In a just-previous posting, I ended with talking about visiting an older fellow in Zurich, Rafael, who, beyond listening, did little else 40+ years ago than advise me to accept my feelings, at that time a hefty amount of sadness. I was leaving the the passion of my early years, Mathematics, and thinking of retraining in an area that involved more than only a commitment to ideas and theories (when I google the Covitz-Nadler Theorem of 1968, I no longer understand it or why I was so interested in it), but a commitment to my human kin, to people. I was travelling with M and our two older kids ... with my worldly posessions, so to speak, when I stopped for a while to seek the good counsel of that fellow.
Afterwards, I found another older fellow and talked to him about sadness and other matters for a number of years. Harold died in 1986, long after we had stopped meeting to discuss my human frailties. Aye! That's one of the paradoxes. We go to folk to share the vulnerabilities of life and to feel a degree of closeness, to fill the emptiness and loneliness that are frequent co-travellers on our life-voyage. But hat relationship, too and like all others, ends with still another loss. Can one fault the logic of the loner, the anchorite, the hermit ... who chooses to avoid connections so as never to feel loss? ... Well! Life is not about logic, alone. I have long believed that those of our long-past ancestors who never developed the belief that to be connected is to be safe wandered off in prehistory from their Mothers and were driven from the gene pool by being eaten by tigers and bears. To live is to seek connection.
Still, one cannot avoid that connection which yields glee ends with loss with breeds sadness which drives us to fill that wistfulness with new others ... A cycle of the twins ... Sadness and glee. In an ideal situation, this occurs smoothly ... one wave washing over us and cleansing us .... another wave, different than the first, coming and washing over us differently. Some get stuck in one or the other. That sucks. For those who fail to experience both, to my way of thinking, experience neither. Talk more about that, someday ...
Interesting to me the response of concern I received from a number of readers here or at least backdoor on Playing in the Last Quarter. Somehow the impression was left that I was very ill or depressed. I think neither is the case.
Right at the moment? It's a wave of concern mixed with a bit of sadness. M and I had children ... all grown and gainfully employed ... one just finishing Second Quarter matters ... two others looking at 50. Then, there is our odd child ... GuntherDog, the one who has a troubling so-called positive oedipal complex wherein he snarls anytime I approach M ... like when I walk into the room. Like a good oedipal Father, I don't take his complaints about me too seriously, though there must be something in my repeated claims to my bi-pedal type acquaintances that I keep hearing Gunther bark: "you're a schmuck."
Gunther has his ways. In the morning, I rise 4'ish, pee, brush my teeth and invite him to come downstairs and go out to do the same. Until a few days ago, Gunther would jump down from his chair and run to the top of the stairs, where he would sit and wait to be petted repeatedly. "No petting and I go back to Mom, Schmuck!" I'd obediently do so and, then, start going down the stairs ... he'd fly down them, I'd marvel with pride at my dog-son's ability to have all four legs in motion at the same time as I, a sensible Player in the Fourth Quarter, would hold onto one or to two railings, dependent on my degree of morning stiffness, and comfortably and at a genteel pace walk.
The past two mornings began the same but Gunther was no longer flying down the stairs but, rather, walking down at my pace or less. "How the great have fallen!"
Well ... just having innured myself to having two middle-aged kids, it appears that GuntherDog, too, has entered an arthritic phase. And I? I'm wondering if I'll ever hear his adolescent rage at his Father, at me ... will I evermore be the target of his charming: "Dad, you're such a schmuck ... how could Mom ever love you when she has a vital guy like me to sit and listen to the News and Hockey Games nestled against her. Hell, Dad! You don't even like hockey."
Who knows? Maybe it's not arthritis and the Great and Awesome GuntherDog will fly down the stairs, again ....
In any case ... May the archangel of healing, Raphael (not my Rafael but Ezekiel's), visit my GuntherDog and make him smile, again.
Woof! ... err ... Amen!
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