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.