Late Term Weaning

It occurred to M, just a few days ago ... just before Thanksgiving Day, that this would be the first such Thanksgiving Day when we would be eating with friends but no relatives.

Over the past 16 years, our parents have left. And now: #1 child is in Bangkok on business (his wife and child, invited by us, but eating elsewhere); #2 lives 330 miles North and none of us (except the kids) are up to travel, this time; and #3 and her three kids are eating with our son-in-law's family. All seems at peace with the little (middle-aged) ones, but life changes. The breast becomes a bottle; the bottle a sippy-cup and then you get forked. 

M's Sister and my three sibs are all 300-350 miles away. We'll eat with my Soul Brother and Sister, Milt and Ruth. Milt had been my graduate school professor in the 1960's and we've stuck together, since. Ruth has found me to be an acquired taste. Their oldest is 2000 miles away; their second in Sub-Saharan Africa; and their youngest will attend with child. Indeed, most of my visitors this week have talked of abandonment issues -- abandonment through death is prominent in their conversations. Weaning in the Last Quarter hardly seems like an adventure ... more of a heartache ... but certainly more of reality. 

The fantasy that family will live forever must rest, today, on my pillow on which I've left many dreams. I will miss our three and Milt and Ruth's older two, today, and will enjoy Deo volente their youngest and her child, their oldest's oldest, and a niece of Ruth who won't be going home to (is it) New Mexico, this year. 

An Old Hungarian lady who spent most of her last years in London postulated that one of the splits in life is between Envy and Gratitude. Maybe, Miss Klein -- as she came to be known -- was right. Thanksgiving in whatever Quarter is about accepting what is ... what you have ... 

The healthy wean. They don't deny but accept that "the breast is best" but the bottle ain't so shabby, either.

2,000 years ago, the Ethics of the Fathers, an old book of wisdoms, proclaimed:

                   Who is wealthy? S/he who celebrates what they have.

My tribe began with an innocent flirtation with M in 1965 and has now proliferated about the Earth to build their own. Maybe, it's time to ramp up the flirtation with M, aye?

Happy holiday!

Funny

Funny that the speaker on the evening that I stumbled into and joined-in-dance with my azaleas was talking about old people and their caretakers. Damn, we need caretakers. I think she cited some data indicating that the average age of caretakers (maybe it was the median age) was 83.

Chances are, I need to go to more talks about young people -- LOL. 

Any case, I told her about my incident with the bushes ... she thought maybe Yoga would help and said she couldn't help thinking it was funny ... I know what she means ... the image of me lying there among the bushes contemplating the absurdity of so much of what we confront each day has me busting a gut, too. 

Oh, how the great have fallen! ... and me, too.

Hey ... Y'gotta have a hefty dose of humor to Play well in the Fourth Quarter ... oh! and it doesn't hurt to recognize that many of the Leaves of Fall can stay just where they are until Spring!

Play on, mes Amies, play on!

Still Riffing on Memory

Visitors came and went, yesterday .... Most left behind bits of wished-for-memory that couldn't be reconstructed ... one called after leaving ... "oh, the guy that &%#%* had an affair with was the Rhythm and Soul guy, (&$@$^&&." Another struggled with me (not against me ... I couldn't remember either) over the names of some rather scurrilous politicians. It all felt right.

Went to sleep not that long after dinner ... the Eastern European beanpot (Cholent) that I use for olfactory memories of my Hungarian Mom and Grandmom's cooking and the cheeseless Pesto about which they knew nothing. My cooking is mostly a big hit with the kids and Cholent and Winter Soups are among the favorites ... along with M's mashed-potatos. Sometimes, I serve Cholent with taco shells and chopped stuff and call it  Mexican Cholent. (I feel loved by the kids, if seen as more than a bit odd.)

Four of the grandspawn were in attendance, last night ... three to keep the littlest of the cousins -- the visiting Princess CC, as she is called -- company. If CC thinks of herself as the Princess, daughter of the absent Queen and King off on a business/vacation, the others--  chances are -- think of her as a sort of family mascot. I call her Big Time Cute and she complains: "No, No, No. I'm the Princess" and, indeed, she is. Dinner was great. Something of a post-dinner discussion of exorcisms followed .... are they only Roman ... do the Romans think of exorcising demons from infidels or are they just "in trouble." What of Carribean Isaland exorcisms or Hindu or Jewish ones. Did any of us want to exorcise the demons from other dinner celebrants?

I was still in a-fib, my heart, that is, had lost its memory. My Beats per Minutes were jumping about like a drunken sailor on a dock ... no obvious destination, even if there were memories of the name of the ship on which s/he docked. 165 bpm followed by 79 and 32 ... and back up to 118. No pattern except the entropy of a heart that had lost its memory. It's 4 in the AM, now, and it seems to be coming back. Hovering in the high 60's and 70's as I sit here .... not quite double my typical 38-40 bpm.

(Funny, my laptop just froze .... apparently, though, it remembered what I had written in "the Archives." ... Yeah, for computers!)

Faith and Reliance, Nachmonides wrote. Still, though, have with me the scene of falling into the azaleas about 32 hours ago ... that is, I still have the memory of my memory-lapse of my feet and balancing-system coming up the two short-riser steps coming home from a Township meeting on Caring for the Caretakers who Take Care of the Old and Infirmed. (Guess it's good that we live in what once was the Presbyterian Widow's home.)

Funny.

But upon arising this morning, my mind was playing with the idea that there is no remembering without forgetting and vice versa. "You can't have one without the other."

     I remember much of what occurred including the recognition that some is missing.

     I remember that I have forgotten much of what occurred at some moment.

I find a third category ... I have had memories that cannot have been ... or cannot have been, as they are remembered. One stands out, at the moment.

When we were young, the four of us kids in a Boomer family ... three born before deployment and one after 'Miltie came marching home.' I don't think there were many times we walked to Coney Island Beach ... maybe a half mile down W. Fifth Street to the Boardwalk. On this occasion, my Father had all four of us on his shoulders. My three siblings were on one and I was on the other. True, my Dad had big soldier-boy-shoulders but not big enough -- likely -- to carry an 8, 9 and 12 year old on one with King Howard on the other. I, also, have two or three memories of rooms that never existed. So, indeed, there is a third category:

     I remember things that never were or never could have been.

Was it Hermeine Gingold (Hermina can be a Hungarian name ... isn't my riff about being lost and looking for my missing Hungarian Mom -- damn! I had an Aunt Hermina ... Hermina Neinei) and Louis Chevalier who sat on a park bench in the late 50's movie (Gigi) singing, while having notably different memories of their youthful love affair with the words: "Ah, yes. I remember it well."

Maybe memory is a place much like an amusement park: y'just gots to tighten your seat belts and enjoy the ride.

I had a free moment ....

"I had a free moment?" Sounds like the beginning of an unfortunate poem.

Took some time to rake leaves ... Memory and "the Autumn leaves ... upon my" lawn .... I thought to myself resonating with my own errant thoughts, this AM: maybe memory wavers as the present requires more attention. Came home from meeting last night and didn't maneuver a step correctly ... Howard! You Klutz! .... fell into the azaleas. I laid there thinking that I wrote a poem about the feud between the Azaleas and the Honeysuckle and the uncomfortable choice I was never willing to make to cast my lot favoring the one or the other. After a good five minutes of laughing at the Old Guy in the mirror,' I decided to go in the house to lick my wounds which were minimal, even if they looked worse. M put a band-aid on ... Oh! Was she the Mother I was looking for in this morning's blast? Then raking this AM in a warmish drizzle,  my Fourth Quarter 'ticker' decided on its own to get out of sinus rhythm. And my heart is still chugging along ... I sometimes can think of it as dancing!.

But, truth be told, Playing in the Last Quarter -- at least in the best of circumstances -- seems to strike an Azalea/Honeysuckle balance between "memory, dreams and reflections" on the wonderfully intruding present ... to paraphrase der Alte Hexenmeister from Vienna, Ole Dokteur Freud.

Back to work in office ... maybe my next visitors will bring rakes.

Yes, yes ... Bring rakes, if you like!

Memory ... Memories ... Lapsed Memories

Yesterday, the matter of memory raised to the surface ... How do I complete: "I do not remember ..." ... or was it? "I remember?" I don't recall which it was.

 As I was preparing to set up an Eastern European Bean pot (well, maybe it was Western European cassoulet even if I thought it was Eastern European Cholent) for the four grandchildren who'll be joining M and I this evening for dinner with two parents ... the thought surfaced ... "I don't remember" even if the early-years TV show was "I remember Mama."

Cholent cooks slowly ... Memory appears and disappears. Vorstellungen (inner film clips of what is and what isn't or just what can't be remembered) rise to the surface of our minds and birth feelings ... if the feelings are too disturbing, they go back to sleep -- I suppose one could say that they go back to sleep in the recesses of our memories.

My mother made cholent ... when I cook my bean pot, the smells are similar ... potatoes, onions, garlic and a half-a-dozen different kinds of beans. I remember my Mother ... Who was it? Jeremiah the lonely bachelor of the OT (that's not Overtime but Old Writings to those who embrace the New Ones of the NT) or Isaiah the Depressed. I don't remember...  but one of them, I think, had their God opining: "I remember with you the loving kindnesses of your youthful days, the love shown by a your bride-days .... You followed me in the wilderness towards an unplanted land." That's what Mothers do ... or at least those who are good enough to point us and accompany us to an uncharted and unplanned and unplanted future.

A voice calls out in the Wilderness of the Fourth Quarter of Life: Mother, where are you?

So much of the Last Quarter is about memories and missing memories and memories that are missed. I feel the glimmers of tears not quite ready to appear, this morning.

Ah, but after setting the pot of beans on its ten-hour journey to the Land of Cholent, I threw together basil and spinach and olive oil and cashews and blended them with garlic and salt and pepper to prepare a Pesto Mom never knew about but might well have liked.

I am nothing if not memories and lapses of memory ... the remains of old fires burnt in my Wilderness over the past many years by a traveller and his fellow pilgrims.

On the Fullness of Ink

On the Fullness of Ink
The bottle of ink
Was but half-full.
Missing
Were all the words
That once filled
The fullness
Of the empty top half of
The bottle of ink.

Letters Written but Never to be Received

Yesterday was full of messages ... Someone wondered about "the value of it all" ... another about Kafka ... I found myself wanting to write a letter to my friend, Corbett. I wanted to tell him about my recent impulse to do some Biblical translations, particularly the words of King David's primary heir, son of his lover whom he stole from Uriah the Hittite by arranging Uriah's death on the battlefield. I wasn't drawn to this son's lusty poetry of Songs or even to his Proverbial one-liners, though I am moved to listen to such recommendations, as: Don't rejoice in the fall of your enemy and chill on letting your heart dance with joy when s/he stumbles. No, I wanted to tell Corbett that I am more and more drawn to Soloman's Ecclesiastes, as it is called in Greek/English or The Congregant (Kohelles) as it appears in its apparently original language. King Soloman's  riff on "Nothing of nothingnesses ... all is nothing."

Corbett and I met on line maybe 15 years ago when professional chat rooms were proliferating online. This discussion group was multinational and centered on the writings of a physician turned psychoanalyst by the name of Bion -- long dead. Corbett had been an engineer and, like many, had turned to managing other engineers. Bion had (I suppose in WWI) briefly been in need of treating lots of people damaged on those bloody battlefields of relatively modern warfare ... not the somewhat more savage wars of four millenia past but the horribly bloody conflicts of last Century's second decade. ... Bion found that he could not treat these people singly and began treating them in groups. Corbett had to deal with engineers not getting along at corporations like Xerox in the early days of the telecommunication bubble ... of cyber-doo-dads and the early internets. So, drawn by a need to develop group skills, Corbett ended up discussing such matters with a multinational crew of folk who had mostly attended a So. American conference about Bion in 1997.

In any case ... a friendship grew between us. Corbett came to lunch, once and then returned for a week with his teenage son to visit M and I. I heard someone recently say that cyber-friendships are thin ... not real. Oh! And the fact that Corbett and I lived across the N. American continent from each other did make talks at the coffee shop or walks around some Ringstrasse in this or that city unlikely. Still, I think Corbett and I developed a capacity to listen to each other and to feel "listened to" by the other. (I keep going back in my mind to Montaigne's writings that arose after he could no longer talk to his friend and collocutor, Etienne de la Boitie.)

Maybe it was during this time of year, a couple of years back, that we had our last phone conversations ... maybe a month of them ... daily. Corbett was in a place where he could die quietly and with enough dignity and narcotic painkillers to cut through the pains of his osteo-sarcomas. His now-grown kids and ex-wives would visit him a lot and friends -- I include myself -- would serve their/our roles, too.

As I write these words on a rare morning of the Fourth Quarter when I "slept in till after 5 AM," my mind skips about to all those who are now MIA in Life ... gone from my life ... ghosts skipping with me ... frolicking about amongst my memories. Now I want to tell them all about an errant wish to translate the words of Kohelles ... of the Congregant ... of Ecclesiastes ... that appeared in a dream just about 50 years after JFK was shot down.

Maybe I'll try "sleeping-in" tomorrow, as well.

 

So Glad that Yesterday's Over

It wasn't the worst day ... but felt a bit off my game. After my morning visitors and before late afternoon arrivals, M and I went on some -- what are they called? -- errands, I suppose. I didn't quite have my balance all the time. Walking through stores ... it was after lunchtime for Parents and Kids out on a gloriously pleasant almost 70 degree day a week before Thanksgiving in Philadelphia. It was the infant and preschool set ... mostly out with Mama.

I was thinking, again, about how much easier it is for some folk (well, me, for instance) to do for others and give than to receive. The thought kept coming to me that while it may be so, as the saying goes, that it is better to give than to receive, the absence of  a good dose of either capacity may well cause heartache. Of course, I knew this intellectually but I suspect didn't quite "live it." There was a young woman behind us at a checkout with a singing 4 year old. He was quite happy carrying a small lampshade for Mom and she seemed quite pleased with her little fellow and happy, if a bit harried, as I might expect her to be.

My mind wandered to what I must've been doing on such a day as this when she was born in the 80's. I certainly wasn't doing DISCO. The 80's saw me teaching in university ... what my colleagues called "fulltime." (Oops, it's 434 AM and someone called, another Fourth Quarter person, to report complications, but now I'm back to writing about reminiscing about the 80's). Those days, our older kids were to turn 20 and our youngster was to lag behind ten years and indulge in those things that preoccupy what we nowadays call Tweens. But I was playing Pater Familias and also teaching and then directing for many of those years (and all the 90's) a post-professional training program for helpers ... Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Social Workers with the occasional Psychiatric Nurse. Then there were my other duties supervising folk working with an addicted population and training  family therapists trying to meet the needs of people disillusioned with their previously made choices.  Oh! And then my plumbing and masonry and building retaining walls with my indentured sons and occasionally working as my sons' mechanic replacing a clutch plate on a Saab story or getting greased up over some other used car problem.

Any case, all these thoughts flashed "in mind, in line" in the moment before Mom and four year old found a better line for him to use Mom's new lampshade as a megaphone. How did a kid born around 2009 know about megaphones, anyhow? Go, figure!

It must have had an impact on me, though, as by the time "day was done" and a call came in offering to make a later-week appointment easier for me, I found that "inside" I was not as cordial as I might've been. A kind of "cool, no that's OK" ... didn't feel quite like me, "where was the gratitude?" ...even given my problem being comfortably receptive to receiving. It was obvious to M that I was not quite myself by the time Monday ended with sleep and it was still on my mind as I rose 4:00'ish.

I do remember bopping about with our two sons, 40+ years ago. Good memories! Think I must've been beneficently envious at the checkout ... not wanting to take away what the 2013 bopping pair behind me had but wishing, indeed, that I could have parts of it visit me, again. (Our youngest grandchild who is, BTW, 4 yo, IS coming to spend 4 days with Grandma and Grandpa ... I wonder ... not certain 'what I wonder'  ... but enough wondering for today!)

"He ain't got rhythm! He ain't got rhythm"

 "I lost my rhythm! He ain't got no rhythm .... I lost my rhythm ... I could ask for something more ... but (at least) nobody showed me the door."

The deeper into this Last Quarter I get, the less my internal clock behaves. My Circadian rhythms seem to be different ... sleep is interrupted ... Oh! And while the organizer of yesterday's meeting allocated three hours minus a break for me to talk about relationship, I couldn't get it done ...  I stopped when it was time and was cordially told that I might finish next time. (They're gonna invite me back! Damn, that's good!) Ah, well! As I noted above, nobody showed me the door and it was a wonderfully accepting audience, more than half of whom are Last Quarter Players, themselves. You may have heard that we're a growing population ... we who were spawned by the soldier boys (and girls) after they marched home from WWII.

Anywho, embrace yourself, Howard, and embrace your skill set. You rake leaves well ... can still do most plumbing jobs ... your brain still works even if its CPU (Central Processing Unit) has slowed down maybe due to all the deposits (cookies?) left there by alien websites and their cyber-cobwebs ... and even if your internal clock is off by a good 20%.

After my last posting on "receiving," I did try to be more in tune with all the kindnesses directed toward me from the participants in this half-day workshop. Drove home with one of the participants ... my youngest child who was one of the workshop participants ... and she helped me process this, quite well, after taking a call from one of her younger kids demanding that she get home.

Oh! And there are no mice in the office, this morning ... or none coming out to wiggle and wriggle and show me how much rhythm they got and I? don't got!

Blessed are you, God, King of the Universe who has created mice and has (at least) kept them still and quiet, this morning.

It's So Damn Personal

It all is ... So damn personal, that is. If I listen carefully to myself, I hear it everywhere. I have told myself that I'm posting to a blog about Playing in the Last Quarter. It's a good story but, truth be told, one never writes about  anything but one's own and betimes others' footfalls and where one senses they have landed. Part of my Playing in the Last Quarter are these postings and I am, when all is said, a Senior Citizen writing about his own experience in getting old. All quintessentially personal. Lived life is bound inside of who we are ... and bound for both better and for worse.

I am talking this afternoon about relatioinship not because I am educated in such matters but as one for whom every cell in his body is forever connected somehow to relationship. Amongst my favorite authors? Kohelles, the writer of Ecclesiates who after studying all sorts of wisdom and amassing wealth, wine, women and song, discovers that in the end all is but foul wind except for his relationship to another and his relationship to his God.

I was walking by a garden patch that obviously just days before a recent frost had held the greens from last Spring's Lillies of the Valley among hearty/hardy Pachysandra that manage to remain no more than "looking chilled" through-out a Pennsylvania Winter. Oh! I didn't think they were speaking only to me. They were there to speak to anyone who would listen. How I identified with both the wilted Lilly-Greens and the strong Pachysanda.

And not long ago, I was comfortably meeting with another visitor to my life ... mine to theirs .... as my mind found its way along its winding and turning ways and times to a moment 30'ish years ago when, as an adult with adolescent children, my mystical grandfather asked if I wouldn't come and study those things that he had received in his studies -  90 years before - for one year. I remembered refusing .... objectively? I needed to support my kids. But personally? Receiving from another is never easy for me ... or for others, I suspect. Any case, I was aware that I was fighting receiving from that Other ... ach du lieber ... I was fighting, even if so cordially. I have known those for whom receiving is toxic ... feels like poisons ... "You can repeat what I say ... word for word ... and I'll deny it came from me and call it 'your poison.'" Oh! I'm so much more sophisticated than that ... oh! ... and substantively no different. Afraid like others in Clan Anthropos to take in from the World ... to feeling vulnerable ....

Oh, my. I remember coming off the streets of Brooklyn crying to my beautiful Mother about having just lost all the skins that m'Lord had placed protectively on my knee. I was open to Mom making it better. The antibacterials of the day burned ... mercirichrome ... methiolate ... but open to sharing those vulnerabilities with beautiful Mom. Maybe it's that loss of the ability to receive that keeps a "rich man from entering the Kingdom of Heaven?"

No. Receiving ... a notion buried amongst the details of traditions that have fallen from the generations before into my/our hands ... to do or not to do .... the word Kaballah (so popular in pop culture these days) is not defined by its content but means "receiving" ... the process of taking from another. I suppose Madonna knows that.

This afternoon for some three hours, I'll be talking about relationship ... the Elusive Good Relationship ... I suppose I could add ... As Reported by One Old Man who has Struggled to Find these experiences like someone who never gets off his dinghy ... rowing on Loch Ness ... waiting for Nessy to appear ... maybe just once more.

It's no wonder I spent years studying Mathematics ... It's so easy to pretend that Mathematics is impersonal.
Nothing is impersonal.

Listening/Being Listened to

Communication.

Two people sitting in room? or standing on their heads.

Speak-speak-talk-talk.

Being Listened-to-and-fro.

Feeling one is Being Heard.

Believing.

The Spaces in Between.

Busy Weeks ... and the mice still coming.

I don't recall when I last wrote ....

Spoke publicly, I think, first weekend in November about difference and the different ways we either integrate difference or try to "disintegrate" those who are. This coming weekend, I'm to speak for 3 hours (well ... speak and discuss) The Elusive Good Relationship ... the problems we people, especially those curious folk who live in the Third Quarter of Life, seem to have maintaining a level of sanity in their relationships. I'll be looking at the Book of Genesis and the Encampments of the Warlords we call the Patriarchs. The Broadway show tune ... "Don't talk of love; show me" doesn't apply. Those relationships had a surplus of neither. And then the Nazarene comes along in Matthew 19 and whacks the Pharisees a couple of times and accuses them of being "hard-hearted" ... maybe "stiff-necked" in the original ... for thinking that divorce might be contemplated. Why is it so often the unmarried who think they know about marriage!? 'Marriage,' he says, 'is forever and divorce is akin to adultery.'

Whoa! The notion of the relatiuonship that 'no man will put asunder'...  though many may put 'us under.'

Maybe, I should be pleased Playing in the Last Quarter ... humankind can be such an annoyance (and we call mice "pests.") Went to a meeting Monday night where a percentage of a professional group was claiming that they weren't necessarily better than those who sought to join them but so significantly different than they that giving these others a vote would feel like ... 'well, it would feel like the one place I have to feel special with those who are like me would have been taken away.'

Nobody in either group (one lady hinted at it) was willing, apparently, to do the obvious comparisons with with racial, ethnic, gender, sexual-orientation groups ... 'Y'know. Y'just hadda be white to wear the Green Jacket and look like Kermit de Frog.'

I am looking forward to going to visit a meditation and breathing expert who has agreed to see if such practices might further limit my cardiac arrhythmias that have (Grusse Got) reduced my times in arrhythmia to less than 10% but I still can't run without going out of cardiac-sinus-rhythm and the exquisite peace of the 'loneliness of long distance running' (the other side, maybe, of a mid-60's film) is something I miss greatly.

Symbolically, I suppose, running away from the crazies!

Keeping count: Only one mouse (poor Mortimer) dead; 5 caught live if a bit frightened of the giant who caught them and set them free with a nod to all the Freedom Fighters who came before them and to Mortimer who gave up his life in his attempt to take back his Homeland (my office!).

Was it Brutus who spoke of his love for Caesar, even if he recognized that he had had to kill him.

(I guess you can tell that I like the mice.)

Are there Always More Mice

I'm back to "feeding" some mouse/mice. Back to the Havahart ... Filling it with food and coming back to finding the food gone with no obvious sense of gratitude ...

Mildred ... Will you just shut the door and let me catch you and send you out into the Winter!?

Maybe, that's part of Playing in the Last Quarter ... accepting that there will always be more mice.

Good News?

I don't know how to separate Good from Bad News ... but after posting about Morte de Mortimer, I found one of his friends alive and well in one of the Havahart traps and set a very frightened him/her Mouse free in the Wild. It was certainly a Mouse ... big eyed ... adorable. May s/he go on to a long life of avoiding cats somewhere out of my office and home.

I'm starting to feel vaguely religious about this whole matter. They say many people find their way back to Faith in the Last Quarter. I do not know whether Mortimer did or not.

A Public Confession: Mea Maxima Culpa

Mortimer the Mouse is dead. I killed him.

After a week of trying to bait two different Havahart traps that allow a homeowner or office denizen to catch a so-called pest and return him live to the Wild, Mortimer kept taunting me with each of my visitors, last night. He would come out of wherever he was making noise and run about and scamper back into hiding. He was feasting on peanut butter and crackers each time he would successfully foil the Havahart trap.

I could say that it was "Death by Cop" as they call it in the TV shoot-em-ups. But truth be told, Mortimer and his kin were doing what they had been doing forever ... finding shelter from the Winter's cold and I was doing what Colonialists have done, forever: claiming this home and office as my own and killing anyone who got in my way.

I don't know much about Morty (who may have been a Magdalene). I don't know if he was a Father ... of course, he was some Mouse's child. Actually, as I said yesterday, he might've been a vole. But it was me who went out to the hardware store where they sell chemical weapons and brought Mort to his end. RIP, Good Buddy!

Alas. I have met and known too many people who are unwilling to accept what my youngest child's Nursery School teacher told her many years ago: "when you walk or drive, you're often stepping on bugs and killing them ... know that! ... think about that." Edith Post was a very smart old lady. I'm not speaking about original sin but the ongoing everyday sins of living. The folk I've known may be divided (perhaps, this is too simple) into two categories. First and not so uncommon are those who cannot imagine doing harm to others, though they do see when others harm them. Second is a group who may even think about causing pain to others. In my work with kids and their parents, I have found that the "innocent" group ... those who simply cannot imagine hurting or wanting to hurt their kids, do indeed hurt or even abuse them. Then there are those who betimes have fantasies or images of hanging their kids by their toes and whacking them with the core of a roll of paper toweling or worse; they tend to not abuse their kids.

Ah! The non-thought is Father to the deed, as one of my visitors claimed was the most important thing he learned from me. (Or that I learned from him!)

Sorry Mortimer! If we meet in some better place at some better time at "the Inn at the end of the road*", I owe you one! Maybe I'll tell you about a relative of yours in the Winter of 1973 ... We called him Harvey Wallbanger and worked out a way to save him .... many times.


*  (I think Alexander Woolcott's or GK Chesterton's eulogy for the other or for Dickens ... can't recall)

My Friends from 1994

(Follow-up on Mortimer the Mouse)

The Peripatetic Animal Phobe Home Alone

Yesterday, I jumped up on my bed
And heard a scratching overhead.
Had I heard this sound before
Perhaps a’scratching on my door?
Ghosts of road-kills from the past?
I got down from my bed real fast.
I fell upon a cold hard floor
And scurried fast right outside my door.
There they were six feet or more
Rockie Raccoon and his sister Lenore.
Coons you’d never chance to feed last
Whether in the attic or on your grass.
So now I’ll sleep a’standing on my head
While Rockie and Lenore scratch in my bed.

Can You Afford to Lose Some Battles?

I guess one of the things Eriksons Eight Conflicts of People at different stages of Being doesn't emphasize is the need for a bit of humor in losing some battles here and there. Maybe it was recent ... maybe not .... a visitor did leave a door open to my waiting room on one of our recent cool days ... those looking down the road-just-ahead ... the Road to Winter. Apparently Mortimer the Mouse or Wilhelm der Vole et familia decided to take up residence in my office and home ... maybe hearing that Ft. Lauderdale was getting crowded or that Voting Rights Acts were being abridged in their usual vacation spots in America's South.

Any case, I did what any card carrying Mouse-Lover would do. I ordered live-traps from Amazon. I now have one that needs a squirrel sized mouse to set it off ... the Sylvester Stallone of Mice. And I have another adorable little one that is especially made to entice one's free-loader in to have a piece of peanut-butter-on-cracker, setting off a trip platform which shuts a door. Now I understand some old expressions, like:

           Gotta build a better Mouse trap ...

           Smarter than the average Mouse ...

And why Jerry almost always outsmarts Tom (Tom and Jerry Cartoons). In 1994, I wrote a bit of doggerel about Rocky Raccoon and his Sister Lenore who had taken up temporary residence in my attic and, now, I've become the great benefactor and feeder of Mortimer the Mouse who has/have figured out how to not trip the door by (maybe) leaping over it with joyful abandon and who seem to love peanut butter on his or her or their crackers. I could be a nice guy and go for the full treatment: peanut better and STRAWBERRY jelly ... Hey, PB&J for all!

By the Last Quarter, they all apply.

Position First Appears	Immersed in a Basic Conflict	And continues into later years.	Fulcrum on which the Position Balances or Fails to Balance
Infancy (birth to 18 months)	Trust vs. Mistrust	Last Quarter	How much can I trust/how much do I need to mistrust ... my legs to walk, my hands to hold, my fingers to button, my heart to not succumb to leaf-raking in the Fall .... my spouse to hang in there and for either of us not to become rancorously bitter.
Early Childhood (2 to 3 years)	Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt	Last Quarter	How much can I do things for myself or think I need to do things, without help or even feel that "help" is no more to be offered.  Comfortable resolution leads to feelings of autonomy, failure results in feelings of shame and doubt.
Preschool (3 to 5 years)	Initiative vs. Guilt	Last Quarter	How much do I find excuses for not engaging the world. Success in this stage leads to a sense of ongoing meaning and purpose. People who force the issue, end up doing damage and feel guilty.
School Age (6 to 11 years)	Industry vs. Inferiority	Last Quarter	Here, it's easy. It's connected to the previous position. I do better if I feel that my engagement (prev. position) with the world is well done. Indeed, there are lots of ways to get up and go.
Adolescence (12 to 18 years)	Identity vs. Role Confusion	Last Quarter	Am I just a grandpa? a grandma? a pensioner? an old fart? Or do I develop and befriend a sense of who I am.
Young Adulthood (19 to 40 years)	Intimacy vs. Isolation	Last Quarter	Young adults need to form intimate, loving relationships with other people. Success leads to strong relationships, while failure results in loneliness and isolation.
Middle Adulthood (40 to 65 years)	Generativity vs. Stagnation	Last Quarter	Adults need to contribute in a manner that outlasts their own too brief stay in Life. By the Last Quarter we've contributed kids (for better or for worse) and whatever we did at work. Success leads to accepting new adventures ... Failure to endless repetition.
Maturity(65 to death)	Ego Integrity vs. Despair	??	(I've never believed that Erikson's last stage added much to the previous ones. Maybe he was thinking: I just gotta hold it, together.

I've been saying for the past couple of years that gettin' on is neither for the feint of heart nor for anyone but the bold to energetically engage. I'm comfortable with the idea that many folk would produce different sets of basic conflicts that follow us through life. I suppose this has the imprint of my own conflicts. How else could it be?

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Last Quarter Alienation

I spent the past three days mostly at a meeting of people with interests similar to mine and -- in the large -- folk within 15 years of my age. I suppose I did these calculations at those moments when the threat was greatest that I might look disinterested. I suppose I heard about twenty talks over the three days and five of them (there I go calculating, again) I found annoying, boring, or "kinda-silly." That's pretty good, I suppose. Three quarters kept my attention and one quarter gave me time to either think a bit about my own stuff (relationships, the arthritis that has just appeared in my right hand, the visitors to my office that I would be seeing at that moment if I weren't in some Sheraton Hotel conference room, why the conference planners weren't arranging for coffee ... ) ... my own disgruntledness.

Ah! Disgruntledness in the Last Quarter. That's not exactly what I'd be talking about on the third day of the meeting when it was my turn "to share wisdoms," but that was part of it. I was going to show a half hour of a film about a Belgian high school student who was very different than most of his peers ... lacked social-cuing skills ... like verbal pragmatics ... knowing when to enter a conversation and how to filter out extraneous information which is so much a part of communication and to "get the message" through the garbage that accompanies it. The Director/Screenwriter had written it in response to a kid from Brussels who in those circumstances suicided. (Movie is called Ben-X).

I was to using it as a metaphor to help me understand the way difference was negotiated in the communities to which I belonged .... a number of which not untypically are plagued with infighting and splits. Such thoughts, I believe, must also relate to my own sense of adolescent alienation and I was gonna (and did) talk of that, as well.

Speaking is strange. Not untypically I and those with whom I've discussed this have a parallel conversation going on in their minds ... well, maybe not exactly parallel to the conversation at hand. Like right now, I am thinking, paraphrasing an old song: 'The Autumn leaves upon my lawn ... the Autumn leaves ... need be raked' (I could go on ... I'll resist the temptation). But back to the feelings of alienation.

This AM it occurs to me that while this sense of not being comfortably situated in a group is, indeed, typical in the high school years, I see it more and more among my confreres in the Fourth Quarter. Someone (Erik Erikson) said that if one fails to feel a sense of giving back in the 60-Death years, the result is despair. I don't recall how old he was when he wrote about these stages of being that he described ... each stage potentially dominated by a central conflict, but it occurs to me more powerfully than before that these conflicts are present at every such stage (Erikson agreed but it hits me more so as I negotiate his Last stage).

Maybe I'll list all the conflicts he postulated when I write next and think about how each new one brings the older ones along. (Parallel conversation? thinking, at the moment of his early childhood conflict: 'Trust vs. Mistrust' as I say, for today ...)

Bye.