TIDY YOUR OWN PATCH
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From the Cambridge English Dictionary: patch noun [C] (AREA). C2. a small area that is different in some way from the area that surrounds it:.
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I am grateful for my Northern European heritage. My ancestors lived in Ireland, Cornwall, Lithuania, Belarus, The Netherlands, Germany. It is all so terribly unfashionable today in the USA to be appreciative of European ancestry, but I do not care. My ancestors weren't slave owners or aristocrats. Quite the opposite. They were Czarist serfs, exploited Irish tenants, Lithuania ironworkers and displaced Bavarian Jews.
Fact: I don't begrudge anyone their honest history or heritage, as long as they do not begrudge me mine.
If embracing my European heritage and making the best of it entails "White privilege" in the eyes of the resentful and begrudging, so be it. That has no ill effect on me whatsoever, but I would caution anyone who gets into being that brand of woke: It is s self-pitying vortex which is hard to escape once entered.
You see, my folks were very clear on how they gradually ascended from pig-ignorant poverty to the American skilled working class with the benefits of property ownership and steady employment. Part of that lesson entailed paying no attention to whiners and complainers who feel entitled to things they refuse to work for. A major part of that lesson was the concept of relentlessly tidying one's own small patch of the world.
The first test of that latter wisdom came to me when I left home at 20 after being physically and psychologically abused for being an admitted homosexual. In my college years, I had earned a new VW bug, cherry red. It was my first new car and made my life as a university commuter bearable. So, as a college grad at 20, I set off to New York in my bug. A college friend took pity on me and put me up for a week before I returned back to Boston.
Once I was back in Boston, I had no place to go and no money to speak of. About $150, to be precise. I briefly toyed with the idea of selling my car. Then I realized I could simply live in it. And I did, for about a week. I am 6 feet 3 inches. Everything I could pack came with me when I rushed from my parents' home. My tiny patch was the inside of that little bubbly car.
I said prayers of thanks to my German cousins for reclining bucket seats, a design breakthrough in those days. With the seat fully drawn back from the dash and the seat back fully reclined, I could sleep through the night. Public toilets and various sundries from the drug store made keeping up my hygiene fairly easy. Back then, it was easy to breeze into any hotel lobby and find the restrooms off the lobby.
In today's America of homeless people living in cars just about everywhere, I am reminded of that week. My car did not look like a hoarder's, though. I kept my unused cloths folded and packed. I was a smoker, but never smoked in the car. I tried not to eat food in the car as well.
When I secured a job and a much-needed advance in pay from a previous employer, I graduated to a room in a Boston rooming house, an American institution which has sadly become equated with crack dens or halfway houses. My first room was a huge drawing room of a Commonwealth Avenue mansion in Back Bay. It cost an expensive $40 a week, paid in advance. I was making about $150 a week as a lab tech, so I felt quite well off.
I remember the astonishment of my bizarre landlady, the addled heiress of an old Boston family, who commented on how "tidy" my room was kept. This revealed to me, of course, that she was a daytime snooper, who entered our rooms with a master key while we were away. This propensity of hers, combined with her late night meanderings on landings and stairwells wearing nothing but a loosely tied bathrobe, encouraged me to move to a less expensive and smaller room in Boston's Fenway area.
There too, my fellow-renter and concierge, a violinist for the Boston Symphony by night, snooped and commented on my "tidy" room. Both instances made an impression. In acknowledging my "tidy" habit, these quirky authorities in my new adult life conveyed an increased respect for me in their attitudes.
As my adult life grew to better jobs, intimate relations, shared spaces and various vocations, my habit of keeping whatever patch I occupied tidy continued to pay off. My greater challenge came as I encountered harsh criticism from some people in my life for being "too anal".
I soon realized that these people were more than willing to benefit from my "too anal" habits in homemaking, doing my job or cooking for others. So, I developed the habit of tidying my life and relationships by simply dropping people who felt entitled to unfairly criticize me while benefiting from my presence in their lives. And, looking back, I am glad I developed that wisdom early on. I have seen too many relationships wither and turn acidic because one partner did the unappreciated tidying for both.
I look at videos of the destruction of cities by young dysfunctional proponents of today's Leftist causes. I see "proud Americans" trash public property in Washington, DC, to no effective purpose. They are gangs of complainers and demanders, but also users and destroyers. No person who has had to clean streets, maintained a garden, shingle a roof, lay a patio with pavers, or any other manual contribution to any shared environment would so readily destroy the hard labor of others. And to hear them peddle Marxist tripe about justice and equality or patriotism is insult added to injury. They are just plain spoiled and voluntarily stupid.
The presidential election of November 2020 has brought a sea change for some. Frankly, this escapes me. Nothing has really changed, other than a different selection of fake personalities manufactured for screen time. The virus is still the virus. Misguided government overreach is still yielding its disastrous consequences. The US and global grass-roots economies are still shattered. And people are still traumatized. Some are cowed into conformist submission. Others are rightfully enraged.
And my tidy patch has not been significantly changed. I will admit that keeping it tidy has been more challenging. Shortages of basic food and dry goods in early 2020 caused me to adapt my rigorous resistance to hoarding by organizing an efficient pantry of just-in-case supplies. But I am slowly weeding that out. Exercise, meditation, healthy nutrition ... these foundations of my patch have been unshaken.
If someone asked me how I have survived the HIV epidemic for nearly 40 years and cancer for nearly 20 years, I would simply say that smart science, luck, common sense and maintenance of a tidy patch are the reasons. I had no part in discovering the medications that saved me from dying from AIDS 25 years ago. The luck of having good parents with good genes and common sense surpasses any lottery jackpot. But learning how to keep my own tidy patch with whatever skills I could bring to it...that, I believe, has allowed me to be truly alive, as opposed to simply a survivor.
Those who read my essays regularly know I have lost my enthusiasm for corrupted United Nations bureaucracy. However, this document from the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, summarizes succinctly some core features of Buddhist life philosophy. In reading it, it may be helpful to keep in mind these precepts are geared for monastics, those most dedicated practitioners. I have tried my best to live up to the mark of many of these precepts as part of tidying my own small patch of the world. I hope you will read it and take some practical value from it.
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