenevolence.
The End
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