Thoughts on Prayers
Milt, my eighty-year-old live-in father-in-law snoozes on his catnapper Laz-E-Boy. A half-gnawed Slim Jim droops from his clenched fist. His chin rests against his sternum. During fits of wakefulness, he boasts that he’s managed to hold on to his hair. You can almost see it in the afternoon light streaming through the window, three strands of hair crossing the Rubicon of his liver-spotted head, weak as his streams of piss. A Michigan game recorded two years ago when the team benefitting from Jim Harbaugh’s penchant for cheating dominated college football plays as his flat screen. Revisiting Michigan victories is as close to masturbation as this old boy gets anymore. Poor bastard must be tuckered out from retrieving the mail, carting an armload of thrift books up the driveway.
Christ, I think, I don’t ever want to get this old, to where my mere existence fills dumb Polacks with resentment. I’m fifty as I type this and this age has presented me with any number of indignities. I can still cash in on cool points, though, by regaling the young whippersnappers with tales of my adventures at Woodstock ’94, dodging the mud people and witnessing a bare-footed, bare-chested Henry Rollins in his prime command the stage. I hate having to explain to people who Henry Rollins is.
I’m not annoying, yet. I don’t think I’m annoying… I’m monitoring the situation, in real time. Every time Milt opens his mouth, though, I find something interesting to do in the next room, often stopping the blubbering bastard mid-sentence. Because I stomp through life with my middle finger forever poised above the “fuck you” button, people often believe I’m incapable of feeling guilt for my short dealings with elderly motherfuckers. This is simply not the case. I wish I could feign interest every time Milt tells me Gertrude from Pines Church suffered a nasty fall and broke her hip. Instead, I’m so exhausted from listening to him talk about Michigan football and his nonexistent heart condition, I end up cutting him off with “what was the bitch trying to do? Walk? Don’t you think it serves her right?”
This man has lived through some interesting times; as long as I’ve known him all he’s ever talked about is National Championships and a goddam Clive Cussler book he read back in ’86 every time I try to turn our conversation toward literature.
Milt’s not an idiot, though he often wanders through life slack-jawed, as though he hit the Tylenol too hard the night before. He has the ultimate end around to my profound disinterest. Dinner prayer. You see, I live in what my wife refers to as a “Christian household.” My old chrome buddy Michael Harold Ryan might recognize it as such though he would likely wonder why no one was putting money in his pocket as an act of charity for the unemployably oppressed. My wife lives inside a Jesus bubble, where everything will work out with a little bit of prayer, a little bit of good thoughts.
This puts me in an awkward position seeing as how I walk the left-handed path, arm in arm, with Satan. It is a frame of mind and spirit I must utterly conceal beneath the thin veneer of Christian toleration that my wife believes to be Catholicism. In order to aid in her delusion, I indulge their propensity for dinnertime prayer as led by Milt who came by his religion the old-fashioned way, by becoming a recovering alcoholic.
This is one of those compromises which have become the cornerstone of our marriage. I must guard my tongue in all matters spiritual, or else risk the wife’s disappointed shake of the head and quiet assurances that I’m only speaking out of shock value and that I do indeed love Jesus.
Anyway, dinner prayer is sacrosanct at the Polish Hammer household, or the Polish Anvil household, as it were, and she will not allow me to write my next column, read, play Torn City on my phone, or gaze forlornly at the crows eating the fallen fruit off the pear tree in the front yard, while Milt is speaking the dinner prayer.
So, Milt’s got one over on me. All that bullshit he’s been trying to tell me since I came home from a hard-ish day at work, gets told to me now, under the guise of his conversation with Jesus, as I watch my Stoufer’s lasagna cool beneath two-inch snowfall of Parmesan cheese.
“Oh Lord, please put your healing hand on Gertrude. She fell over in her parlor as she was walking as was her right to do. Help her get through her hip surgery without complication. We know you are going to be with her every step of the way.”
Yeah, he’s with her every step of the way, but he sure dipped out on her when she was crossing the parlor to spy on what the neighbor across the street was getting up to. If God is the interventionist God this household believes him to be, it must mean that He kicked that elevated lawn mower down on Mark while he was about to change blades. It liked to kill him, instead God saved him! So he can spend the next eight months suffering a degloved hand and an Eval Kineval’s worth of broken bones. God fucked that dude up! But why? Maybe he was a pedophile and the eleven-year-old down the street prayed for that guy to get his. Meanwhile, Milt’s dumb ass is praying for God to ease his suffering.
I know all about the goofy books, why bad things happen to good people, and why good things happen to bad people and all that happy bullshit, I just don’t care. Any God looking down on us from his cosmic catnapper must think we’re all a bunch of fucking idiots.
Milt continues the spiritual torture. “Lord, the weather was an almost autumn-like seventy-three degrees, with no rain and the occasional burst of sunlight. I thank you for that.”
I can’t imagine God standing in his celestial kitchen with his hands on his hips saying “well at least somebody appreciates the day I gave him,” while parts of West Virginia are under two feet of water, half of southern California is marveling at fire tornadoes and kids in Gaza are missile-dodging on empty stomachs…
But my wife can.
At least she steers clear of most of the really batshit crazy fringe antics. I’m not just talking about Trump fanaticism, I mean the shit you read about in the truly goofy corners of social media. Shit like The Rapture, or good reviews for movies starring Jim Cavaziel, or who I call the Billy Zane of the secular movies.
I don’t know. I guess I’m just disappointed. There was supposed to be another rapture last week, and nothing happened. I guess nothing happened. Has anyone seen Charlie Kirk, lately?
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
