Optimism

Optimism? I guess that's an important part of healthy Playing in the Last Quarter.

Erwird Schreien, the great pre-existentialist German Philosopher, is purported to have said:

 "Optimism in the face of certainty and certain disappointment is 

the necessary refuge of 
Illusionists, the Newly Married, Parents and the Old." 

Optimism? Is it a form of delusional thinking? When your 70 year old Gastroenterologist tells her 70 year old patient -- lying prone and loopily just waking up from a twilight-sleep after a so-called scoping procedure (right! just a procedure):

"I'll see you in 12 years,"

what pray-tell should the patient's response be? How 'bout?

"Twelve years? 

Are you totally daft? 

TWELVE YEARS! 

YOU'LL BE DEAD AND 

I'LL BE BEING PUSHED IN BY A DISINTERESTED ATTENDANT! 

TWELVE YEARS, MY VIOLATED ASS!"

For the record, I haven't had a colonoscopy in a number of years, now, I like my GI lady, and it's a total mystery to me how it is that this bit of questionable medical optimism woke with me, this morning. Kurt Eissler, a great post-existentialist Philosopher and Psychiatrist, made it a habit -- that is, before HE died -- of giving his dying patients subscriptions to magazines. I can imagine Kurt, now, sitting up in Heaven and reading old issues of Smithsonian Magazine from a subscription that expired not long after he did! BTW ... I don't think for him it was a matter of "That'll keep'em busy" but rather his belief that optimism is a good thing ... And I agree ... with apologies to my Gastroenterologist, if she's reading this, that is.

What's my point? When a friend tells you that there's nothing to live for, no reason to go on, or that the everyday pain of life is 'just too much,' what is it that they're saying? I'm not big on making recommendations and I am, right now, planning on going back to see my GI Doc in another 7 years or so, but I dare to recommend that when your friend makes one of those comments, it may well be ill-advised to take it as a testament to the value they put in your friendship. 

Please, don't misunderstand me. A friend who draws you emotionally near by telling you that they're sad and struggling and could use the warmth of your hand in theirs is sharing with you that not trivial fraction of life that deals with loss and everyday disappointments that are expressed with a bonding feeling of sadness. And a bonding/proximating experience it is to share the wistful in life! But depression, as I keep repeating (some will say: "hey, the guy needs to convince himself" -- well, may ... be?), is in many ways the opposite of sadness. The depressed person pushes you away ... withdraws into sullenness ... the sad person wants you close.

To get specific ...  The pessimistic person pays little attention to the fact that today is the last Day of Channukah when some fraction of 1 in 500 people worldwide celebrate that a small minority can survive even if they're not exactly like the other 499 of 500. 

The pessimistic person, similarly, pays little attention to the fact that tomorrow is the day when, perhaps, 125 out of every 500 people worldwide celebrate the birth of a child. Now, how nifty is that! As we people-folk tend to take things personally, you can bet that maybe a majority of Christian kids see that day as a day when their parents celebrate them ... maybe not their little brother or sister ... but a day to celebrate them! And the gifts that some people pooh-pooh (as in Winnie the Pooh-pooh?), be assured! those kids see those gifts as proof that the holy-day is, at least in part, about how pleased their parents are that they were born.

So

Happy Channukah to all, ye Jewish Oldsters 

and 

Be Merry, My Old Christian Friends.

Shhhhh! Now to those of you who are not religiously-minded and find no solace in temporal optimism offered by such holidays, I give you a bit of compensatory doggerel written in (what today is a rainy) Philadelphia, 20 years ago.

‘Tis the Week in the Delaware Valley 

On Dancer! On Prancer! Get going sweet Vixen!

There’s a party Thursday night on Lake Nockamixon.

Friday, stead of work we’ll have us a brew

While dining in Center City,

Chateaubriand for Two?

Saturday lunch on Ninth Street?

The gang’s ordering Christmas Stromboli

Sambuca, Linguini, maybe Cannoli.

Hey?

Does Tel Erhardt still have that place near Paoli?

Sunday? Philly’s partying for Monday nearly done

Rum Nogs, Hot Toddies, maybe a scone

As we sit by the fire and drink, just us! alone!

Loosen our belts ... Oh moan! Oh groan!

Tuesday? King of Prussia and Oxford Valley, too?

One more drink for me, a pudding for you!

Ah! Wednesday we’ll wrap, pick at Russell Stover

To wake Thursday morning ...

That’s Christmas Day ...

Both hung- and hanging-over!

The moral of my story could be no more clear:

If it’s weight gain and headache this week that you fear

As you don and don’t doff Christmas pounds year after year.

When invitations arrive ... comely, inviting and luminous

Send “regrets only” and tell your friends

Sorry ... I’ve joined the Ethical Freethinkers' Society and

ho-hum! ...

Become ....

A secular humanist.

Three on Trust

(1) Nachmonides wrote many centuries ago about The Faith and The Reliance; trust must live in there somewhere. He was talking about a person's relationship to his or her God and I'm thinking more about what Trust looks like in a relationship between two or more of His or Her creations. I'm as confused, now, as I was when I wrote a choppy Trust I -- maybe, a few days ago.

Thought out of the Blue: In August of 1993, I was attending a seminar and between meetings was walking through the streets of Minneapolis with Leroy Robinson and Ajit Daniel, two other seminar attendees. We were talking about race. Leroy was born in Brooklyn, as I was, though he was Black and I was White and Ajit was Indian, pale-brown-pigmented somewhere between us. Of course, Leroy was not Black-skinned and I and at least one of my sons and my Dad's family can get dark enough in late Summer to pass for someone who likely wouldn't be welcome in White supremacist groups. (Indeed, an uncle of mine was pulled out of his car in the 1940's for dating a White woman.) This was, perhaps, one of the later days of a nine day Seminar and the three of us, Ajit, Leroy and Howard, had hung out a great deal together and trusted -- there's that word -- each other certainly sufficiently to talk about race. Our experience, perhaps, walking through the largely White and Blonde Mall of the Americas perhaps cemented such a bond.

Twenty years before the recent conversation about racial profiling in Missouri, Cleveland, and New York, Leroy pressed me to identify those people walking down the street whom I trusted and those who might make me queazy enough to pause, cross the street, or gird my loins. Leroy was particularly insistent on my checking my visceral reaction to Black Teenagers wearing hats with the brims pointing to where they came from. It was clear that that gestalt ... 3 African American kids walking briskly towards me got me to stand up straighter ... but facing three similarly attired white
kids bopping down the street towards us got me defensive, as well. Hard to measure.

(2) No TRUST, here .... I walked into a bakery frequented by religious folk, yesterday. A guy my age wearing a Viet Nam Era Army-Medical-Corps hat was ahead of me in line. We struck up a conversation; I began:

"Ah, so whaddya do?"

"I'm a pathologist."

"I work with'em before they die. I'm a psychotherapist."

"Psycho .... Therapist, eh? Good. So tell me why that reporter for the Rolling Stone screwed up 
that story so badly about UVA and the supposed gang-rape."

"Sorry. I don't know the guy or gal reporter and anyway, I'm pretty certain you know that Leviticus 19 admonishes against speaking loose-lipped about others ... unless there's a clear and present danger. And, indeed, it implies that that's connected to Godliness."

Shit. I'd thrown down the gauntlet. An obviously secular guy preaching to a devoutly religious person ... dem's was fighting words. I was an impious who thought he knew something about Scriptures or the later writings. Geez ... Two old guys who should know better in a Pissing Fight about Passages and Politics. Truth be told, I didn't have to verbally thwock this guy and he coulda let an infidel alone, as well. But the end of the matter was on the street. Him slamming himself into his car and me walking to mine. Both of us, I imagine, mouthing something like: "What an ass."

Bil'am's Ass was smarter! (Numbers 23/24 ... only someone behaving as an Ass would cite that!)

Sometimes we -- particularly denizens of the Last Quarter -- can be Asses. Good to accept oneself.

(3) Mornings with GuntherDog as we both age. I've been getting up at 3:45, these days. Four hours of sleep appears to be a sufficiency, at least when supplemented by a 45 minute afternoon siesta. For a while, GuntherDog would stay put in his retired chair of honor that he took as his throne some years ago. Recently, though, he groans ... slowly gets out of his chair ... shakes a bit while I'm doing a spine-stretch ... toddles over to the door. I don't know if old male dogs have enlarged prostate glands that drive them to pee by 4:00. I know we're both aging and a little arthritis in the back and a more frequent need to pee seems to go with the process. After a minute, I open the door which is kept closed because PrettyGirlCat who is maybe 13 years old occasionally is too tired to make it to the litter box if she's with us. It's just a threesome, these days ... M, Gunther and I ... The Groaners Three.

Any case, Gunther won't simply run down the stairs.

"New Day, Pops. You gotta prove yourself."

Proving myself worthy of his Trust requires that I take several minutes at the top of the stairs to love him up. He sits and if I go downstairs, he continues to sit.

"Hey, Old Guy. I can hold it a good long time 

or just pick my leg up, right here."

I used to stand there and scratch his head. If I'd stop, he rubs his scruffy head on the balusters:

"Don't stop, now, Schmuck. Just gettin' off. 

Stop now and you'll just have to start from the beginning."

I gave in a few weeks ago. Now, I sit with him and we discuss our prostates, I scratch his head, he occasionally licks the hand that gets him off on the exquisite pleasures of head-scratching. I sit there for a good long time and when he's ready, he leads our way downstairs ... more slowly than once ... but still sure footed. I use indoor plumbing ... he the back yard. Then I write and Gunther naps.

Trust, whatever the Hell it is, takes a long time to develop and I still don't quite get it.

Trust I & Playing by the Numbers

This is all too theoretical but it's me waking up, this morning. Maybe, it's that I watched Rogers and Hammerstein's production of South Pacific, last night. So many of the post-WWII theater and cinema productions had to do with the horror of war and how it relates to difference and to hatred. Any case, arose at 4 thinking of such matters. I've also been rereading things I've written about Joseph's Dreams, the ones that got most of his brothers up in arms and ready to do in the little snitch.

Indeed, I've been thinking a great deal, lately, about the notion of trust. Over the years, many people who visited me in my office suffered from a most curious illness which seemed to yield a thorough absence of trust ... a belief that I can rely on another to hold me ... to not drop me. A few not-so-brief thoughts concerning my thinking need to be repeated from postings over the past several years in order to clarify what I'm thinking. Healthy living, for me, has two major necessary component parts that join ... that tightly dovetail with each other ... to render the Good Life, or, at least, its possibility in a not-always friendly World.

The first has to do, itself, with a three-component internal-external process. To lead the Good Life, I must be aware of what it is that I want ... call these impulsive wishes to have desires, if you like. I must, then, be willing and able to scrutinize the actions that would follow acting out on these wishes and to rule them out if they on-balance are likely to cause undue pain to myself and/or to others ... more than choosing not to do them would cause. (I'm a follower of the Old Greek Aristotle on this one .... Virtue involves, in part, the recognition that one is always choosing either between two or more mutually exclusive Goods ... or two Bads -- I think it's from the Ethica Eudemia). And thirdly, I must, recognizing that this act has been reasonably scrutinized and promises the fulfillment of a wish -- however fleeting, have what it takes to act on it. Want -- Evaluate/Scrutinize -- Act.

The second component I was thinking about has to do with what I've talked of so often in these ramblings of a man trying to figure out the complexities of his Playing in the Last Quarter ... I am referring to the very rare and not-so-easy ability to recognize that, just as Others are a bit less than Subjects-in-their-own-right inside of my head, I am a bit less than a-Subject-in-my-own-right inside of their minds. I long ago concluded that it is in the acceptance of this Subjectivity of Others (recognizing that they laugh and cry, have relationships to their own theoretical and religious Gods and love others besides me) that the former middle component comes into being. By accepting that Others are complex beings -- Subjects -- just like me, it becomes all but impossible to -- say -- break into their homes and trash it, even if I might covet their Plasma TV. Aside: there were mystics who decided that for God to create a Universe which he filled with the all encompassing Beauty of his/her Kingdom, he had to pull himself back, leaving a space for his Creations to be. They called it Tzimtzum (צמצום) and what to say? to have a relationship with another requires that I/We/One is able to redact oneself to make room for that Other. Sounds so simple!

Maybe a previous leader of the United Nations went too far, but I suspect for my thinking, it was "just so:"

Do you wish to forfeit even that little to which your efforts may have entitled you? Only if your endeavors are inspired by a devotion to duty in which you forget yourself completely, can you keep your faith in their value. This being so, your endeavor to reach the goal should have taught you to rejoice when others reach it.             

                (Dag Hammarskjøld - 1957 in Markings, p. 153, 1964)

So, back to this illness that many people who have visited my office drag along behind them -- like their bottoms, maybe I'd add. These folk have never, perhaps, been treated as Subjects-in-their-own-right and have not had, therefore, models to copy in turning this benevolently around on others. But what's most striking is the manner in which they've turned it around on themselves. There are three weapons of torment that they use to destroy their own ability to pleasure alone and with others.

In the first place are thoughts about life that are unpleasurable and constrained and impossible to carry into action as they're uniformly two sided: I call them OADS ... Obsessive Ambivalent Dialogues. These thoughts implicitly deny the possibility of the Thought-Scrutinize-Act paradigm that I just before mentioned. Taking Aristotle's better fork in the road won't do it, as the other fork won't be taken.

"I must take both paths; I cannot take both paths."

Talking to such folk caught up in these OADS, one is likely to become thoroughly frustrated and disheartened -- bereft of any future --  for, indeed, it is impossible to satisfy the impossible.

The second and third parts, though, are the icing on the cake. A part of them demands that they do things that are UnPleasurable (Compulsions) and not do things that are Pleasurable (Injunctions and Prohibitions). By establishing such a world, these people (mostly men ... but some women, as well) reverse that paradigm of Want -- Evaluate -- Act ... or, better to say, they reverse the middle part. Actions are scrutinized not by whether they bring pleasure but, rather, by whether they either block that pleasure or cause displeasure.

I haven't counted the number of these visitors to my office over the past 40 years. And sometimes I wonder why I woud take on the task of trying to bring them into the light of choosing pleasure. Hell! Freddy Mercury said: Pain is so close to pleasure ... and the French have a notion of exquisitely painful pleasure ... jouissance. And maybe -- just maybe -- I/we all suffer from some of this disease ... not permitting pleasure.

In any case, for some reason this morning, I came to a conclusion I'll have to try to understand  later that trusting and being trustworthy, both, require the knowledge that one's other -- be they kin or friend or visitor -- will choose pleasure over pain ... and not the reverse.

If you understand this connection, I'm all ears.

A Letter Continued ...

Harold ...

This whole thing about writing/imagining-to-write to someone long-gone is a bit unheimlich ... eerie ... uncanny. I've only done this once before. More than a decade after you died, my youngest child was expecting our first grandchild. Little did I know how important she would end up being in M and my lives, though I suspect that M knew all along. Y'know, just for the record, you used to say that among the only decent things I'd ever done was to marry a literate woman and one, I might add, who is far more intuitive than I and connects on a far more profound level with our kids and grandkids -- she would, indeed, never refer to them as spawn and grand-spawn as I have often in these scribbles about aging over the past years.

In any case, this first grandchild was predicted by the Seers of that day ... an ObGyn in Chicago. That prophet never bothered to predict that this youngster would ultimately find the eidetic memory that I had once had but was already beginning to lose. None of this was known and I began writing daily letters -- in my excitement -- to "Cletus the Fetus" .... In time, an entourage joined me in writing to the unborn one about how futures unfold. The three other grandparents ... Aunts ... Uncles. But I digress.

I began these ramblings about Playing in the Last Quarter of Life, I suppose, to deal with what others have said and that I was discovering about later life. It ain't for sissies!

You never particularly liked Erik Erikson ... you thought he had watered down the Words of the Master. Still, I was, before I began these notes, confronted by the conflict of Erikson's last stage of life. You, of course knew (dammit, Harold ... You knew just about everything) about that. Those who could feel pride and joy in their accomplishments would spend that Fourth Quarter reflecting, adding to whatever they'd done in life without undue regret, and sharing gracefully what they've gathered together with those who were to follow them. Those who despaired in this stage of life would hold little or no value in the Wisdom they had accrued, would be unavailable to the next generation, and would get stuck in feelings of bitterness. 

Well, Harold, I'm not despairing. I am slowly working on making my previous contributions more accessible to others. Indeed, I've copied the 1998 book on how people may come to a healthy state in which they see others (including the unfolding next-Gens) as complex Subjects with Worlds of their Own ... I've copied it on my web-page for any and all to read and am struggling to make it more user-friendly by making it shorter and clearer. Got some publishers interested ... maybe. And I do try to strengthen those connections with the denizens of the future. Funny, isn't it? The ideas for that book of mine were the ones you thoroughly disapproved of and, yet, in precisely that Eriksonian style of supporting students and kids, you once told me: "publish it and take your comeuppance like a man, Howard." 

So ... Yes ... I'm writing to you, to one of my Ghosts and, perhaps -- just, perhaps -- you wouldn't with your anti-religious style approve of that. I won't worry about that -- the dead don't get a vote, as Kohelles, the writer of Ecclesiastes might've said. And even if my fantasies are looking back to you and my other hauntings, my interests do flair out into the future.

Like last night ... pretty late ... M and I watched Judy Holiday in the 1961 screen version of The Bells are Ringing with K, one of our younger grandkids ... the actor ... the comic actress who is so much like the talented Holiday who never lived to see this stage of life. The not quite 11 year old was transfixed ... in love with a 50's (on Broadway) musical ... maybe Deo Volente she'll stop watching Disney.

Just one last thing. Funny, again. Was corresponding with some of those pioneers of the future -- not my students or visitors to my office, per se ... just folk I met along the long winding road (see, below). They seemed to believe that my pleasure at the success I mentioned yesterday (or was it the day before?) about getting some rights for a disrespected group of up-and-comers to which they belonged had something to do with some functional value or right that might accrue to me. I considered it for a moment. Then remembered what someone had inscribed about values and relationship inside the back cover of a moldy copy I have of Chesterton's Autobiography. I send it to you ... with love. Howard

(Insciption)

When Chesterton died in 1936, 

I took down from my shelf 

his fine book on Charles Dickens and, 

as a private memorial Service, 

reread the final paragraph. It ran like this:

"We have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant; 

and the passage is along a rambling English road, 

a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled. 

But this, at least, is part of what he meant; 

that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; 

but rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, 

which through God shall endure forever. 

The Inn does not point to the Road; 

the Road points to the Inn. 

And all roads point to that ultimate Inn, 

where we shall meet Dickens and all his Characters, and 

when we drink, again, 

it shall be from the great flagons in the Tavern at the End of the World."

-- from Woolcott in Long, Long Ago

  

A Letter

Dear Harold ...

From your early days in US Army Intelligence during WW-2 through your decades-long attempt to get a variety of hierarchies to crack, especially those that excluded masses of our brethren either from Restaurants or Water Fountains or Professional Organizations, one could argue that you really didn't do so well. When you unexpectedly died in 1986, much of your work hadn't been completed. People still, today, think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone (contrary to your efforts in The Realist); America is still often divided along racial lines (again, contrary to your many efforts to bring the World of People's together); and professional groups in this Land of Milk and Money (as your older Brother, Abe used to call America) still scramble about trying to control their niche in this or that Eco-System.

But some things have changed. Oh! Police and various minority communities have not found a way to police urban areas without both being put in danger or killed or killing and riots are still breaking out. Countries are still fighting -- smaller wars that your War but millions of lives lost, still -- and both anti-Moslem and anti-Jewish sentiments seem to be on the rise. I know you liked the communications between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud where Freud suggested that War -- the human propensity to hate and kill -- will never be removed but, still, may be tempered if we folk come under the sway of two of our maybe-not-so-natural inclinations ... Loving our Neighbors and the Recognition of Similarities, that, I suppose one could say, allow us to love those oddballs living next door.

I think you'd be pleased that during daylight hours, it's become pretty safe for people with different color skins to walk down streets, together. We have a President here in the USA whose Dad was
African and Mom, a mid-Western White. I suspect you -- certainly I -- have no problem identifying with him ... recognizing the similarities, that is. He's a family guy ... really quite bright and thinks quite deeply, even if he chose to attend Harvard Law School ... he doesn't appear to catastrophize ... indeed, they call him No Drama Obama. (Obama is not an Irish name, by the way.) True. Half the Country finds nothing good in what he does and seems to hate him; even if you had a bias when you were alive against prayer, I do pray for the Secret Service that has protected him for 6 full years.

Sorry that I haven't written you in all these years. I talk about you a lot. You were my mentor and I identify you as such, just as Paul Harbour was yours, Hans Sachs his, and Freud mentored (that particular) Little Hans. An old psychiatrist -- Si must be over 85 -- called you a genius, last Tuesday night. Not much compensation, I suspect, for being dead. Still ... nice to hear, aye? I responded
holding to my stubborn and obsessive position that you don't have to be a genius to be God-awful
bright and I explained to him that I neurotically eschew words like Genius and Hero but that maybe Genius applied to you, anyway ... Blah-blah-blah. How long have I been wordy?

I remember when we were both teaching at the Institute. You called and asked me how I was doing with the students. I explained that all was going well for your young protege (I wasn't 40, yet), except that quite often I would explain some principle of being human or being ill and someone would quietly opine:

"But Harold said it this way."

Well, Harold ... One of your goals was met, last night. A stigmatized and maligned group of young healers whose recognition we fought for got some of that recognition. The vote was something like 67-27. I was sitting in the audience, heard the vote, and my eyes warmed. Mind you, it made no
difference in my status and wouldn't have in yours. But we did Ok, didn't we?  I thought you would like to know.

Harold ... You did real good. 

I still miss you.

Geez ... Almost forgot to tell you. There was a Good Ole (somewhat) Liberal Boy, ex-Gov of Arkansas, who was President in the 90's ... Billy Clinton. His wife Hillary is poised to become our next!

Hey!

The Sun'll Come Out

Yesterdays meeting was maybe not entirely typical of what happens when a diverse group of smart people come together to discuss questions that have no answer. This is a small venue ... I recall one meeting had 3 people in it and some, like this one, had maybe 30-40.

It's not that we had a singular question to examine, nevermind to answer. We were gathering to watch snippets of a documentary (by Armand Nicholi who is a Psychiatrist and Professor at a major university) that combined biography of Freud and CS Lewis with a discussion by a roundtable panel of very literate and smart folk (led by Nicholi) on belief/disbelief in God ... or a god.

I had decided to talk for 15 minutes and, as might be expected, it turned into 30; the more entrenched in the Last Quarter of Life I get, the less I manage to stay within the 15 minute stable ... I run off like a playful young horse -- who am I kidding? Still, most of the additional 2.5 hours were spent in respectful dialogue.

I was impressed by people's openness; M, who was also in attendance, was pleased. I was impressed, as I said, by the honesty of the participants ... there was a clergy person ... a theologian ... a bunch of psychiatrists ... a similar number of Psychologists and Social Workers  ... a Physicist/Economist couple who sat apart ... a young Seeker ... and people, in general, in no great need to proffer an answer but willing to play with each other's mind set about this question ... the film is called something like The Problem of God (a PBS piece). Ah, yes ... some wanted to wax theoretical ... I had the fantasy of falling into a hole in the midst of a field ... how, as moderator, do I get out of this. Shamefully, I used someone of the participants as a shill ... "hey, so and so thinks you're waxing too theoretical." I, apparently, didn't have the Kohones to simply say: "whoa." My goal was for people to arrive willing to end up someplace other than where they began on this question and most of us bring our theories all neatly packed with a bright red seasonal ribbon keeping it closed and tightly wrapped.

This was better. Personal. Up close, much of the time. I like that. Life is real ... Time for theory has to be boundaried.

Ach du Lieber .... These early Wintry days ... leaves are put away ... Holidays are being readied ... Certain faiths are enmeshed in prayerful Advent. A thoughtful time to wonder about our place in the Cosmos. Indeed, I thought it a fortunate coincidence that the readings for Advent on its second Sunday begin with Isaiah 40 ... "Comfort, Ye ... Comfort, Ye, my people" ... made famous not only by poor depressed Isaiah but by Handl and his Messiah suite. And a coincidence that my license plate on my car ... reads NACHAMU ... Isaiah's Comfort, Ye.  

Was I comforted? I dunno!

I wasn't expecting answers and I had a good time.

I wasn't expecting any more.

"Who is rich? He who rejoices in what he has" 

(Ethics of the Fathers c. 2,000 years ago).

A Riff Later Today

I'm scheduled to show a film about attitudes towards Religion and Spirituality and to generate a discussion of some of its implications, today, with a group of people whose interest lies in the healing Sciences and Arts. I tried to have such a meeting when I, myself, ran a training facility while I was still an energetic Third Quarter Player. My faculty thought I was loony! ... So, I didn't do it. Anyhow ...  Life in the Third Quarter for me was loaded with energy ... Being on today from 2-5 PM -- now in the Last Quarter of Life -- intrudes on my nap time, especially since with travel it's in actuality 1-6 PM, ending after dark when my very limited vision in my left eye doesn't discern well the road from a telephone poll. (I did accidentally find my auto's fog light switch, last night.)

My goal in choosing this topic to discuss is not to convert the religious to the secular or vice versa ... rather, it's to see if the Healers have something to learn from both the down-side of Religions in their many lengthy wars and, on the plus side, the way Spiritual Folk take in certain principles for living, as they, for instance, try to live by the opposite values of the Seven Deadly Sins:

• Kindness in place of Wrath ...
• Sharing/Giving in place of Greed ...
• Shared Pride/Humility instead of Pride ...
• The Tempering of Desire by interposing reason and safety on Acting on Lust ...
• Gratitude where Envy might have been ....
• A wish to Contribute instead of Slothfully watching the Big Egg-Timer empty ... and
• A Joy in Pleasure rather than Gluttony's "We want it All; we want it now" (Freddie Mercury).

In my faith tradition, we have an abbreviated list of three things that typically bring a person to sin: 

• Anger, 
• Pride and 
• Envy/Jealousy.

Healers, especially, these days when health insurance companies look to get people in and out of inpatient and outpatient treatments leaning on walkers and with Foley Catheters in place, these healers tend to try to place everything about healing in a Scientific Framework and I find them to be full of anger, pride and envy, as they undergo harder times in their professions. They talk of Evidence Based Therapies as the insurance companies have instructed them to do. It's OK for your doc to talk to you as a person-in-your-own-right but only if its demonstrably connected to improving your healing. Wasn't it bad enough that men were busy measuring their penises and forearms and women the shapeliness and size of their breasts, waists and ankles that we had to add these Statistical measures to every act the healer did ... even just being kind and/or human.

Maybe it was earlier but certainly by Freud (1933) we have him arguing against the introduction of any World View ... any Weltanschauung ... any notion of values in the Good Life ... none of these were to officially enter Freud's clinical theory of treatment, though as a healer he was (quietly) a warm man ... ready to welcome musicians, composers, religious leaders (though he was an atheist, himself), poets, and everyday folk into his practice and advocated a pro bono hour each day. ... I dunno how many healers, today, indulge in such pro bono work ... I'm certain some ... but I wonder how many.

Any case, the Religious tend to fight among themselves and so do the Healers.  So, I'm gonna spend my afternoon instead of napping dialoguing with those who are not home watching American Football or -- with the smart ones -- napping with the Dog!

I'll need some good fortune, as these healers tend to get feisty.

Better not get feisty with me!

Invitations in this Morning's Mail

I still get -- as a denizen of the Fourth Quarter -- invitations in my e-mail. Some are from Nigeria to join the wealthy ex-pats in business deals ... Some are from a group that promotes young Russian and Ukrainian hotties who'll keep me warmer than Avishag the Shulamite ever kept David in HIS dotage. This morning I got one from a guy I know a little bit who is part of a group having a banquet supporting some organization in NYC ... seats were $1,000-$100,000, though I had the fantasy that better-padded ones might be available, as well, for Koch, Koch and Adelson. I got an invitation to join a LinkedIn network by someone who is too old to be my grandchild, but not by much. Hell, I consulted in their high school (listed on their Profile) before their parents got there, maybe. No explanation ... just ... "I'd like to join your network." What happened to the Second-Person Impersonal with a respectful capital-Y ... You:

Dear OldSter-Sir ... While I know that You must be old and tired 

and maybe even busy, 

I would really appreciate You joining little-ole-me 

in a network for a purpose I'm willing to share with you

some other time.

Well, dammit. What's the purpose? Wanna go running in the fields with me in Spring with the young girls from Russia or the married women in my town who are just dying to meet me? Then I get an invitation asking if I wanted to present at a conference? I wrote back, thanking for the invitation and wondering about how much time might be allocated for such a presentation. He matter-of-factly responded:

"16-18 minutes."

16-18 minutes? 16-18 minutes! I used to stutter. If I regress, it could take me that long stating my full name or walking back from the MEN'S ROOM or emptying my bladder, for that matter ... y'know, in the room with the homunculus on the door ... the one not wearing a kilt ... any of those could take me $u(&i#G 18 minutes!

Tradition has it that the Temple in Jerusalem built on the ground that people were killed over last week was destroyed because of the gratuitous enmity that was exacerbated by a mis-addressed invitation between two guys who disliked each other ... Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. Enough invitations!

Though, as I think back, the Nigerian invitations WERE kinda sweet. Y'know ...

"... my Husband ran all the oil companies here, 

sacked away $Millions of pilfered Peso's 

and I chose your name from 6.7 Billion others to share it with 

because I know that you're ... 

 "Linus the Lion; King of the Jungle ... handsome, brave and intellekatektual."

Ach du Lieber ... I think I'll spend the day in response to my youngest child's E-vite to attend her Vegetarian Thanksgiving Dinner ... all my kids, in-law kids, and grandspawn will be there and I suspect this Last Quarter guy can overtake any escaped Braized Tofu and Three Bean Salad that may run amok during the celebration!

Happy holiday to all celebrants.

Go read the Book of Ecclesiastes

So, yesterday, I was sitting with Mi5 ... that is, my friend, Mi, whose in the 5th Quarter of Life ... 80 something. I told him about my 40'ish Philosopher dinner guest who thought the writer of Ecclesiastes was a real downer; Mi replied:

A downer? 

My &$$, you bet he was a downer! 

He was damn depressed.

So much for my thinking that even though the World carries on with its cosmological and meteorological regulated happenings with utter disregard for us peop's, there is a positive message in the writings of Kohelles (the self-identified author of Ecclesiastes) that finding love of an-Other and the Good Life can open us to optimism.

New anecdotal theory:

40-ish people seek some abstract meaning;

70'ish people are satisfied 

if they've made peace with their life 

and their lover/husband/wife hasn't 

kicked them out of bed, yet; and

80-ish folk regress to the 40-ish position.

All this is, I suppose, to say: I don't (yet) got a clue. Do you?

Happiness and Sadness -- The Juggling Continues

Last night we had Late Second Quarter dinner guests  and their kids. I mentioned (as I had in my last posting to this Blog) that I had recently been reviewing the Book of Ecclesiastes with another guy-denizen of the Fourth Quarter of life. We had both, in our readings, seen the author who calls himself something like "the Congregant" (Kohelles) as someone who had found peace and joy in recognizing that while he could not change the cosmic processes ... couldn't make great changes ... rivers would continue to their source, in spite of all his efforts and would still fail to fill the seas ... Sun would rise and set ... $ and wisdom wouldn't change the big picture, either ... he might  still find meaning in loving another and in walking in the path of the good or the path that god laid out for him. The lady dinner guest, a therapist, was on board. The guy philosopher thoroughly not, though maybe I wasn't understanding what he intended. Their kids excused themselves a bit earlier with their iPads. I finished dinner pretty happy, if vicariously sad for the philosopher (who chances are didn't need me to be sad).

Then I arose this AM. The butchered man that I thought (again, last posting) I must have met when he was a kid was still dead and his family, I suspect, still in shock and mourning ... along with those crying for the other million+ people whose deaths were recorded in, say, the last week, including my friend, Bill. A 40'ish neighbor who had studied Law at one of the most prestigious American Law Schools had still succumbed to her cancers. My quotidian aches and pains of late middle-age still were just where I left them.

And still ... the cat, Pretty Girl, was thrilled that the living room door had been left open for her to enjoy its heat ... GuntherDog was/is back to his AM dog-napping after peeing and seems quite at peace, especially as our dinner guests are still gone -- poor neurotic fella can't relax around company! And the gifts that I received this week are all still in place. And I'm sitting here pleasantly unwrapping my gifts. 

Gifts? ... Lots of them. Like Kohelles, I find myself rejoicing that some folk, including some of my office visitors and my doctors, friends, kin and two other older guys who see me a fit study partner, shared moments in time with me ... one of them shared a manuscript for a beautifully carved autobiography that moved me to joy and tears ... M still shares a bed with me .... oh! and some of my grown kids are coming over to work with The Old Guy raking the falling leaves.

How does the old song (not) go about raking leaves after the kids have left home?

The Falling leaves

Outside my window

The forty million fucking leaves

That just had to Fall!

Since they went away ...

(you can figure the rest)

Anyhow! It's been about 110 years since Freud tried to make some extra bucks in publishing a book about Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious. Copies of his Dream Book weren't all moving off the shelf (and I think the first printing was something like 200 copies). Anyway! In the Joke book, he concludes that the witticism elicits laughter because of its illicit content ... sexual or aggressive. I've long thought differently ... that pleasure in the well-told-tale is resident in the experience of another person sharing space and time with you -- something first experienced at or about 4 months when the kid figures out that: 

I and Mommy are both here ... 

Right now ... 

I know it ... 

She knows it ... 

We know it .... 

Yeeeeeeeeee-Ha!

Sharing space and time? The great jokester with the punchline or pun-line or tear-jerk-line, for that matter, brings the other to a brief but very pleasurable moment in space-time ... that tiny little shared space that the punchline creates for "just the two of us" and that exists for a fleeting moment in this crazy flow of time.

Thems the gifts ... maybe the only gifts ... others willing to work shoulder to shoulder ... mind to mind ... however ... with rakes? ideas? and occasional romps in a pile of leaves or pages or the hay behind the barn.

Surfaces

I sit in my office surrounded by surfaces. In front of me a foot stool covered with a Turkish rug and books and papers to-be-read and both this year's and next year's appointment book -- each calendar to be filled in as the time passes and later taking its place on a shelf designated for calendars ... the rings of my tree ... every year a new one. There's a new manuscript there from my friend, J, about his last 25 years trying to teach others how to write. I've read maybe a quarter of it. Tomorrow is coming, soon. On my left, is a tilted and movable surface that holds notes about meetings and on my right a round table with a lamp that shines light on memories.

I don't know where my Dad found the lamp's ceramic vase but I do remember it being either the Winter of 1954 or 1955 when he fashioned a base for it of Maple, turned on a lathe at a local community center in Toledo, Ohio. It was the very same Center at which Grandpa Miltie's Swimming School got its name, the evening that he catapulted me into the middle of the deep end of the pool making it unquestionable in both words and deed that 'not swimming wasn't an option.' I suppose it's possible that when my spawn and grand-spawn heard of Grandpa Miltie's ways and means, they may have understood an implied threat. Mea maxima culpa. In any case, the lamp shade must be older than the lamp or even the vase from which the lamp was fashioned. SisterJ thinks it may have been hers. Stories of the Fourth Quarter are -- each one of them -- variation myths that modify with different themes, as they arise from different memories. The shade is adorned with alternating brass and copper lion-heads on its six barely translucent sides ... two are missing. This round lamp-table holds a modern phone that reads "ringer off" but continues to quietly ring when interlopers call. And then there are my pens that commemorate a little boy's watching his own Grandpa write with ink-pens on his desk in his religious office where he met with his congregants in the Coney Island neighborhood in the halcyon days when four Grandkids lived upstairs.

That pretty much covers my practical reach from the chair on which I sit for well over 40 hours each week ... meeting ... reading ... writing ... puzzling and fascinating about the present and past.

The past few days, (I want to say) too many ghosts have been visiting ... the Dead have risen, only to fall, again. I heard Monday of a modern day massacre. One of the dead I must've met for I knew his grandfather, well. I cannot yet retrieve a memory of meeting this man ... barely into his Fourth Quarter ... hacked to death in the name of difference, otherness and retaliation. It would've been when he was a little boy. Ach! Certainly a very old story even if he was only 60 years old. I once wrote that our animal instincts seem to split our sensing of the Other into one of three categories ... Prey, Predator or Kin. When Kin are with us? we seem to naturally protect them from Predators. And when those Kin have been taken from us, those we imagine to be responsible may all-too-easily become our Prey in a never-ending cycle of retaliatory moves set in motion, perchance, when our ancestors met strangers in the clearings of jungles and blamed them for all that was wrong in their own little Primal Horde situated in some clearing just over the next rise.

Who starts a cycle that I am able to mouth the word responsible as if I could determine that, as the kids on the playground can say, so easily:

'he started it.' 

All those words like responsible that don't quite mean what they say. When presidents or commanders accept ultimate responsibility for some oops, they don't mean they are able to respond to the consequences of whatever occurred and to remedy or undo the same. No. It's more like:

'Something bad happened 

and I can't find anyone to throw under the bus; 

nor can I do jack-shit about it.'

I don't like words like fault much, either. And I don't like blame. Pointing-fingers are all so linear .... 'he did it and pointedly not me.' And, oh,  I'm not the Dalai Lama who can meditate about it ... I lack his faith ... I wish I had it.

Yesterday, I got news, as well, that Bill died after drifting away for too many years into a cloudy place. Last time, M and I ate out with he and his wife, Bill began doing a jig and singing quietly and happily in the Thai restaurant in a young part of our city. Bill was a gentle Soul. We worked together. Funny. Bill was the Director but we did, indeed, work together. No pettiness in his directing. He saw the role of a clinician-administrator as protecting his colleagues from intrusions from above and below ... from inside and outside. I brought the same view from my days running a school. Bill was also my general in days when he ran Emergency Medical Services at rock concerts. He would put together a team of perhaps 130 people ... ER docs, Trauma Nurses, EMT's and VietNam trained Paramedics, and Psychologists, as well as the many Stretcher Bearers whose job it was to bring in those fallen on a typical day at a 125,000 person concert ... I think the last one we did was Live Aid some more-than twenty years, ago. Bill was a great general and, as far as I know, we never lost a single celebrant -- no matter how intoxicated on no matter how many drugs. Oh, some needed to be trucked off to nearby hospitals and others got worked on in ORCA's -- Mobile Surgeries ... but no one on our team and no concert goer ever got left behind. I do miss the image of the General always even-tempered and almost always walking about with a cellophane box of Stella d'Oro cookies.

Wanna a cookie, Howard?

Thanks, Bill.

I think what saved me, yesterday, was a visit from a friend. We've decided that it's time -- here, in the midst of the Last Quarter -- for us to understand the writer of Ecclesiastes and his view of the value of relationship over everything else. Our workdays had shut down and we spent our hours together pondering our pasts and wondering about the choice of the author to call himself Kohelles. It comes from the biblical word for gathering.

L'kahel is to convene but it could be to gather, as well.

l'ha'Khil is to make to convene.

Kahal is a congregation.

Some writers have suggested that he saw himself as gathering together much wisdom. D and I wondered if Kohelles was chosen to denote his status as one of the convened ... a Congregant ... an Everyman.

Maybe it doesn't matter. We have decided to convene when we can to discuss these writings:

"All the Rivers go to the Sea 

and the Sea is not filled? 

(they go) to the place 

where the Rivers go ... 

(and) there, they return to go (once more)."

With more than a nod to Bill 

and his bride J 

and their kids H & B 

and his grandkids 

whom I never got to know.

It Hardly Seems Fair

This past Summer, we did what we hate to do -- we took GuntherDog to the Kennel. The management of this Maximun Security Pet Prison had us sign a note, indicating that we understood that Gunther was now a Senior Dog and it was understood that 'the older dog' is prone to sudden illness and even death. Geez ... Gunther was no more than 11 years old. How could that be?

There have been changes in G, our last-remaing child (the Cat really doesn't count as a child) that have been clear to us for some time. M and I can be out of the house for quite a while -- 4-5 hours or more -- and we'll unlock the front door ... and walk in ... and find Gunther napping on the job. And he's become less comfortable around visitors ... friendly? really friendly! but kind of manic. He'll beg at the table and precipitously charge off ... 40 pounds with four-paw drive but no limited slip differential. It's really quite a sight, as he tries to get to the back door with an apparent bladder emergency.

Ah! Old Men and their bladders.

The biggest change I've noted, though, is in his morning ritual. I'm most often the first up in the AM. Gunther reluctantly will get off his Seat of Honor and follow me to the top of the stairs after I've peed, that is. Then ... then, he'll sit. We have an understanding, we do -- Gunther and I. He requires that I scratch his head for several minutes and openly proclaim both my fealty to him and my sense of him as a Goo-Boy. "Yes, Gunther. You are the very best." When he "feels the love," Old Man GuntherDog will toddle down the stairs, looking back precisely once to demonstrate his awareness that he's Man of the House, now, and that other Old Guy's function -- the one holding on to the railing -- is limited to Door Man and Waiter ... and little else.

Yesterday, I went to a family's religious celebration. The Grandpa in the family (Grandpater Familias) had been my first graduate school professor in the 1960's -- and later a colleague and, for a year when he moved to this area, a houseguest before his family could follow him. Ah, such memories. I shared some of them with his youngest and her husband of maybe 20 years ... some of the last people on God's Good Earth to call me Howie. I told her about my first day in graduate school. I knocked on her Dad,


Prof. F's door.

"Dr. F ... I came to Buffalo to study Topological Lattices."

"You'd like to study. Good. I'm busy. Read this book and come back to discuss it before 830, tomorrow morning."

"Thank you."

I left his office and began walking down the hall and leafing through this pamphlet-sized volume ... no more than 100 pages. I was quicker in those days and, in spite of the anxiety of talking to this red-headed, blue-eyed Madman (of a truly Great Soul), I within less than five minutes realized that the author, Leopoldo Nachbin, had penned this gem in Portugese.

Pitter-Patter. Knock-knock. The young Doctoral student at the door cracked open by Dr. F stuttered out:

"But Dr. F ..."

"Whaddayawant?"

"Dr. F, the book is in Portugese!?"

Door slams and deep voice arises from within this Minotaur's Labrynth:

"DOES THIS KID WANNA BE A COMPLAINER 

OR A MATHEMATICIAN? 730 AM -- SHARP!"

I would soon have reason-enough not to argue with him. It was during that Winter in Buffalo, that walking on campus, the youngster suddenly found himself face down in a snow-drift -- victim of a flying tackle from his Professor who had little to say from above beyond a gruff: "Stay alert, Kid."

My Lord ... My Sweet Lord. Yesterday, we were both tearing up ... Old Men all seem to begin to tear-up more easily (maybe as soon as they read the numbers on their Social Security Checks). He was talking about one of his kid's long-time teacher ... a Pianist. She had died at 95+ and the family was still reeling from this loss of someone dear to the family for maybe 35 years. And talking of his kids (43-55 year old kids) would bring that wistful warmth to his eyes, as well.

Ach!

The guy who gave me my French Language Exam (Shit! I shoulda studied Portugese) in English was there, as well. I remember the day clearly. After reading Fleur du Mal for more than an hour in English, Dr. JC -- with a twinkle in his eye -- looked up and dismissed me with: "See. You know much more French than these Flatulent Brittany Cows in this Math Department." I passed.

I hadn't recognized Dr. JC until we were leaving the party. Alas.

Memories. The Fourth Quarter has lots of memories.

It was twenty years ago, just around December that I wrote some notes, the words of which returned to me, yesterday, at the party:

Witnesses

On the bottom of his closet,  like two soldiers they stood

A layer of dust demanded “You’ve seen these before”.

Witnesses for what he now couldn’t and once could

When he bought them.

Was it nineteen sixty four?

One at a time, he picked each up, turned it around,

“Look! The pattern on the toes is just the same,

The leather’s still good, the color still brown,

And inside

The author hadn’t changed his name.

Yet they spoke of different times and of a different man

Who wore them then more than a quarter century ago.

These shoes were now witnesses to god’s sinister plan,

That from vibrant forms,

Takes man and transforms him to Lore.

And now those same wing-tipped shoes are 50 years old. Nevermind Brittany Cow: Holy-cow!

With a nod to Drs. F & JC -- still among my heroes!

Masonry and Decisions

One helluva curious day. Some visitors to my office. A meeting with spiritual kinds of people. Four/five hours of working as a sort of stone mason .... carrying and mixing bags of cement ... ending with a path from my youngest's new office to the bathroom entrance. Showed my son-in-law with whom I've done many "projects" (calling them projects is like young Docs calling colonoscopies or cystoscopies "procedures" ... betimes, I'd like to "procedure" those youngins, m'self ... giv'em a little bit of their own medicine, aye!) with my philosopher son-in-law who arrived in the family with little appreciation for either the shear joyful madness of invention that comes along with "winging it" or a belief system that had a sufficiency of Faith that "projects" of this ilk might be complete. By the time the Last Quarter rolls around, one acts "as if" the only thing that can intrude on completion of the project is an unexpected myocardial infarction. Much still to do but the path Deo Volente (God Willing or Im Yirtzeh ha'Shem) is done.

By the way ... Did you know that with the percentage population boom from us Old Farts, there came the creation of the 60 pound bag .... less than 85-94 pound bags of mortar, concrete and Portland that twinged my back for its first three Quarters. It's as if some Marketing MBA knew that 60 pounds in the Fourth Q feels much like 85 pounds in the Second and Third.

All this having been said, I woke up, today, with a memory of some old guys and feeling, if not my age, then my back -- whatever! Yesterday was a good day.

Moments like these (liturgies, camaraderie, helping kids, cooking crazy-good stuff for Grand-spawn, playing with Portland Mud-pies, ...) take on new meanings in the Fourth Quarter. Woke up with this memory of walking in a retirement area with M, my Oldest, his wife and the youngest of the 3rd Gen
Spawn. They went in to an ice cream store and I sat down with a bunch of mostly guy-retirees. One made fun of me for still working.

"What y'waitin' for, Kid? 

For the Wheelchair, Walker and the Viagra?"

Get it while y'can." 

Cute, I thought. Members of my Generation of Fourth Quarterniks quote Janis Joplin or Freddy Mercury.

Another was sitting with his arm around two women, roughly his age.

"This is Tuesday and this Hot Lady is My Gal Friday."

Right! this time, I thought, cheekily. This guy has a hard time gettin' up from the bench never mind rising at playtime. Others bantered about where they came from ... apparently, most had arrived here from Chilly Toronto and were enjoying their new somewhat warmer playground and new and old playmates.

A third oldster looked less ebullient. He was without some one woman to play with. He was sitting right next to me; he had just broken up. He ashamedly whispered that his Lady had aged and now only wanted to sit at home in front of the Tube and he was thinking that Tube and Tomb could be pronounced the same by someone with even the slightest speech impediment.  Maybe they'd get back together but he doubted that his guilt would trump his wish to continue living. Who knows what Old People will do? (Watched an Old Episode of the Brit-Com "As Time Goes By" ... Lionel gets followed home by a Shaggy Dog and all fall in love with the Scruff.)

John and Yoko said it:

Christ, y'know it ain't easy,

You know how hard it can be,

The way things are goin',

They're gonna crucify me.

I guess we quote Lennon and Ono, too. (LOL)

Ach du lieber! Life, in every Quarter, has its tough decisions. The Young Docs likely have a pill for that, too.

A Waitress in a Donut Shop

Maria Muldaur sang and maybe wrote a song about a Waitress in a Donut Shop:  

I'm a waitress in the donut shop

I see him on his morning stop

He talks with a buddy speaking of his sweetheart
She gives him a rough time
He gives me his dime

And then parts

Soft sighs

Soft and pretty moans

In dreams I can make you my own

She gives him a rough time

He gives me his dime

And then parts

Truth be told, I don't know anything of the life of the waitress who served us. M had us 

looking in search of Indian Pudding ... a mix of cornmeal and molasses and milk, maybe 
.... but certainly a mixture of memories she keeps ... eating at a restaurant of her childhood when her Father and Grandfather were there to eat with her. We were in an old New England roadside diner that had shellac covered curved wooden ceilings and was populated mostly by Players in the Last Quarter. Across from us was a couple. He once was maybe 6'5" and 250 pounds .... Once a big guy. Now, he walked carefully with a  limp ... jeans and a heavy plaid shirt. She was thin ... maybe 75 years old and maybe too carefully dressed and coifed for this particular Greasy Spoon. They were taking care of each other.

The waitress? She was maybe half their age and said all the right things to that couple, 

to M and I, and to everyone else she served. She was not unattractive and maybe when 
younger was very much so. But it was not her shape that attracted my attention but the manner in which, after saying 'the right things,' her freundlich demeanor dropped and was replaced by a cold disinterest, as she moved to her next customer. 

What do I want from some poor lady trying to earn a living ... it must've been some time on an afternoon ... Maybe four days into our trip. Someone last week, an old friend, suggested that the waitress was suffering 'whiplash' .... she was being compared by me to the other waiters and waitresses that we had along our roadtrip. And I suppose my friend was right to point this out. Who says that our waitress had to measure up to some standard that I was establishing? She assuredly didn't. She was, to use my own 

language, a subject in her own right. I suppose so.

So, what is it that I want? wanted? not that I deserve or am entitled to for a $6 tip. But what do I want? I was, indeed, comparing her to a French Canadian Chocolatier who had served us coffee, tea, a scone and what appeared to us to be a genuine smile in her Inn in Southern Quebec.

Genuineness! Can a waitress in a donut shop offer up genuineness to dozens of 'easy overs' and burgers with and without fries day after leg-cramping day? And what is genuineness, anyway.

Many of the visitors to my office arrive asking something about how I'm doing ... I typically pause and think ... How am I feeling? Is it OK to answer honestly and genuinely and then to ask the same: "How are you?"

Are a psychotherapist and a waitress bound by the same rules of genuineness? And, if so, are we all? The day by day interactions ... the quotidian meetings in the supermarket, at the fish monger, walking to work in the morning and passing by another worker going off to work and watching the Fall leaves swoop across the street by a light morning wind ... is it possible we do, indeed, owe that other, that stranger, a genuine nod, a hello, a 
recognition that they're there.

There is a magical moment that parents get to witness at just about four months. Little Jane or Johnny suddenly recognizes that Mom or Dad and the infant not old enough to take a first step or put spoon to mouth knows that a space is being shared ... a moment when two people stand in the same moment of time. Some have called this the Mirroring Phase ... I, in my mind, call it the Yee-Hah phase ... The little one is so thrilled by this recognition of simultaneous presence that a Weeeeeeee sound or a Texas Yee-Hah is let loose.

I suppose for me ... Here, in the Fourth Quarter, it still means all for me to know that
another is willing to share space and time with me. That's what I ... M and I, I dare say, want ... nothing more .... To share a piece of space time on this crazy journey we all take ... mostly alone.

Nothing more.