How Roy Keeps His Dignity

When we visit the dump it's an adventure.

Mid way along the 20-mile trek, I informed the Mrs. we didn't need to check in at as we had been doing.

Past the gate, turning right, heading directly to the dumpsters, meant, as we discovered, travelling the wrong way down a one-way street.

The inevitable hullbaloo attracted the attention of the man in the shack.

Sheepish, plastered grins, exposed, we drove into range of his magisterial presence.

I blamed it on the wife.

As we giggled nervously, Roy peered into the distance, searching, in vain, for a runaway steer on a vast lonesome prarie.

Was it the same for our Dumpenfuerher, as it was, for Hitler's father, a retired petty bureaucrat, in Mailer's The Castle in the Forest, who "under it all was the heavy disappointment that he had not arrived at any of the powers and distinctions to which his intelligence should have entitled him."

Or for me, nearing retirement, wheeling patients in and out of the hospital, like other elders in our community who have time on their hands.

Are all vestiges of ambition (never burning in any event) now gone?

Might the wheeling man, old and past it, be dismissed, pitied, envied, by amibtion-ascendent doctors passing in the long corridors?

David Rothkopf wrote in Superclass that Thomas Friedman is a member of "a global elite of 6000 who have the ability to influence millions of lives."

That's out.

Evelyn Waugh contends, "it is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice - all the odious qualities - which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride, envy and greed."

No money to be made here...obviously.

Neither jealously nor envy are in play.

It's not of pride to create that which resembles the original thought.

Unfulfilled closure makes for uneasiness - a desire, Frank Kermode claims, "to satisfy an appetite for endings, marking off the period between two ticks, calling, even hearing, the second one as tock..."

Gifts, once possessed, were second-hand, manipulating mechanical skills of others.

There is no tock to the tick.

Spiritual Gifts inventory results recorded last Sunday indicate change.

Where hospitality was once foremost, during am era defined by shelter management, this has ebbed, replaced by 'mercy,' indicating, wheeling patients, indeed, conforms to the 2008 inner-Spotsy model.

Roy's wistful, desperate, landfall in an imaginary prarie tells much of how moving beyond what you are secures ambition-transcendence.