The Scholars have spoken: SEX IS GOING TO CONTINUE.
As I fessed up a couple-days-back, I was to attend a meeting of scholars. "It was a cold, dank night" but still the circle filled. All the attending folk are interested in the complexities of being human. Average Age? Maybe 62 .... 13 Good Souls or so. Scholars. Couple a Third Quarter types bring the mean down with the Late Last Quarter folk to the beginning of the Fourth Quater when flowers still smelled sweet ... Hell! When I could still smell flowers. Really a very nice group of people who have thought deeply about these matters for many years, some more than others ... oh! and me. About half are MD's or DO's and the other half, if you include one writer, are health professionals with different Letter-Salads following their names. Not a lotta Dr. This ... Dr. That going on but maybe there's a pecking order anywy -- but, at least at the surface, first person and friendly-like.
I was not at the top of my game. A couple of hours prior to the meeting my heart decided to go out of rhythm. (BTW ... not all that dangerous ... the Atria of the Heart can flutter about quite a bit before an event has any significant chance of capturing your "freak flag" ... oh! .... and your humor.) It's funny how the brain interprets irregularities in the heart. It goes something like this.
When my heart is at its resting and rhythmic rate of 38-45 beats per minute, I'm calm and relaxed and pretty easy going. When it moves up to 80-100 because of exercise, it still feels pretty good. I can feel my heart beating: "I'm still alive, God ... thanks." When I leave rhythm and am moving willy-nilly from the 40's to 135 or 228 and back, again, without any particular pattern, my brain thinks there's something wrong. Maybe a tiger sneaking its head out of the jungle, a tiger who will soon will try to "dine with me" ... or, more to the point, "dine on me." Now, when a person is anxious or their brain gets the "Your heart's moving fast" signal of anxiety, lots of things change. The normal sweating and palpitations are there for getting the person ready for fight-or-flight ... Those parts of the brain that control Abstract Mathematics, Poetry, Near Vision, Memory, Sequencing, and Complex Thoughts, in general, take a nap. There's little point in either writing a poem for a preying Tiger nor of looking closely at his incisors just before he's to claw you and eat you. No. Those functions have learned to disconnect with anxiety and a-fib convinces the brain that it's anxious. Indeed, what the Armies of the world do in Basic Training is, at least in part, teach how not to shut off those protective higher functions and to permit some of that strategic thought even while fighting or running for your life.
All this was to say that when I'm in this state of mind that accompanies cardiac arrhythmias, "Good Comportment" is not likely the highest grade on my dance card ... or maybe I'm making an excuse for being Old! ... and last night was no exception.
We were all to have read this piece on the need for morality in the health care provider. Now, the author's notion of morality didn't include any prohibitions or compulsions, beyond the usual ... that in my thinking, reduced to "We don't make love and we don't make war." Years ago, a colleague had suggested a simpler version: "We do what we say we were going to do." This particular author that we were reading suggested that morality centered on a capacity to see the other -- say, the patient -- as a person in their own right ... Martin Buber had called this an Ich-Du ... I-Thou relationship to separate it from treating the other as an It (an Ich-Es relationship in Buber's German).
I would have thought that all this that the author was borrowing (while appropriately citing) from Buber would've been thoroughly uncontroversial. I woulda been wrong.
Do I think human folk can revel in the elegant ideas of another one of our tribe? I used to think that. This morning I bounce back and forth from hopeful playfulness with this simple idea and disquieting disappointments that even those who are professionals at this Psyche game have a difficult time listening to each other.
Or maybe, I'm just an Old Man who finds it hard to be satisfied and sits on a chair near his stoop shaking his cane and kvetching at the same time.
And what does this have to do with Sex and Aggression?
For that? ... our next episode of Old Guy Kvetching .....
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Sex, Sex, Sex, More Sex and Aggression
I seem to have been surrounded, this past weekend, by Sex and Aggression. Walking in and out of a room, last night, while the Grammy Music Awards was showing, most of the performers looked "pretty and hot," their lyrics were "if not pretty then hot," and the sets for these performances were "either hot or ejaculatory" (with explosions going off like fireworks on the Fourth of July.)
When I wasn't trying to catch some lyrics that my Fourth Quarter brain couldn't process and my ears couldn't quite make out, I was reading a friend's writing on sexual morality among health care providers and clergy-folk. He made it sound rather simple ... too simple for me. He could imagine having "the hots" for a patient but, with a sense of morality and a sense of the Other as "a subject in their own right" (an expression we've both used in our writings for quite some time), he could never act on it. He was largely arguing from Martin Buber's position on the difference between I-It and I-Thou forms of relating. In the former, the Other is an Object who, at least for the moment, is little else than the thing through which gratification is achieved. In the latter, the Other is, to use the phrase again, a subject in their own right.
Then there was last week. Visitors to my office had referred to "Birthday sex," "Anniversary sex," "Buddy sex," and "Decrease the anxiety sex." Sex, Sex, Sex and More Sex.
By the time someone reaches the Last Quarter, they've likely had sex between 3,000 and 4,000 times, not counting multiple orgasms and -- what to say? -- solo horizontal aerobics. I'm relatively confident in my belief that even our most acclaimed artists fail to produce that many great works of art and that much sex fails the Grammies criterion of loud music, wild lyrics and flames shooting out of all corners of the stage.
I remember living in New Hampshire 40 years ago during the Winter of 1973-1974, the Winter of OPEC's discontent. It was freezing and the Heating Oil wasn't refined enough to keep furnaces burning. I don't recall whether "the Sex was Up" or "Down" that Winter, though I have clear recollections that M and I and the Kids not infrequently slept in our goose-down coats and Kazimierza Kuratowski the Saint Bernard often slept between us ... not certain whether she was there to be kept warm or to warm.
I don;'t recall any longer whether I was present in this particular Bar-Lounge or was the recipient of a Bar-room tale told by someone else. Any case ... At the bar were seated two youngish men, sitting and drinking, together ... and an old Geezer nearby drinking alone. The young guys were describing their sexual exploits. "The Sun, the Moon, the Moving Heaven and Earth" talk went on ... and on ... and on. The Old Guy finally turned to them: "You young whipper-snappers ain't got nothin'. When I fuck there are sparks." Of course, it's not clear that for any of these three men, sex was more than expressions of aggression and the need for tension reduction. Who knows? Maybe they were the last of the great hot lovers?
Anyway. Old sex? Young sex? I don't know. Ask Masters and Johnson! For me the question is far more what we humans are looking for in the sack, against the tree or on the pool table. I didn't -- I might add -- get the answer from my friends' writing. A bunch of folk in a reading group are getting together tomorrow night ... mostly Old Farts from the Last Quarter ... to discuss these writings. I'll get back when the scholars have spoken.
Meantime? As the Capitol Steps used to say: "Keep yer Bousers Truckled" ... or not.
When I wasn't trying to catch some lyrics that my Fourth Quarter brain couldn't process and my ears couldn't quite make out, I was reading a friend's writing on sexual morality among health care providers and clergy-folk. He made it sound rather simple ... too simple for me. He could imagine having "the hots" for a patient but, with a sense of morality and a sense of the Other as "a subject in their own right" (an expression we've both used in our writings for quite some time), he could never act on it. He was largely arguing from Martin Buber's position on the difference between I-It and I-Thou forms of relating. In the former, the Other is an Object who, at least for the moment, is little else than the thing through which gratification is achieved. In the latter, the Other is, to use the phrase again, a subject in their own right.
Then there was last week. Visitors to my office had referred to "Birthday sex," "Anniversary sex," "Buddy sex," and "Decrease the anxiety sex." Sex, Sex, Sex and More Sex.
By the time someone reaches the Last Quarter, they've likely had sex between 3,000 and 4,000 times, not counting multiple orgasms and -- what to say? -- solo horizontal aerobics. I'm relatively confident in my belief that even our most acclaimed artists fail to produce that many great works of art and that much sex fails the Grammies criterion of loud music, wild lyrics and flames shooting out of all corners of the stage.
I remember living in New Hampshire 40 years ago during the Winter of 1973-1974, the Winter of OPEC's discontent. It was freezing and the Heating Oil wasn't refined enough to keep furnaces burning. I don't recall whether "the Sex was Up" or "Down" that Winter, though I have clear recollections that M and I and the Kids not infrequently slept in our goose-down coats and Kazimierza Kuratowski the Saint Bernard often slept between us ... not certain whether she was there to be kept warm or to warm.
I don;'t recall any longer whether I was present in this particular Bar-Lounge or was the recipient of a Bar-room tale told by someone else. Any case ... At the bar were seated two youngish men, sitting and drinking, together ... and an old Geezer nearby drinking alone. The young guys were describing their sexual exploits. "The Sun, the Moon, the Moving Heaven and Earth" talk went on ... and on ... and on. The Old Guy finally turned to them: "You young whipper-snappers ain't got nothin'. When I fuck there are sparks." Of course, it's not clear that for any of these three men, sex was more than expressions of aggression and the need for tension reduction. Who knows? Maybe they were the last of the great hot lovers?
Anyway. Old sex? Young sex? I don't know. Ask Masters and Johnson! For me the question is far more what we humans are looking for in the sack, against the tree or on the pool table. I didn't -- I might add -- get the answer from my friends' writing. A bunch of folk in a reading group are getting together tomorrow night ... mostly Old Farts from the Last Quarter ... to discuss these writings. I'll get back when the scholars have spoken.
Meantime? As the Capitol Steps used to say: "Keep yer Bousers Truckled" ... or not.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
So, I Had a Dream
There are cultures in which the Shamans divide "little Dreams" from "BIG Dreams." I had what I would describe as a little one ... a very little one ... and that following the day that Woody Allen's 100 year old analyst (from Crimes and Misdemeanors and from behind the couch), Marty Bergmann, finally passed on. Will dream analysis ever be the same?
In the Dream, I was doing a "Soup Clinic" .... teaching people how to think of soup. This, in and of itself, in my family might be a source of amusement -- yielding laughter. It's my firstborn who is the one in the family with a flair for cuisine ... haute and otherwise. When he was a youngster -- c. 35 years ago -- a family friend gave him the gift of cooking lessons with a local Chef who drove a big Mercedes and spoke with a heavy German accent ... just heavy enough to overuse cream and have some local TV shows. Since then, Firstborn has mercilessly criticized his father's soups ... in the large? accusing his Papa of allowing, on occasion, soups to wander beyond a simmer into a boil. Now, I'm getting hot! "A boil on his head for accusing his Dear Ole Dad of such wanton sins and misdeeds."
But back at the Dream. Apparently, I had accepted the Gospel of the Firstborn and was warning the people I had been describing from the Grocery Store (see past 3 or 4 postings) of the near-Mortal Sin of Boiling Soup. It was, let me add, not a pretty scene. Firstly, Firstborn was off in the wings (was this being televised?) looking unappreciatively and disapprovingly of Il Papa's techniques. Not saying a word but with that look on his face ... as if to say: "you MUST be kidding."
Buffy and Burton were asking why I didn't have bottles full of Saffron. "We have bottles of Saffron ... full bottles." And then there were the dissatisfied and the unhappy. One was scowling and the other was demanding that I repeat everything ... repeatedly. I woulda called a manager ... Oh! but we really weren't in a Grocery Store!
Me? I was explaining that the most important two things to do with soup were, after vowing to never allow a soup to boil:
A. Pre-panfry any vegetables -- only fresh! -- that are to enter the sacred soup pot.
B. After the panfrying of vegetables is complete, carefully ... CAREFULLY .... with a wooden spoon of curved wooden spatula remove every bit of the cooked vegetables and guarantee their delivery into the pot. Nothing ... lemme repeat ... NOTHING may remain in the frypan.
Then, I left explaining that my Prep-Chef would "close" and pointing to Firsatborn.
The dream ended with all participants complaining by gesture or word that that Ole Man was using equal amounts of dried peas, barley and rice, destroying the flavor of each.
I woke up in a sweat with an impatiently disgruntled GuntherDog waiting to be escorted downstairs for his morning toillette.
And this nightmare? this occurred after the three dining grandspawn all seemed to be thrilled with not only my vegan pesto to satisfy their little vegetarian personnas, but with my cassoulet, kugel, and fruit compote, to boot.
I can only imagine the Dream that might have followed rejection of my cuisine.
How DID Julia Child sign off!?
In the Dream, I was doing a "Soup Clinic" .... teaching people how to think of soup. This, in and of itself, in my family might be a source of amusement -- yielding laughter. It's my firstborn who is the one in the family with a flair for cuisine ... haute and otherwise. When he was a youngster -- c. 35 years ago -- a family friend gave him the gift of cooking lessons with a local Chef who drove a big Mercedes and spoke with a heavy German accent ... just heavy enough to overuse cream and have some local TV shows. Since then, Firstborn has mercilessly criticized his father's soups ... in the large? accusing his Papa of allowing, on occasion, soups to wander beyond a simmer into a boil. Now, I'm getting hot! "A boil on his head for accusing his Dear Ole Dad of such wanton sins and misdeeds."
But back at the Dream. Apparently, I had accepted the Gospel of the Firstborn and was warning the people I had been describing from the Grocery Store (see past 3 or 4 postings) of the near-Mortal Sin of Boiling Soup. It was, let me add, not a pretty scene. Firstly, Firstborn was off in the wings (was this being televised?) looking unappreciatively and disapprovingly of Il Papa's techniques. Not saying a word but with that look on his face ... as if to say: "you MUST be kidding."
Buffy and Burton were asking why I didn't have bottles full of Saffron. "We have bottles of Saffron ... full bottles." And then there were the dissatisfied and the unhappy. One was scowling and the other was demanding that I repeat everything ... repeatedly. I woulda called a manager ... Oh! but we really weren't in a Grocery Store!
Me? I was explaining that the most important two things to do with soup were, after vowing to never allow a soup to boil:
A. Pre-panfry any vegetables -- only fresh! -- that are to enter the sacred soup pot.
B. After the panfrying of vegetables is complete, carefully ... CAREFULLY .... with a wooden spoon of curved wooden spatula remove every bit of the cooked vegetables and guarantee their delivery into the pot. Nothing ... lemme repeat ... NOTHING may remain in the frypan.
Then, I left explaining that my Prep-Chef would "close" and pointing to Firsatborn.
The dream ended with all participants complaining by gesture or word that that Ole Man was using equal amounts of dried peas, barley and rice, destroying the flavor of each.
I woke up in a sweat with an impatiently disgruntled GuntherDog waiting to be escorted downstairs for his morning toillette.
And this nightmare? this occurred after the three dining grandspawn all seemed to be thrilled with not only my vegan pesto to satisfy their little vegetarian personnas, but with my cassoulet, kugel, and fruit compote, to boot.
I can only imagine the Dream that might have followed rejection of my cuisine.
How DID Julia Child sign off!?
Friday, January 24, 2014
Before his icy cold, who can stand?
Psalms 147 "He tosses his snow about like fleece-wool ... Frost like ashes .. Ice like
little crumbs .... Before his icy cold, who can stand?"
I was writing about that guy in the woolen coat with his black beret pulled down over his ears ... yeah! The guy who can still shake his walking stick and kvetch at the same time. Sleep didn't come easy in the creaky old man's creaky old house and it didn't last. Sleep irregularities seem to be common in the Last Quarter and when the clock turned 4 AM and he could feel irregularities in his cardiac rhythm which bode poorly for continued sleep, he arose. Like Phoenix of his Ash-es ... (couldn't resists).
At least three grandspawn were to arrive after I was done with my visitors, today, and they needed to eat. 4 AM is as good a time as any to cook, especially when atrial fibrillation is doing its things ... one of which is making it hard to think.
So, just happens to be that this is the same guy ... walking in the aisles (hey! any of you Second Quarter types, try feeling for that peripatetic old man ambling with a slightly lost look in his eyes down -- or was it up -- aisle 4 in the Grocery Section. This is the same guy in his not-very-updated kitchen. No tiles sent through Prague. No Convcave Convex ovens ... no ice box big enough for the inlaws who are gone already, anyway.
Just me and what to cook. It's freezing cold? Ah, a cassoulet (Cholent, if you're from Minsk) to warm the two tweens, the adolescent and their parents. They're hungry? A potato, carrot, spinach, onion pudding (Kugel, if you're from Pinsk). Oh! And some hot cranberry, apple, lemon, orange, raisin compote (mashed hot fruit if yer from Selma, Alabama). Goes well with Vanilla Ice Cream for dessert.
Anyhow. As the Old Guy is standing and doing this and that (what did I forget? what should I add? What was my address in Toledo in 1957?), I was noticing how I made a point of completely emptying every sauce pan and dish that was to go into the final mix. Was I a parsimonious, skin-flinty kinda guy who needed to make certain I was getting every last potato-shred into the oven?
Any case? A memory came. There were some Wiseguys ... Scholars ... who live about 2,000 years ago. Their colleagues called them the Ten Waistrels or Time Wasters. They talked and disputed and studied all day. One of their ruminations came to mind, as, perhaps, a result of my thinking about Psalms at 4:00. They were trying to reconcile two passages.
"To God belongs the Earth and all that it contains."
and
"The Heavens? The Heavens are for God. The Earth (S)He gave to the Children of Mankind."
These scholars tended to get nervous ... freak out, if passages in the canonized Scriptures couldn't be reconciled. One of them had an aha moment.
"The first? the first is before making a blessing. The second? after making a blessing."
Ah, so I got it for the Old Guy, too. The first passage is before I totally scrape everything into the final mix ... and the second? you got the second.
Timer is about to go off on kugel.
Bye.... we'll eat at 6:00 in this Icy Northeast Corridor.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Old Man -- Shaking a Stick
Thinking of renaming the Blog ... Old Man Shaking a Stick and Kvetching, at same time.
Beats "Chewing Gum!"
Beats "Chewing Gum!"
Uniquely 21st Century
Well, maybe not.
I'm thinking of those folk who are cloaked in 'the beautiful' -- even when shopping. It's been cold, here, in the Northeastern United States. Oh, and as I've aged, I do wear a coat in the Winter and a hat pulled over my ears. When M and I moved to Philadelphia with our older kids in 1974 from a cold valley in the shadow of New Hampshire's Mt. Monadnock, coats seemed irrelevant ... and hats? who needed a hat? I had a full head of hair and a Thyroid Gland that kept my hair growing and my body-heater fired-up, all the time.
But Thyroids age with the rest of Last Quarter functions and hats and coats are the order of the day. And so the Old Guy walking in the Produce section has on a heavy woolen coat and a black beret pulled down over his chilly ears.
And there they are as big as life ... Burton and Buffy sniffing the organic cucumbers ... and sniffing in my direction, as well. OK, guys, it snowed 13" last night and I have visitors who come to my office beginning as early as 600 in the morning. I haven't been able to find anyone crazy enough to come and clean my walks at 500 and -- get a life -- SHOVEL does come before SHOWER in the dictionary." B & B still hog the aisles and look at me as if I needed to buy my veggies at the Soup Kitchen and 'Buck-up, Boy, and get yourself a proper hat or go back to Brooklyn or to some backwater town in New Hampshire!'
Maybe if I was younger, it wouldn't get at me. I don't know Burton and Buffy but I have had a repeating experience since this Century began. I'm picking up a colleague ... Maybe going to a meeting. "C'mon in for a minute, I wanna show you something." It sounds safe enough with the homey language ... 'c'mon right on in.' Maybe they're 'gonna' show me something they're working on or offer me a beer. (Well, I don't drink beer or other alcohol, as it tends to get my heart out of it's normal rhythm ... But, still.)
No. It's just about always the kitchen. Refrigerators big enough to keep the in-laws fresh for their 80th anniversary party and enough burners on the cook-top to cater the affair in-house. The tiles are imported from Prague and the countertops passed through Tuscany on their way to the suburbs. The ovens, need I say, are big enough to roast an Ostrich and sufficiently convective to do so in 35 minutes. And sometime before we go to the the meeting with boxed chicken salad sandwiches, the figure $125,000 is snuck into the conversation.
Need I add the most fascinating detail: it's possible that the kitchen has not yet been launched by use!
But Thyroids age with the rest of Last Quarter functions and hats and coats are the order of the day. And so the Old Guy walking in the Produce section has on a heavy woolen coat and a black beret pulled down over his chilly ears.
And there they are as big as life ... Burton and Buffy sniffing the organic cucumbers ... and sniffing in my direction, as well. OK, guys, it snowed 13" last night and I have visitors who come to my office beginning as early as 600 in the morning. I haven't been able to find anyone crazy enough to come and clean my walks at 500 and -- get a life -- SHOVEL does come before SHOWER in the dictionary." B & B still hog the aisles and look at me as if I needed to buy my veggies at the Soup Kitchen and 'Buck-up, Boy, and get yourself a proper hat or go back to Brooklyn or to some backwater town in New Hampshire!'
Maybe if I was younger, it wouldn't get at me. I don't know Burton and Buffy but I have had a repeating experience since this Century began. I'm picking up a colleague ... Maybe going to a meeting. "C'mon in for a minute, I wanna show you something." It sounds safe enough with the homey language ... 'c'mon right on in.' Maybe they're 'gonna' show me something they're working on or offer me a beer. (Well, I don't drink beer or other alcohol, as it tends to get my heart out of it's normal rhythm ... But, still.)
No. It's just about always the kitchen. Refrigerators big enough to keep the in-laws fresh for their 80th anniversary party and enough burners on the cook-top to cater the affair in-house. The tiles are imported from Prague and the countertops passed through Tuscany on their way to the suburbs. The ovens, need I say, are big enough to roast an Ostrich and sufficiently convective to do so in 35 minutes. And sometime before we go to the the meeting with boxed chicken salad sandwiches, the figure $125,000 is snuck into the conversation.
Need I add the most fascinating detail: it's possible that the kitchen has not yet been launched by use!
Monday, January 20, 2014
Grocery Types (take 3)
Got your running shoes on? If the type that finds no good in the aisles and is critical of every gift his or her god gave them is off-putting, there is another from whom you should run before asking questions. This person, male or female, has a hook that runs sharp and deep and needs major provisions in an almost continuous way.
"Can you help me find the canned tomatoes?"
"I think they're over there."
"Could you show me."
"You bet."
"Are they any good. I don't know. The picture on the can shows pale tomatoes."
"Well, lemme see if I can find the better ones."
"They look expensive."
Yes. That's too late to begin running. These people are -- in a broad sense -- healthy, if healthy means knowing how to get out of the World what they want or need and have never received. Indeed, the impression they give you is that you have what they need at this very moment. Trouble is? You don't ... they're insatiable ... Oh ... and your needs don't count.
"Oh! And where's that good fresh pasta? Could you find that for me, too? I'd really appreciate it."
Laura Nyro had a lyric: "Run, run, run, like a son-of-a-gun." I'm being callous, aren't I? Well, yes. These people have never experienced emotional satisfaction. Maybe their parents were profoundly depriving .,, but chances are pretty good that it wasn't the tomatoes that were held back; once the tomato problem is resolved, what to serve with them is near at hand.
By the time you become a denizen of the Fourth Quarter, you might hope that you'd figure out what the Good Life was all about ... what the healthy individual looks like ... how the well community behaves. Some time ago, I thought it was sufficient for the healthy person to be one who appreciates and even cherishes the inner world of another. For that person, I imagined and wrote about it quite a bit, every two person relationship includes that cherishing of the Other's Others and Wishes and Beliefs. Unfortunately, that kind of person is easy prey for the tomato and pasta bandit who by now has you answering questions, mopping floors, and bending down to suck the dirt from between their toes. In their insatiable hunger, by the way, these folk do, indeed, feel they deserve what it is that they're asking for ... but will never be filled or satisfied.
"Run, run, run, like a son-of-a-gun."
"Can you help me find the canned tomatoes?"
"I think they're over there."
"Could you show me."
"You bet."
"Are they any good. I don't know. The picture on the can shows pale tomatoes."
"Well, lemme see if I can find the better ones."
"They look expensive."
Yes. That's too late to begin running. These people are -- in a broad sense -- healthy, if healthy means knowing how to get out of the World what they want or need and have never received. Indeed, the impression they give you is that you have what they need at this very moment. Trouble is? You don't ... they're insatiable ... Oh ... and your needs don't count.
"Oh! And where's that good fresh pasta? Could you find that for me, too? I'd really appreciate it."
Laura Nyro had a lyric: "Run, run, run, like a son-of-a-gun." I'm being callous, aren't I? Well, yes. These people have never experienced emotional satisfaction. Maybe their parents were profoundly depriving .,, but chances are pretty good that it wasn't the tomatoes that were held back; once the tomato problem is resolved, what to serve with them is near at hand.
By the time you become a denizen of the Fourth Quarter, you might hope that you'd figure out what the Good Life was all about ... what the healthy individual looks like ... how the well community behaves. Some time ago, I thought it was sufficient for the healthy person to be one who appreciates and even cherishes the inner world of another. For that person, I imagined and wrote about it quite a bit, every two person relationship includes that cherishing of the Other's Others and Wishes and Beliefs. Unfortunately, that kind of person is easy prey for the tomato and pasta bandit who by now has you answering questions, mopping floors, and bending down to suck the dirt from between their toes. In their insatiable hunger, by the way, these folk do, indeed, feel they deserve what it is that they're asking for ... but will never be filled or satisfied.
"Run, run, run, like a son-of-a-gun."
Grocery Types ... (Take 2)-
There's the person walking up and down the frozen food or produce aisles who is neither amused nor having a good time. The look on their faces is sour, as if they had just mistakenly eaten by mistake that Green Sour Cream in the back of the fridge since Obama had dark hair. Best, by the way, not to initiate conversation with them -- just in case they've recently sharpened their incisors.
At least some of these people are from the Sub-tribe of Clan Anthropos that hates not only the living but life, itself. We give the word "living" to those things that change in relatively short amounts of time. People, Animals, Plants, ..., maybe even Rivers and their Beds. Living things are forever in a state of flux ... they seem to never stand still. I can plan on where to place a rock in a garden ... not so easy to decide where Raspberry Bushes should grow, nevermind the vines that grow wherever they want, pretty much.
These people hate surprises. If the Grocer changes the placement of their Bran Flakes or Prune Juice (especially, if they're Last Quarter types), they'd rather go or not go without rather than seek out the new secret shelf on Aisle D. Change your mind about when you'd like to meet for coffee? "No thanks. Let's just forget it." These, curiously, are often people who fear and hate death but are, in many ways, drawn to the inert ... to the dead. Change is unacceptable and their ideas are rigidly caught in a lock-step march. They are the most dogmatic of students.
I remember a magical moment in 1969 from one of my previous incarnations. I was teaching -- of all things -- a university course in Mathematics. When I got to something or other which is now lost in History, a student raised his hand and said: "But my last teacher told me to do it this other way." Fair enough! I gave him an example where that "remembered" method yields an unacceptable answer ... unacceptable? because it was obviously wrong. (nasally) "But my other teacher ...." After the fourth or fifth plaint that even though his present teacher's method yielded an answer he recognized to be correct and his last teacher's method gave the wrong answer, still and all: "But my last teacher ...." ... After all that, I looked him in his eye and said, as only a young professor can: "And your Mother told you she was a virgin."
It's quite amazing but -- in a flash -- I found myself transported to the Dean's Office being asked to explain myself. The Dean was not amused (maybe he was one of the life-haters) when I admitted to him: "Well. True enough. I didn't rightly know whether he was adopted." I don't imagine that I had much impact on the student or the Dean but I did learn that resurrection of the dead was no easy task.
I'll leave it for anyone reading to imagine how these folk could rain on Robin Williams' birthday party ... but they can. Death is all around them and any form of spontaneity in thinking or acting will get them pissed off.
Beware!
At least some of these people are from the Sub-tribe of Clan Anthropos that hates not only the living but life, itself. We give the word "living" to those things that change in relatively short amounts of time. People, Animals, Plants, ..., maybe even Rivers and their Beds. Living things are forever in a state of flux ... they seem to never stand still. I can plan on where to place a rock in a garden ... not so easy to decide where Raspberry Bushes should grow, nevermind the vines that grow wherever they want, pretty much.
These people hate surprises. If the Grocer changes the placement of their Bran Flakes or Prune Juice (especially, if they're Last Quarter types), they'd rather go or not go without rather than seek out the new secret shelf on Aisle D. Change your mind about when you'd like to meet for coffee? "No thanks. Let's just forget it." These, curiously, are often people who fear and hate death but are, in many ways, drawn to the inert ... to the dead. Change is unacceptable and their ideas are rigidly caught in a lock-step march. They are the most dogmatic of students.
I remember a magical moment in 1969 from one of my previous incarnations. I was teaching -- of all things -- a university course in Mathematics. When I got to something or other which is now lost in History, a student raised his hand and said: "But my last teacher told me to do it this other way." Fair enough! I gave him an example where that "remembered" method yields an unacceptable answer ... unacceptable? because it was obviously wrong. (nasally) "But my other teacher ...." After the fourth or fifth plaint that even though his present teacher's method yielded an answer he recognized to be correct and his last teacher's method gave the wrong answer, still and all: "But my last teacher ...." ... After all that, I looked him in his eye and said, as only a young professor can: "And your Mother told you she was a virgin."
It's quite amazing but -- in a flash -- I found myself transported to the Dean's Office being asked to explain myself. The Dean was not amused (maybe he was one of the life-haters) when I admitted to him: "Well. True enough. I didn't rightly know whether he was adopted." I don't imagine that I had much impact on the student or the Dean but I did learn that resurrection of the dead was no easy task.
I'll leave it for anyone reading to imagine how these folk could rain on Robin Williams' birthday party ... but they can. Death is all around them and any form of spontaneity in thinking or acting will get them pissed off.
Beware!
Sunday, January 19, 2014
The People You Meet at the Grocery Store ...( Part One of a Week's Worth)
The People you meet, there, and in your home, office, school and on the street.
Maybe not a Coalition? but Rainbowed.
I woke up twice, today. The first time the clock read 1:12 and my eyes saw 7:12. Each time I got out of bed, I was aware of dreams with problematic (to me!) people. 2,000 years ago, a Babylonian writer compared a dream uninterpreted to a letter unopened. Not the experience I have. I recall some dreams completely and some dreams I retain but shards ... pieces from times long gone, maybe, or are they too frightening to recall. I'll leave it for those who voice: "I need to know" or "I do know." Oh! I don't get caught up in whether I'm really here and typing (is this still called typing) letters to describe personalities as I take them in.
In my neighborhood growing up ... I can think of at least half a dozen ways of parsing knowledge:
Today's Sunday ... Yesterday was Saturday and I seemed to run into most of these types, and assuredly others. One was someone I hadn't seen in a long time who visited with her kids. Nothing was so important that he had to be fought against .... everything was open to consideration. Damn ... Room to breathe.
One misunderstood online how I was describing the previous interaction, thinking that I said that there had been some kind of discomfort that had been healed by the meeting. I explained that that was not the case and that perhaps I'd been less than clear in my description, she heard me and that was all good.
Funny. I have been in an ongoing discussion about my curious style of communicating. I don't like talking in a manner that breaches someone's confidentiality rights in public, even if they agree to it. I find it haughty and grandiose to criticize ("That was no good") or compliment ("That was great"), even about something so everyday and quotidian as food or a haircut or sweater or idea. I tend not to think that inside the sentence "I think you're a schmuck" the real emphasis is on "I think." I don't mind saying: "I don't like you" and have said it.
I remember when our kids were young, there was a psychologist (Ginott?) who wrote a book, advising people to criticize their child's behavior rather than their child. I'm cool with that, providing ... providing that the speaker isn't caught up in believing they have the absolute authority to judge the behavior. I have tried to train myself to report on how I feel in the presence of the behavior. "I don't seem to be able to get a word in and it makes me anxious and sad" as opposed to "I experience your verbal pragmatics as intrusive and self-preoccupied." Maybe, there's no difference. Who knows? Not me.
I do sense that the older I get, the deeper into the Last Quarter, the less I appreciate the knowers of the world ... tho, I have no doubt that I may betimes come across to some as "knowing." The Mother who visited me yesterday seems to intuitively sense that the best she could do with her kids was steer them ... kinda the way you steer a 5,000 pound 1966 Pontiac Bonneville. And when one was sad, she could pick the little one up and hold her.
Maybe not a Coalition? but Rainbowed.
I woke up twice, today. The first time the clock read 1:12 and my eyes saw 7:12. Each time I got out of bed, I was aware of dreams with problematic (to me!) people. 2,000 years ago, a Babylonian writer compared a dream uninterpreted to a letter unopened. Not the experience I have. I recall some dreams completely and some dreams I retain but shards ... pieces from times long gone, maybe, or are they too frightening to recall. I'll leave it for those who voice: "I need to know" or "I do know." Oh! I don't get caught up in whether I'm really here and typing (is this still called typing) letters to describe personalities as I take them in.
In my neighborhood growing up ... I can think of at least half a dozen ways of parsing knowledge:
- For some the emphasis was on the power of the I. There were parents, for instance -- mostly men but women, somewhat less often, who would offer: I and You both know it because I say it and I'm in charge." or "While you're under my roof" or "Because I say so."
- There was a similar type who didn't feel the tension between what they said and what you said, as they seamlessly recoiled from whatever you said ... as if it didn't exist.
- There were those who would retaliate or runoff when losing.
- I had great difficulty with those who would imagine that I or another was disagreeing just to be disagreeable.
- That type had another related types that presented themselves as victims in a disagreement. They would either angrily cry (not the come-hither-be-with-me-I'm-lonely-and-sad cry) or seek rageful retaliation. But they always thought themselves the aggrieved party -- winning? or losing?
- There was a small minority of folk who eschewed the acceptance of anything as incontrovertible knowledge. And they fell into two types: (1) Those who saw all knowing and/or belief as hopelessly valueless; and (2) Those with whom I strongly identified who felt strongly about their own thought-out and received beliefs but realized that others felt the same about their beliefs. Those, I called "skeptics." I know the term has been co-opted for questions of the existence of the Divine, but I think it applies outside that context.
- There were also those who like an abusive spouse repeatedly fought tooth and nail and then made up, only to do it again and again. I remember a Hilda, I think her name was, daughter of refugees, who would beat you up and then say how sorry she was. I always wondered what went on in her home that set this serial attack-apology-attack cycle in motion.
Today's Sunday ... Yesterday was Saturday and I seemed to run into most of these types, and assuredly others. One was someone I hadn't seen in a long time who visited with her kids. Nothing was so important that he had to be fought against .... everything was open to consideration. Damn ... Room to breathe.
One misunderstood online how I was describing the previous interaction, thinking that I said that there had been some kind of discomfort that had been healed by the meeting. I explained that that was not the case and that perhaps I'd been less than clear in my description, she heard me and that was all good.
Funny. I have been in an ongoing discussion about my curious style of communicating. I don't like talking in a manner that breaches someone's confidentiality rights in public, even if they agree to it. I find it haughty and grandiose to criticize ("That was no good") or compliment ("That was great"), even about something so everyday and quotidian as food or a haircut or sweater or idea. I tend not to think that inside the sentence "I think you're a schmuck" the real emphasis is on "I think." I don't mind saying: "I don't like you" and have said it.
I remember when our kids were young, there was a psychologist (Ginott?) who wrote a book, advising people to criticize their child's behavior rather than their child. I'm cool with that, providing ... providing that the speaker isn't caught up in believing they have the absolute authority to judge the behavior. I have tried to train myself to report on how I feel in the presence of the behavior. "I don't seem to be able to get a word in and it makes me anxious and sad" as opposed to "I experience your verbal pragmatics as intrusive and self-preoccupied." Maybe, there's no difference. Who knows? Not me.
I do sense that the older I get, the deeper into the Last Quarter, the less I appreciate the knowers of the world ... tho, I have no doubt that I may betimes come across to some as "knowing." The Mother who visited me yesterday seems to intuitively sense that the best she could do with her kids was steer them ... kinda the way you steer a 5,000 pound 1966 Pontiac Bonneville. And when one was sad, she could pick the little one up and hold her.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Bridled Optimism
I do think of myself as an optimist ... a realistic optimist. I have faith in a future for myself, for M, and for our progeny. I tend to live with a presumption of good intentions ... that is, I use as a default position -- until disproved -- that whomever I'm doing commerce with -- be it emotional, relational or economic commerce
-- is acting in good faith and dancing both as well and as fast as they can
I do have my days, though, when:
Deception. Alas, I deceive, as well. Maybe not suffering a fool is not such a bad thing, even though I hesitate to tell people publicly what I think of them. I do think of myself as a Southern Frank ... not one of those Northern Europeans, THE Franks, who invaded when I wasn't paying attention in World History classes .... no, I'm one of those Southern Merry Franksters from So. Brooklyn (aka Coney Island) who tend to speak their minds ... street kids ... gutter snipes who are not likely to hold their tongues, at least not for long. I do battle with that propensity to tell people what I really think of the ... again, in public. Someone once said: It is preferred to cast oneself into the fiery furnace than to embarasss a friend before many.
I'll offer-up an example of my deception. It was about 35 years ago. A man who would come for consultation with me was angered by something or other that I no longer recall. I know that I can be edgy and when I heard he had gone to Dr. Bob (I can give his first name as he's long-gone to a different place to practice psychiatry on God's angels), I was pleased that he was seeking counsel from someone, even if it was Bob.
Bob and I had been part of a study group that met for years in a locked conference room on a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital. When Bob would show up late, it became common for no one to unlock the door (with its blinds pulled down) in order to let him in. Bob. Bob was both an MD and a DO but was also a TS (total schmuck), even if in many other ways he was a sweet old guy.
Bob called and made some absurd recommendation about how I might handle this fellow should he ever return for further consultation. So, there I was on the phone. I saw no gain for anyone in offending Bob or telling him that he was a TS -- I suspect he knew ... TS's can be very bright. I was caught up in my thoughts of what a schmuck he was and at a loss about what to say until I recognized that I was, indeed, full of a great many thoughts.
Ahah! I said to him in the quietest of tones: "Thanks, Bob. You've given me a great deal to think about."
Hey, that wasn't entertainment ... that was deception.
************************************
So, Howard, remember: Deception can be the Best Part of Valor!
-- is acting in good faith and dancing both as well and as fast as they can
I do have my days, though, when:
- humanity, in general, seems like an experiment doomed to failure. On those days, I worry that speech and language, in general, is good for nothing but misrepresenting reality ... good for little else than telling lies;
- people speak so quickly so that they cannot be questioned as they proceed towards a conclusion, especially not to be heard by Players in the Last Quarter whose processing skills are slowed; and
- people tend to rationalize and explain (rather than explore) all kinds of snarky interactions with each other.
Deception. Alas, I deceive, as well. Maybe not suffering a fool is not such a bad thing, even though I hesitate to tell people publicly what I think of them. I do think of myself as a Southern Frank ... not one of those Northern Europeans, THE Franks, who invaded when I wasn't paying attention in World History classes .... no, I'm one of those Southern Merry Franksters from So. Brooklyn (aka Coney Island) who tend to speak their minds ... street kids ... gutter snipes who are not likely to hold their tongues, at least not for long. I do battle with that propensity to tell people what I really think of the ... again, in public. Someone once said: It is preferred to cast oneself into the fiery furnace than to embarasss a friend before many.
I'll offer-up an example of my deception. It was about 35 years ago. A man who would come for consultation with me was angered by something or other that I no longer recall. I know that I can be edgy and when I heard he had gone to Dr. Bob (I can give his first name as he's long-gone to a different place to practice psychiatry on God's angels), I was pleased that he was seeking counsel from someone, even if it was Bob.
Bob and I had been part of a study group that met for years in a locked conference room on a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital. When Bob would show up late, it became common for no one to unlock the door (with its blinds pulled down) in order to let him in. Bob. Bob was both an MD and a DO but was also a TS (total schmuck), even if in many other ways he was a sweet old guy.
Bob called and made some absurd recommendation about how I might handle this fellow should he ever return for further consultation. So, there I was on the phone. I saw no gain for anyone in offending Bob or telling him that he was a TS -- I suspect he knew ... TS's can be very bright. I was caught up in my thoughts of what a schmuck he was and at a loss about what to say until I recognized that I was, indeed, full of a great many thoughts.
Ahah! I said to him in the quietest of tones: "Thanks, Bob. You've given me a great deal to think about."
Hey, that wasn't entertainment ... that was deception.
************************************
So, Howard, remember: Deception can be the Best Part of Valor!
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Day Off -- more or less
As the years go by, Family and Relatives, Pets and Friends accrue ....
for many of us, at least. And those members of one's network (nevermind,
Facebook and LinkedIn and all the twits atwitter) age and sometimes get sick.
It's one of those days for M & I in the Fourth Quarter.
Blessed are you, God, Ruler of the Universe,
who heals the sick
and blessed are your little elves in green scrubs.
Blessed are you, God, Ruler of the Universe,
who heals the sick
and blessed are your little elves in green scrubs.
Monday, January 13, 2014
All's Fair in Love and Biography
I don't know whether it was Emerson or Thoreau who claimed that the Great Person is the one who says what they have on their mind while the rest of us sit in our own stink and think: 'Oh, I thought that, yesterday.'
Alas, that's not the end of the story. When the Great (GO) One gets even Greater, their followers begin concretizing the contribution made by GO ... "Don't change a word" ... and trying to figure out who is to take over the Greatness of GO. It happened with religious and political leaders, as well. People are still fighting over who the rightful heir is to Muhammed or to Luther or to Thomas Jefferson. I remember during the Iran Contra Hearings, everyone cited Ole TJ ... both sides. What did President Obama said about Mandela: "Now he belongs to the ages" and, if I may add, everyon'es entitled to write their own history of him.
So back to this Old Man's rant ... here's how it goes.
Heck! I haven't had that many Great Ideas, but I can see it now. Oh, I have a theorem out there bearing my name but it's my 1997 book that I cherish the most. I'm not a Great One, so it won't take more than a passing comment by some little %$^& to discount the value of the ideas in that 400+ page book. Someone will come along and say that I'm still upset that my 4 year-older Sister once promised me an Indian (Native American) costume, if I stopped biting my nails when I was 4 years old. ... and didn't come through with her promise. And someone else will be certain to find out that I picked my nose on the old New Haven rail line from New York to Providence. ... "Uh-huh ... now, I see why he so eager to diagree with certain bits of accepted wisdom back in 1997."
What got to me today was the result of a discussion about one such GO. Someone announced that she had read a book suggesting that he gave up some of his most prominent ideas because of something his Father did. Then, someone else in the discussion went on speaking about the allegations, as if they were whispered in her ear by the Great Goat God of the Oracle.
Funny. Same morning, M found an article about a man we knew in his 80's. He and his second wife cooked OK but nothing to write home about. Apparently, when a youngish professor in the closing chapters of the Vietnam War he had broken in to FBI headquarters to try to bring some of the ills of that agency out in the open. Bill continued teaching Physics and, as far as I know, he and Maxine led good quiet lives ... he? teaching Mathematical Physics ... she? a therapist. I'm just waiting for someone to come along and blaim his cooking for the break-in.
Yuch. And when I die/And when I'm dead, dead and gone/
There'll be one rumor born/And no Truth to carry on.
Here's Thurber's view of it:
Alas, that's not the end of the story. When the Great (GO) One gets even Greater, their followers begin concretizing the contribution made by GO ... "Don't change a word" ... and trying to figure out who is to take over the Greatness of GO. It happened with religious and political leaders, as well. People are still fighting over who the rightful heir is to Muhammed or to Luther or to Thomas Jefferson. I remember during the Iran Contra Hearings, everyone cited Ole TJ ... both sides. What did President Obama said about Mandela: "Now he belongs to the ages" and, if I may add, everyon'es entitled to write their own history of him.
So back to this Old Man's rant ... here's how it goes.
- The Great One lays out important ideas;
- The students make a religion of it;
- The new religion becomes mainstream and the only way to get to the Truth or God; and then
- People who want a "rep" take out the Great One by finding a flaw and discounting the ideas.
Heck! I haven't had that many Great Ideas, but I can see it now. Oh, I have a theorem out there bearing my name but it's my 1997 book that I cherish the most. I'm not a Great One, so it won't take more than a passing comment by some little %$^& to discount the value of the ideas in that 400+ page book. Someone will come along and say that I'm still upset that my 4 year-older Sister once promised me an Indian (Native American) costume, if I stopped biting my nails when I was 4 years old. ... and didn't come through with her promise. And someone else will be certain to find out that I picked my nose on the old New Haven rail line from New York to Providence. ... "Uh-huh ... now, I see why he so eager to diagree with certain bits of accepted wisdom back in 1997."
What got to me today was the result of a discussion about one such GO. Someone announced that she had read a book suggesting that he gave up some of his most prominent ideas because of something his Father did. Then, someone else in the discussion went on speaking about the allegations, as if they were whispered in her ear by the Great Goat God of the Oracle.
Funny. Same morning, M found an article about a man we knew in his 80's. He and his second wife cooked OK but nothing to write home about. Apparently, when a youngish professor in the closing chapters of the Vietnam War he had broken in to FBI headquarters to try to bring some of the ills of that agency out in the open. Bill continued teaching Physics and, as far as I know, he and Maxine led good quiet lives ... he? teaching Mathematical Physics ... she? a therapist. I'm just waiting for someone to come along and blaim his cooking for the break-in.
Yuch. And when I die/And when I'm dead, dead and gone/
There'll be one rumor born/And no Truth to carry on.
Here's Thurber's view of it:
The very proper gander
by James Thurber
Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, "There is a very proper gander." An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. "They said something about propaganda," she said. "I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander's clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. "They were up to no good," she said. A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb. Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander's house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. "There he is!" everybody cried. "Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!" So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.
Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.
(Source: Thurber, James. Fables for Our Time. New York, 1940.)
Saturday, January 11, 2014
The Denial of Death
A young researcher is told that he is dying and writes a book. He comes from a field in which the fears that are precipitated from thinking of one's mortality were, at least, then attributed to Neurosis. He wonders as he pens his work. Man was Ernst Becker.
I recently stumbled upon a discussion about "aging" that maybe has morphed into one on "death." It's on a psychology type Discussion Board but I don't rightly know if the participants are therapists, researchers or folk who like to lurk. Who is to know once one enters the World of the Internet ... full of thaumatrurgy and deceit. In any case, it doesn't matter. The care taken in replacing rings and pistons while rebuilding a reciprocating gas engine can be learned by experience. Most of us don't get to practice dying ... "Now fall Caesar" no matter how many times you play at it, doesn't impart the fulkness (or maybe I should say the emptiness) of the experience.
One person had a tragic accident where they brooke more that two dozen bones ... she has no fear.
Another lives alone in Oslo ... cheerful town, ther proclaim, of Edvard Munch ... apparently trhe Woody Allen of his day. (Oh, that picture of a woman sitting by her child's deathbed, notwithstanding.) His heater and refrigerator don't work in Balmy sub Arctic Northern Europe ... but, hey.
Freddy Mercury waffled between lyrics of immortality and those of death.
Freud spoke of thinking en passant of death every day.
Moses begged not to die. Moses, if you read the story, didn't go quietly into that dark night.
And even the Prince of Peace called down from the cross ... Eli, Eli, lamah Sabachtani ... I always wondered about that expression made immortal by the writers of the Christian gospels. The Aramaic is uniformly translated as a reference to Psalm's Eli, Eli, Lamah Azavtani ... My Lord, My Lord, why have you abandoned me. But The Crucified well would have known that Sabachtani and Zavachtani sound alike ... especially from way up there on the cross ... and the latter means "slaughtered," and, in that sense, "killed" ... "made dead" (though the Writings of Moses have a word which litterally means "And he made him dead" ... Va'Ymisuhu ... from the story of the poor older sons of Judah, Er and Onan.
Oh, we can kid about it ... that is, we can respond to it as a kid would ... with counterphobic behaviors and speech.
"Hey, I can abuse these drugs ... I don't care if I'm gonna die."
"Y'know, I wound that bike's/car's engine out to 7000 RPM and it wanted to go faster and faster. 120,
130 ... 150 mph ... whoa! What a thrill."
"YOLO (Y'Only Live Once) ... "
There was a period of time when many of my visitors to my office had AIDS or were about to contract HIV from their reckless behavior. It was during that time that I started hearing YOLO quite a bit ... maybe I heard it, before, but I don't recall that being the case. When I'd visit them in the hospital or at home and near death, I recall none who were in a party mood. Mostly, people held on to my hand, as if to say: Don't let me fall into the emptiness, alone.
The Peat Bog Soldiers ... the Boys who died in the War of the Roses and the ones Moses generaled against the Midianites have all been, as far as I know, forgotten. We the living post markers for our "dearly departed" at the cemeteries of the world.
Am I being maudlin? I don't think so, but I do hold to the belief that paying attention to the closing paragraphs of the story can peacefully coexist with attending to the opening and to the body of the story. So many cultures have expressions about living every day as if it were your last ... making each communication to those we love be ones that we might like them to hold in their memories in the years when they go on in our absence and not being afraid to embrace any attendant fears.
I've long-believed that feelings can be invited much as waves ... to briefly carry and then flow over us. I remembder when my kids were still in school sitting on a beach with sizable waves. We were watching a woman fighting these pretty big pulses of the Atlantic ... unwilling to be carried by them, she was repeatedly hurled onto her butt ... frustrated ... annoyed.
Lord! May I dignify my fears and then let them pass until they return.
With warm regards from a Last Quarter Player
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Then and Now
I suppose it's only Now and Then that I compare the Then and Now. Maybe it was visitors and correspondents, denizens of the Last Quarter ... people in their Sixties or beyond who precipitated a rainstorm in my head as I was rising, this morning ... or maybe it was just me reaching about as anniversaries come and go ... 35 years in my office and my home, too .... 35 years, too, since I resigned from running a school for disturbed inner city adolescents ... 40 years since M, Kazimierza the St. Bernard, and our older two kids were bivuaced in a 50 foot single-wide on the campus of a residential facility for very disturbed kids ... 40 years since OPEC's oil embargo ... must be about 45 years since we had a choice of Wet Diapers or Woodstock, choosing the former .... 48 years of marriage ... 50 or thereabout years since that whole collection of assassinations and Cold War Showdowns .... I generally don't like comparisons ... neither those between different Beings nor those contrasting different times in the same Beast ... c'est moi!
I guess it's the one about me that was kindled by these meetings ... on line and in person ... by my fine fellow travellers in our 60's, 70's and 80's of life. In any case, the light sleep of the Fourth Quarter (can it really just be Melatonin depletion) had me reminiscing about the differences ...
I'm sitting in my office, as I write. The office is not so different from 1979 when I set it up, except for the bathroom that was built in 1993 after a tornado decided to drop a Beech Tree on that corner of the waiting room ... as if some voice had called out from Isaiah's (Is. 41? or is it 40) Wilderness: Howard! Upon this corner shall you build a better office bathroom.
The bookcases are the same, except for the ones in the new bathroom and the one that came in the early 80's ... one that my Grandfather and scriptural mentor left to me when he died shy of his 100th birthday sometime in the early 80's. Perhaps, half the books are different but half, I suppose, are the same. Old writings from antiquity and from the first half of the 20th Century and last half of the 19th. When I moved in, there was just enough space for the library ... now many shelves are two books deep and others have stacks of horizontal books. Many books over the years have been borrowed to seek homes in other libraries -- hey! how many times can you read a book. I suppose books are like most homes .... whatever their legal status, they're in actuality short term leases ... held in trust, so to speak.
There's a scroll that the same Grandfather brought from Hungary about 100 years ago. It still needs some repairs that I have promised myself that I will carry out before I place it in the hands of its next keeper. It, too, is being held in trust. Half of the furnishings are replacements or additions, though the waiting room looks much as it did.
If the books are the same, the eyes that read them are notably different. Oh! And it's not entirely my office, any longer. Our youngest child, who would toddle in to occasionally visit, herself, when I moved into this office, now shares the sign at the foot of the office path and this chair that I sit on as I write when she greets her own visitors to this office ... when she holds court, so to speak.
For me, I suppose, I need to talk more about this but the tasks of the day wait for no one and no thing. And so, I'll end with two ditties written 20 years ago. I suspect I may have shared them earlier in these notes about aging that began less than three years ago, but they resonate with my feelings ... this morning .... sitting here an hour before the Sun rises to bring the teperature above freezing for the first time in several days.
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?
I guess it's the one about me that was kindled by these meetings ... on line and in person ... by my fine fellow travellers in our 60's, 70's and 80's of life. In any case, the light sleep of the Fourth Quarter (can it really just be Melatonin depletion) had me reminiscing about the differences ...
I'm sitting in my office, as I write. The office is not so different from 1979 when I set it up, except for the bathroom that was built in 1993 after a tornado decided to drop a Beech Tree on that corner of the waiting room ... as if some voice had called out from Isaiah's (Is. 41? or is it 40) Wilderness: Howard! Upon this corner shall you build a better office bathroom.
The bookcases are the same, except for the ones in the new bathroom and the one that came in the early 80's ... one that my Grandfather and scriptural mentor left to me when he died shy of his 100th birthday sometime in the early 80's. Perhaps, half the books are different but half, I suppose, are the same. Old writings from antiquity and from the first half of the 20th Century and last half of the 19th. When I moved in, there was just enough space for the library ... now many shelves are two books deep and others have stacks of horizontal books. Many books over the years have been borrowed to seek homes in other libraries -- hey! how many times can you read a book. I suppose books are like most homes .... whatever their legal status, they're in actuality short term leases ... held in trust, so to speak.
There's a scroll that the same Grandfather brought from Hungary about 100 years ago. It still needs some repairs that I have promised myself that I will carry out before I place it in the hands of its next keeper. It, too, is being held in trust. Half of the furnishings are replacements or additions, though the waiting room looks much as it did.
If the books are the same, the eyes that read them are notably different. Oh! And it's not entirely my office, any longer. Our youngest child, who would toddle in to occasionally visit, herself, when I moved into this office, now shares the sign at the foot of the office path and this chair that I sit on as I write when she greets her own visitors to this office ... when she holds court, so to speak.
For me, I suppose, I need to talk more about this but the tasks of the day wait for no one and no thing. And so, I'll end with two ditties written 20 years ago. I suspect I may have shared them earlier in these notes about aging that began less than three years ago, but they resonate with my feelings ... this morning .... sitting here an hour before the Sun rises to bring the teperature above freezing for the first time in several days.
Thoughts of Leaving Someday
Six bookcases lining the wall and filled on the inside with jacketed books and above with two philodendrons (one split-leafed), two senseveria that bloom every third year or so, an old microscope, test tubes on a rack, an oak bowling pin, a bulb that he found on the beach. On another wall is a glazed bookcase from his grandfather — a shaman of a different ilk — that one filled with sacred books. Hanging are diplomas and certificates and pictures of der Alte Hexenmeister from Vienna. There are, as well, five chairs, a desk, a couch and an awareness that he will and must leave this office some day.
Six bookcases lining the wall and filled on the inside with jacketed books and above with two philodendrons (one split-leafed), two senseveria that bloom every third year or so, an old microscope, test tubes on a rack, an oak bowling pin, a bulb that he found on the beach. On another wall is a glazed bookcase from his grandfather — a shaman of a different ilk — that one filled with sacred books. Hanging are diplomas and certificates and pictures of der Alte Hexenmeister from Vienna. There are, as well, five chairs, a desk, a couch and an awareness that he will and must leave this office some day.
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.
“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.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Busy, Busy, Busy
I remember two people who passed through my life in the Third and Fourth Quarters who were always "busy, busy, busy." From time to time, I would hear in my head: "I'm too busy for thee." But plates do get full and I've felt that way, lately.
M and I had three children and they had children. Only one of our grandkids is old enough to be thinking of heading off to College but all three families are caught up in life .... Busy, busy, busy .... and still connected to M and H as titular heads of the tribe. Then, there are the visitors who come much like those who would visit my grandfather when I was his preschool student learning the languages of the sacred writings of my forebears ... Grandpa would answer the door, welcome the visitor and -- at least, so it seemed to me -- thoroughly forget the 3-6 year old who would go hiding behind a magical chair made in the late 1940's, I suppose. The chair could open up into a single bed. Maybe I assumed that any such structure as a magic chair could protect me from the abandonment that I felt. Maybe I was trying to wake Grandpa up to my presence by being absent. Could be.
The Last Quarter and its needs to be responsive to at least three generatiuons and others who have gathered to share their circles (oops, in 2014 I could say "networks") with us is quite a busy place, even without the nosy Docs who keep wanting to look inside one's body with their devils'-work cameras ... MRI's and CAT scans, EEG's and EMG's, needles and hands that feel around inside.
And recently, I've added an errand I've taken on while reviewing a biography of a man with whom I have strong personal and professional identifications. He was one of the folk from the generation of pre-WWII thinkers who tried to understand the authoritarian personality, as he and others thought of it ... people who are quite dominant and unnecessarily forceful in their own families and. curiously, tend to subjugate themselves to a great idea or leader ... in the time of these writers? ... Stalin, Hitler and later Mao.
In my own training, years ago, I found the same kind of personality. People who would slavishly take on a given dogma "from above" but then "masterly" try to subjugate others either into a certain set of beliefs or to some sort of social conformity.
The task, a not too lengthy review for a professional journal, is not onerous and the editor is kind. Working through these ghosts from past and present relationships is difficult for this aging fellow who is having the best time and the worst time with it.
Adios!
M and I had three children and they had children. Only one of our grandkids is old enough to be thinking of heading off to College but all three families are caught up in life .... Busy, busy, busy .... and still connected to M and H as titular heads of the tribe. Then, there are the visitors who come much like those who would visit my grandfather when I was his preschool student learning the languages of the sacred writings of my forebears ... Grandpa would answer the door, welcome the visitor and -- at least, so it seemed to me -- thoroughly forget the 3-6 year old who would go hiding behind a magical chair made in the late 1940's, I suppose. The chair could open up into a single bed. Maybe I assumed that any such structure as a magic chair could protect me from the abandonment that I felt. Maybe I was trying to wake Grandpa up to my presence by being absent. Could be.
The Last Quarter and its needs to be responsive to at least three generatiuons and others who have gathered to share their circles (oops, in 2014 I could say "networks") with us is quite a busy place, even without the nosy Docs who keep wanting to look inside one's body with their devils'-work cameras ... MRI's and CAT scans, EEG's and EMG's, needles and hands that feel around inside.
And recently, I've added an errand I've taken on while reviewing a biography of a man with whom I have strong personal and professional identifications. He was one of the folk from the generation of pre-WWII thinkers who tried to understand the authoritarian personality, as he and others thought of it ... people who are quite dominant and unnecessarily forceful in their own families and. curiously, tend to subjugate themselves to a great idea or leader ... in the time of these writers? ... Stalin, Hitler and later Mao.
In my own training, years ago, I found the same kind of personality. People who would slavishly take on a given dogma "from above" but then "masterly" try to subjugate others either into a certain set of beliefs or to some sort of social conformity.
The task, a not too lengthy review for a professional journal, is not onerous and the editor is kind. Working through these ghosts from past and present relationships is difficult for this aging fellow who is having the best time and the worst time with it.
Adios!
Sunday, January 5, 2014
The Abby Rule and Social Media
Once Upon a Time .... there was a youngish college professor ... as a matter of fact, he was barely more than thirty years old and thought himself capable of humor. He was -- indeed we may assume -- full of good humor or maybe he was half full of good humor and half full of ... himself. In any case, it was a Wintery Day in 1978 and his 830 AM class had already begun. Quiet as a mouse, a third-time and excellent student who had missed the previous several classes took her seat at 850 ... twenty minutes late and, as they say, two days short. The professor who, as we have said, was full of something began ragging on her and riffing on her lateness. It is lost to history exactly what he said and what is remembered is but the following.
The girl's name was Abby and she ran away from the riffing and ragging ... or, at least we know for sure, that she ran out of the class in tears. 920? Class was over and as the college professor was gathering up his props, Abby returned with the sequelae of a good cry still apparent around her reddened eyes:
"I'm sorry. I had to leave. And I'm sorry that I missed two classes and I shouldn't of been late. My Mom and Dad were divorced when I was young and live separately. I've mostly lived with my Mom. I went to visit my Dad, last week, unlocked the door thinking he was still at work and found him smelling and dead on the floor of his hallway. I think he was trying to crawl out to get some help."
Long story ... In the college professor's mind -- ever since -- there has been "The Abby Rule" which says, in short, that upon meeting someone after even a brief separation, consider before you begin to riff and rag on them that they may have just recently buried their Dad.
When was it that the internet allowed for -- more or less -- instantaneous communication between groups of people who included both near and dear and others who were strangers, maybe speaking a strange tongue. I remember being surprised by the so-called "flare-ups" of hostility that would not infrequently occur between people who as Ellen English (the late, great wife of the late, great psychoanalyst Spurgeon English) would say: Should of known better (referring to the nasty behavior between her husband and his onetime writing partner and friend Gerald Pearson). In any case, I think I came to these discussions maybe 15 years ago ... loved them and hated them. Built long-time friendships with some, passing acquaintances with others, and unpredictably uncomfortable and aggressive interactions with others.
It is popular to attribute these flare-ups and on-line animosities to difficulties with hearing the emotional intent of others. As folk as diverse as Philosophers and comedians like Louis C.K. have pointed out .... words don't have intrinsic meeting. I might say "Fuck you" to someone on line or wish them "eternity in indulging solo horizontal aerobics" and really mean "that was sweet" of "Good job," as parents are wont to say, these recent decades, to their clever toddlers. On the other hand, my "Fuck you" might mean "Lookee here, Jepthah ... Your Mother was a whore and you're a two bit general who couldn't behead a Midianite if he laid his hairy neck on your kitchen table" (Judges 12 or 13 really twisted bad! sorrrry!). The popular attribution of responsibility for the animosities that do, indeed, flare up is typically offered up to the listener's inability to know the speaker's intent.
I wonder, though, if Abby's Rule, the role that the listener's life-context carries, doesn't play a part, as well, in these contemporary kerfuffles. The speaker who opines:
"Hey, Man ... I'm being careful. I didn't capitalize nothin' ... there was no 'FUCK YOU' .... now, that woulda been nasty. No, I very carefully uttered a very quiet, barely audible 'fuck you' ... hey, it was so Friends-ee, it was almost a 'fuck thee' and s/he had the gall to get upset. I'd like to give'er a piece of my mind and I think I will." And from there, the beat goes on!
That speaker, if s/he did nothing else, forgot to pause long enough prior tio riffing and ragging good-heartedly on their Abby ... failed to pause long enough to find out if Abby is up to the task. It was about 2,000 years ago that a scholar of Sura or Pump'disa -- I forget -- said that "Everyone should say to themselves that the world was created for them" ... everyone, that is, should see themselves as if they are in the center ... that all sounds, sights and visions come to them .... that Mom and Dad were placed here on the Earth just so they could be born and raised well. Perhaps, it would be fair to say that it takes the best of us considerable time measured in decades to learn to appreciate that, indeed, Everyone ... Every single one of us may have that right ... that everyone comes to conversations with their own distant and recent histories that may or may not include traumas that may or may not have -- just this moment or week -- occurred.
"Amen, Brother Howard. Hope that's all the Sermon for this Sunday Morning! I could use me some Jo! Coffee Hour to commence, now, Fra Howard? Yeah, yeah? BTW ... Was you that Youngish Professor cause you sure enough ain't so young, anymore."
A-A-Amen!
The girl's name was Abby and she ran away from the riffing and ragging ... or, at least we know for sure, that she ran out of the class in tears. 920? Class was over and as the college professor was gathering up his props, Abby returned with the sequelae of a good cry still apparent around her reddened eyes:
"I'm sorry. I had to leave. And I'm sorry that I missed two classes and I shouldn't of been late. My Mom and Dad were divorced when I was young and live separately. I've mostly lived with my Mom. I went to visit my Dad, last week, unlocked the door thinking he was still at work and found him smelling and dead on the floor of his hallway. I think he was trying to crawl out to get some help."
Long story ... In the college professor's mind -- ever since -- there has been "The Abby Rule" which says, in short, that upon meeting someone after even a brief separation, consider before you begin to riff and rag on them that they may have just recently buried their Dad.
When was it that the internet allowed for -- more or less -- instantaneous communication between groups of people who included both near and dear and others who were strangers, maybe speaking a strange tongue. I remember being surprised by the so-called "flare-ups" of hostility that would not infrequently occur between people who as Ellen English (the late, great wife of the late, great psychoanalyst Spurgeon English) would say: Should of known better (referring to the nasty behavior between her husband and his onetime writing partner and friend Gerald Pearson). In any case, I think I came to these discussions maybe 15 years ago ... loved them and hated them. Built long-time friendships with some, passing acquaintances with others, and unpredictably uncomfortable and aggressive interactions with others.
It is popular to attribute these flare-ups and on-line animosities to difficulties with hearing the emotional intent of others. As folk as diverse as Philosophers and comedians like Louis C.K. have pointed out .... words don't have intrinsic meeting. I might say "Fuck you" to someone on line or wish them "eternity in indulging solo horizontal aerobics" and really mean "that was sweet" of "Good job," as parents are wont to say, these recent decades, to their clever toddlers. On the other hand, my "Fuck you" might mean "Lookee here, Jepthah ... Your Mother was a whore and you're a two bit general who couldn't behead a Midianite if he laid his hairy neck on your kitchen table" (Judges 12 or 13 really twisted bad! sorrrry!). The popular attribution of responsibility for the animosities that do, indeed, flare up is typically offered up to the listener's inability to know the speaker's intent.
I wonder, though, if Abby's Rule, the role that the listener's life-context carries, doesn't play a part, as well, in these contemporary kerfuffles. The speaker who opines:
"Hey, Man ... I'm being careful. I didn't capitalize nothin' ... there was no 'FUCK YOU' .... now, that woulda been nasty. No, I very carefully uttered a very quiet, barely audible 'fuck you' ... hey, it was so Friends-ee, it was almost a 'fuck thee' and s/he had the gall to get upset. I'd like to give'er a piece of my mind and I think I will." And from there, the beat goes on!
That speaker, if s/he did nothing else, forgot to pause long enough prior tio riffing and ragging good-heartedly on their Abby ... failed to pause long enough to find out if Abby is up to the task. It was about 2,000 years ago that a scholar of Sura or Pump'disa -- I forget -- said that "Everyone should say to themselves that the world was created for them" ... everyone, that is, should see themselves as if they are in the center ... that all sounds, sights and visions come to them .... that Mom and Dad were placed here on the Earth just so they could be born and raised well. Perhaps, it would be fair to say that it takes the best of us considerable time measured in decades to learn to appreciate that, indeed, Everyone ... Every single one of us may have that right ... that everyone comes to conversations with their own distant and recent histories that may or may not include traumas that may or may not have -- just this moment or week -- occurred.
"Amen, Brother Howard. Hope that's all the Sermon for this Sunday Morning! I could use me some Jo! Coffee Hour to commence, now, Fra Howard? Yeah, yeah? BTW ... Was you that Youngish Professor cause you sure enough ain't so young, anymore."
A-A-Amen!
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Memories and Disappointments
Yesterday morning, we woke up to snow and cold. My morning visitors canceled giving me ample time to shovel walks to office and come + 200 feet of sidewalk. My neighbor, Adib, showed up with a rather impressive gas-powered snow-blower ... one of those so-called "random acts of kindness" that bumper stickers recommend. I don't know that Adib is all that far away from the Fourth Quarter and it felt particularly heart-warming to have a neighbor come and offer to widen the maybe 18" swath I cut on one of our sidewalks.
In any case, in between shovel shifts, I made soup, as planned, and, with M, made potato filled crepes ... potato blintzes, anticipating the weekly visit from our youngest's brood. It was curious how disappointed I felt in the soup. It had a flavor I couldn't easily warm to. M liked it but I was stuck with a sense of "yuck." Memories popped up of when my maternal grandmother's kitchen morphed from the wonderful baking smells of a Hungarian kitchen to the image of my clerical grandfather wiping out unwashed glasses and placing them gently into a white cabinet. The glasses were no longer sparkling ... the plates betimes crusty.
M and I are a far cry from that ... what do they say: 75 is the new 50 -- interpolate, as you will. The three grandspawn and thei parents, indeed, gobbled up the soup and blintzes and some Vegan pestoed pasta and gleefully took home leftovers. The eldest of the three did, in response to some comment about my oddness, quietly proclaim that her sense of me was "less odd than psychotic." True, a moment later, she described the severity of social networking addiction in her schoolmates by noting: "Take some rats ... Put'em in a cage ... Crack on one side ... Facebook page on the other ... Watch 'em run for Facebook!"
So, what are these feelings that I've been writing about for several years, now. Can't say that I have any handle on it. Grandma and Grandpa led a noble life ... Grandpa with his many followers ... his congregants ... his sheep. Grandma running the home and occasionally picking up a nearly 500 year old dream book and helping Grandpa's Little Sheep understand their sleepy-time dreams.
M and I are doing pretty well. My youngest and spouse were talking with us after Dinner (Yuchy soup and all) about Facebook and how people tend to present pictures of this wondrous life that they are leading. I wondered if I was doing the same. They assured me that my kvetching about the travails of Life in the Last Quarter was different ... I'm a tough sell ... I'm still not convinced that the soup was up to some bizarre standard which utilizes the changes in the kitchen of two Old Hungarian immigrants as some hazard that I need to avoid.
And Sonny and Cher's beat just goes on!!
In any case, in between shovel shifts, I made soup, as planned, and, with M, made potato filled crepes ... potato blintzes, anticipating the weekly visit from our youngest's brood. It was curious how disappointed I felt in the soup. It had a flavor I couldn't easily warm to. M liked it but I was stuck with a sense of "yuck." Memories popped up of when my maternal grandmother's kitchen morphed from the wonderful baking smells of a Hungarian kitchen to the image of my clerical grandfather wiping out unwashed glasses and placing them gently into a white cabinet. The glasses were no longer sparkling ... the plates betimes crusty.
M and I are a far cry from that ... what do they say: 75 is the new 50 -- interpolate, as you will. The three grandspawn and thei parents, indeed, gobbled up the soup and blintzes and some Vegan pestoed pasta and gleefully took home leftovers. The eldest of the three did, in response to some comment about my oddness, quietly proclaim that her sense of me was "less odd than psychotic." True, a moment later, she described the severity of social networking addiction in her schoolmates by noting: "Take some rats ... Put'em in a cage ... Crack on one side ... Facebook page on the other ... Watch 'em run for Facebook!"
So, what are these feelings that I've been writing about for several years, now. Can't say that I have any handle on it. Grandma and Grandpa led a noble life ... Grandpa with his many followers ... his congregants ... his sheep. Grandma running the home and occasionally picking up a nearly 500 year old dream book and helping Grandpa's Little Sheep understand their sleepy-time dreams.
M and I are doing pretty well. My youngest and spouse were talking with us after Dinner (Yuchy soup and all) about Facebook and how people tend to present pictures of this wondrous life that they are leading. I wondered if I was doing the same. They assured me that my kvetching about the travails of Life in the Last Quarter was different ... I'm a tough sell ... I'm still not convinced that the soup was up to some bizarre standard which utilizes the changes in the kitchen of two Old Hungarian immigrants as some hazard that I need to avoid.
And Sonny and Cher's beat just goes on!!
Friday, January 3, 2014
"Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow"
Drama ,,,, High Drama .... 7" of snow is, these days, sufficient to call out thetalking head thespians .... High Drama over 7"!
Our youngest should be here later on with her brood for dinner. Visitors to my office, today, will most likely postpone their visits ... more time for me to cook dinner. Yay! I had a Canadian racquetball partner who for many years would have a gathering to usher in the New Year .... Crepes ... Blintzes. Think we'll make some blintzes for tonight. M does the filling ... For tonight ... Mashed potato with fried onions and mushrooms. I'll do the wraps. Still trying to figure out what kind of Soup goes with Potato Blintzes/Crepes? If I could remember what gathered in the soup pot for the celebrated New Year's Eve Soup, I'd replicate it, I suppose ...., detail memory is one of the first to leave most Last Quarter parties! .... I suspect I'll have lots of time to cook, anyway, as there is a covering of snow and people just don't travel through the snow in 21st C. Philadelphia.
Have already shoveled a path for GuntherDog to have some privacy when he goes out to relieve himself. Our oldest is in the Middle East on business and our middle must be methodically and calmly shoveling snow with his son in the burbs South of Boston. At least they have something to shovel ... foot and a half or something. I have the path to the office clear, too.
But the drama .... life in North America and drama? I suppose every age has its reasons for getting excited. apparently, every part of the human anatomy is open to inspection on the Internet and that drama, I suppose, needs to be replaced. (GuntherDog, by the way, is already resting from his AM lavage and the coffee has long been made ... Mad Dogs and Old Men ... ? .... Or is it Old Dogs and Mad Men, perhaps, have less to get excited about.
What is drama about? I think when they were handing it out, I was doing what I did best ... 'playing hooky' .... hanging in the quiet of museums and dorky universities. One of my high school teachers who had a deep Eastern European accent mixed with a little Shanghai from his WWII years there ... He would say "Hovid ... Yer no shtudent ... Jest a bum mitt office hours." Well I must've been out on that day, too. The funny thing is that I do experience something like drama in my chest ... I don't suspect anyone except maybe M knows about it ...
Or maybe it's just another one of those 'guy things.' Who's to know? Howard as calm as Dirty Harry ... I wasn't so calm when I ruptured a disc (L4-L5?) couple years back. I had crawled to the front door ... "Don't worry, M. I'll just crawl down to the car and drive over to the ER." Any case, maybe I'm just forgetting my own drama.
The weather outside is frightful ... damn ... 7" of snow? .... Idiopathic arrhythmias? Maybe I'll just crawl back to bed until Spring.
"Lotsaluck, Howard. You are who you are."
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Can You Please a Fourth Quarter Type?
I have resisted Facebook and most social media, though I do connect with people in professional discussions on LinkedIn which inevitably wax and wane in their level of snarkiness. Still, when M reported to me that people were writing in glowing terms about my New Year's Eve soup, I did a happy dance. What joy there is in knowing that something you did for another was welcomed with gratitude. The list of such potential "gifts" would be lengthy. From Soup to Nuts, as they say, car work and carpentry, plumbing and pleasuring.
I mean "really ... Even an Old Man can be pleased."
I do hope that I, my near and dear, and the anonymous folk who listen to my machinations about joy and sadness in the Fourth Quarter have ample opportunities for Happy Dancing in these months to come.
I mean "really ... Even an Old Man can be pleased."
I do hope that I, my near and dear, and the anonymous folk who listen to my machinations about joy and sadness in the Fourth Quarter have ample opportunities for Happy Dancing in these months to come.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Behold and Beholdin'
There is a song taught to children: Hineh Mah Tov .... Behold just how good it is for Brothers and Sisters to sit down together.
The verb "party" is relatively new. I think I heard the infinitive first walking between meetings in Center City Philadelphia in the mid-1970's. An attractive youngish woman stopped me on the street and asked: "Do you want to party." And while I had not heard that usage prior to that moment, I divined precisely what she had in mind. I explained to her that there were three problems.
First ... I had to get to a meeting.
"Do you really HAVE to go," she queried.
Second .... I'm married.
"Well so are most of my best customers."
Third .... My wife gives me a quarter in the morning, tells me to have a good time and that's all I got.
"Oh, well" she sighed and trotted off.
In the subsequent years, I became comfortable hearing my childrens' generation use the verb in its many forms ... "I'm gonna go party" ... "Philly is partying tonight" .... I even used it in a bit of doggerel in the mid-1990's. (I'll post that, later.)
But last night was a party. The men averaged a bit over 70 years in age and were all pretty much deaf. The young chickies closer to 65 and could hear even their spouse's mumblings pretty well. One of the couple's were newlyweds ... less than 20 years, together ... The other two married for a combined whopping total of 99 years. Three cats and a 24 year old grand-daughter who didn't look uncomfortable in this cursorily assembled Old Age Home completed the invitation list.
As it is not written OR sung:
Let most of the cocelebrants be wined and dined ...
For between them they have no rhyme ....
Let most of the cocelebrants be wined and dined ...
For they forgot the lyrics and even how to spell "Auld Lang Syne."
All but one of the celebrants were born in America ... he, in India. Then, there was Hungarian, Native American, English, Irish and Scottish, and Russian blood all flowing through the veins of the revelers at this American celebration of still another year. There were two retired university administrators, a retired Industrial Engineer, a retired Mathematical Statistician, another who was still working, an ex-Mathematician who retooled as a Healer (that would be me), and a Linguist Wannabe ot to-Be. 4/7ths of us admitted to needing to get to bed before 10:30 and the Industrial Engineer was just this side of pickled and very funny when she is.
I made the Soup but couldn't tell nosy people what was in it (cause my Brocca's area in my brain is broken and my Wernicke's don't work too well no more), though I could tell them the dozen or so things that weren't included due to animal rights preferences and allergies. The soup was a big hit which made me do a Happy Dance, inside, but without a recipe is not likely to be repeated. Then there were Vegan delights and some dead animal all dancing around the table. Half of us got high on Sparkling Apple Juice .... the other half on Foreign Fermented Sparkling Grape.
I do hope that you who follow along with the tragedo-comedy that is the Last Quarter of Life had at least half the fun I had plaing with people, most of whom I've known for over 40 years, with M who has shared my bed ... or have I shared hers? ... for over 48 years and two younger interlopers who I've only known for a quarter of a Century.
Let most of you celebrants be wiined and dined ...
Except those in Denver who are smoking Pot .... ....
Let most of the cocelebrants be wined and dined ...
And find gratitude for friends and parties we've got!
FELICE CAPO D'ANO
AND "PARTY-AND-PLAY-ON" WORLD
OF LAST QUARTER PLAYERS!
The verb "party" is relatively new. I think I heard the infinitive first walking between meetings in Center City Philadelphia in the mid-1970's. An attractive youngish woman stopped me on the street and asked: "Do you want to party." And while I had not heard that usage prior to that moment, I divined precisely what she had in mind. I explained to her that there were three problems.
First ... I had to get to a meeting.
"Do you really HAVE to go," she queried.
Second .... I'm married.
"Well so are most of my best customers."
Third .... My wife gives me a quarter in the morning, tells me to have a good time and that's all I got.
"Oh, well" she sighed and trotted off.
In the subsequent years, I became comfortable hearing my childrens' generation use the verb in its many forms ... "I'm gonna go party" ... "Philly is partying tonight" .... I even used it in a bit of doggerel in the mid-1990's. (I'll post that, later.)
But last night was a party. The men averaged a bit over 70 years in age and were all pretty much deaf. The young chickies closer to 65 and could hear even their spouse's mumblings pretty well. One of the couple's were newlyweds ... less than 20 years, together ... The other two married for a combined whopping total of 99 years. Three cats and a 24 year old grand-daughter who didn't look uncomfortable in this cursorily assembled Old Age Home completed the invitation list.
As it is not written OR sung:
Let most of the cocelebrants be wined and dined ...
For between them they have no rhyme ....
For they forgot the lyrics and even how to spell "Auld Lang Syne."
All but one of the celebrants were born in America ... he, in India. Then, there was Hungarian, Native American, English, Irish and Scottish, and Russian blood all flowing through the veins of the revelers at this American celebration of still another year. There were two retired university administrators, a retired Industrial Engineer, a retired Mathematical Statistician, another who was still working, an ex-Mathematician who retooled as a Healer (that would be me), and a Linguist Wannabe ot to-Be. 4/7ths of us admitted to needing to get to bed before 10:30 and the Industrial Engineer was just this side of pickled and very funny when she is.
I made the Soup but couldn't tell nosy people what was in it (cause my Brocca's area in my brain is broken and my Wernicke's don't work too well no more), though I could tell them the dozen or so things that weren't included due to animal rights preferences and allergies. The soup was a big hit which made me do a Happy Dance, inside, but without a recipe is not likely to be repeated. Then there were Vegan delights and some dead animal all dancing around the table. Half of us got high on Sparkling Apple Juice .... the other half on Foreign Fermented Sparkling Grape.
I do hope that you who follow along with the tragedo-comedy that is the Last Quarter of Life had at least half the fun I had plaing with people, most of whom I've known for over 40 years, with M who has shared my bed ... or have I shared hers? ... for over 48 years and two younger interlopers who I've only known for a quarter of a Century.
Let most of you celebrants be wiined and dined ...
Except those in Denver who are smoking Pot .... ....
Let most of the cocelebrants be wined and dined ...
And find gratitude for friends and parties we've got!
FELICE CAPO D'ANO
AND "PARTY-AND-PLAY-ON" WORLD
OF LAST QUARTER PLAYERS!
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