Year's End

I keep coming back to the issue of acceptance of change ... I feel like a broken record. Funny, isn't it, that people under 35 and maybe much older, don't have recollection of 'broken records' ... of the LP that got scratched one day or covered by little fingers and their finger food ... and kept playing the same few seconds of a song. I look at those folk who are near and dear to me and flashback 40 or 50 years to a time when they were vital, sharp and maybe less prickly. I don't know why people who are > 60 or so get prickly and short but they do. Maybe the question is better asked about why they don't get pricklier, still? That process, alone, of seeing those who are close to me fading ... I wrote a ditty almost twenty years ago, now, about finding a pair of wing-tipped shoes at the bottom of my closet ... I called them witnesses to God's sinister plan to turn a person with all of his/her aliveness into lore. Yesterday, a listserv of colleagues went a bit off the deep end ... I don't know how old people are on this discussion board, except for one of my students from 30 years ago ... he says he's 65. But a bunch of the others began the friendly silliness of of double entendres .... not my thing. I read through them with no interest in participating. They began this after some bullied a lost member purportedly for having bullied them. It's perfectly consistent with some of the rules of what a Doctor from Vienna called the Unconscious ... das Unbewusste .... the Unknowable. In the firs place, if Alice does something to Barney, in her mind she won't be able to distinguish between that having occurred and Barney having done that to her. And secondly, if Alice blew Barney away, she is not unlikely to switch the violence to humorous play. In any case, I had no particular interest in playing. We had just returned from a trip to Disney planned by one of my kids (calling a 46 year old man a kid may be a poke at an old pig, in itself) to get all the cousins, together. Funny. They're my grandkids but have a life of their own as cousins. Go figure! Anyhow ... the colleagues online reminded me of the three eight year old girls loading a Hangman App onto a laptop (actually, an iPad) and repeated word-guessing just two words ... penis and vagina and giggling as little kids are prone to do. I don,t think I would've joined in with the online folk even if I wasn't in midst of a cardiac arrhythmia .... a much better witness than Cordovan Wing Tips that I've grown old. Enough ... New Years Eve I'll spend with M and with my longest-standing and closest friends ... When I met Milt, he was a newly minted professor and now he's a newly retired professor. And Ruth couldn't have been more than 27 when we all met at a Department Xmas party in December 1968. WTF! and how does that happen, BTW? Happy New Year.

Families Gather

We gather together .... A trio who sang peace songs, Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, sang a curious one which had the following lyrics ... "And when I die ... and when I'm dead, dead and gone ... there'll be one child born and a World to carry on, to carry on." The Fox in the Little Prince says that ritual is necessary so that he knows when the farmers are busy dancing with the girls allowing his an entre into the chicken coops of his World in order to dine. The first works better for me, at least Playing in Life's Fourth Quarter. Perhaps, this holiday was the first for me in which I felt my family and its begats as an unfolding of generations ... M and I began this madness in 1965, the year that a harmless flirtation turned into a marriage. 1966 and 1967 saw the appearance of two cgildren and a tgird little miracle, this time a girl, appeared the same year the Eucharist Congress occurred in the Philadelphia we then lived in and was highlighted, just at her debut, by a visit from the Vatican's finest. In a talk around 2000, I spoke of another innocent flirtation ... this one not with a hot young girl but with a hot idea that would follow me through my writings from 1978 to ... well ... I imagine, at least, to the grave. This had to do with the primacy of seeing another as a person, a subject, a doer in their own right ... and how hard that was for humanity. In any case, the family enlarged with in-law kids and our charming grandspawn .... the first in 1999 ... then the only boy to come along in 2001, three more girls in 2004 and the caboose in 2009. While we've gathered many times, this year was different in many respects. For one, it was all planned in terms of travel and destination by our oldest. He chose a place most of us wouldn't have thought to come ... Disney Florida ... Grandpa Dork doesn't quite belong in Disney, except when he's on the jazz, possibly, and then as a character. Everyone flew except Grandma and Grandpa who sauntered down the thousand miles by car over some days. My children got along (six grownups individuated in their own very different directions, paired off as part of God's plan .... her mysterious plan) and the grandchildren, particularly, the three eight year old girls. Last night was our last one here and eleven of us were gathered in one of the two apartments that we took up during our stay here in Florida. The three eight year olds were busy writing silly and betimes salacious words on a hangman ap and the rest of us ... six of the adults and the two older kids ... took to discussing the religious proscription against gossip and bad speech. One thing led to another ... Leviticus 19 came into play ... "You shall be holy, for I am holy" the Writer/writer reasons and tgen goes on to list one after the other the component parts of the good life. Charity ... not taking advantage of the blind by placing a stumbling block (or does leaving one in place count, too)in their way .... honesty in business dealings .... and the Writer/writer repeatedly hitting the reader with "I am the Lord" or "I am the Lord your God" ... as if to say ... this is Godliness. Lots of effort was expended on the sentence that combines the need to eschew gossip but to disclose in matters of safety ... "don't stand by on the blood of your neighbor." Discussion wandered to matters of whether responding on the failure of a contactor to do a good job on a listserv was gossip? or protecting the deaf and blind? or honesty in business. Was there a notion of gossip in ancient Greece? Could there, indeed, be a polity in which these very issues weren't a prominent part of the discussion? What did it mean that Socrates was tried and executed for words? What moved me to quiet tears, though, was the manner in which a new generation and its 11 and 14 year old representatives stood up, so to speak, and announced their presence in this intergenerational and never-endinding discussion of the good life. "And when I die, there'll be 6 grands born and a World to carry on, to carry on." Pretty cool how this whole thing works. Merry, merry ... Happy, happy. Howard

Still Caught on Newtown

• On the Pictures of each and every victim ... child and adult.
• On the compassion and/or anger that it has generated in colleagues.
• On the questions that I go to sleep with (hypnagogic thoughts) and those I rise with (hypnopompic ones)
• Why are we so angry at each other ... colleagues, Senators, school kids to each other, ....

          and maybe most pressing on my mind lately

• What grows in each of us that bodes poorly for taking on Louis' attitude ... "apres moi la deluge" ... after I'm gone what do I care about those kids ... , I ask myself since this catastrophe that visited, chances are, thousands directly and 100's of millions indirectly. How is it that many, maybe even most of us, develop a sense of caring for the living and for the yet-to-come? Global warming will contribute to rising oceans so that when tsunamis, even little ones, hit the shores of Bangladesh, the Mediterranean, New York, Boston and Philadelphia where I live, they'll wipe out population centers! Why should I care about any time after the Fourth Quarter ends.

In my work, I come to know people who do and people who don't care ... even folk who came to visit my office with a very clear: "What the &%^$ do I care about 20 little rich kids! Angry folk ... well ... too hurt to feel for others, anyway.

How do we come to deal with the truism that for me, for most of us, 70 years from now we become an inscription on a marker in a graveyard that someday, itself, will fall into history.

I wonder a lot about this when I hear the talking heads and Pols ask about why the youngster killed.

We're going away on vacation, soon ... hope to meet up with my 6 grandkids and their three sets of parents, my kids. They're flying and we're driving in ... past Millions of homes on the side of highways, each home with a complex drama going on inside ... Do I pay attention to what I cannot know? or do I "drive-by" ... there's a word with ambiguity attached to it. Do I drive by as if each is little more than bricks and mortar ... frames and windowshades?

Happy Holiday to anyone out there listening. Chistmas celebrates the birth of one child ... by celebrating one morning in the life of our own child, for those among the faithful in Christendom. We shall not ever reach a time when every child is celebrated. That's sad.

 

Just One More Thing

Many of my colleagues in the Helping Professions who consider themselves experts want to go out and heal, as if they, themselves, had conquered death.

Beware of experts!

Death, Be Not So Present

Twenty Little Kids and more than a half dozen Women and a killer who, apparently, everyone thought was odd ... all dead. Friday and it's weekend, three of the major Sabbaths, restful days, all disturbed by gunshots and mourning and pain and of course by ...

Details ... all the talking heads voraciously furrowing for details ... pressing at the State Trooper trying to do his job amidst his own feelings ... details will save us from the horror of 6 and 7 year olds dead for no obvious reason. Getting near to the town ... leaving a Teddy Bear ... trying to balance feeling with not feeling.

A Killer ... I don't know what plagued young Lanza ... who knows. The circulated picture? A confused and different boy ... Asperger's? Maybe. But Asperger's doesn't kill. Alienation for years ... maybe the all too often brought up bullying ... Odd kids are bullied incessantly in school. Another Blogger attacks me for being like the others ... blaming Asperger's. No! There was a law passed in maybe 1974 that required that Odd kids be placed in the Least Restrictive Environment that might maintain, presumably, their academic forward-progress. Odd kids in a school full of odd kids doesn't hurt so much. Odd kids in an environment full of aggression towards the different hurts like hell. Take a healthy kid and put them in a totally different environment that's mocking of those differences for 12 years and you may -- at least part of the time -- create a monster ... full of revenge.

Blame ... I blame an old Law. Others blame the illness or the Mother who collected guns. Some blame the Laws. The Republicans and the NRA! The Democrats and their Godlessness. Huckabee says the schools are Godless and murder is the obvious outcome. I wrote on one listserv that I had considered during a morning fearful reverie that our civilization with it's 20,000,000 people cities and hostile rhetoric and inabilities to embrace difference had reached a tipping point.

Inability to Feel ... The listservs I've been part of are drenched in hostilities. Fights breaking out between professionals who as a widow of one of the great analysts, Sperge English, once opined: "should have known better." Fight! Don't embrace difference. And, damn! Don't feel.

Answers ... We wait on answers that will give us that long-overdue but heralded SENSE OF CLOSURE. There is no closure to mourning. Like any other wave, its destruction depends on its amplitude (its height) and its frequency (the time-distance between crests, for instance). Mourning eases and never ends. Those of us Playing in the Last Quarter, charter members of the Club of Orphans, know well that mourning has no closure.

In my tradition, upon hearing of a near one's death, we rip our clothing in rageful anger, eschew speech and pleasures, and say Blessed is the Truthful Judge. The usual is discontinued until it is possible, once again.

Writing

Been a while since I opened up my notes on aging. Thanksgiving came and went. Half my family was gone .... always disappointing to recognize that the family that one was born into has gone .... but, of course by the Last Quarter, even the one that you have created has broken into a number of little pieces. I see the sadness in my older son who has decidedly single-handedly to take his wife and child, as well as his two siblings' families to the so-called House of the Mouse. M and I will drive down the 1,000 miles each way and meet them to play a bit.

I think I wrote last year about my oldest grandchild's query while walking through her just-dead great-grandfather's home, looking at the pictures and asking how families are made. She wasn't asking for a sex-education class but a far more profound question about how this thing we call family is constructed ex nihilo ... from nothing.

How do you explain to a six year old that family is a process ... like a fractal ... with one copy birthing many others that are in some ways duplicates of the original. How do we explain it to ourselves as our younger generations have dared disturb the Universe by constructing an identity and a family all their own.

In any case, M and I are tired and struggling at the moment to figure out where the past half century + is packed away. Life, in the end, I suppose, happens along a sinus curve with peaks and valleys full of energy and lethargy. Wake up, wake up, M ... Winter is setting in but there will likely be another Spring.