If there are ghosts and when I'm dead
the house enfold in love
what becomes of what was me;
the family then in tenure apprehend,
that though they own the house
and have the deed,
my claim is not entirely moot.
The lady in the garden in the afternoon
feels her slight hand as my own hand with hers
tending to the flowers grown
from seedlings several generations past,
of flowers in the garden while I was alive.
And looking upward
we as ever see the trees,
and clouds and sky above,
and hear together how the birds
whose paths there cross
each to the others call while on the wing.
Subdued and muffled if they are,
are the sounds a ghost may make,
and little but a mist is what they form,
not much perceived by those who dwell
in the comfort where my comfort was.

Bruce Campbell Walters

I received a certified mail notice in my mailbox a few days ago. I was inclined to ignore it because my father had advised me long ago that it is best to refuse certified mail because nothing good can come of it. “It is probably trouble, a legal notice,” he said. “If someone has good news for you, they will send it by regular mail.”

A small box on the notice identified the sender as “KCUM.” Who was that? I did not have the slightest idea – perhaps the law offices of Katz, Crum, Unger & Marley? People say that curiosity killed the cat. Well, I have always liked cats more than man’s best friend, and I seldom followed my father’s advice, except to put the curtain inside the tub when showering. Besides, the mail might be a certified check for a million dollars, I rationalized, an inheritance from an unknown relative. So I ventured over to the South Beach Post Office Saturday morning. While standing in line, I learned from one Samuel Justice of Texas that teardrop tattoos under your eye stands for the number of prison terms you have served or the number of people you have killed.  I finally signed for a parcel from Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences. It turned out to be my father’s ashes. Like father like son – my body shall soon be ashes or dust, I thought.

Many years ago, Lloyd told me that a man changes, that he becomes his own man after his father dies. My father died last year, at the ripe old age of 90, and I cannot say that I have changed that much, except that I am more like him. I am more aware of my mortality, but my awareness is not due so much to my father’s passing as to the cramps I am more and more frequently experiencing in my extremities. I am unable to hold a pencil without my hand seizing up. And sleeping for long is impossible because my legs cramp and my arms hurt. When I do fall asleep, my sleep is often disturbed by the activities of the gold-toothed, tear-drop tattooed gang who moved into the one-room apartment behind me, where they claim to be conducting business for a local night club, running a half-way house, and selling Santeria blessings, all with the landlord’s blessing thanks to rolls of cash.

I dare not see a doctor since I have no insurance, and many years of voluntary poverty have inclined me to frugality – it is only now, at this late stage of life, that I wish I were reasonably rich.  Health insurance companies like people like me; that is, before we get old: I have visited a doctor twice in the last forty years. But if something were seriously wrong with me now that I have no insurance, a trip to an emergency room would be absolute disaster, rendering me homeless or a deadbeat in short order. A coworker of mine who has no insurance went to the emergency room in Hollywood the other day, with what a doctor on the phone thought might be a ruptured hernia. She was there for three hours. The doctors found nothing, and thought she might have passed a stone. Whatever it was, she fully recovered from it, and received a bill for $35,000 and some odd dollars.

In fact I am getting what is called old, so old that a young tourist lady addressed me as ‘Pops’ Friday, so old that I cannot believe the reflection in the mirror is mine. But I don’t allow my age-in-itself to pain me, for why suffer needlessly? A painful arm awoke me this Saturday morning – my right hand had swollen up much larger than my left. I got up and worried over the prospect of infirmity and of being a burden on society. A gun would be good insurance against that prospect, I thought, and guns are easy to get in South Florida. Better yet, I might go to Mexico and get a dose of that drug veterinarians put animals to sleep with. On the brighter side, I am not nearly as old as my father was when he died. Since I still have my wits, I might somehow get the $2.2 million the investment advisor said I already need to live to 90, including adequate health care.

Unlike me, my father was a small man, a featherweight boxer at his peak. He said he had never been really happy since my mother’s death, but he had felt normal up to age 85, and after that all he wanted to do was to die. People did not want to hear of that want, so he tried to keep his mouth shut on the issue to spare them – he once recounted with admiration the story of the ruined Kansas City saloon keeper who dressed up to the nines and walked proudly into the river until all that could be seen was his top hat floating down the river. My dad declined rapidly in the end, and weighed about 65 lbs at death. The parcel with his ashes weighed about 10 lbs. I recall that he received his own deceased father’s worldly possessions in a cardboard box: cowboy boots, a rundown watch, an old photograph. My dad was poor but he left us no such material pittance. He did make a proud point of leaving us his I.B.E.W. death benefit along with the balance of his social security funds in his checking account. His point was to leave something, as much as he could, instead of nothing, which was a big deal to him, having lived in abject poverty through the Depression.

As for his ashes, he had donated his body to medical science. Since my mother Charlotte died of polio at age 21, he abhorred wakes and funerals and all the expensive trappings. He was determined to spare us the formal occasion for prolonged grief, taking care to see to it that his body would be transported to the university with nothing ado after his death. He complained about the fact that human remains had to be carried by licensed transporters at considerable expense. In any event, he said, his soul was going to the Better Place foretold by funereal preachers, where he would rejoin my mother, his beloved Charlotte.

Dad was a teetotaler except for an infrequent Swisher Sweet and glass of Mateus. Well, I admit he was addicted to coffee. Whereas I once got a kick out of saloon life, where booze presided, his favorite entertainment was diner life, where the coffee had a sobering effect. He liked nothing better than to take me into a diner for Coffee and a Burger, to play the Jukebox, flirt with Waitresses, to tell stories about the Depression, the War, the Union, and Flying Saucers. “Son, if you had to give up all your rights as a human being, would you take a trip to Outer Space on a Flying Saucer?” Of course my eyes would get a big as saucers at the prospect; mind you that he had actually seen flying saucers landing in a Kansas cornfield, and once met an alien downtown.

It was with the coffee cult in mind that I decided to take my dad’s ashes for coffee. I figured I would have one of those $4.25 Breakfast Specials sold all along Ocean Drive in South Beach, and treat him to a cup of java , as he liked to call it. I had always passed those special offers by because I figured the $4.25 must have been a gimmick – one can obtain an excellent American breakfast downtown, at Emily’s, for $3.95 including eggs, meat, potatoes, toast, and coffee, but the going price of that kind of breakfast on South Beach is about $13. I questioned the young host who was hawking breakfast on the sidewalk in front of the Medi Bar & Grill at 1025 Ocean Drive. He pointed at a picture of the American breakfast I wanted, and assured me that the price was only $4.25. Wow.

Given the occasion, I would have paid more, and even would have bought two full breakfasts if it were not for my father’s steeping me in Great Depression psychology. When totally down and out, one might order hot water in a cup, which was free in the good old days and then use the catsup on the counter to make tomato soup - free crackers were also on the counter. Tar off the hot roof next door, by the way, would serve well as chewing gum. Just recently I noticed a homeless man drinking about two dozen hazelnut-flavored creamers at the Seven-Eleven coffee stand. Anyway, if I had bought dad breakfast, I would have splurged and gotten him his favorite food since the Depression: a peanut butter sandwich and grape juice, and, of course, several cups of java .

I placed my father’s ashes opposite me on the table, introduced the waitress to him, and ordered one breakfast special and two coffees. She understood perfectly, and served us graciously. Indeed, the lovely young lady had a charitable attitude, which I understand is derived from the Graces. I told her that my dad liked his coffee scalding hot, that he would sometimes embarrass me, putting his thumb in the cup of coffee when served and telling the waitress he had order hot coffee, thank you very much.

“Then I will take the creamers away,” she said, “because that would cool it off.”

“Indeed,” I said. “He liked his coffee black.” I did not add his favorite saying because it is impolitic nowadays, even in the Free State of Kansas where he oft said it, although it is not intended as an insult: “I like my coffee like my women, hot as fire and black as night.”

The coffee was delicious, and I could tell that my dad liked it, and he liked the waitress and the wonderful setting on the beach as well. My special breakfast comprised two large eggs, a single strip of bacon, many small halved potatoes, toast and jelly. I recalled that I used to get a similar breakfast, with more bacon and all the coffee one could drink, for around $1.50 at a greasy spoon on the beach back in 1970, so there has been considerable inflation since then.

My dad was a man of few words and he liked them plain and simple. His wonderful stories were short and sweet and to the point. To say the least, he was not saying much at this breakfast, so I occupied myself with a tedious paper on Justice that I was carrying, folded up in my back pocket. I had just finished reading a fascinating paper on Charity the day before, and had almost tearfully concluded that my life has been wasted, not because I had done so little for myself and was barely more than a successful failure, but because I could have done so much more for my kind yet was not moved to do so. My dad certainly had his faults too, but he was a hard worker and a charitable man. His aspect was as frightening as that of Moses over disobedience, but we were not beaten for our deviance; he readily interceded on our behalf, and he forgave us for our faults, which were many in number, just because we were his children, even though we sometimes wanted to deny it. And he worked long hours in construction to support us.

In his old age he still got out and about despite his frailty. He wept at the sight of the poor on the wintry Kansas City streets, and sometimes gave them a goodly portion of his social security income. His hero was the fellow who handed out over a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills to people on the street. I warned my dad that vagrants might rob him and perhaps worse, but he did not heed my warning. He reminded me that he had been a fighter; he showed me the sharp blade he concealed on his person, noting that he knew how to use it and would do so if need be.

As for my new subject of interest, justice, I had heard a Greek myth to the effect that Zeus had given every sane person a sense of justice, and that people without that sense should be exiled or executed. I looked up the word in a law dictionary but the definition was nothing to write home about – I once had a whole book on Justice by some fellow named Rawls, but I never got to it. So I copied the eight-page article on justice from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Friday. I folded the pages in four and stuffed it in my back pocket this morning.

Now the eggs at the Medi Bar & Grill were delicious, and while eating them I learned that justice is not a thing but is a property of things; therefore it is best “to focus the explication on the adjective ‘just’ – or, better still, ‘unjust.’ Doing so facilitates clarification on how justice judgments are distinctive within the larger realm of moral judgments, and the larger universe of evaluative judgments.”

What a mouthful, something to sink one’s teeth into, I thought, and tried the potatoes – they were too salty – and I soon discovered that “The application of ordinary empirical predicates such as ‘tree’ or ‘hard,’ is two-tiered; based on a definition and empirical facts. Any dispute about whether such a predicate applies thus reduces to linguistic and empirical differences.”

Cool! And I had not even finished the second paragraph. I got to the single strip of bacon by that time – not bad, not too fatty, but two strips would have been better. I then read that “evaluative predicates” have a special feature; to wit, “their application is only conditioned, not determined, by their definition and the empirical facts. Thus, people can disagree about whether a painting is beautiful,” because “they have different conceptions of beauty. The same holds for moral predicates….”

I never would have known it, not in those terms, I thought, as I ate my toast – it was cheap, white bread, and it would have tasted like toilet paper without the butter and grape jelly. I skipped ahead, to the second page, and was introduced to a peculiar word, judicanda, those “things to which predicates are applicable,” derived from the Latin judicandum; “that which is to be judged.” I skipped even further ahead while sipping coffee, to “dimensions” and “domains” of “formal and material (in)justice” and to several “hypotheses” of justice, such as the fourth one, that “Justice is not purely recipient-oriented.”

You see, the concept of justice implies that it has a recipient. Which reminded me that the article I had read on charity pointed out that the giving of alms was a duty in the old days, one that was done mostly for the good of the giver so she or he could feel blessed or powerful or superior or go to heaven and so on. But then charity became more recipient-oriented because the good of the recipient was taken more into account than the prestige and self-esteem of the giver. It was only just for the rich to share their good fortune with the poor, for the goods of this Earth were given by God to all, and those who had more were simply trustees for those who had much less. It was soon discovered that charity was very often not very good for the recipient because it demoralized him or her. Whole armies of beggars were produced by almsgiving. It was far more preferable that people work for their charity, but then they would not need it. As Andrew Carnegie pointed out in his ‘Gospel of Wealth’, competition is a wonderful thing because men who accumulate fortunes are fitter than the rest of the pack hence they are best suited to assist the poor. But charity should not be given to the unworthy, and, fortunately, “Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do, except in cases of accident or sudden change.”

The waitress kindly refilled my coffee cup. I ceased pondering to thank her and to ask for the check. I gazed at the lovely environs, and wondered what my dad would say over my tedious philosophical tome on justice – he had a way of summing things up, like the Greek who said that “Justice is to each, his own.”

“Justice is for all to own.”  I heard my father’s voice!

“What is justice?” I inquired.

“Justice is charity, and charity is love,” said he, and fell silent again.

The waitress returned with the check. It totaled $14.17. It is a long way from $4.25 to $14.17. The sum included tax, of course, and $3.50 for each cup of coffee, and a mandatory tip was included. I was feeling so charitable that I volunteered two dollars more for the tip, and I parted the restaurant $16.17 shy of what I had arrived with in monetary terms. But I had my father’s ashes and I was a little bit wiser in the ways of the world. The end of the world shall surely be nigh when people start bringing their own coffee to the special breakfast.

Miami Beach

September 20, 2008