The Old and the Miserable

I read a posting, yesterday, on what the author and the professionals she researched called comfort sex ... she wasn't talking about sex-with-an-ex, she said, nor about friends-with-privilege, as it has become fashionable to describe an occasional romp under the sheets with someone you might go way-back with but who is destined to remain just that. I found nothing in what she reported surprising with what I've learned in teaching and working with people in the next several generations after my own .... people Playing at the End of the First Quarter and those in the Second and Third Quarters. This has included Free Thinkers, Spiritual Folks and arguably quite Religous Folk.

One of the great bugbears of living and, perhaps, one of the great killers is anxiety. It is, arguably, the signal that sets the Psyche in pursuit of solutions ... Fight or Flight, Anger or Withdrawal, and Depression. In the Animal Kingdom, anxiety announces the imminent appearance of danger ... a Tiger about to spring out from the jungle or something equally pernicious. As Humankind has become more self-aware, less smell and instinct-driven, the range of signals that set off the anxiety signal has broadened. It comes when the future is too well known and rife with danger but, also, when we stand on the edge of the unknown ... when the danger of the future is precisely connected to its unknowability.

Sex is a well-known panacea for a host of such ills .... I agree (I think the writer's name was Donato) that Sex can be Comforting as it comes to relax both the long and striated muscles of the arms and legs, tensed and ready to respond to anxiety, and the muscles of the internal organs and their mucosa.

It is by no means the only route to relaxation ... exercise, music, meditation, prayer and Yoga can have similar results. Indeed, the opportunities for outleting, for relaxing from the madcap vagaries of life, from feelings resulting from poorer health and loss, are many.

The Miserable -- and the Old and the Miserable are no exception -- are caught in a circularity or a Catch-22, of sorts. On the one hand, their anger at the World  results from an internal notion that their ills were set upon them with some intentionality by an uncaring World; this prevents them from indulging in these variegated methods for relaxation. And on the other hand, their unwillingness to indulge in these many methods for Comforting themselves, alone or with others, intensifies their aloneness and thus their anxieties.
They cannot accept that, at least to some extent, Life is a Crap-Shoot.

Their misery deepens.

Deeply sad to watch this process.

Kvetching v Miserable Kvetching

The Last Quarter has no shortage of pains or shaming disabilities .... and certainly no shortage of losses. The pains cover the known body ... the back, the hands, the joints, oh! dem knees! and shoulders! and hips! ... though, it's possible that headaches become less frequent. A woman once described to me her sense that for her and her husband to make love, a frontloader and other earth-moving equipment might be necessary to situate their bodies in a manner conducive to "lift-off." A 55 year old Urologist said to me that -- more or less -- everybody over the age of 50 leaks ... and he was over 50.

The losses do pile up. If I wasn't an orphan, I'd be taking care of "my ancients." For those of us with living parents in the US of A, we learn quickly that taking care of the old ones, finding a place where they can live with even a modicum of dignity and/or paying for that facility can lead us, ourselves,  to a vent on Skid Row. Medicare and -- when it's available -- Medicaid don't begin to solve the problems of finding a Medicaid-eligible bed; paying out of pocket for decent care is approximately $100,000 per year, well beyond the means of all but a few. Social Security might pay 20% of the cost. Veterans Benefits add $1,000 each month .... not a pittance ... but nowhere near enough. And Congress is poised to dip into these funds.

Then, there are the ghosts. We can count the pets of our adulthood that we've buried ... I think I've said good-bye to 11 loving and furry quadripeds ... 4 dogs and 7 cats. Three kids have moved out and, at this time, they are all still out. Many friends have gone ... some disappeared. And colleagues who we once played with in the cracks in our work schedule? Some hang in there, some send cards and many others are gone. Did they die? Who is to know?

Playing in the Last Quarter ain't for the feint of heart.

Still, there are some other areas where we may have an advantage over the youngin's. Indeed, depression has a lower frequency in post 65 year olds than in middle-aged folk (35-55). Why? Who knows. Have we learned to accept? Have the depressed ones died in greater numbers than the jubilant ones? We may come to believe that we no longer have anything to prove: if somebody doesn't like the way we think, too bad!

But what of the old and miserable, those for whom the pains and losses precipitate into something akin to the "trek of the walking dead" ... It has not been my experience that the pains and losses for these "zombies" are or have been greater than they are for others. No. I know of no one Playing in the Last Quarter who has lived and not suffered. These people -- pointedly -- seem committed to their misery ... and ...s/he who dares to tell them so bears the sin of purportedly making them more miserable.

The friends, lovers and spouses of such sufferers have the unenviable choice of being fools or bastards .... fools? if they continue to live under the cloud of misery ... bastards? if they refuse to do so.

Thus, are some of the choices of those over 63 years of age.

A Little Sad

A friend came to visit today ... beaten a bit by interactions with colleagues ... brought sadness with him ... I shared .... Two old men can be sad, together ...

From ditties et lettre du Abe Isaacs

On the Fullness of Ink

The bottle of ink

Was but half-full.

Missing

Were all the words

That once filled

The fullness

Of the empty top half of

The bottle of ink.

A Memory like Wicker in a Spring Storm

M and I kid that between us we have one good memory. Visitors to my office have noticed that my memories improve on things I may have learned before 1965 ... the year I married! Oops!

Yesterday, the lick of the dog that bit me?! Never explained. I was in a-fib brought on maybe by exertion. I worked like a beast of the field on the leaves. I popped out of the arrhythmia. Fo figure, the youngsters say.

Thus, is life and its unpredictability in the Last Quarter.

Any case, popped back in last night .... and went for ride in my Little Beast car for a meeting of, I'd guess, a 50-75 crowd ... a youngish reading group.

There's a bit of doggerel here somewhere.

The Tail of the Dog that Bit Me

Came out of afib, much as I went into it ... inexplicably. I met the Leaves ... and I went on preparing the outside of our home for Winter. I typically face the truth but by not necessarily acting on it, one might say that I deny it.

We have too much space, too many bedrooms, far too many bathroom for our two behinds to sit upon, and much too much property. Lotta trees. Trees have leaves. Deciduous trees that lose leaves in November. No resident children, this year.

Last year, I may have kvetched that Child, in-law and 3 grandspawn were here ... filling the bedrooms, equalling out bottoms and bathrooms, help with Leaves ....

It was yesterday that after years of my droning on about how good we have it, Marsha began talking about the same thing. What to do for all those who have little to be thankful for on this coming Thursday, the American holiday, Thanksgiving.

I once wrote about the curious manner in which action-verbs seem to transmute int nouns and finally into Proper Nouns, a usage which seems to strip them of their meaning.

I wrote of Mammon which in the Gospels took on "nomen daemonis" ... the name of a demon ... (this, in some translations "Who will you worship? God the Father or Mammon." Mammon was a common noun in both Hebrew and Aramaic and meant lucre, money, filthy lucre in this context, freeing the churches to amass great wealth as the original meaning melted away.

Sabbath (Shabbos in Biblical Hebrew) was a gerund that meant restfulness. Restfulness was reified and nowadays Sabbath is observed only in communities we identify as odd. Too bad. Six Days we emulate the Doing Powere of our gods and on the Seventh, we admit to being creations .... like the howling dog and the roo.

Thanksgiving, I like to imagine, began as a mandate to offer up gratitude to our gods even before Winter threatened our forebears. Then it became a day of offering thanks ans was fixed on one of the last Thursdays in November. Now, its food, family and football ... and family is optional. Too bad, ay?

Reminds me of a joke from my years in Seminary. Young guy goes to head of Seminary. "Time for me to begin dating women but I don't know what women like." The Head say, after careful thought: "Women like Food, Family and Philosophy." (he forgot football, oops!) Guy gets a date and arranges to go for walk.
After a mile ...
Guy: (Thinking to himself ... Food) .... Hey, do you like Chicken Soup?
Girl: I do, I do!
After two more miles.
Guy: (Thinking to himself ... Family) ... Do you have a Brother?
Girl: No, I was never blessed with a Brother.
Three miles later, suffering, getting nowhere
Guy: (Thinking to himself, Philosophy) If you had a brother, would he like chicken Soup?

There are days

The Autum Leaves, my &^%%# back! There are those moments in the Last Quarter when the bruisings of the first 65 years or so do accumulate and the day-by-day vagaries of life bring with them a great deal. Some folk will experience such days and their events as "overwhelming."

Yesterday we were visiting our youngest grandchild who is just beginning to appreciate the value of mischief and speech. No longer can I amuse "My Ancientness" with teaching the little sweetie mildly offensive ditties that bring on my Daughter-in-Law's wagging finger. All was fun and my middle-aged son took me for a ride in his Beast of a Car ... from what I understand, it tops out at a bit more than 180 mph. He was showing me a project that he was working on and all was fun. We got back to have some of my beautiful daughter-in-law's chicken soup.

Oops. Outa nowhere ... the sinus block ... the electrical part of my heart that give out the 'chick-a-boom-k'boom-now' signal went its own way. Happens to lots of Last Quarter warriors .... Heart suddely going 160-180 beats per minute and then heading down to the 40's and up again ... willy-nilly. My playful mood continued, thinking of how blessed I was that two consecutive visitors to my office hadn't come to blows ... the first trying to park around the piles of those blessed Autumn Leaves near the curb made some contact with the first, words apparently were exchanged, police came, and nobody was physically hurt. Then the stomach cramps came from who knows where and I began thinking too much (OK, obsessing) about the neuropathy in my legs that leaves my toes numb and the questionable status of the herniated disc that sidelined me for a couple of months. Holy cannoli, Batman, don't I get a break?

And now, I still look out at those damned Autumn Leaves .... those ... those ... you know how it is ... and my arrhythmia continues and I wanna be young ... I wanna be that age that never existed when I experienced no pain. Let me say it to myself, again: I wanna be that age that never existed when I experienced no pain.

Then I can laugh at myself.

The Leaves of Autumn await his Highness who needs to go read The Princess and the Pea!

Hail to Me! Hail to Thee! Hail to the Last Standing in the Fourth Quarter!

A Chill in the Air

Winter has arrived with its tell-tale chill. The kids are not going to arrive to rake the leaves -- but I visited there, already. Kvetch-Kvetch-Kvetch ....

There's a religious tradition that reads the part of Genesis that follows with and on Sarah's death. It's that part that got me in trouble years ago when I suggested that Ole Abe couldn't feel deep sadness. In that same tradition, the section from The Prophets that is read is that part about King David not being able to be warmed. They bring him blankets? no go. They bring him a beautiful Shunamite girl? and not only doesn't he warm but he "doesn't know her" -- wink-wink! OK! Maybe David was low in thyroxin .... and the chill of a slow thyroid and the Cold Castle was too much for him.

Easy for Players in the Last Quarter to stumble over the Young and the Beautiful, I suppose, and I have wondered with Marsha about what happens if she predeceases me ... Do I go to "pay as you play."

Alas, these are among the puzzles in this Last Quarter ... puzzles and pitfalls.

The Prophets' reading ends with David's talking to his previous hottie, Bathsheba, about who was to take over ... she was pretty clear about wanting her son, Sollie, to assume the throne. What a mess followed.

No throne? but maybe I can straighten things out so that my kingdom doesn't fall apart, as David's did, when the Two Minute Warning expires.

I'll do my best.

But I Miss You Most of All

I like trees. I like leaves. I can muster up an affection for leaves ... falling ... from trees. 'But I miss you most of all, my Darlings' when Autumn Leaves must be raked.

Many of the folk who visit me and seem to capsize -- one way or the other -- their boats, either into manic mischief or a depressed pseudo-death, rather than a juggled mixture of of sadness and glee, have, indeed, suffered great losses. Their World treated them as things ... as objects. They were abused or shamed and often came to treat themselves as if they were inert things.

The make self-destructive decisions in one or the other of these postures ... Whirling  or Bed-bound -- as if Dead.

The Last Quarter has its abandonments. I once had children working shoulder to shoulder on raking and blowing and moving those leaves.  It's true! I admit it. I have moments when I have passing reveries that I've been deconstructed like an Old Shed -- left to rot behind the garage. The sense that the 0-55 crowd don't give much credence to my having had a complex past ... or, hey! ... a future conjure up in me maudlin thought.

The Sun is just coming up. Norway Maple, Sugar Maple, Oak, and Willow leaves colored by some Red Japanese Maple. I need to greet them with a recognition that my once-indentured Spawn have found their own families and emancipated themselves. I need to go out there among those leaves ... having been left.

Long live freedom!

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch

Was hanging out (old folks hang out, too) with mostly other oldsters at a meeting down in Florida. There are so many different ways to be Playing in the Last Quarter. I was there with Marsha ... the dog was with our youngest Spawn and family up in Philadelphia, and the house and cat were being catered to by a neighbor just about our age.

Others at the meeting were living other models.

One, long divorced and living alone ... not certain if she adopted us or we adopted her. I went to her talk ... she to mine .... Living the single, professional, I'm-pushing-70 life in a big city. Another just lost his wife of 40 some-odd years. All were puzzling the complexities of a less cooperative body, a mind that processes more slowly, retirement and the looks of the 25-60 crowd ... "Lemme get that door for you" ... or ... "Get outa my way Old Bald Man in the Slow Lane." Jugglers ... at least those with whom we hung out.

I don't know how it looks to the youngins, but I found a Dignity of Everyday Life in many of the 60-85 folk, there .... an embracing of where we/they were/are ... sometimes even a chuckle ... often some beneficent envy for the younger with their toned bodies (I know, I know ... there are the Young Untoned, too) and Big Sky futures.

My compensation? My major decisions have been made ... I cherish them ....

People don't like my decisions .... "Ah, well" .... or, if they really irk me, a heartfelt wish that they spend eternity indulging solo-horizontal erotic aerobics .... (the lenth of that cuss often quiets them down)

Gotta get back to what it's like for those who cannot juggle glee with sadness. Will do so. Promise.

After I recover from two plane rides.

Last chance to kvetch, for a bit

"Leaving on a Jet Plane," as the song goes, but not till tomorrow.

When I began writing these bi/tri-weekly notes, thought it good way to stay in touch with myself, particularly, but with M and "the Spawn," too.  I had found that journaling without potential witnesses had its drawbacks. Aloneness and a 'slow-creep-factor,' an ooze toward fiction. That others might listen in to what it was like Playing in the Last Quarter, I thought, might keep me honest. I did have some experience in this, before.

When my first grand-spawn was due, I began writing to her by e-mail. She had no name. It became a series of "Dear Cletus the Foetus" notes sent to her entourage .... future grandparents, parents and uncles and aunt. It was a first for the entire entourage ... first grandchild for all four of us ... first child for the parents .... first niece for the older uncles and aunt, to be. Other members of l'entourage joined in .... betimes, with new advices for Cletus ... how she might choose to appear or when or what she might do when she did ... even how she might shop.

I have had other experiences in self-disclosure, including some online-published and very personal reflections on my visions of retirement ... in the form of doggerel. I'd been writing "Ditties et Lettres du Abe Isaacs," short (well, mostly short pieces) and whimsical poems about an old guy in my field. Of course, Abe is a close relative of his author ... very close.

I'm still enjoying this.

While away, I'd like to write a bit about those who don't dance ... who cannot, to try another metaphor, juggle glee and sadness, the good with the bad .... Here, I need to work things out in my head.

I have a favorite bit from Scripture ... from Leviticus 19 .... maybe 19:20 or so .... It defines the difficulty I have in proceeding: Traditionally, the first half of the passage goes:

          Don't go loose-lipped among your people, (but) don't stand idly by as your neighbor bleeds;

The passage traditionally has a much terser second half:

          I am God.

I have a right to discuss my own stuff, but the confidentiality that I owe to others is -- if you take Scripture seriously -- no light matter.

Going away to speak and to think.

Dancing is rhythmic

When Does the Dance Stop? The kvetch begin?

My life is a commercial for one or another NSAID that will, perhaps, soon prove to be dangerous ... or, at the very least, has 'been reported to cause death,' as they are prone to say.*  

'Do you have atrial fibrillation without heart valve involvement ... we Docs call it a-fib because it's so cool.' Oh! Those docs are so .... so cool. I had one tell me not to really worry about an 11% chance of "a silent stroke or better" for a certain procedure that his hospital would love to do to me. I was supposed to think that 11% is a small number, a little probability. And it is. If I had an 11% chance of losing $5, I'd be 'cool with it,' too. But if one has an 11% chance of sliding off some iced mountain pass, it is best to sit on one's ass .... at home.

Any case, I woke up yesterday in a-fib, spent the day in a-fib, and woke up, today, in the same place. Once or twice a week for 5 years, now, I travel through this strange country. For many of us Playing in the Last Quarter, atrial fibrillation is one of the unwritten 'benefits' that comes with life's contract.

Ah! but we danced. We did. Marsha got her Chloe-Fix (= time spent with #6 grandchild and our oldest child [who didn't spawn till his early-mid forties] and his wife) and we visited Chloe's Mom and Dad, too. Did I mention that?

Got home early and did some gardening and then worked on a talk I'm giving Down South in a few days on why people in my field seem to hate each other -- particularly when they get into cybergroups. I do feel the mischief, familiar to me as it is, coming on! I do suspect that the audience might explain to me -- in dramatic detail -- why we don't like each other. Even got to pause to cry a bit during a tribute to Andy Rooney that M was watching.

Could there be a better day? OK, ok! My Resting Heart Rate is usually 40 beats and steady and today it was bouncing from the mid-70's to 160 something -- quite on its own schedule. (What to say? The Old Guy or his heart, at least, "ain't got no rhythm).  But the Sun WAS shining, the sunroof WAS open on "Little Beast," my car, Chloe was shyly figuring out if maybe and after all there could be room for both Grandma AND Grandpa, and ... people in the stores we stopped into were in a good way.

Shew!









* I have a strong interest in ancient religious writings and have been long-impressed with the manner in which the Writer of the Old Testament plays with the Ancient Hebrew. In the story of Er and Onan and the same hot widow, Tamar, that they left behind, the Writer uses a similar construction: va'Ymisuhu .... and "He made him dead."

Stop Kvetching ...

It's hard to stop kvetching, Playing in Any Quarter -- the tasks are many for each. Indeed, as I think about it, my grandchildren and children have many more things to keep them busy .... Who to love ... How to behave ... Who to become ... Who to love ... How to behave ... and ... Who to become... all in some chronological repeating order. I don't know how many times it repeats; I think at least twice. I remember the dizziness of this process in myself, though I'm still working on/with Marsha, my first wife, the lady who has arisen with me and whom I've arisen with some 16,500 times, not including naps!

I have, like other Players who have been Blessed/Cursed with making it to the Fourth Quarter, gone through many incarnations ... a Poet Laureate called them "The Layers" in a poem he dated for his 95th birthday. Stanley Kunitz, too, recalled: "I have walked through many lives/some of them my own/and I am not who I was/though some principle of being/abides from which I struggle/not to stray." He wonders: "How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?"

For Kunitz, he had a "nimbus clouded voice" directing him to '"Live among the layers/not on the litter."' I think some Popular Psychologists call this "getting on with life." Kunitz can no longer be asked what he meant and his contemporary Archibald Macleish, once Librarian of the US Congress, already warned us "That a poem does not mean/A poem is," but I don't think Macleish, himself, was recommending against finding our own meanings in others' words.

For me, the call to "Live among the Layers" is a recall to remember all the incarnations ... of those we loved and of who we became and, perchance, to smile about how we behaved. Happy/Sad are the recollections.

Happy/Sad are the choices we make Playing in each Quarter.

There's that other voice that may speak to my kids and grandkids ... "Kvetch! ... Don't Kvetch ... but remember to Dance!"