I Want to Remember

Yesterday was Monday and the day before? Sunday. Yesterday, I recounted -- sitting with M at an off hour lunch-dinner coming home from an "airing" -- recounting how I had few memories of my father ... of Dad .... or even of Daddy except in the sense that he left me of what it was like to hold a chain saw or a rotary saw or to lean mindfully and precisely on a table saw pressuring a piece of lumber along a guide. .... At the end of 65 years, together, he was hardpressed to find the same even-ness in treating Mom ... 'tender was the night' but full of his sadness and the occasional outbursts of a soldier-boy grown old as he watched Mom's expressions and receptions ooze away.  Maybe that describes a corner of the map that comes with Playing in the Last Quarter ... an important quarter? Yeah! And an important corner of that Quater ... Remembering, Forgetting and Working Through, one oldster described as he grew older .....  full of its mixed metaphors, aye? .................... Yesterday, a Third Quarter Warrior who had just been through one of those surgical wars emailed me saying that he, too, didn't have many memories of his Dad .... his Dad died when he in 2nd grade or something. A lady wrote to me that she cried after reading some postings and, at the same time, someone sent me one of those LOL's ("laughing out loud" abbreviated so people have time to check their Facebook Page and to Twit or Farm ....) I call them the Big Two feelings ... Glee and Sadness .... the two most powerful signs that we're still with it, still alive. One is modelled on wagging tails and hello's. The other on different-directed tails and unavoidable good-byes. .... .... Oh, yes! The corner that I mentioned. ............................ How often do we mention something only to watch it fade entirely away, as one liturgy says, "as a Dream flies." .......... I was thinking of Sunday with its airing that I mentioned, yesterday ............. Fourth Quarters are more for "airings" and "romps" than runs. Airings with M. Have you noticed how Old Orphans tend to appear in pairs when they're in the early years .... and then they surface in gendered packs a little later on? "Back to the Corner, Howard! You were talking about the Corner." Take yer time, Sonny .... I'll get there............................. There's more, true, there really is more. The 40-55 year olds who occasion my office, the young ones, they are typically running up my office path just in time. They arrive, betimes huffing and puffing .... The 65-85 crowd? they get up progressively more slowly from the waiting room chairs where they've been sitting for a bit .... The youngins are just experiencing the slowing down of processing and occasional retrieval problems ... You remember, maybe (and that's a maybe), the first few times you knew where you were, in what room of what home, but not certain what you came to find. By now, I've come to stop women in the aisles of supermarket. "If you or your husband were thinking of dinner, what would you be buying?" Haven't been arrested by the store-Dick, yet, for harassment! I remember when M thought I was going deaf because it took about 2 extra seconds to sort through her communications in my mind. I remember a couple of years later when it began happening to her. ........... ................. Airings with M ............. driving slowly with the top down and people honking their horns from behind. "Old man! Git outa my way. I'm running." ... Memories that are important and memories that don't come .... maybe they weren't important. "Oh, don't worry ... they'll come back." Just love those people who predict the future for me. I'm not violent ... you needn't worry about the big block headlines:
OLD MAN SHOOTS FALSE PROPHETS .... ....... 'Doctors attributed to an overdose of Geritol a man's sudden shooting spree in which he was heard citing the mandated treatment recommended for soothsayers and necromances in the Old Testament.' ..............................

................................................For me, pictures become important. Orphans fight over them as parents' homes are emptied .... Who gets Great Grandma and Great Grandpa? .... Who gets the sketch that Mom made when everybody sketched in High School? ..... Memories .... .......................... ........................... oops! Gotta run (LOL). GuntherDog needs to pee, again .... The old guys bladder just isn't what it used to be. ..... ..... ..... I do really like to watch him run, though, and joy in  his lifting of his right leg (GuntherDog is right-legged) which, for the moment, trumps my exploration of the Corner. ....... Here, I come, Gunther! Bye 

Forgetting Spring

M and I went for a ride, yesterday, to a Lavender farm in a place called Peace Valley .... top down (on the car) ... 75 degrees. 25 miles away, a place with mixed resonances for me. I had to stop a 10K, there, when my heart went faster than it had ever gone before and when the paramedics wanted to truck me someplace safe. I refused their help but appreciated the offer. Memories of riding around the hilly 6 mile loop on one of my 1974 Raleighs in maybe 2010 .... alone ... sometimes with others. ....................... M and I took country roads heading towards home and decided to stop for some soup not far from our home. Maybe it was seeing a mid-late-60's Triumph TR-4A or TR-250 (can't quite tell these cars apart, anymore) parked out front or hearing about some perturbations in the family ... something kicked in. Our minds are such curious places. In 1915, someone wrote a piece about the mind called das Unbewusste, the Unconscious Mind. There, the author said that feeling states occur in awareness as memories from deep inside, themselves, move towards awareness. He thought these memories took the form of visual film clips or images. He called them in his Viennese German vorstellungen, though his whacked out translator called them ideas. ..... ......... ........ Images? as they rise and fall into the recesses and folds of our CPU's ... our Central Processing units ... supposedly bring feelings to mind and life................... The soup was pretty good ... a kind of dumpling chicken soup .... and the Triumph was visible through the window of the restaurant. My brother-in-law had a TR-4A before their first kid born in 1966. She's now middle-aged and fighting against fracking in touristy-rural Sullivan County, New York and my Brother-in-Law is legally no longer my Brother-in-Law. ..................... Time passes. ................... I realized myself and shared with M that I had few-to-no memories of my Dad in the years untill he retired when he was 70'ish ... retired, anyway, into another job ... a sort of religious one. Simultaneously, I recounted how I had spent the past 40+ years working .... I reviewed the jobs. A long time had passed since we had married in 1965 and since my Dad, too, had gone off to work at maybe 430 or 500 AM 5+ days a week after my Mother prepared him breakfast. I knew he came home except, that is, for the year (1957, maybe) when he lost his job, and worked in Providence, RI, in preparation for bringing the family East from Toledo. All my very limited memories were stored in the things he taught me to do and the tools he taught me to use. Maybe, after all is said and done-done-done, the "empty flashbacks" weren't related to the Two-Seater Triumph but to the body-memories that surfaced when I cut the bottom off a swinging yard-gate so that it wouldn't get caught on the deck I built years ago. It was beginning to warp upwards and the gate was getting caught on it. Or maybe the wish for more memories had to do with my grand-daughter coming over with her Mom. Sophie wanted a grandchild, so to speak, of her own. There had been a Japanese Maple on the path to my office that had died of a strangulated root maybe 25 years ago. The stump remained. I cut it to 6 feet and used it for droopy plants in the Summer months. Sophie was born long after that. Before the tree went, though, its seeds were dropped or planted by a cooperative bird outside my office ... maybe 34 years, ago ... now, those saplings are about 30 feet tall. In any case, a two-footer had taken seed on the other side of my office .... grandchild of the tree that many of my visitors used in meditations beneath her .... and we dug it up for her to take this piece of "her" history to her parents' home not so far away. Sophie's Mom had just texted a picture of the sapling in its new home, arriving as we were sitting in the eatery. .................... Grandparents and grand-trees .... Grandchildren and saplings. .................. Dad, where are you, where were you and where are the other memories that keep you vital in my mind? .... for obviously you are.

Aging Successfully

Lemme first say, I have no reason to assume either that I am or that I am not aging successfully. I am still working and earning a living, I have been married for 47.5 years (half years begin counting again in the Last Quarter, as they had in the toddler years). I have three children with whom I have regular contact. There are 6 grandchildren who claim direct kinship with me, and GuntherDog hates me and loves his Mother.There's, also, some cardiac arrhythmias, a bit of neuropathy in both legs, and an intermittently present and annoying post-eating bloat. ............................................................. ..........................................................

This all comes to mind, this morning, after having received a hyperlink from a colleague. She had listened to another oldster, 78 year old George Vaillant who years ago, as a young Psychiatrist, began studying Harvard men in classes in the early 40's. She sent this short interview piece along suggesting that it said interesting things about successful aging. And interesting, they were. Don't drink or smoke. Good genes are important. Stay married, you'll learn survival skills and you won't be lonely. And, as Monty Python or some crazy Brit would have it,  try to "look on the good side of life." Oh! And be the kind of person who gets into Harvard in the early 1940's.
....................................................................................................  ...................................................
Coincidentally, had dinner, last night, with my friends Miltie and Ruth. Miltie and I were discussing the changes that might occur with on-line courses that seem to be slowly coming of age; one of M and my kids is involved as a VP in one of them. Conversation (associations CAN be loose in the Last Quarter ... your "bean" rattling around in the helmet/in the skull apparently takes a toll!) turned to the common experience of kids going away to out-of-state schools rather than going to the home-grown variety that can be much less expensive. I had wanted to write a book about this almost 30 years ago when one of my kids' college counsellors proved to know dittly-squat about the quality of schools. Guy was quite thoughly confused about such matters. In my thinking at that time, it occurred to me that most colleges are rated either by objective measures of how good the kids were going in or coming out ... in terms of $, success, .... It struck me that it was something akin to measuring the quality of a restaurant by its patrons ... Mercedez outside? well healed and staid. Lamborghini's outside? Fast and rich. Ford Taurus's and Dodge miniwagons parked in parking lot, behind? A little overweight and tired from chasing rugrats! ........................................ Any case, kids wanna go away and maybe they wanna make their parents pay! .......................................  And measuring Harvard Men may have advantages ... but moreso for the Harvard Men then for studies. Ah! The reality is that research is expensive and local samples are far less so and most convenient. ............................... Enough to say that for those of you Fourth Quarter Fighters who believe in reincarnation ... Lookee, here ... Next time you come this way: Don't drink or smoke. Go to Harvard and marry a rich Cliffey or, if you're a Cliffey, stick with Harvard and MIT and Yale and (you get it). Don't drive a Ford Taurus and start out young with AA; it does seem to work for Alcoholis but why should the rest of us poor Souls suffer unnecessarily. ............................................ I'm gonna go try to teach GuntherDog how to howl at the full moon over Philly.

I'm Tired of Fighting.

"My Daddy's bigger" ... well, "my Daddy was Bigger, anyway" .... My way is better ... As Cocky said to Sir in Roar of the Greasepaint (Anthony Newley singing to Cyril Ritchard) 50 years ago in some theater on Broadway "From now on, we're gonna do things my way, my way or not at all. We're gonna do what I wanna do when I say! Not when you say! but when I say. .... I say that your way could lead to war." ................. Bet there's a You-tube for listening toi the song. .................... On one of the listservs I visit, I suspect there's about to be a little kerfuffle about Near-death and After-death experience. My guess is, like in other kerfuffles, each side will feel pretty good about their position. Can you hear the cheers going up in the audience .... the Roar of the Crowd .... nicely portrayed in every generation ... the Coliseum ... Ben Hur and the call for blood in the chariot races ... the Hunger Games ... the Superbowl that finally will allow for hanging the losing team .... or hoisting them up on their own pitards for a celebration to follow! Yay, TEAM! ........................ ............................. 
Near Death Experiences ... Extranatural experiences? ., while I do not have these experiences, to date, I find them no more imbued with hocus-pocus that so much of the remainder of spiritual and/or religious life ... no less scientific ... no less supported by witnesses. Indeed, as I believe that all knowledge is based on axioms and unprovable postulates ... on weltanschauungen ....  ,... on worldviews, such as  .... human life is valuable .... love and care for others is important and important for the Universe .... what happens between me and my neighbors or the flutter of a butterfly impacts the Universe .... Hell! that even the likelihood that 3 Billion people living within, say, a couple miles of the ocean's fury are wiped out by superstorms is worth avoiding (pragmatic philosophies to each of  which I subscribe). .............................................
Easiest to speak of my own religious practice. I have joy and pride that my grand-daughter will sing from the prophets. Whoever is leading the so-called prayer part of service (could well be me) will ask the "righteous gates to open for me so that I might enter them and praise the God"  and will turn to the left and to the right gesturally (citing Psalms:"as they speak from this to this saying ... ") addressing the heavenly host of angels moments before rising three times up on heels on the words "Holy, Holy, Holy is God of the Heavenly Armies ... All the Earth is filled with His honor ................... . The weak of (science) mind imagine that Science is based on irrefutable fact .... You might get me wrong ... I'm an advocate ... a strong advocate for Science .... for testing things and acting according to my unprovable hypotheses ... like saving 3 Billion people is worthwhile ... 'that psychoanalysis, too, is worthwhile and the church really isn't dead' .... But I don't hold onto a belief that my religion is so obviously more sensible than any other ....   Moslems kneeling on their prayerr rugs, Catholics on their built-in kneelers, or, for that matter, apocalytptic cults or my Physician neighbor who once a year holds her Haitian chicken sacrifice rituals. ....................... Just sayin'. .........
Bawk-bawk.  Bawk-bawk--bawk-bawk!

................................. I'll leave it to others to be right!

Cuiouser and Curiouser

I don't know that I ever expected to figure "it" out .... after all, "it" changes at least as often as decade to decade .... sometimes moment to moment. I think as a child, "it" began as a quest for competencies ... I suppose we all, Players in the Last Quarter, remember the young woman sharply telling her Mother in the laundry room: Mother, I'd rather do it myself. We get more or less caught up in a struggle between those who are holding on to their skills and those who want them for their own .... for the first time. .................. A slew of competencies ... locomotion ... self-feeding .... cleaning one's own butt .... travelling independently in ever-widening circles, initially around home-base, typically Mom and Dad ..... independence and autonomy .... the right to connect with the tattooed, with the Gothed-out, I suppose, with the swing-dancers and the bad boys and girls ... ..... Then we dress up to the dreamed parts ... bathed in sharkskins or tailored suits, dripping in Gold announcing how much I'm adored or Rolexes telling others how much I've done. ................... I feel, betimes, like I've attained "it" when I'm carrying around a power saw ... gas-powered, electric rotary, ... reshaping a little world and I feel it when I enter the office I've occupied for 35 years .... Howard the Lion-Hearted and his lair from whence he holds court over his silly collections of statuary, books and findings, and who is visited there by those who seek my company and counsel. ........ Mandelbrot and others began playing with fern-like geometric structures that have a curious property. Each peace grows into the whole. One is called the Sierpinski triangle, named after one of the greats from the Polish Academy of Science that flourished, particularly, in Warsawa and Lwow before the Great War. Stage 1. A triangle can be cut into four smaller triangles by bisecting each side and joining the sides.   Stage II. The middle of the four can then be removed and the three smaller ones can be cut into four still smaller triangles with the middle of each removed. .... Stage III, etc. can, in our minds, go on forever, yielding a swiss-cheese of triangles that covers an area but can be thought of as having no substance ... no area. ....... Each triangle, if this could really be done, is exactly the same as the whole. ..... These folk called these structures Fractals and interactive forms of them can be found on the Net. ..... In any case, In the search for "it," we eventually become like one of those big triangles ... replaced by many others. When we were disassembling my parent's home some years ago, I was walking with my grand-daughter. She asked, looking at the framed pictures, how a family was formed, as obviously my Dad and Mom had their family. I didn't have the heart to tell Sophia that families are formed as older families break apart, allowing for the new. So much of what keeps our nose to the grindstone in searching for "it," has to do with, what I call, 'the fantasy of the eternal family.' I still have a brother and two sisters ... 69-73 years old and each with their own family of children, grandchildren and livestock. We are connected by Histor but the eternal family is in pieces. Each of my children, now, have their own families and the one that I sat in front of as proud pater familias is in many ways no more. ....................... Being part of an unfolding and recursive process ain't tiddlywinks but is part of brisk Play in the Fourth Quarter.

Playing with What You Got

Garbage-in/Garbage-out? An old expression for a troubling fact of life that makes so many of the processes of life not more understandable, necessarily, but explainable. Some examples? ........... I don't have a world class sense of humor ... neither did my Father. Coincidence? or Garbage-in/Garbage-out? ................. Indeed, for years, now, when I shave, I see my image coming back but it's complex. It's not the me of my Second or Third Quarters of life and looks curiously like my Father. Maybe not so curious. I taught in an art institute for quite some time ... purportedly a course on certain relationships between non-representational art, the students' work, and theoretical Mathematics. When the students were 'bored' because I was ... well ... being 'boring,' they would doodle and draw pictures that 'bore' a striking resemblance to Uncle Carl, my Dad's uncle, who looked a like like him and had been dead since before these 20-somethings had been 'born' (see, hoe annoyingly and punily punning I can be ... Garbage-in/Garbage-out.) ................................ A Dokteur in Vienna nearly 100 years ago said this was inevitable. He claimed that poart of the growth process in children had to do with taking in 4 kinds of Garbage. (1) Like my Dad. (2) Totally different than my Dad ... totally, Man! (3) Like my Mom. (4)  Totally different than my Mom ... totally, Mam! ............... If he was right, if we unconsciously "learn" (so to speak) from our parents, what are we to do. ..................... By the way, it doesn't end there ... I guess one can say: it doesn't end. My poor kids carry around pieces of me ... my sons may be shaving me already and my daughter may occasionally be troubled having said things that sound like me. Who knows .... 'only the shadows that we've joined in creating know.' .............................. So, here I am stuck with -- inter alia and among other things -- grandpa's invisible samovar and sayings hanging around my neck and coming out of my mouth (respectively). The albatrosses of living things. ............................... There was another dokteur, Leopolt Szondi was his name. He claimed that we get troubled when we don't accept our fate and our psychic family heirlooms. (He's long dead, so if I take liberty with what he called Schiksalanalyse ... Fate Analysis, he can't object, anymore ... as my Dad might have said.) ................. By the time someone begins Playing in the Last Quarter and even much earlier, most of these heirlooms are in place. Can we make peace with them? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? An old Rock song said ... "I feel like letting my freak flag fly!" .... Fly high, Mom and Dad .... while I've created some of my own, I'm still flying your banners .... God have mercy on my children ... and theirs.

Easy and Tough Mornings

I do wake up some mornings like a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed squirrel ready to climb trees and chase my good buddy in spirals up and down some tree; this is not one of those mornings. Maybe aging is in part measurable by the % of one type of day over the other.................... I'm 50-50 and heading slowly South and not necessarily to the Riviera  ....................
................................. Strike one up for the sour days ..................................................................
I began to lose my energy at about 430, yesterday afternoon .... failed to maintain the belief that I could continue, that evening, to "Play" in Life's Fourth Quarter. The second youngster/killer of the Boston Marathon was still on the loose. My grandchildren, those who live in that area, were home from school. My Brother was not working, as he lived in the shutdown/lockdown area. I was so sad for the people who lost to death or injury and even tearful for the "Lost Boys." One of my afternoon visitors to my office was struggling to develop a hair of gratitude to himself for the positive changes he had enacted in his life, at great cost and effort, I might add, and was assuredly not happy with me. ...... I was,with M, on aGrandma/Granpa Gig, cooking between visitors for my 9 year old twin grand-daughters ... tag team mischiefers, that they are. I had cooked before my first visitor in the early AM but failed to allocate time for a nap. I have become like a toddler: I need my nap. Maybe 40 minutes sometime between Noon and three.  I felt tightly wound .... no patience for the dogs, either. The  kids' dog, Lovee, a big black teenage Lab I've been trying to teach to howl seemed more like a nuisance to have about. ........................................................ Life is not a bowl of cherries and Fri 19 April was feeling like the pits. ...................................... This AM, I couldn't sleep. Lovee and GuntherDog were busy scratching Winter's dry skin and resettling. M has a torn bicep and is in pain throughout the night. My cooking left me with the results of a faulty gastro-esophogeal sphinctor, the shut off valve that keeps acids and other corrosive stuff out of the esophagus so they don't burn the esophagus or go down the bronchia to the lungs. Bad taste ... pain. Sour-Sour-Sour. I had sour dreams about my kids .... odd for me. And, indeed, my GE-Sphinctor began to lose itts tone, like bellies and breasts do .... GE Sphinctors lose that squirrel spunk! ....................... Throw in .... the back. Old backs don't want to be straight anymore and add that to nerves that transmit less data from back, through legs, to toes ... and you have a recipe for numb toes that no longer work in concert with the touch mechanism of the foot, at large, that leads to difficulty maintaing balance. So no primary dizziness, but, still, an inability to achieve balance. And then there was this woman who claimed I had been in arguments with two other old men. Hell, no. They hurled epithets and I reported quietly that I didn't think we liked each other. Geez! Is that an argument? ................................... My Heart Rate is OK .... a little high for me at 43 but steady as a rock. It's 451 AM .... I have responded to Email correspondence and four offline comments wondering if my last posting was about my own sex life .... ..... This all reminds me of the Lee Hayes lyrics (don't know who wrote it but he sang it 50+ years ago): Each morning I wake up and dust off my wits/roll outa bed and read the obits/ If my name's not there, I know I'm not dead/So I eat a good breakfast and go back to be. ..................... Actually, I don't read the obits. Guess, I don't wanna know. 

Some Things Don't Matter as Much

The Old Farts I run into ... oops! ... those of my compatriots who are Playing in the Last Quarter that I meet ... friends, visitors to my office, people who are the age of my grandparents as I first remember them, me ... these people don't seem to have the same lists of bugbears ... of things that bother them. .................................................  Older Men and Women may still look at the Hotties and Hunks that strut their stuff somewhere out there in the Late Middle Aged Fog that exists beyond growing cataracts, but the softer-edged person laying next to them in bed is still a welcome partner in Olympic Style Paired Horizontal Aerobics. Haven't heard anyone kvetch: "God ... I went to bed with a Prince/Bridget Bardot and woke up with a Frog/Grandma." Instead, I hear people smiling at the kindness represented by asking their lover after coitus if they're OK, fearing the so-called "Big One" ... the Myocardial Infarction that ends the dance and the dancing. Haven't heard anyone complain about the inherent humor of asking after intercourse: "Do you remember if I took my dulcolax, today?" and many have laughed, telling me of such occurrences ...................................... I suspect the great writer of the German language, Goethe, must've been older when he penned: "Mach es kurz, Am Jungsten Tag ist's nur eine ferze" .... 'make it snappy for on the Day of Judgement  whatever it is ... is little else than a singular fart.' There's that word, again, 'Fart.' When one enters the Kingdom of Dotage, one pays less attention to such gastro-intestinal happenings as when friends or, for that matter, near and dear and the people who occasion my office get up from the dinner table with a put-putting sound feeling their way to the nearest bathroom. ....................................  But so much else loses its bite, as well. ............................ The food begins to taste good because someone still wants to shop for you or cook for you .......................... Indeed, in good relationships, who cooks and who does the little chores that younger folk may fight over takes on less meaning ........................ The Grim Reaper may actually become the sleep Doctor who finally cures you of middle-aged sleep patterns ....................... the social slaps and slings and arrows of life take on a lesser meaning .................................. "She/He doesn't like me? Well, I don't exactly like her/him either."Remember the time that was important ... being part of the in-group ... the cool group .... or the group that has that cute ^&$% in it ....  ...........................  I haven't heard any of these older folk complaining about the absence of multiple orgasms and, as a group, we are thankful everytime a car (Grandma called it 'the machine') starts. Wow! Look, Grandpa. No drying off ignition cables, no silicone sprays when it rains, none of that crank-crank-crank. (I might actually revekl in once more hearing that crank-crank-crank sound out of something I wasn't married to ... LOL). .................. Perfectly clean glassware doesn't seem to matter as much after 70. ...................... I remember one visitor to my office, a round woman with a round husband, describing their sexual encounters with joy but noting that it would have looked to her 20 years before as something like moving around heavy machinery or fontloaders ... slogging through the mud! ........................  Life can be a good teacher! ..................... Think I'll spend parts of today thinking about the things that don't bother me as much.

A Very Good Day in Syria

Like so many of my countryfolk in the USA and like my wife tearing and torn up by the bombings in Boston and the carnage, including, as both random and wartime violence always seem to, the death and destruction of children and the devastation of lives that wanted little more than to live in peace, raise children in peace, snd grow old and die with dignity, I was pained by the explosions in Boston. Like many of the people I met yesterday, visitors to my office, cyberfriends on line, family in correspondence, and colleagues at a meeting, last night, I thought first of those I know who might be affected. 'Good that my Brother was busy celebrating the beginning of one of the years of his post-70 life and not running the Boston as he had when he was just a little younger.' 'Good that my younger son was able to pick up his kids at school and get them to their home away from Boston.' 'Good that my cyber-colleague's daughter wasn't hurt in the health tent at the finish line.' and 'Wonderful to hear that my colleague's daughter and her boyfriend were perennially late getting to events and that she wasn't visiting them in Boston from Philly ... for she's always on time.' It hadn't occurred to me till now that I can even imagine feeling relieved that my cardiac arrhythmias keep me from entering any long races, any longer. Good to hear my Iranian friend and colleague say what many of us who belong to Ethnic minorities will say ... 'It will be good if whoever did this turns out to be from some other Ethnic minority or politically motivated group.' Like so many, I am caught in what nature and my self preservative instincts have in store for me ... taking care of those near and dear to me. Still, how do I integrate that what occurred yesterday in Boston represented the best of days in Syria's civil crisis, a super day in Iraq's tormented years both before and after the redemption by America's Shock and Awe campaign from almost ten years ago. How do I balance my own normal narcissism with the fact that if I count bodies, Boston on Marathon Day in 2013 was a typical, if less dramatic day in major cities around the USA. How do I find rest for my National Chauvinistic tendencies that has myself and many others deaf to the carnage in other places? How often have I heard foreign tragedies objectified with political arguments. Busses blown up in Southeast Asia. Little girls disfigured and killed in India and Pakistan and Africa. The years of terror induced in Israel, the PA and Gaza ... bombs and busses ... rockets doing their damage .... Those of us Playing in the Last Quarter have listened to the messages of Simon and Garfunkle's Christmas song with its almost subliminal remembrances of the number of Viet Cong killed. We have heard our talking head newstypes reading off Statistics about the numbers who died. As the generations pass, our progeny will study these years in History or even poetry ... Achilles and Agamemnon types will rise and the word Hero will be used on the winning sides. Jepthah may be remembered for his war campaign against the Midianites but the sacrifice of his daughter who wanted little eose than to be able to go hiking with her girlfriends in the mountains before being sacrificed to Ba'al or some other god will rarely be read from Judges. There is an enormous price we ultimately pay for our Narcissism. And still ... yesterday in Boston can only be described as a very good day in Damascus.

Masters and Their Dherents

M and I spent yesterday AM listening to a series of memorial lectures on the 20 th anniversary of a very wise old man's death. Moving speeches by his now 80 year old daughter, herself a near retired professor of religious history, and her son a middle aged religious leader in his own right. At one point a tape was played of the old man speaking to a small group of people gathered to celebrate the first month of a child's life. I had known the speaker since I waa a child ... a connection between him and my grandfather, another religious thinker. I'm certain that I had pestered both old men in the manner youngsters do. I cared deeply for them both. In this talk (I had heard many that this man gave in the 50's and early 60's ... this was mid 1970's and he must have been in his Last Quarter). He spoke of going into classrooms full of sadness and feeling very old about to confront college aged and graduate school aged seminarian types. 'An old man facing a group of perhaps naive but wide-eyed and bright youngsters.' As the lecture progressed, he said that he felt other religious thinkers join him ... his grandfather, scholars from the 12th and 13th Centuries and beyond .... and, he added, "from antiquity." By the end og his 3-4 hour seminars, he would feel, apparently, like one in the middle of an unbroken chain of people ... some who agreed with each other and others who disagreed maybe even with themselves, from time to time. As he recognized himself as a part of this chain, his sadness would lift and he would experience -- if I caught his drift, as the kids used to say -- being a part of .... a droplet in a flowing river .... a piece of the whole. If he was sad and tired going in, he said, and in some pain from keeping his aging bory together as he was leaving, during the Seminar he felt no such discomfort ... On one of the discussion boards in which I participate, I've been duplicating either these recent postings or modified versions of them. As I've experienced in similar situations, they were not accepted by everyone as ... what to call them .... 'shared but unfinished ideas' of someone Playing in the Last Quarter. Some see them as pretentious or provocative. At moments such as those, I feel some of the Old Man's sadness (which old man I am referencing?) I am not typically angered by such thoughts ... what do they, betimes in offensive language, say about everyone being entitled to their own thinking. Another person reported being disturbed by the tension, as if there was a need for 'the flowing river' to be without waves ... without perturbations on the surface or below. I had a sufficiency of brilliant teachers, not only in what they knew but in how they 'met' the world in sharing what they had. I think I was 15 and approached the old guy with a question about his religion's attitude towards spaying my promiscuous dog. He could've shooed me away or shewed me the door. Instead, he sat down for, as I recall, 6 hours or more ... it was dark before we finished in the library and he had pulled from the shelf many of his ancient texts. It was all, by the way, obiter dicta ... those comments that judges write after their decisions, comments about their thinking. There was either no decision or, else, the youngster finally came to realize that it didn't matter. I told my grandfather about my meeting with the Old Man. He laughed ... and then laughed some more. Blessed is the one who makes opportunities for the young to meet Masters.

wounded Warriors

Quiet morning ... M is asleep. GuntherDog sacked out beside me ...rereading exchanges on a number of listservs and discussion groups and what I've written, here ... Impressed by what wonded warriors we are/I am. I'm not a person who thinks much about things outside of space-time but I choose to hang out with those who do. Our weltanschauungen, our world views, seem to align. I like their literature and their liturgies and their sacred spaces .... the literary folk talk of 'necessary illusions' in writing .... I suppose that there are necessary illusions in living. A youngest grandspawn of mine offers up: "I am a princess!" She's three and a half and that half a year is very important in the development of fantasy life. She is the product and the first one of her middle-aged Dad, Poppai, as she calls him in her Portugese ... her King, I suppose ... mine and M's older son ... and her somewhat younger Mommai. .................... ..................... I could figure out how to dissuade her from her phantasmagorical nonsense: "you cannot be a Princess for your Poppai is really not King." ................... ................... I think I'll just buy her a tiara, instead. ................... ................... It was Poe, that Delmore Schwartz lost soul from a previous century who screamed at science in his sonnet to her ... I recall bits: .... "science. True daughter of Old time thou art. .... Why preyest thou on the poet's heart, Vulture whose wings are dull realities" .... he ends by accusing Science of attempting to steal from him his "Summer Dream beneath the Tamarind Tree." A brief poem by Stephen Crane arises from junior high school, as well. Might go like this: I saw a man pursuing the horizon. Round and round they sped. I accosted him. I said: you can never. 'you lie,' he cried and ran on. .................. I was mesmerized in junior high school by the 'round and round THEY sped' ..... by that singular word that suggested that the man and the horizon were in some joint enterprise, Guess that I still am ... a little distortion of reality never hurt anyone, ay? Like with us Players in the Last Quarter ... covered in sweat and mud .... not being able to see the clock .... LOL ..... in the middle of the night, really not being able to see the clock and not being able to remember the name of that movie!

Angry Old Man/Sad Old Man?

I had a friend who died 4 or 5 years ago. Maybe he was 92 or 93. We were students together in a training program, he the oldest in our cohort, I the youngest. They called him Eph ... short for Ephraim, too biblical a name for the Twentieth Century. Years (decades, indeed) after we trained, we would meet for lunch ... he and I or M, he and I .... into his 90's. He, this very kind man who ran non-profits for 60 years, would inevitably get pissed off at the wait-staff. A scene I remembered recently in another posting to this Blog was when he ordered sandwich and 'a coffee' at a deli. The young man brought both out, getting the response: are you stupid? wyen someone order a sandwich and a coffee, he expects the coffee to come after he finishes the sandwich, otherwise the coffee will be cold. I gave the young man an extra large tip ... thinking to myself that he had just been aggressed upon by this Old Friend of mine and deserved combat pay .................... On a listserv discussion group that I'm active with some folk are discussing whether sadness covers our anger or whether anger is used to protect ourselves from the experience of sadness. Another older person, a retired professional, visited me recently. He's had to give up his sport, his walking is unsteady, continenxe and much else is questionable and unsteady in his 80's. And still another younger person, still under 70, visited recently. A kindly person, indeed, a good grandma and earlier a good mama ... all three of these people (roughly 70, 80 and 90) could be described as kindly people who have committed their lives to shepherding the world's wounded in their professions. ............ In thinking of them, the conversations that arose to my mind were all about having done something 'angry' and, still, all three I would describe as kindly Souls, suffering from the inescapable sadness of aging and its losses. Sadness is, as I've argued in these postings before, so primary a feeling when we experience the variety of losses that accompany the unfolding fractal that is life. It brings with it a similarly primal sense of vulnerability ... like when we can't find Mom or Dad's umbrella at the beach. If it gets too painful, we may start barking at others ... barking makes us feel stronger, less vulnerable. Sadness leaves us enriched.

Self Protective Devices

M just told me about an old professional hockey player ... retired and not doing too well ... taken in by a family ... putting his fists up, as he did 50 years ago, and saying that he wasn't going out without a fight ... I think his name was Larry Seidel. .............................. We all put our fists up or, else, beat ourselves. The animals are blessed with instincts and a Danger-Response system that pairs certain dangers with reactive reflexive responses. It has long been known that we members of Clan Anthropos .... we people animals ... with our ability to be aware and to reflect on dangers have a more complex set of responses .... maybe it's my species bias that has me calling them more complex? In any case they are different but still protect us from feeling endangered or "small" or emotionally vulnerable. ........... Sigmund's special child and in many ways his successor, Anna Freud, wrote a book on these protective devices called the Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. A physicist came along -- he was also a psychoanalyst, Robert Waelder -- and said they were a mess ... confused ... any list of them, he said, would sound like "Protein, Egg, Cake" ... and then along came a Boston-trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, the valiant George Vaillant, who tried to organize them. All these people, in my estimation, succeeded and yet left out one such defense from their system. ....................... Anyone whose lived to Play in the Last Quarter has had the experience of folk pushing ahead of them at a traffic light, at a bank or supermarket, or just treating us as if they had rights not available to us. .............. For years, now, when I leave the house to drive, I try to bring along a piece of fruit. When I get in the car, I set the trip-meter back to zero so that I can see how long it takes for someone to express their narcissistic right to dominion over my path. I've never made it to 12 miles. I note the mileage, take a bite out of the bidden fruit, and say a little blessing: Blessed are you God, King of the Universe, who has chosen not to make me a sphinctor magnum. I then say: There goes another Sphinctor Magnum ... Go Sphinctor! ... and LOL, as we say here in cyberspace, I travel on. ............ I've begun to do the same thing in online discussions as folk accuse this oldster of simple-mindedness, self-indulgent behaviors and a host of other misdeeds. Any case, I call this the Sphinctor Magnum Defense or the A%& H*^& Defense, for short and for those who find Latin an offensive tongue! ..................... How could Sigmund have forgotten to list that defensive maneuver? I dunno.

They Call it Sleep

You remember the halcyon days of uninterrupted sleep? Some have suggested that in their studies, it was always a fantasy. A guy whose name was Schwerdtner and was prone to asking difficult questions at meetings of the Vienna Society wondered why sleep was necessary, at all. The year was 1907 ... the venue? an office at Begasse 19. I think it was the same evening that he (I've not been able to find out who he was or what happened to him) asked why it is so difficult for people to hold multiple feelings towards the same Other. The question was never really taken up (as far as I've been able to determine) at that ot future meetings of that esteemed society which, at the time, included Adler, Freud and Jung, as well as many others. .......... Maybe Schwerdtner was Playing in the Last Quarter, though I imagine him younger. But I do find that my confreres-in-age seem to generally report (it's such a cheap thrill to split infinitives with abandon!) difficulty sleeping, particularly staying asleep, and seem to develop rather hard and fast judgements about those they meet. Y'think it's hardening of the arteries? or, maybe, just hardening to life's experiences. What did King George the Second say: 'Fool me once, my bad! Confuse me beyond all reason and ... and ... somethin' else applies. I'll get back to you on that.' ........... We/I do seem to get stuck in our/my judgements. This seems to be particularly so in situations where our interactions are limited ... those judgements stick ... don't have opportunity to evolve or flip into a new experience of the other. Context is all and the context I bring to my Others is, perhaps, my historical sense of them. There is a kind of mental inertia that Schwerdtner seems to have wanted to isolate in his question. .......... Can I ever come to accept that my wife's husband isn't all sugar and cream? Can I ever come to accept even long after his death that my Father who came home from WWII something like the Greek's Agamemnon or the Bible's Jepthah a little rougher than his four oh-so-refined children would have preferred? Can I ever come to see the other sides of people who've bitten me online? Can they ever come to see another side of me? .............. Any case, I woke up thinking about Schwerdtner at 3AM .... my Sainted Herr Dokteur Schwerdtner ... vhere are you vhen I need you? und who vere you?

Responsa

I don't typically reread my Blog postings; it's ME barking at the Universe, at Anima Mundi (its spirit), ... It's me shaking my cane .... only a couple thousand readings have occurred of my park bench ramblings and only recently have I begun to forward them to some of the listservs to which I belong. But yesterday, I seemed to hit a nerve with people who identified parts of themselves in my howling at the Moon. There's a connection, maybe, between howling at la Luna (a character in a feminist movie from mid-90's -- Antonia's Lines or Lives? ... beautiful film) and being Loony. It was reminiscent of the followup to a talk I gave in maybe 2000 in Frankfort, KY, at the Association for Science and Culture. It was a small organization led by Physicists and Religious types and just about any critter you could imagine whose interested in the meet of these two Worlds. I was talking about how action words turn into common nouns and then into Proper Nouns, at which time they lose their meaning. I had four words in mind: sabbath/Sabbath, filthy lucre/Mammon, truth/Truth and science/Science. A topic for another posting. But after my 50 minute talk, screaming fights broke out between the esteemed and gathered who had become quite "esteamed," one might say. Nearly two hour skirmish and I hardly said a word during that time. Any case ... a lot of steam, yesterday, came from members of three listservs and some colleagues. I suppose I was onto something when I suggested that Players in the Last Quarter like to shake their canes. ........... Still, even with a very busy and long day, M and I had some windows of time to speak, yesterday ... part of it was devoted to second and third generation issues. What does it mean for our oldest to be in S. Korea and Japan right about now and for our oldest grandchild to be eating at a Druze dinner in a Druze Village somewhere in Northern Israel. Then one of us noted the obvious ... that when we're young, the 40+ crowd needs to seem old to keep us separate from them ... maybe like troops not going into battle steering clear of "you who are about to die." ............. Can't say that I was troubled by the comments ... I felt separate from those who registered dis-ease with what I said or how I said it. what I wrote yesterday could be heard by any reasonable person as borderline snarky and I have lived inside a service profession where being screamed at and even threatened with bodily harm may not be common but isn't so rare, either. But, as in my profession, I was interested ... Could that posting from yesterday incite? Did it mean, as one person said, that I was just a mean bastard? or grumpy old man, as someone who isn't prone to snarkiness of their own said. Me grumpy? Nah! Me grand-pere! Someone accused me of blogging instead of communicating; right on! For me, these writings have given me the space over the past few years to sit on my park bench ... a crazy old man and talk out loud without an earbud that might make it look OK and bear witness on myself and others growing old ........... I suppose I'll continue after I've been diagnosed as defficient, as deficiency, too, is central to Playing in the Fourth Quarter. .... Oh, yes! And by then, I hope to recall whether this is Playing in the Last or Fourth Quarter ... maybe a slip about my skepticism about Overtime. LOLLaBFLaB (Laughing Out Loud Like a Big Fat Laughing antiquated Buddha ....... but me Grumpy? ........ Another day!

Listening to Old People

Listening to Old People? and being one, at the same time? It has its advantages. ............ We are not of one fabric, we Players in the Last Quarter ... but that shouldn't surprise. Some of us get boastful ... one oldster, yesterday, went into his typical tirade about how many famous people he knew. Some of us speak from atop ... from overhead ... one up ... homiletics of source ... "And the Lord spoke unto me, saying ... and I quote." Some of us piss and moan. "I told that waiter to bring me coffee and it was cold by the time I began drinking it. Didn't he know to bring it at the END of the meal." Some ask question after bloody question. "Is that what you meant. I just wanna make certain I understand exactly what you're saying." ............ I write sometimes as if I weren't part of the walking brain-dead ... but I am. ................. Well? Not quite brain-dead. Nor are these others that I keep bumping into in cybergroups and in restaurants and in my office. Hey, people over 60, 65, 70 .... have you considered your relevance to the culture? When you were 20, you didn't trust anybody (well, most anybody) over 40 and now that you've turned your weed into weed-whackers and sold those on ebay for two point canes and wholesale generic fiber supplements ... Now that you're no longer surprised when you walk into a room and have forgotten what you had intended to find and, instead, have learned to be surprised by what IS there ... "Hey, look at this ... I didn't know I had one of these" ... now that it takes a full three seconds for the words spoken to you to be parsed into sensible thought units ... now that finishing a 10k 4th means ... 4th from the guy who fell over and was trucked off to the hospital in an emergency vee-hickle ... now, that all that' and more has transpired, to whom DO you feel relevant? ........ ??? .......... Well, that's depressing, Howard! ............ Maybe not? Yesterday, I listened to a conversation about whether Buddhism (in its varieties not specified) and psychotherapy (in its varieties not really specified, either) were comparable or incomparable. I found myself thinking to myself "Hey, get a life ... or a bike." While the twenty and thirty and forty and fifty somethings are raising their kids and turning the wheels of industry and original thought, my brethren and sistren are arguing about the price of toilet paper on Greyhound Busses in Thailand. And I'm reading it and criticizing the discussion. ............. Spring has arrived in the Northeastern parts of USA and I'm going riding on my 1974 Raleigh International and watch "The Living" ... at least, after I go see my Doc, today. If I don't come back ... well, if I don't come back, consider this Blog part of an invisible past. .... LOLLaBFLaB (Laughing Out Loud Like a Big Fat Laughing antiquated Buddha)

Authenticity in Cyberspace ...

My oldest turned 47 yesterday in Korea and today here in the USA. How does that work? Birthday wishes on both days! ....... I was with that same online group in cyberspace, yesterday ... at least when my cardiac rhythm was cooperating. But first, the more stable my arrhythmias become, recently and maybe, the more surprised and maybe disappointed I become when I spend time with my sinus bloc not cooperating in sending out regular electrical cues for my atrium to beat at its usual 40 bpm. The doc with the new meds does have my vote and I am very appreciative of the improvement ... till two months ago about 50% of time in rhythm ... now about 85-90% of time my heart 'ain't misbehavin'. ............ Yesterday, it was a lovely ride with M whose arm is sending shooting pain signals ... top was down (the roadster's, that is) that followed a lengthy conversation with our youngest whose oldest was flying for a group religious and play adventure in the State of Israel and maybe Jordan.She'll meet with Israeli and Palestine kids her own age and talk of the madnesses of war. Einstein would be proud; I am enormously proud of my grand-daughter who also just received an award (to be conferred in Carnegie Hall) for her macabre writing. Our youngest's other kids and partner were away at a water theme park giving an opportunity for Mother and Father and grown spawn to talk of joys and distresses, while Grannie charted the 747's progress over the Atlantic. ...... Anycase, the ridewith M closed with ice cream ... the ice cream did something to Gus (my esophagus) which lays over one or another side of the Vegus nerve and heart and I was off to the races. The rest of day was spent in and out of rhythm. The talk was still very good ... the ride was good ... and even the online cyber-talk was good mixed in with a talk with sibling by phone (he was on the jazz) and friends for dinner who (anyway, the female partner) thought we should spend $4800 on a new mattress. Shit! My first new car in 1965 cost $2010..... But throughout this time, the oldsters on the listserv were bouncing between talking naughty (breasts and jock straps and the liberatiuon of body parts ... good thing corsets and girdles were not there to have me citing Scripture: Gird your Loins, sayeth the Lord, the time for rest is passing). .... All the odder that this seventh grade talk was in a mixture with questions of whether there could be true comradeship and joy (Alexander Woolcott?) and affection and relationship on line. .... A bunch of Players in the Last Quarter still questioning the authenticity of cybercommunication. .... Someone says: 'I hate you' and belief and , not infrequently, response follows. Another says: 'I love you' and doubt reigns. Hate is so much more believable than love ... accepted as so much more authentic. .... There was a frenchman 100 years ago who would attract people from around the world to form circles (the jerks IN the circle) an repeatedly recite: tous les jours a tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux. (Everyday in everyway we get better and better). Maybe I can get this group to which I belong to recite something similar about authenticity on our winding road that must've surpassed 3000 messages in a few months between about ten oldish farts and maybe one young one. Tevya whining to Goldie: Do you love me? Old whines in old bottles!

Senior Immunity

One might think that Players in the Last Quarter have earned a degree of immunity to the sillinesses that infect early life. Like many Players, I watch ... hell! When we're not in our Cialis claw-footed tubs with our much younger spouses, we must be observing the World and sharing our wisdom -- like Wise Ole King Soloman in Proverbs or Ecclesiastes -- with those younger and not so "in on the secrets" as we. ............ But like many other Players in the Fourth Quarter, I've been participating in listservs and discussion boards since about the time the Twin Towers came down, killing thousands, disturbing the tranquility of many families in the USA just as families in other war-torn countries have experienced forever, and leaving many feeling isolated and disconnected. I sought these online groups expecting friendly love and the affection that accrues to people who are members of groups. Church, Mosque and Synagogue have been infected by the rampant distrust that has grown in our lifetimes and the internet held out a last great hope. ........ Instead of love and affection, though, we found it all in cyberspace: Love, Hate and Indifference. .... It was just about 100 years ago that a Dokteur from Vienna offered up a fairy tale which he told one of his students -- tongue in cheek, maybe -- that he thought up on a rainy Sunday afternoon. ...... He thought that ages ago, people lived in Hordes that were dominated by a single male who held control over all the women while keeping the kids in check. One day, however, the kids, tired of being shoved about like pawns on a chessboard or prawn on a plate, rose up and killed and cannibalized Papa and created rituals to cover their deed. .... What the Good Dokteur never considered, however, was that what changed, perchance, was not predominantly the overthrow of Papa but the understanding of the power of grouping and subgrouping. ..... In any case, online groups may have all the stuff of these Primal Hordes. People gather and avow themselves of the comfort of subgrouping. It takes the form in cybergroups of flare-ups .... of subgroups gathering into units to make war on singleton others or on other subgroups.In one group I'm in, a fellow from Chicago has been identified as a right-wing-whack-job ... another as being inscrutable, that is, ununderstandable. A third was identified as hostile and driven out. All of these folk --Identified odd ones and Identifiers, alike are Players at least in the Last Half ... most in the Last Quarter. ...... ...... ..... In schools, this subgrouping seems to take the form of bullying, of choosing to excommunicate and torture or identify-as-odd-and-alien certain individuals (again, bullying) or subgroups. But Old Farts are not immune to the same torments and flare-ups, or at least, that's the way it seems to this Oldster ... at least, today. ......... BTW, I did go to hear that talk, yesterday, and my student present. I stayed for more than half and didn't leave till after lunch. Players in the Last Quarter may flare up like the rest of the folk but they rarely leave without eating lunch.

Disappointment

Many of the visitors who come to see me are dominated by disappointments in their lives. We members of Clan Anthropos can be disappointed in just about anybody ... Disappointed in our Parents for not being sufficiently kind or watchful or protective ... Children for not being stars every day or for reproducing our own historical way of doing housekeeping in their rooms .... Hey, just shut the door! .... Lovers for not being expressive enough in the bedroom or thankful enough or for showing their age. At kind moments, one lover says to another: 'you look just like you did 45 years ago.' What did Mama Cass say ... Dream a little dream for me. .... We get disappointed in things or body organs, too ... ...... Why doesn't that car start? It only has travelled the equivalent of 6 earthly circumnavigations! .... ..... Damn ... I was never allergic to gluten or dairy intolerant before! .... .... ..... ..... What is it, this feeling that we betimes show gesturally when someone says something that doesn't quite meet the highest possible standards that some voice in our head sets and then, essentially, demands of others. ..... ..... Players in Last Quarter experience disappointment ... Hell, I mean me .... I am experiencing disappointment, today. A favorite writer/thinker of mine is coming to town and a fine ex-student of mine will be speaking, too. The older guy wrote a favorite piece of mine that I read maybe 15years ago. It was a report of his reactions in the weeks after finding his wife of many years dead in their bed of cancer, I think, on an otherwise typical morning. He wrote so poignantly about his own feelings of being in a bubble, disconnected from others who were engaged in their own lives and, apparently, oblivious to the manner in which the world had changed, now that HIS wife had died. The Sadness. The Anger. ............. I had wanted to go to hear him speak ... It begins later this morning. I don't know if I can. Spent the night with a nasty Dyspepsia and Nausea that seems to be increasing over last few days. I think disappointment can be placed as counterpoise to many other human feelings but among them is gratitude. Can I hold on to a sense of gratitude even if I miss this meeting? .... I suppose, I'll see. .... I was planning to leave M off to visit our youngest grandchild ... Our 3.5 year old cherub, the adorable mascot offer much older cousins. They'll be disappointed, too, if M ends up staying home and taking care of the ailing residues of the First Quarter Player she married in 1965.

A Rose by Any Other Name

There are times that I get ... really tired ... plum tired ... fall-over tired .... "How am I gomnna be alert for my visitors today" tired. Have a meeting, tomorrow, in town. Oh! Downtown is 10 miles/half hour away ... close. An ex-student of mine will be among the presenters and I'm drawn to go .... I like the main speaker ... his writings and mine (tho we trained in different "theoretical churches") are in many ways similar. My son offered to put his Mom, the unsinkable M, and his Dad, in a lovely hotel. Had to say "no" ... I tend to be rather positive much of time ... but not when I get as the Brits put it ... fagged out. ... Tres fatigue .... like that tiredness that comes at the end of a long road trip ... cat-sounding yawns ... windows open ... cofe don't help tired. Maybe it's the Winter. I think Winter needs to be abbreviated in the Fourth Quarter. Like maybe Firt Quarter ... 20 minutes. Middle Quarters could stay at 15 but last Quarter could be 10 ... or maybe signing autographs. Lemme say it just once more and then I'll take some "puppy uppers" ... well, some vitamins, anyway ... My gas tank is on low, today. Could use some proxy energy, today.

BTW

That riff was on the heels of a day in which I thought about a word that was rarely, if ever, in my lexicon ... 'overwhelmed.' I know I had a dream last night ... don't recall it ... It was a good dream .... When I couldn't remember it, I thought of an Autumnal phrase from a religious liturgy that was describing life and ends, in it's language, v'cha'chalom ya'uf, as a dream flies away. A man named Levinson and his crew of researchers spoke of the need in the end of one's Second Quarter to reformulate the dreams of the First. Levinson et al stopped short of examining the needs of the Fourth Quarter. I need to think them through. Certainly, it's not winning the 10k or driving faster than anybody in an open cockpit rocket. It's not spending a whole night making wild and passionate love. ------ Anybody got any ideas? I'm collecting.

Enough, Already

There's an Eastern European tale about a Father with nagging children. He is told by his Mentoor/Master to start bringing home this animal and then that animal until the house is full. Indeed, the ids begin to say " Enough, Already." order is restored.----------- The Last Quarter sometimes feels "enough, already." Children have begun showing their vulnerabilities as they look towards 40 and 50. Spouse has the same needs you do. Friends nag that you don't give them enough, typically without asking if you have any more to give. Professional colleagues expect you to be able to do everything you did in the Third Quarter. Hell, I know of one 85 year old lawyer whose young lover got to get too needy. ----------- All this happens as our capacity to juggle is compromised by a weakening cognitive apparatus and memory. Keeping four balls or more in the air is a young person's game. And the number of gifts both required to give and to receive ... OMG .... The kids say. The kids want you to be forever young and forget that there are days when you're forever uncomfortable and in distress. -------- No wonder old people get cantankerous. ------ And all through this time, one's body is changing in shape and function that it has only done so dramatically before, during the years of pubic shock (early adolescence with it's unwieldy growth spurts) and pregnancy and it's dysmorphing processes that end with the symphonics of his/her majesty the baby (a doc from Vienna used that phrase in 1914, I think). -------- I'll keep this kvetch short ---- Enough, Already!

A Backside kinda Day

Old people like to Play even if it is in the Last Quarter. Well, there is a backstory ... Or, considering my yesterday maybe I should call it a 'backside story' .... It began when the mail and three of my grandkids came over at the same time. The 14 yo found a professional magazine in the mail and, as a writer, turned to the creative section which included a rather ribald and lengthy bit of 1994 doggerel that bore the name of her grandfather ... Not her other grandfather, the dignified Doc from Rhodesia but the Brooklyn Kid. She was shocked ... 'someone published this smut.' I began singing Tom Lehrer's 'Smut ... I want nothing but ... Smut' .... I was on a roll ... Then there was the same author getting in what So. African Jews call a feribble on line ... And folks from Appallachia call everyday battles between the Clampetts and the 'who was the family they were fightin' with' .... there was sniping between two typically quiescent Musers ... one of them, you guessed it ... Grandpa. So, Grandpa while he's makin' an omelet with onions and mushrooms, says to his-self ... 'Grandpa ... Why doesn't you send ya friends on line an invite to enjoin some days of the the Dear Lord's Sabbath from aggression' just like brother Cuckoo bird did in N. Korea ... at least according to Andy Borowitz's online piece in yesterday's New Yorker. ... and he did. But can you imagine if we ever instituted a day free of aggression online ... I explained the compatibility of this to my grandchildren with the span from Holy Friday to Easter Ascension Thursday. Anyhow ... Last night was a monthly meeting of a professional group ... Not the youngest reading group in the Resthome for Retired Healthcare Pro's, either and we were checking back over an old writing on Sadism and masochism and feelings of omnipotence. I can only say that I came back around 10 pm cowboying in the roadster like Bronco-Barry with a big smile on my face when my lady, M, right outa the blue says: OK, Howard ... What'd you do, tonight? Suffice it to say that somehow Goethe's comment was cited in German ... his Mach es kurz,am Jungsten Tag ist's nur eine ferze ... (make it snappy for on the Day of Judgement it's little more than a singular fart)was brought to describe the state in which a bunch of unassuming 'old farts' each thought it appropriate in their lives to have their names affixed to lengthy and complex writings in hardcover, at least once. New song .... Is it Waites or Cohen or Barry MacGuire .... Monday is a backside kinda day. Today is last Day of Passover, Remembering the Dead Service for Jews, and Easter Wednesday. "Shame on you, Grandpa!" and have a good day!