"For a Crowd is not Company; ... where there is no Love"

Francis Bacon penned those words in his introduction to his essay on Friendship ... not his shorter essay on Love. Going to sleep, yesterday? awaking this morning? My mind continues to tease me on the meaning of Kindness. I listened to a lengthy talk by the physicist Michio Kaku last night .... talking about brains and memories and even humor. He cited someone: Do unto others before they do unto you. I hadn't heard him speak since M and I were at a meeting in Frankfort, KY, more than ten years ago. He seemed to exude -- then and now -- freundlichkeit .... a friendly and a love of Creations.

Still, I went to sleep thinking, to paraphrase the lyricist of Broadway's Oliver: where is kindness. Justice? Justice seems content to live within the framework of the Code of Talion: An eye for an eye ... or, as many commentaries would have it: the value of an eye for an eye lost.

Kindness is more than fairness ... more than a comparison of fractions .... < ..... = ..... >. Three of my grandkids were over on Friday evening. The 15 year old was not celebrating the vagaries of her High School Euclidean Geometry class. S, our Sweet Pea, S? I imagine that I owe her a great deal. I like to think that as my once-pretty-extraordinary memory became lost going into the Last Quarter, S found it. On top of that, Grandpa wrote doggerel; S is a poet. Grandpa wrote technically; S writes beautifully and has been amply recognized for her efforts. Last year, she was among a select group of kids to be presented with Gold Keys at Carnegie Hall in a national competition.

I was moved to offer her a lot more than chump-change if she could prove the converse of one of the easiest theorems given to high school kids to prove. The easy one is to show that if two sides of a triangle are equal, then the two corresponding angle bisectors are equal, too. The converse (if two angle bisectors are equal in length, then the triangle is isoceles) is not easy, at all. It was apparently first posed in 1840 and each new proof is publishable in the journals of those curious creatures, the Mathematicians.

That night, Grandpa's sleep was disturbed. Was I being Kind to see her as capable of taking on a serious problem in a field that was not her first interest? or was I being Sadistic in placing before her something that would -- knowing her -- trouble her mind until she won her many hundreds of dollars and demonstrated that she could do the proof. (Or was I being just plain old demented in forgetting that in the World of Google and Wicked-pedia, I might easily get Scroogled or Googled by a magical perusal of the relevant keywords.)

Among the greatest kindnesses in the last twenty years that I've experienced was when I presented a project to my ex-graduate school professor and closest friend for well over 40 years whose favourite expression -- or so his wife claims -- is "Are you stupid." His warm response was to fortify me in the work: "it's astounding that no one has thought of this before." Such a simple message ... such a simple kindness. Others had tried to pick at it without really giving it serious thought. I suppose, for me, the other received kindnesses that stick out in my memory are similar .... I refer to those times when I've had the experience that I was being heard. Agreed with or not agreed with but heard! And I suppose that was what my friend did for me.

Kindness? Love? Maybe they meet in listening and seeing the other ... visibility. M and I were with my friend, his wife and their grand-daughter, last night. It was Ruthie's 73rd birthday, 51 years after they married and just after the kid's 25th birthday. Four of us have some degree of hearing and processing loss and while I can't put my finger on what I mean by Kindness, there was some of it there, last night.

I'll continue working on it.

Words, Words, Words

In setting Pygmalion to song, Lerner and Lowe wrote for a young lady coming into her own to sing:

Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! 
I get words all day through;First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do? Don’t talk of stars burning above; If you’re in love, Show me! Tell me no dreams filled with desire.If you’re on fire, Show me!Here we are together in the middle of the night!Don’t talk of spring! Just hold me tight!Anyone who’s ever been in love’ll tell you that This is no time for a chat!Haven’t your lips longed for my touch? Don’t say how much, Show me! Show me!Don’t talk of love lasting through time. Make me no undying vow. Show me now!

We don't experience unlimited opportunity for redemption in the Last Quarter and words often ring hollow. Tevya asks his Lady: "Do you love me." She answers with cooked meals served, babies born and clothes cleaned. Tevya, still in the midst of the Third Quarter is not satisfied: "But do you love me?"

Many are the great thinkers who've written about Love .... the Harlows and Suomi wrote about it in primates .... Theodore Reik and Ethel Spector Person wrote of it from a psychological perspective. Many others, too.

And many are those who accept the accoutrement's of love as sufficient. Enough sex. Certain special types of sex. A number of lawns mowed and plumbing leaks fixed. Unthinking agreement. Love, indeed, can be "just a four letter word," as the young Bobby Zimmerman sang in the 60's.

Anyhow, I do think we denizens of the Last Quarter -- closer in age to Lerner and Lowe composing than to  Lisa Doolittle singing the song -- crave something from our near and dear. but what is it? 

Reik wrote mainly of young love which, he believed, was born in envy. I see something in another that is beyond my abilities and I'm drawn to it ... sometimes like a moth to the flame. I wrote some 15 years ago (a chapter in a book about men in the 21st C.) about my envy for M and her relationship to her (our?) brood and now grandbrood. I never could duplicate with myself the visceral closeness that exists between a mother and her kids. I wrote it after our middle child had spoken up at a 50th birthday celebration for his Mother ... "She's the Mommy," he said. Daddy's, alas, die young and are replaced by Fathers ... if they're lucky? by Dear Old Dads.

There are so many words to semantically parse ... Love, Kindness, Acceptance, Embracing, Being-with, .... I could go on. Maybe it's enough to add descriptors ... Mother-Love ... Young Love .... Joint-Parenting Love .... Empty Nest Love .... After-Surgery Love ...  Late-Life Love. 

I obviously need to think about this more but it strikes me that the Bumper-Sticker Love comes closest to what I'd like in this, my dotage: Random Acts of Kindness.

I will think more on it but right at the moment? I think I'd opt for Gratuitous Kindness, especially having seen no lack of Gratuitous Enmity (Sin'as Chinam, in another language) in the couples I've known.

"Words, Words, Words. I'm so sick of words."

    

"Hey, Doc!"

Started about a week ago:

That Huffy-post image that I brought up a few days ago ..."Not a pretty picture to think of a demented, coughing and wheezing, fat old person with a dull look on their face being wheeled toward the exit door of a Nursing Home by someone paid $10 an hour with preciously little training in Geriatrics on their way out for their tri-weekly excursion to some McDonald's of Dialysis Centers."

No.  I have memory retrieval issues but I'm not demented. No coughing or wheezing -- not right now. I do carry 25 more pounds that when in graduate school 46 years ago ... c. .5 lbs/year. Yesterday, I was tired and the Good Youngish Doc immediately wondered if I were depressed. Depressed? I think not. Three months since a vacation and tired. And, my God-given wheels (though from time to time stiff with some neuropathic numbing in the extremities) and my kidneys are all still functional.

I am here at 3:00 am due to a simple series .... exciting or anxietizing dreams, either, lead to my waking from sleep with that great TV seller of pharmaceuticals ... Atrial fibrillation without complicating valve problems. When this occurs, the regulator that keeps a sinus rhythm ...
 B-bump .... B-bump .... B-bump .... Goes kerfluey .... Bump.Bump.Bump.Bump.....Bump.

It's decidedly an older person's irregularity. It can get set off by odd foods traveling down the gullet and disturbing the vagus nerve that wraps around the top side of the heart right outside the esophagus ... alcohol is a common trigger. Big meals do the same thing for me and so do dreams.

Nowadays, the right combo of drugs seems to shorted the episode. Anyway, it's March and M and I usually get in the car and drive South till it's warm. Leaving in a couple.

Days later ....

WE got there .... Made it to Hilton Head Island, So. Carolina. Something over 700 miles ... 1100 
kilometers.  Nice place .... long ride .... old drivers. Found a place to stay. Who could have known it was the Hormone Hotel and Beach Resort? M and I researched best we could when the undergraduate students Fly South to play in the Sun. As the Spring Semester is typically over by the first days of May, 22 March seemed safe from both the "lemme figure out sex" crowd and the motorcyclists that seem to migrate during the same weeks. 

Best laid plans. I think we forgot to take into account the dropouts .... I think we came to Dropout Week in Hilton Head. Yesterday on the beach we decided to spend the rest of our Spring R&R where we could relax. Home.

Did make us appreciate the quiet dignity of non-drinking, backwater Chincoteague where we've vacationed almost every year since 1982. Heading home, today, to be with GuntherDog. The Androgens and Estrogens feed more Cancer than Sex in the Last Quarter, anyway.

Drive Howard (and M), Drive!

Not a Pretty Picture

The Huffington Post last week ran one of its pieces ... "The 14 Most Common Health

Concerns for Seniors."

It listed: 

            Heart Disease, Arthritis, Respiratory Diseases, Alzheimer’s Disease, Osteoporosis, Diabetes, 

            Influenza and Pneumonia, Falls and Other Injuries, Substance Abuse, Obesity, Depression, 

            Oral Health and Poverty.

Not a pretty picture to think of a demented, coughing and wheezing, fat old person with a dull look on their face being wheeled toward the exit door of a Nursing Home by someone paid $10 an hour with preciously little training in Geriatrics on their way out for their tri-weekly excursion to some McDonald's of Dialysis Centers. 

I actually prefer that image that I mentioned in a previous posting when I suggested that little kids making snow angels on their backs are doing their best to channel Grandpa ... the Grandpa who spent his last hours convulsing on his back in the snow, clutching his snow-shovel, just after having his last and final Heart Attack!

I called this Blog "Playing in the Last Quarter" with the intention of highlighting the paradox of being roughly 60-80 years old .... namely that, perhaps -- just perhaps ... older folk can still PLAY in spite of the recognition that the CLOCK IS TICKING. Many of these postings have dealt with my sense that there are two major emotions: SADNESS and GLEE ... and that both can live side by side and almost in support of each other in the WELL-LIVED LIFE.

Among those 14 apocalyptic horsemen that chase us in the Last Quarter, some are programmed in by genetics. I wear the ties of my brother-in-law who died about thirteen years ago from sudden cardiac arrest. I wear the ties to remember a very talented and nice person. He exercized and was trim. He painted in the Primitive American Art-style, though he earned his living otherwise. He died at 63, as did his brother, father and one uncle, as I recall. 

We have no control over either our genetics or our biology. Some things, apparently, are "Written in the Stars." 

And, still, I have no reasonable druthers but to believe that a goodly percentage of the variability in how we Older Folk live out our years (in Statistics, they measure such %'s and call them r-squared)is dependent on how seriously we play and how seriously we accept our role as stewards to our bodies.

Me? I'd prefer not to end up in that fat old demented wheezer in the wheel-chair blaming my partners (biology and genetics) for doing me in! Maybe readers to this Blog -- while drinking their Green Juice -- can petition the Huff Post to write about "The 14 Most Pleasurable Ways to Play in the Last Quarter, while Working towards a Grand Old Overtime." 

Playing with Ghosts

Kunitz, the poet I recalled in the last posting, typically ends strong: "Touch me. remind me who I am."

I don't know a great deal about Stanley Kunitz .... I seem to recall that he and his artist wife lived on Cape Cod and that he had a connection to Columbia University and was poet laureate, quite late in life, and had some connection to the National US Archives, before the USA had a poet laureate. He's one of my ghosts.

Woke up, this AM, with other more personal ghosts .... friendly ghosts ... like Casper, the mischievous little fellow of 50's (or was it 60's) television. Many of the visitors to my office suffer visitations from ghosts they wish they could lose ... preferably in some dark alley. Their memories sometimes even intrude on the latter day versions of these visitors to their minds. Disillusionments with and resentments towards family members who are either dead, changed or no-longer-necessary, as they once may have been.

My ghosts are, as I said, mostly friendly ghosts.  Some are live ghosts ... by that, I mean nothing more than the traces of folks still in our lives who were once so different. Children who are grown. Spouses who have "grown up," as well, and joined the revelries of Last Quarter Play .... How did that happen?! Even grandchildren leave traces, as they grow and morph into new forms. Little "TRANSFORMERS," that they are.

But many of the ghosts of later years no longer have a presence beyond in our minds and hearts. This morning, it was an ex-Marine named Sukkie who in later life became friendly -- he and his wife, Diane -- with my parents. I was half asleep when Sukkie appeared ... followed by Maurice the Liturgical Singer and his wife Minnie. They had a son, roughly my age, and a younger daughter and a cognitively challenged brother (Minnie's Brother) named Maxie who would recite nonsense poems. 

These images began a veritable parade of images ... Parents .... In-Laws .... Grandparents, I had three that I knew ... a plumber on W. 5th Street and Old Man Engler who disliked kids noisily playing on our street. Neighbors in Toledo and Providence. My neighbor who lived next door when we moved into our present home ... Sam ... who lived there with his wife and his daughter and her family and his son.

I know where many of these people were buried ... and all these images go with me.

A living visitor is coming up the office path. I hear her feet. It's time to put the writing down, for the moment.

A Return to Stanley Kunitz: Touch Me

                                       "Touch Me"

I return, often, to Kunitz and his poetry ... 

"Touch Me"

 Summer is late, my heart. Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two scatter like leaves this night of whistling wind and rain. It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown. Outdoors all afternoon under a gunmetal sky staking my garden down, I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells; and like a child again marveled to hear so clear and brave a music pour from such a small machine. What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. One season only, and it's done. So let the battered old willow thrash 
against the windowpanes and the house timbers creak. Darling, do 
you remember the man you married? Touch me. remind me who I am.

Mammam Habemus? Mamman non Habemus

When the King dies, folk gather in the square and call out "Long Live the King." When a new pope or, in the most recent case, a kind of Second Pope is elected, the throngs of people call out "Habemus Pappam" .... We go yourselves a Pope.

To be an orphan ... to be without a Mother (Paul Robeson or Ritchie Havens singing? ... don't matter) or Father or, worse, to be without both is to be adrift. Mama and Papa not only provide safety but also provide answers to questions and directions on how to get certain things done.

Growing up and getting on in years ... Third Quarter ... Last Quarter .... highlights the frustration of recognizing that the Guru in the Saffron Robe? the analyst smoking his cigar? the doctor with his own name crocheted into his or her breast pocket? ... well, what to say? The curtain has been pulled away from the Great Oz. Can we make peace with that? I don't know .... ask a Guru!

There seem to be a number of types of reactions to being orphaned. One has the orphaned taking on all the roles that were once performed for him or her. "I can do anything better than you can," the song goes. Or, at least, I can muddle by doing it all. The whirling Dervish Orphan. S/he is faster than a speeding train and more powerful than a speeding bullet (even if s/he confuses things sometimes) and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. .... Eventually that person, like the aging cat who embarassedly misses the counter, fails to get a job done and gets frustrated. In the most disillusioned like Hemmingway, maybe, only one way out exists.

Another orphan feels thoroughly helpless to take on any of Mama and Papa's magical mystery tasks. Everything seems impossible or impossibly burdensome. Every counter is too tall to reach and all the cat food is on that counter. "If I could build me a ladder like my Daddy used to build, I could get there. But poor DaddyCat broke his neck on that last jump and I'm afraid to try."

Both solutions suck. One yields a sense of aloneness and the other? Depression.

There must be a middle ground, y'think?

Lemme try that leap, next time.

Alienation

Tuesday night, I was to attend a meeting at the local professional society in Philadelphia. As I was going in, I was talking to someone I've known for not quite 40 years. He was to teach a course and I was going to meet with a reading group that has been meeting since the 1960's and to which I was invited some years ago. He was wearing a men's tweed hat that might have looked fine on a driver of a 1959 MGA and still looked good, today. As we were going in, one of the members of my reading group arrived. He, too, was wearing a tweed cap and he, too, was involved in this professional community for 40 years or more ... a community with not much more than a hundred professionals. I'm not a voting member of this society due to history and politics, but, rather, something of an honorary member.  Still, it struck me as profoundly sad that these two both foreign born physicians, members of the same group for many years, had never met nor did they know each other's name and needed to be introduced by an outsider of sorts. How alienated a world we live in has often struck me but maybe never more profoundly than at that moment. 

After the meeting, I left feeling blue and glad -- only later -- when I arrived home to M and Gunther Dog. It's loaded with a sort of pathos that all these years have passed in my life and the 65 and 75 years of my colleagues and, still, people don't quite get on with each other in communities of mutual interest, concern and fraternity with each other. 

Another Day in Paradise

Euphemisms & Other Kindnesses

One of the visitors to my office calls me Grandpa Smurf. One of my kids told me -- or maybe it was M -- that the Old Guy on the Smurfs was Papa and not Grandpa Smurf ... unless Smurfette had a teenage baby or something, there is no Grandpa there among the Blue-faced Leprichauns of TV-dom ... that is, Grandpa Smurf already "passed," as we're prone to say.

Now, this is just a hair (don't say a word about my disappearing hairs) difficult. The Last Quarter doesn't align with other measures of age, as it includes years from Late Middle that morph into Old Age, Dotage and, betimes, Dementia. (Dotage, by the way, is the Age of Dotterers who walk hither and yon without knowing exactly why and -- and this is important -- who've forgotten that Dottering might be spelled with two-T's).  All this is to say that between the Addled state that many Fourth Quarterers find themself in and questions of General Semantics, it is no small feat to decide when to don the title: Old Man. And it doesn't make it any easier to know that all the Rockers of our youthful years 50 years ago have either, as the Capitol Steps averred, "traded their Weed in for Weed-whackers" or have applied to sit in Rockers for repaints of Grandma Moses ... ... or that when Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were singing "Old Man," the person they were referring to was roughly the age of our kids.

This is serious, now. No funning. "What am I?"

What am I when the tonicity in my lip muscles decreases sufficiently to produce drool stains on my tie?

What am I when younger people look at me with a degree of pathos as they hold the door open?

What am I when kids walking on the street smirk or comment a bit when I drive by in a roadster?

What am I if I no longer care if I forgot what I was looking for when I walked into a room?

What am I, Heaven forfend, if I don't remember the different usages of Lunesta and Levitra?

Now, please don't tell me; Grandpa Smurf gotta figure this one out by himself.To be continued (with any luck)

Brief Riff: Happiness, Sadness, Envy and Immobility

Two Thousand years ago, the Middle East was in a state of frenzy ... waiting for The Promised One to come and save them from tyranny and war and illness. Greeks, Romans, so-called Barbarians ... Invading ... Ruling ... Being Displaced ... Whole Populations moved about so many game pieces. Religious and Philosophic cults must have been plenty. Today, all is different. The Crimea, once again, has become a momentary hotspot for Russians and Ukrainians to stand-off or stand-down. Two Thousand years ago, there were Essene Cults and Kumran Cults and the New Christian Cult and Pharisees, to boot. Some walked the line between cults. M and I named our second child after one of the scholars who did ... but not because of his Politics but rather due to his Pragmatism.

A story was told of Akiba that he had a child late and was planning a one month celebration of his birth and his faith tradition's requirement that he symbolically redeem the child from the Priest-Class who were promised the gift of first born among the Cattle, the Produce and Human Babies, too. The story goes that Akiba was confronted by a non-believer who questioned the reasonableness of his planned celebration. "Celebrate? Don't you know that your son was born a mortal and, therefore, surely shall die." Akiba responded: "We don't make an oleo of Glee with Mourning. We Celebrate at times of Celebration and Mourn at times of Mourning." So, was Akiba's Pragmatism.

It's snowing out, once more. Someone said it was -- for this Season -- the 15th measurable snowfall, here where we live not far from Philadelphia. It seems less violent that the hooplah that predicted it and the Prophets are prophecying only a few more hours of snowfall. Last night was the Oscar Awards Shindig. I was tired and decided to turn in early but caught bits and pieces. Lots of people having a good time.

I've often talked in these notes about the beneficial value of Sadness and try, simultaneously, to model my belief in the healing properties of Glee. There are many, though, who cannot enter these worlds in the spirit in which Akiba laid them out. They get caught ... stuck ... entrenched in odd thoughts .... that Immobilize them in Envy and other disrupting feelings that get stuck in their Emotion Craw. Some examples:

"Watching the Oscars is torturous ... all these Beautiful People without a care having fun. Not me." (envy of others)

"I'm at the Party but nothing could ever be this good, again, so I'm miserable." (envy of Self)

"Whenever I think of past Glee, I remember that I am no longer Happy." (no wonder)

"When I think about my Life, now, I realize it's not worth it." (If I may chuckle: Darke Diem!)

The Last Quarter, I admit, is not for the feint of heart ... it requires a combination platter of what Akiba would have called Chessed and Gvurah .... a plate with room for both Random Acts of Everyday Kindness in a mixture with Warrior-like Moxie, both in order to meet head-on a world that is not always kind.

It was a bit earlier than the time Akiba walked through his land that another peripatetic scholar opined that the Good Days would arrive when the "hearts of the Parents return to their Children and the hearts' kindness of the Children comes lovingly back to the Parents" (closing lines of Malachi).

                                        Glee can oscillate with waves of Sadness ... but

                                                  Glee cannot conquer Envy.

                                   War cannot block those Random Acts of Kindness.

                                        Sadness has room for both Glee and Kindness.

                                   If you didn't get it in Quarters 1 to 3, there's still time.


Ask the kids. Life is a variant on Rock-Paper-Scissors.

Gotta go shovel a bit .... May it be for joy.