Madamoiselle Sandra

When King David was old and cold they brought him a Shunamite Young Pretty to try to get him going. They shoulda brought him a cardiologist, instead. Scripture reports that he didn't "know" (wink) her and not too long after joined Jesse in eternal rest.

I'm one of something like 50,000,000 people on the Atlantic Coast of the USA who are in Miss Sandy's sights .... a Hurricane the meteorologists (some of whom are rather attractive Shunamites, themselves) describe as a unique and potentially disastrous storm. It has already killed in the Carribean and seems likely to kill many in its path.

I don't know how many millions of the 50 million are Players in the Last Quarter ... but many. It is my first storm that has frightened me thinking about my inability to respond ... Late Middle Age brings "irresponsibility" .... an inability to respond as one did once upon a time.

In 1993 at 305 on September 28 a tornado picked up a Beech Tree and moved it vertically from another's property maybe hundreds or more yards away through the roof of my office where it stood vertically ... damaged but still tree-like. By the time the insurance adjusters came to assess the damage that 40+ feet of debris left, I and my trusty chain saw had spent a week removing essentially all the debris. No more.

Nineteen years older, it's a non-starter. Yesterday, I needed to install a pump in the basement and do some other light-duty stuff with moving my 1996 car into a garage, etc. and this morning I'm on heavy-duty analgesics struggling to lift my leg high enough to put on my pants. I included many months ago a bit of doggerel about an old set of wing-tip shoes in the closet and my sense that aging has its way with us ... turns us from vigorous worker to lore ....  This morning, it's there looking me in the face.

The Good Brother Thomas Merton, in one oif his many prayers, wrote: My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going, I do not see the road ahead of me.

Brother Thomas, wherever you are, let me add: and Dear God, I have no idea what your emissary, Frau Sandy, has in mind for me and the other 49,999,999 dwellers of this East Coast. How many feet, dear God, will accumulate in my basement? Will that Willow Tree that sits over my office join it and crush my library? How many of my brothers and sisters will be caught in her wrath? My Lord God, if you've tired of listening to the distortions of politicians and their bull-pucky, give a look over to those of us struggling the World-over and maybe just a moment towards we the fortunate who have been blessed to live long years in a protected and privileged country!

And to whomever is listening? Stay safe.

If you have nothing better to do, 50 million friends, check out the myth of the Kikayon, of the gourd, in the Book of Jonah .... it's got all the elements ...

and stay safe!

The Truth

What is this thing called Truth? Difficult listening to the election advertisements. The talking heads seem quite willing to accept that our candidates for public office will say what they need to be elected or re-elected. While the well-being of going on 400 Million souls is twisting in the wind, the election is treated like a strategic game ... and I accept that it appears unwise to show one's cards. Each candidate has been put forth by a coalition of special interests ... no subgroup, no voting bloc may be alienated or the game is over.

And we folk Playing in the Last Quarter? What do we do?

There are interesting things being written .... spoken, too. Last night, I read an analysis of the election based on the Conservative Brain vs. the Liberal Brain (http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20121021_Debates_a_showcase_of_primal_styles.html ). Didn't move me. The Debates? Didn't move me. The Stump Speeches offer nothing.  I do have my theory of thirds ... take any group and a third of them are good and kind souls. Another third is composed of perfidious little "shits" who shouldn't be trusted any day of week. And then there's a final third of those suitable for dining with once or twice a year.

Used to think that we could solve some of the lying by having public floggings for any candidate or elected official that has demonstrably lied to the electorate. Charge an entrance fee and maybe we could pay off part of the national debt?
I'm not one that is easily disgusted. Getting there. Two weeks to go ... Yuch.

Communication

A comment that I received on yesterday's garbled post,  highlights for me just how difficult it is to communicate. I was talking about bravery in some; how could that not have been heard as talking trash about others?

Just because one doesn't mean to offend doesn't mean that one doesn't.

I have this plant that has survived a direct hit by a tree that landed in my office on Sept 28, 1993 at 3:05 ... delivered by a relatively small tornado. I brought the plant back to life and think of her/him as Mathilda/Mortimer, depending on my mood. I look at the plant, a rather commonplace philodendrum, anmd marvel how it grows where it wants to grow. Maybe 5 years before "the tree," it wrapped itself around a 4 foot fluorescent bulb and choked it to explode. The plant, Mathilda or Mortimer, reminds me how messy life is.

Alas and apologies ... H

Bravery

As I've suggested previously, no Quarter -- certainly not the Last Quarter ... but, in fact, not one -- is for the meek. Indeed, there are those who check out ... who refuse to face the realities of their lives. Yesterday, I found myself thinking of those who fail to experience gratitude for gifts received. On the other side? are all those who rise each morning and in spite of their emotional and physical pains and disabilities greet their near and dear with a dignity of everyday life.

I stand in awe and admiration of all who bring that bravery with them and add life to their step ... for their own benefit and for the benefit of those who walk with them.

Getting Personal

I';ve had a pretty good ride ... 3 middle-aged children and 6 grandchildren. One of my kids and spouse lead a very religiously ritualistic life and work very hard. They and their kids are healthy. One eschews all religion and lives a comfortable and healthy life with spouse and child. They participate in rituals when the family partakes. The remaining child has three kids and a spouse and fall somewhere in the middle though serious health issues follow their family in a yet-to-be-diagnosed illness. DH Lawrence wrote a wonderful short story (The Rocking Horse Winner ... introduced to me by Marsha some 40 years ago) about a youngster who feels with all his body and his soul that he must redeem his family -- most obviously his Mother -- from its luckless state of needing more money. He rides himself on his Rocking Horse to an early death, though his luck won out monetarily.

In almost all our years together, Marsha and I have lived a blessed life. LOTS OF GOOD STUFF HAPPENED. Hey! Just the three kids and their spouses and their six kids would be enough. The fact that they welcome us to join their pilgrimages ... their unfolding lives ... would be enough. But we've also always earned a living and (to borrow a curse from Car 54 Where Are You?) our teeth haven't fallen out on the day before Thanksgiving. Professionally we've been OK. Never knocked the World dead but always wanting for nothing important. Even our health has been somewhere in the middle of the normal curve.

I work a great deal with people who come to me with personally constructed religions that require that they avoid most pleasures and demand of themselves the performance of painful or humiliating activities. This appears to consistently (I have been working with such sufferers for nearly 40 years) go with a difficulty appreciating ... a difficulty experiencing gratitude. Often, this is accompanied by a toxic envy, one that begrudges others their fortunes and bemoans their own misfortunes. Envy comes in two forms ... with the other living comfortably with gratitude ...

In our dotage, this is essential, as we see the next generations strutting their stuff and their stuffs and the still-to-be-filled canvas that they have many years to fill.

Blessing for us Old Ships going out to our Seas each day: May we beneficently envy the young just as we rejoice in our mostly filled lives and already made choices!

Feeling the Burn but Keeping it Positive

To deny the human pains of living is as delusional as some hypochondriases. One exaggerates the importance of things .... the other trivializes that importance.

A youngster in song writes: "It's gonna be a long, lonesome Summer. But Darling I'll tell you this. I'll send you all my love. Every Day in a letter. Sealed with a Kiss."

Thinking positively all the time (Gotta love that Cancer) is as delusional as some pessimisms. One trivializes the importance of pains ... the other replaces life with them.

I suspect it is true of many elections (but I'm caught up in the hype about the American one) that more than half the people will be disappointed in the results and caught up in negativity for times bracketing the election on each side. Maybe 4 out of 9 will be disheartened that their candidate has lost and another 1 or more of 9 that their candidate who they weren't pleased with to begin with won.

Negativity is a well that remains dry even after the rainy Season. It bears little resemblance to Realism and the Fourth Quarter has no shortage of Players who have ended the game. I often conjure up the image of a person rising in a theater and announcing midway through the Second Act that the performance is over. 'Please, finish your popcorn and leave your seats quietly. I'm sending the Cast back to their Homes.'

The Fourth Quarter is chocked full of excuses to do so. Parents are gone ... maybe half the cousins, siblings and friends, too ... and children and betimes grandchildren no longer bear the patina of immortality. If one is somewhere in the midst of a normal health curve, the spine begins to speak in the language of collapse and arthritis ... sleep is not that idealized uninterrupted kind .... and there is some evidence of neuropathy that prevents vigorous signals from reaching the ends of some limbs yielding a sense of numbness. ... One could go on. My own arrhythmias intrude on longstanding habits and hobbies and my Thyroid has tired of its task ... Yuch.

And if one is fortunate to still have a partner, the probability of one getting caught in negativity may be as much as doubled.

To the Negativist, the future is fraught with not only danger but the certainty of disaster. Not only will the election be lost but the entire World Order will change ... and to the iconoclast who votes for the candidate that is never going to win, there already has been a broad denial that incremental change is possible in a direction that will bring them a portion of joy, gratitude and peace. Ethics of the Fathers has it: Who is the fortunate one? That person who feels gratitude for their share in life.

Going to drive 330 miles to visit two of our grandchildren ... the two who live at a distance. At 8 and 11, they'll be waiting at a window, smiling when they receive a cell phone call that we've exited the highway. ... like puppies wagging their tails with glee. The election will wait and so will any visions that include the warnings to the attendees that the sky is falling or the performance is over.

Gunther Dog joined the chorus, last night. He has begun to snore.

The Force of Character

Some years ago, I had a column in a professional rag called the NAAP News. We called it Letters to the Author and it followed an experience that I had with a reviewer of something I'd written (Oedipal Paradigms in Collision) who pretty obviously hadn't read my rather lengthy arguments. I remember reading his published review and not only being in a quiet state of disagreement but being, as is somewhat more consistent with the truth, pissed off. I decided to review books differently. The "Letters" column would attempt, in the form of a letter, to get in the author's "boat" and row a little with them and then to add the author's response. I would not respond to the response, feeling that since I had chosen the book, I had already given the author the right to last response. Maybe I'd do it differently, now.

In any case, a couple of days ago someone contacted the Editor of the rag asking if the column with my letter to James Hillman and his response might not be available. They contacted me as they could no longer find a copy of that issue. I checked my present computer and my last one and found files that must contain the sought after copy but couldn't open the file of Hillman's response to my review of his volume on ... ach du lieber ... aging. And asking Jim Hillman? He died last year. He called himself a Renegade Jungian after leaving the training faculty in Zurich where, as I recall (or where my mind invents?), I met him when I and Marsha and the older kids visited in 1970. I think he had been training director in the educational institute, there.

How the years pass! And how quickly things are forgotten! Not just the four generations that are typically sufficient for familial memory to lose track of Great Grandma or Great Grandpa. But now I find myself confronted with losses of collective memory in a decade or so.

I don't much remember his response, though it was full of freundlichkeit, friendliness, as I recall.

The editor has lost old copies of that issue.

I never thought to keep them.

My computers won't translate the old files.

And Jim Hillman died.

Zo!

Pfffft! They're gone.

Think that may be connected to yesterday's feelings that had me remembering Lee Hayes singing "How do I know my youth is all spent."

Think I'll go for a run, as soon as the Sun begins its run for the day.

Have had better days

Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes used to sing some truths (see below) ... how is it possible that years of energy are followed by dragging one's ass ... as often as not. De-energized, today .... I'll be back ...

My Get-Up-And-Go Has Got Up and Went

Anonymous… 
Old age is golden, or so I’ve heard said,
But sometimes I wonder, as I crawl into bed,
With my ears in a drawer, my teeth in a cup,
My eyes on the table until I wake up.
As sleep dims my vision, I say to myself:
Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf?
But, though nations are warring, and Congress is vexed,
We’ll still stick around to see what happens next!
 
How do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got up and went!
But, in spite of it all, I’m able to grin
And think of the places my getup has been!
When I was young, my slippers were red;
I could kick up my heels right over my head.
When I was older my slippers were blue,
But still I could dance the whole night through.
Now I am older, my slippers are black.
I huff to the store and puff my way back.
But never you laugh; I don’t mind at all:
I’d rather be huffing than not puff at all!
 
How do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got up and went!
But, in spite of it all, I’m able to grin
And think of the places my getup has been!
I get up each morning and dust off my wits,
Open the paper, and read the Obits.
If I’m not there, I know I’m not dead,
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed!
 
How do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got up and went!
But, in spite of it all, I’m able to grin
And think of the places my getup has been!

Looking Presidential

Watching the Presidential debate, last night, was a tormenting experience ... a tired warrior ...  in a Tenth Heavyweight Round .... and someone who was saying a great deal that seemed to boldly contradict what he had said on many previous occasions. Some people come and visit me and oftentimes will talk about what it's like to be living in the declining years of a once-proud civilization.

De-energized! That's it. It's difficult enough getting older but to do so during the Fall of Some Empire seems like a cruel joke.

I feel worried and de-energized. It was Erik Erikson who a half century ago, in describing the variety of conflicts that occasion an unfolding life from childhood to the grave, suggested that in the last stages of life the choice was between what he called generativity, the sharing with one's progeny, and despair.

I feel worried and de-energized and despairing. What could I tell my grandchildren that will be hopeful? A great nation was founded on the magic of balancing free enterprise and individualism with some form of the social contract. And now that nation seems locked into poisonous and betimes dishonest representations of its attempts to deal with a changing World .... A world in which a goodly percentage of the population has become somewhat redundant ... in which change has occurred maybe too rapidly for us to adjust.

I think I'll join some Luddite organization and fight against industrialization or something. The French Legion, alas, won't have me!

Glad that I'm not President.

Taking Oneself Seriously ... Seriously!

Sktrbrain asked if I was joking about my comment about feeling as if meetings were readying me for life in the Day Room of an Alzheimer's Nursing Home .... I had just the previous night been in the company of a group of folk who all have worked in my field and they were driving about -- conversationally -- like so many smashed up stock cars in a demolition derby ... hither and yon ... crash ... bam ... wandering off. Not a Second Quarter Player in the mix. Almost no one ever speaking to the point of the meeting. But each taking themselves very seriously ... myself, included.

I've been busy for the past couple of days ... juggling all the details of life in the Fourth Quarter with those matters that remain in my working life ... I work about 3/4 time ... I waltz.

Here, Sktrbrain, are just a few of my scattered thoughts that have dominated my thinking.

One had to do with the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. The scholars from two millenia past suggested that there were 613 commandments listed. 248+365 ... for their estimate of the days of the year and the number of bones in the human body ... positives and negatives. I became preoccupied with whether the divine comment to Adam (literally, Earthman) after he screwed up by eating the wrong stuff and diming out his lady (some commentaries say that that was his central sin ... primal sin ... his lack of gratitude for the gift of a partner) was one of those commandments. God tells him: "with the sweat of your brow, you'll eat bread." Was that just a curse or was that a recommendation.

Last night, I was hanging out with a bunch of Fourth Quarter types and one relatively young carttonist ... he couldn't have been more than a year or two older than my oldest son ... maybe 48 or 50 or something. That conversation was scattered, too, but had a quality of "lemme tell you where I've been".  There was a sweetness to it .... Towards the end, three couples remained ... married 44, 47 and 50 years, respectively. At least one party to each contract was still working ... actually, all were at least somewhat active. I left that meet feeling hopeful and going back to my morning thought about the value of sweat equity.

As I pulled in front of our home, I looked lovingly at a path that I rebricked (not too well) and a brick planter that I fashioned at the bottom. Blessed are you Animator of the World (Anima Mundi) who still permits me to mix mortar and concrete. Amen.

As one bit of liturgy goes: Listen up to our voices: ... don't toss us out in our dotage; as our strengths wane, don't toss us out!

Long day ahead ... and then the debate. May whoever our president is not toss us out, either. I've just noticed how the carmakers are producing cars that stop on their own before we baby-boomers bash into the cars we're following ... Just in time, I'd say.

Another Meeting

Last night ... one of the attendees just final galley proofs of book on kids' development, particularly around language. The group is, indeed, getting old. Maybe 60-90 or a little better. I was sitting there thinking as the conversation wandered from what chickens experienced before being slaughtered to the % of genes separating chimps from hominid chomps, from the territory shared by Philosophers, Psychologists and Theologians. I think we likely spoke about one of the chapters of the soon-to-be-published and decided, if I may be permitted to wander as I do anyway here, what to read but not talk about next month ... I was thinking how such meetings might prepare one for the Day Room of a Nursing Home. Loose associative paths connecting A to B to Chickens and Chimps.

My Grandmother, Mother and Mother-in-Law all ended up in such places, suffering from Alzheimers. Many of us Last Quarter folk carry with us the knowledge (if not the gene itself ) that we may be beyond any point of return from a trip to some specific illness that our forebears bore.

Still, I went out this AM to try my return to running. My heart wasn't cooperative but I kept up my jog at 6. A neighbor was out with his two pooches behind one of those invisible fences that's supposed to keep les barkers at bay. Life is, in part, I suppose, about trust. All my parts are intact ... though my heart continues its refusal to settle down into a comfortable rhythm, this morning. I remind myself of Kunitz while remembering that my people begin their days with a prayer thanking God for giving strength to the weary, to which I typically respond with a more than hearty Amen:

The Layers

By Stanley Kunitz 1905–2006 Stanley Kunitz

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.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face,

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Homilies and other Happy Tales

Heard someone deliver a sermon on "transitions" ... It was nice! hopeful! New way, she intimated, of looking at her life ... her first son was just married ... about to become empty-nester. We Last Quarter daredevils, on the other hand, have long said goodbye to our kids ... grandkids have come as the next redeemers and they've turned out to be come as they wants. One Poet Laureate recommended that we "live in the layers, not the litter" ... I could go for that, too. Or as my Father years ago would say to Marsha, his daughter in law, if he wanted to eat something that was out of arm's reach at the table: Lemme see some of that.

I haven't run for a year until just recently. Just barely running 2/3 of mile compared to what had been 4-6 miles each day until I began breaking metatarsals Summer of 2010. Sometimes, it feels like transitions and at other times it feels like walking blindfolded over a cliff.

Did feel great to go out in the cool early morning Fall air ...

Think I'm gonna do that .... each morning! a run, however short, out in the World of which I'm still a part. Maybe I can end each day with a similarly brief ride on one of my 1974 pedal bikes ... they deserve to breathe, too.