The Prize in the Box

Pie in the Sky? Prize in the bottom of the Cracker-Jack Box? or just "Hey, somebody forgot to put the peanuts in this box!" We folk who have lived longer than many of the people we knew have experienced being lost and we've experienced loss. Lord knows when we were first aware of loss. Do we still carry memories of having to go solo at feeding ourselves in the High Chair? We chances are don't remember the breast/bottle being removed but maybe whatever comforting blanket or doll we carried around? How many blankets went into the washer and dryer and came out the filter as lint?

I had a bear whose name is lost to me; words can be lost, too. I have it on the shelf in a closet in a bag labeled: Cryogenic Society of New York. My frozen childhood Self or just a cuddly that carries about the smells and memories of being held ... of being treated for lost knee-skin with Merthiolate and a hug ... of a Father willing to go through the heartache of a shrill child recoiling from the need to have a sliver of wood removed from just under the skin or what was left of a tooth dangling in the intra-oral breeze of childhood screams.

I went to school and was, in hindsight, maybe too young to leave the nest. First day in a religious school, one of my perfidious classmates stole my wax whistle that I bought from Abe and Minnie's Candy Store on West 5th Street in Coney Island. I was inconsolable and walked home across a triple-island parkway ... maybe ten lanes crying all the way ... a mile or more? Losses. As we grow, we attempt to find groups that won't expel us and, at least for some of us, we settle into dyadic relationships with one other. This person is almost as good as the Prize in the Cracker-Jack Box.

According to Mark Twain, Adam did that with good faith only to find Eve bringing home strange little creatures. Poor Adam couldn't figure them out. He threw them in water and determined they weren't fish. Maybe he flung them in the air, disappointed that they weren't birds. Shit! The Prize in the Box has to be shared.

Had a curious moment, this week. M has a bum knee and took a Fall going on a Grandma Gig, to boot. Sprained left foot ... old right knee? We don't take our Prizes out into the back 40 and "put'em down" any longer. We become the caretakers. If the unconscious mind cannot separate between A nurses B and B nurses A, the conscious mind can. All of us, I suspect, wonder in such situations about when it's going to be our turn. Woe to the people whose Prizes lose it to Alzheimer's or complicated MS or other debilitating diseases. Oh! But to the moment I mentioned.

M was to go to a Special Person's day in #2 and #5 grand-spawn's school 350 miles ENE away. Her Doc said "no ... y'can't go." M reluctantly called the kids and their kids and explained that, for the first time, she would miss a Special Person's Day. I wouldn't describe her as devastated but clearly hurting in having to tell our sweet little grand-daughter (#5, that is) ... Grandma can't come. From what I could understand, The Little One was in tears and Grandma was consoling the Sweetie in her disappointment.

Aha, I thought. That must be related to the Prize at the bottom of the Box .... knowing that someone else feels ... really feels ... your pain and does so willingly. I thought of the scene in When Harry Met Sally, where the young lover fakes an orgasm in a deli-restaurant and an older person tells the waitress: "I'll have what she's having." I knew when that image came to me that I wanted what my Grand-daughter was having ... a solid dose of gratuitous empathy.

I'm gonna make my fortune selling Tee shirts for Old Fart types:

I'M PLAYING IN THE 

LAST QUARTER OF LIFE

&

I REALLY NEED A HUG.

Getting Old Together: Memorial Day 2014

Maybe, it was 10 July 1994 when I began writing about the accelerated recognition that there was -- after all -- an irreversible quality to Time. M and I still had a young child, then,  just about 18 year old, and our two older kids were 27 and 28, already. I had begun in 1991 to slow the mad rush to wherever it is that we rush to, in those tThird Quarter years. Indeed, most of the people who occasion my office, these days, are that age and older ... or much older. But ttwenty years ago, I wrote -- not about my Dogs,  Shayna Rosa the Wonda Dog or Mitzie the epileptic Bernard who sometimes lost reverse in the midst of a seizure -- but about myself. I was getting older. It could no longer be denied:

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.

That was, indeed and unbelievably, about 20 years ago ... well, it will be 20 years ago the week I go back to see my Ears, Nose and Throat Doc. He's a new Doctor for me. Our previous one ran off to marry a clergyman and we can't find her. 

"Stacy, where are you?"

She wasn't all that old ... likely, ten years younger than M and I ... and had a warmer manner than this young fellow who will likely either sweeten up or toughen up ... aye! there aren't that many choices, I suppose. He was fine. He stuck a flexible look-see rubber hose up my nose to take a look-see and I could swear he said:

"I didn't see any legions."

I didn't say a word but smiled as I simultaneously and instantaneously recognized that he hadn't said what I was now fantasizing about, namely, hordes of Roman soldiers crossing the Rubicon to take on thenow-growing-deaf Esophogeans. Did St. Paul really pen The Epistle to the Esophogeans? Maybe this 35 year old Doc thought that I was going a little brain-soft ... smiling, as I was, in the face of his positive report that he sited no lesions. If I share, as they say, my little private fantasy, M sitting in the examination room with me might opine:

"See what I mean, Doc? The Old Buzzard is going Deaf."

For some reason, I preferred to be seen as a wee-bit demented than deaf. Odd!

******************************************

It's the weekend in the USA when we remember our fallen soldiers .... those youngsters we send out knowing pretty well what percentage of them won't come back and how many will show up at Thanksgiving with limbs that don't work or a mind more like that of the wilted warriors of the Nursing Homes than the youngsters who looked so tuned-in in High School Literature classes. Others will just be haunted by memories. M's Dad had nightmares from WWII experiences until he died 17 years ago and my Father only talked about non-combat related stuff from his tour of duty in WWII Pacific. 

I guess, in my mind, I'm paraphrasing John Donne: Don't ask for whom we celebrate on this Memorial Day, we celebrate for we, thee and me.  We remember unforgiving Time who we label Father Time and -- pointedly not -- Mother Time. Culturally? or maybe just in my mind, again? the notion of Father is imbued with the justice of the warrior and Mom with the beneficence of mercy and sweetness. Some mystics believe that The Good Life has just the right balance between these two which they name Gvurah (warriorship) and Chessed (mercy/kindness). I suppose I wrote that dittie, above, when I passed into that time of life when there is a growing recognition of our quest for Sweetnes ... for the return of Mom. When we crave it from our partners or our partners long for it through their relationship with us ... or when GuntherDog feels a great need to be "loved-up" at the top of the stairs before agreeing to race down those same stairs,  even if he has to wait to pee  ... I suppose the Sweetness we crave in all these situations is experienced when we recognize that we have been meaningful, if only in the loving gazes of another. 

"Keep the Hot Dogs and pass the Sugar, please."   

So Much More to GuntherDog: Memorial Day

So Much More to Gunther and to his aging compadres! Eerie ... Friday night, I dreamed that a new Director was chosen at a Drug Clinic in which I had consulted 20+ years ago. I was unhappy about it. "How could you replace Bill?" The morning after the Dream, I received a note from his wife ... Bill's Dementia was getting worse in Texas where they had moved to be close to their kids (who ain't kids no more) and keeping him at home and away from what is called euphemistically ... "The Home" ... seems inevitable. Some not-so-many years ago, "The Greatest Generation," the one that fought and supported the Great War in Europe, was openly lauded and mourned as those troops began to disappear even from the Obits. It's now the turn of maybe the craziest generation ... those who fought for and against the involvements in Viet Nam, Granada, Iraq I, Iraq II and Afghanistan. Including those who "let their freak-flags fly" (Crosby, Stills, et freres) and those who held on for dear life to the values of the Backyard-barbecuing Fifties. Ah, but I've left Gunther in the kitchen where he's resting after his earlier trek outside to relieve his bladder.

We Players in the Last Quarter want "new experience" (the contribution of some long-dead sociologist named Smith) but we passionately want the familiar, as well ... we are creatures of habit. Gunther, too.

He rises in the morning before 5. If I'm still in bed, he goes right to M. Gunther had a Mother; indeed, we had wanted to rescue her but she was already spoken for ... A visitor of mine once said that all the Good Ones are spoken for, but she was referring to the absence of Good Single Men in the Americas. The Canine Rescue we worked with evaluated us by phone after reading a ten page application. Then they visited our property and had us meet with G before the adoption could be final. He was, perhaps, just less than a year old and full of energy. He could fly around the yard like California Kitchen, or whatever the recent-biggest name in horse-racing is. Horses, Dogs, ... run so much more beautifully that we people do. When California Kitchen (I know that's not the second name but I just can't recall it in the moment; you know the experience) runs and when G runs, all four feet go airborne at the same time. I've had dreams that I can fly but running has never looked that way for me.

So, Gunther rises at about 5 or I wake him when I'm ready to start life for the day. If I start at 3, he recoils from the thought of disturbing his sleep and it requires both M and I to tell him that it's time to pee. While I take care of my AM lavage for two minutes, he rolls about in bed trying to capture M's attention and then slowly ... very slowly ... makes his way to the bedroom door and the top of the stairs where he sits.

"I'm not moving until you luv-me-up ... Run your fingers 

through my hair and make me feel loved, you Schmuck!

Hey, maybe tickle me under the chin!

But stay away from my Belly; leave that to Mom!" 

I swear that's the look on his face, even if his ability to articulate the feeling that says I'm a hapless idiot, a Schmuck, lags behind. If I've satisfied him, he flies down the stairs.

"You can't do that, Schmuck! You hold on to the railing 

like maybe it's time for me to worry about where my next 

bowl of Kibble is coming from .... errrr .... Schmuck."

G runs to the back door.

"Gotta pee. C'mon. What ya waitin' for, .... Schmuck. 

Put a little kick in that Old Man Two-Step before I take 

my bladder impulses out on one of those plants you leave inside! 

Don't ya know that plants like it outside, well, 

except when it's raining ... Schmuck!"

A little clarification is in order. The word Schmuck came to English via Yiddish and before that in German, where it's used to refer to jewelery ... like maybe a hanging bauble or a jewel, anyway. In Yiddish, it came to be used to describe that ornamental piece of flesh that hangs around -- most of the time doing nothing --between a male's legs. M thinks Gunther read my volume on Freud's Oedipus Complex and, anyway, that he doesn't ever say to himself that I'm a schmuck.

Hey, if ya don't believe that Dogs can put together complex ideas, read the 3/4 page Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neil, ... Eugene's spotted kid. You'll see.

I don't believe that he read my book, and anyway, M thinks she can get away with fooling me because SHE thinks I'm going deaf.

Sad!

What will we do when GuntherDog stops running? I dunno.

Even the Dog's Gettin' Old

I suppose it was about 45 years ago that we got our first dog, M and I that is, as I did have dogs before we married. Our first child had had an uncomfortable experience with a big pooch. We decided we would get a St. Bernard puppy and that his phobic responses would decrease as the dog's size increased ... and so, it was. We named the pup Kazimierza at the request of my mentor, the retired head of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Kazimierz Kuratowski. Kaz was a wondrous Mother to our older kids, had a litter of 10, herself, but died young. Kaz was followed by a male Bernard, the Psychotic Dr. Schreber, who lasted ten years and Mitzie (Mitzvah) who only made it six years. Between Schreber and Mitzie, we got our first Mutt, Shayna Rosa the WonderDog and she lived a long time and was the leader of the pack of Mitzie and Cats. Shayna had a way with other animals and was in charge of socializing each. One cat -- upon arriving -- ran up to the third floor and Shayna -- step by step -- made it up to visit him ... and step by step encouraged Munkacz to come down the stairs, after a month or so, where he stayed until he was a very old guy.

When Shayna died twelve+ years ago, I continued to have the sense she'd be there whenever I opened the door to the house. Shayne was some kind of Collie-Shepherd mix, maybe 45 pounds, and had a beautiful voice that I missed ... well, that I miss. Matyos the Cat would walk along the piano keys and Shayna would melodically howl. She stopped that for  the year after her baby (Mitzie the St. Bernard) died during a seizure and stopped singing completely the year before she succumbed to old age. When I stopped expecting Shayna to be there and under pressure from our grandchild, we brought GuntherDog into the fold.

Gunther had been rescued from a Kentucky Quick-Kill shelter and it quickly became obvious why he was there. Poor fella had likely been mistreated by a male owner and was hostile to men, especially in the presence of women. Gunther is about 11 years old and, to this day, snarls when I interrupt he and his Mom watching Cable News. When Grandma is off on a Grannie-Gig out of town, Gunther is quite attached to me but he has a difficulty cherishing the idea that Mom and Dad could have their own relationship that excludes him. Still and all, a very good dog. Never hostile to children. Loves women. And has quite an ambivalent relationship with me.

I just had the thought: maybe GuntherDog doesn't exist ... maybe he's a projection of a shadowy part of me that I choose not to accept?

So much for psycho-babble! I do identify strongly with dogs as I've previously confessed, but Gunther is real and in the other room watching Cable News about another person who took himself so seriously as to feel he had the right to kill others. Gunther must be sitting there, head cocked like Nipper, the RCA-Voice-of-his-Master Dog, wondering about how crazy these people are.

Any case Gunther is getting old, too. He's in his Last Quarter, too. He snores like an Old Man. He farts like an Old Man. And out of nowhere, he runs for the back door to be let out to pee ... like an Old Man. Well, like an Old Man cursed with a prostate as big as a Mango! M thinks he's developing a Dementia. Then, again, M thinks I'm going deaf. (to be continued)

Protecting Oneself

I watch myself and my fellow 4th Quarter types .... we're sensitive to bruising .... and not just if we've taken too much Warfarin.

Initially, I thought to myself -- writing the above -- that it bears or bares some similarity between the old and the young. The young, too, are very sensitive but it strikes me, on second thought,  that the vulnerabilities must include some that are very different .... even if the responses might be similar. Well, then, it's not so much that both are sensitive that I need appreciate, but what the soft-spots are that set off these responses in myself and others Playing in the Last Quarter.

My reflexive turn is typically to Scriptural passages .... even if we change, as we age, I suspect that our metaphors remain rather steady. With the Patriarchs, for some reason, the relevant texts don't seem to show any struggle. Jacob, the Grandson of the Forebear who is credited with setting all this Judaeo- Christian to do in motion and who goes off into the sunset quietly after attempting to do in his older two sons, Jacob gathers up children and blesses them up and dresses them down and reaffirms his preferences for some. Isaac the Betweener and one of his Dad's attempted offerings goes quietly, even if like his favored son, he, too, gets caught in scandalous confused preference- affirming and disagreement with his wife. All this in Genesis, as is Joseph's unremarkable dotage. The only hint the text gives us is in the beginning of Exodus where it is noted that he was, in some sense, forgotten: And a new king arose on Egypt that didn't know/recall Joseph.

It's not until the central character of Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers-and-Deuteronomy is aging that we hear of complaints about getting old. Moses seems to tire of his complaining and whining (kvetching) flock. He begins often saying "this is it" ... "this is the salient matter (zeh ha'davar)" .... and either he or his God that speaks to him feels the urge to put an end to this flock .... to drive them and their whining off a cliff or something. At the end of his life, Moses, himself, complains:

"And I asked for mercy for myself (in the reflexive verb form in the Biblical Hebrew ... va'eschanan) from God at that time. You began to show (me) your servant ...." and now you wish me to go up to some lonely mountain -top and die without getting the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.

Maybe these lead to the two images that I need to understand .... those of my brothers and sisters who feel angry at their progeny? for leaving them? for growing up? for going on to new tasks? and those who feel cheated of the prize that they always hoped for or dreamed of? Maybe, too, there are those who are at peace with gifts received?

The New Testament Preacher of Peace is never given the time to age ... to become defensively dissatisfied with his lot in life ... or death. The curiously quoted Aramaic words at the passion are those of a young man assassinated in the prime of his fame and as his followers were proliferating ... growing in number. The words quoted are assumed to be Aramaic interpretations of the Psalms. There, it says: Eli, Eli lamah azavtani? My Lord, my Lord, why have You abandoned me. In the Aramaic (a language which combined the Hebrew of the day with indigenous Arabic languages), it appears as: Eli, Eli, lamah sabachtani. Now, the word sabachtani is the same word that the Aramaic translators of biblical texts (people like Onkeles) use to render abandonment in Psalms ... but oh! so preciously close to the Hebrew 'zavachtani' which could only alter that passage reported in multiple gospels as "my Lord, my Lord, why have You slaughtered me?.

Maybe that's a question still better rendered as: My Lord, my Lord, why have You taken so much from me?

The Fifth Speaker

I suppose I was the Fifth Speaker this weekend, the fourth to be disappointing ...  As I've aged, I don't like to speak much .... my ability to hold to a line of thought-development or my interest in doing so has waned over the years.

"No kidding, Howard ... we who have been reading your posts sometimes find it hard to find the thread from blog to blog .... blah! blah! blah! or is it blog, blog, blog!"

Well, thanks for pointing that out.

I was talking about my sense that, in early life, we begin without much engagement with the inner world of others and even find their inner world "an inconvenient truth," to borrow from VP Gore. I sometimes repeat verbatim what someone else says and the very fact that I've uttered the words changes their meaning.

It takes us a long time even before we allow another to do things that are for us but not in our own voice.

In the best of circumstances, we seem to develop sufficiently to gather together -- in pairs and larger social settings -- a cohort of near and dear whose contributions to our way of thinking can have a life of its own ... maybe even say things that run counter to our own way of thinking.

Buber, the religious thinker, would try to separate out I-Thou from I-It kinds of relationships. In the former, my Other is experienced by my as a Subject in their Own Right .... someones entitled to their own way of embracing those close to them and having their own idiosyncratic way of relating to their own Gods, Theories and Ideas. In the I- It for, the Other fails to be seen as a Person entitled to their
own style of thinking and efforts are made to deconstruct or even demolish their contribution. Buber (and I following this other Brother Martin) saw this as the basic form of the Good and of the Moral.

In any case, my own experience with audiences is that many need to recoil from the speaker's unique contribution ... unique? if only because it's their own. This morning I'm speaking as Speaker .... wonder if I make a good audience member, especially thinking of my last posting ... sounded kind of snarky to me.

Damn ... Have I turned the Last Quarter corner into snarkyness?  That would be sad ....

It was so curious that one of the members of the group to which I was presenting was apparently incapable of getting into an other's boat and doing a little rowing inn the same direction, before deciding that 'this boat don't float' .... My own inner thoughts wondered why that was so hard for him ... was it that he was protecting the floor? ... was it that as a youngster no one shared the floor with him? .... was it that he was on the shorter side of most men? That seems too simple. Indeterminate, I suppose! Felt drawn into the breach .... we people are strange creatures, myself not excluded.

Came home to hear from M and a call-in visitor, both talking about how someone else couldn't just go with the flow ... you know, the "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" kind of joining.

Seems sad that we humans haven't gone beyond this to Brother Martin Buber's I - Thou or to Brother Martin Luther King's Dream of a world in which we find value in sharing in others' Dreams.

I'll keep trying and learn, maybe, to be satisfied with limited successes.

Dreams

Dreams of Life? Dreams of the Night?

I had a curious weekend which ended with dreams about frustrating travels ... aborted attempts at getting somewhere. LQiM (Laughing Quietly inside Myself) ... Where does the Last Quarter end? Ooops. Maybe better not to end those dreams.

Heard three talks, this weekend.

Friday night, a Canadian spoke of the need to distinguish the mental functions Conscience rooted in Love  from a Punitive Guilt-based way of approaching the World based in Hate. He had me at word one. If only he stopped there but he went on talking ... and talking ... and talking. Used a lot of Big Words that don't resonate well with my aging brain and fail to tickle my aging mind. The speaker was a Mid-Fourth-Quarter resident.

The second speaker talked of his very personal notions of the Good/Godly life and how he had earlier in his life was moved to avoid ritual while now the deeds themselves carry the day.  This speaker lived Mid-Third-Quarter.

The last two speakers were discussing a lost-but-recently-found Training Film that Gene Kelly did for Army in 1946 on what were called War Neuroses in WWI, Combat Fatigue in WWII and the film, and that we now call PTSD. . A Mid-Fourth-Quarter fellow whom I admire spent most of his time presenting a biography of the Dancer/Actor/Director. By the end of this bio, M was about to kick me for bringing her to hear a biography. I was lost in rage at the idea of sending our kids to war and then treating them as either malingerers who need to be rehabilitated to go back for some more (WWI) or as sick folk who hadn't been resilient enough (one audience participant hinted at that) to endure the Fog of War. By the end of the Bio, I was feeling a combination of deep sadness and horror. I kept thinking of the youngsters sent, the spouses and lovers left behind, and the kids growing up at the hands of these soldier boys-returned-home. The story of Agamemnon and Jepthah who went to war only to come home wishing to sacrifice their kids kept coming into my head. How would we like our Boys and Girls to coime home from waging our crazy representative wars, ie, wars where we have our kids go out and fight for us.

There was a fourth speaker ... second at the film. She was a Second Quarter (maybe early Third) Psychologist who had worked with soldiers for more than ten years. I asked her how one deals with one's own sense, if present, in the immorality of war, especially if sharing this with Veteran patients was a two edged sword. I knew in her position, it would be reasonable for her to answer. I left wishing that the refreshments for the film had included some Prozac or a shot of Brandy ... Oops ... I can't drink!

In the end, it was only the second speaker who talked of the value of doing (for him? prayer) that touched me in a way that made the weekend's intellectual fare seem sustaining of life.

No wonder my dream-travels never made it to the end of the line ... where a rich dinner might be served!

I should've spent the weekend gardening!

Old Dog, I'm a Lot Like You

(With apologies to Crosby, Still, Nash and Young)

I think it was maybe within a year of M and I getting married that the New York Times had a spread on how dogs and their owners grew together. I seem to remember the iconic Winston Churchill looking guy walking his bulldog and a long woman with half-mile long hair and body walking her Afghan Hound. Ah, those were the days. Afghanistan was -- to young me, anyway -- a mysterious place with Suqs especially there to buy spices. There was a war waging, but mostly it was in Viet Nam, Africa or the just-Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. I think of them as simpler times.

Ah, enough reminiscing and back to the fantasies upon waking that represent the core and source for these scribbles of a Last Quarter Player who -- truth be told -- reminisces a great deal about being a young Puppy but who, like GuntherDog, is gettin' on. My identification with dogs is longstanding and my willingness not to roll down the car window and howl with any new possible long-eared friend is only there to protect my (grand)children from embarrassment. In the movie about a woman and her progeny, Antonia's Lines, there is a character named la Luna who opens her window each night to howl at the Moon. I identify with her, as well (just as I recommend the c 1995 movie).

Old Dog, look at my life, I'm a lot like you.

Yesterday, M had a disconcerting report from her Doc and her most faithful lover GuntherDog seemed to know. He sat with her on a love seat, as he usually does, sitting up with his left paw on the arm of the divan. Missing was only his smoking jacket ... or, perhaps, a suede vest.

Old Dog take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Yesterday, after office hours, I invited my youngest and her daughters to join M and I in removing the winter cover from a pool we built maybe 30+ years ago. I took 3 or 4 hours to get it ready for removing. A Winter's worth of rotting leaves had to be taken off along with the vast majority of the collected waters. By the time we were done, my arthritic hands and wrists were just like GuntherDog's periodic limp. Like me, he does more than maybe he should and does circuits in the yard that an 11 yo dog shouldn't do. His girlfriend (M) gets all worried and a few hours later he's fine. She does the same with my cardiac arrhythmias and sundry signs of aging.

Indeed, GuntherDog and I (and M, too) are aging together and similar in so many other ways, as I am to my Cohort of Fourth Quarter denizens ... the Boomless Baby Boomers ... the Late Boomers ... those who go Boom in the Night ... those on whom the Boom has been Dropped!

This morning, I slept late (545) and Gunther really had to pee ... "I know, Gunther, I know the feeling."

Almost every morning, he stops at the top stair-landing and refuses to proceed until I pet him ... "I know what it feels like, Gunther. I'm willing to use outdoor plumbing, too, but only if you love-me-up a little."

Whenever I approach the room where the lovers (M and G) are on the loveseat, he jumps into my seat and looks, as if to say: "I got the woman and the chair, Sucker." .... "I know, Gunther, you do; now get off the seat or I take the woman."

Gunther doesn't want much. He likes his Kibble when he likes it ... really likes M's cooking better ... and won't stop his barking. Emile Zola said something about his having come to live loudly. "I know, GuntherDog; he was referring to us."

Well? What to say?  I'm not ready to stop my scribbles and other writing and when my grandspawn are not in the car I feel quite OK push-buttoning the Modern Window Lifts and "Just-sayin' Hey" to my good buddies on the street. LOL ... (not quite ... but close to) Howlin' Mad Howard.

Here's to Thinking about You, Mom ...

We human-folk of whatever Quarter of Life are prone to think that what we are thinking at this very moment is the salient issue to be understood by each and every denizen of the Cosmos. Perhaps the alien is best understood as all those Others that we encounter or can imagine who may not be in on that truth.

King Kong just didn't get it ... people were busy leading their quotidian lives and he needed to climb the Empire State Building and make a big fuss. Godzilla was really no better.

Space aliens don't get it, either. While they're reigning terror from above with their Laser Ray Guns, we're trying to sit down at the table and eat leftover Kapusta from yesterday's just delightful dinner. 

And why the Hell can't the person who cut me off this morning on the Expressway, nevermind the enemy, why can't they know just how important it is for me to get to wherever I'm going, even if I'm Playing in the Last Quarter and not certain what that destination is.

Today, is Mother's Day in the United States. What a curious self propagating race those Mother's are. I know, I know. Fathers have something to do with propagation of the species ... but lemme tell ya ... Kids seem to know. Babies grow in their Mommies bellies and that story about Dad leaving a seed there has gotta be a fairy tale. 

I came out of my Mom's belly, just like everybody, maybe, but Dolly the Cloned Sheep. Baaaah! In fact Bah Humbug on the thought that the 12 pound or 12 pound 8 ounce baby (there's seems to be conflicting info on my exact weight at birth) that came out of my Mother's Belly started as a randomly chosen cell.

So, to my Mom who arrived on these shores from Hungary in 1921leaving most of her family behind to be ravaged by the World War that was brewing in Europe even in those just-post-WW-I days, I have a day to remember you and the other Mothers of my life ... including M and our Daughter and Daughters-in-Law and all those Women and those Men who have Mothered me. Mothered me? Well, yes.

This morning, waking up into a new day, I puzzled ... Mothers? What are they. I didn't have the disappointing experience that many visitors to my office make plain by referring to "Mother as but half a word" or just more plainly as "that fucking bitch." Hans Loewald who must've had a Mother, himself, said that some of our human dilemmas arise from our memories and how they house conflicting (consubstantial, was the word he used ... sharing the same body) images of our Mothers. One image comes from a very early sense that we are Mom's one and only ... inseparable from her ... maybe even part of the same system. Mom didn't mind our dirty diapers and didn't seem to object to all the stumbles and falls that finally got us on our way. My Mom found humor when I hid the hamsters in the pot drawer under the oven ... just for her to find scampering into her kitchen. Mom didn't mind in 1954 when I gave her the phone, indicating that Daddy was calling and leading her to greet my school principal as "hello, Darling." She didn't even seem to object when one night when I was 7, just as she was coming into the bedtime room, I slid down under the covers, getting her to mistakenly kiss TrampDog good-night. I don't know what Mom thought in her last years as she slipped away into mindlessness, but even then she would smile when M and I or my Brother and I would sing songs of her childhood to her in the odd residence in which she spent those final years.

But then there's the other side. We approach even the best of meals hungry and that repast is not infrequently judged harshly if the entree is not just so or if the dessert is made from frozen strawberries. Maybe the most difficult lesson in life is recognizing that Moms -- and Dads, too -- are people in their own right. My Mom wanted to be an artist and, even if she never made a living from that work, she was. I don't know if she wanted 2 kids before the war, one during and one after, but she did seem to care for her family. Would she have been happier if she listened more keenly when her older Sister took her to see Margaret Sanger talk about birth control ... maybe? Part of her was lost in the mourning for her cousins and aunts and uncles who perished in the Auschwitzes of Europe ... mostly, in Auschwitz, itself. Part of her was special for her shared ability to feel those sad feelings for her lost family and to appreciate the wistful tone of the melodies of her European childhood.

It was just a few weeks ago that in the midst of a project I was writing about healthful relationships that I wrote:

To care for another – aye, to love that person maturely – requires 

that they be allowed in one’s mind to be complex subjects in their own right … 

with their own relationships and beliefs that may be independent of ours’. In this sense, it is recognition of others’ inner different worlds that permits love.

Maybe when I was writing I was thinking of my Mother and all the generations of Mothers who figure out how to juggle their own need to be subjects with their own desires while carving out spaces for their kids to eventually do the same.

Here's to you, Mom. You did real good!

101 (ab)Uses for an Old Person

Guess it was the 1980's when 101 Uses for a Dead Cat first appeared.

I don't think I can come up with 101 ways to recycle old people for the advantage of society. M and I were at a meeting, last night, of a township citizens' group that had organized as part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health arm of our township. The Older Adult Subcommittee had been formed to figure out how to provide assistance for the aged members of our suburban/near-urban community. We had high hopes when we agreed to look into it. We were going to provide snow-shovelling assistance to Last Quarter homeowners and maybe leaf-raking, as well .... As Solomon wrote: a time for every purpose under the Sun.

Reality hits hard. The Township Solicitor (the chief of paranoia and liability in municipal government) wouldn't permit youngsters to shovel ... middle-aged people didn't want to shovel ... and very old people, as I noted many blogs ago, were likely to be seen making snow-angels as part of their last desperate act to breathe if they attempted shovelling for others.

Raking? We had one volunteer.

Luncheons? What happens if someday someone dies from the cooking?

I know ... I know. We live in a litigious society and liability does have to be taken seriously. Last night we considered movies ... but maybe, just maybe we should eschew popcorn to avoid oldsters gagging. Exciting movies (never mind Classics that might bring memories to the Old and Haggard Baby-Boomers, like Behind the Green Door ... just jesting) should certainly be avoided. And Road Runner cartoons might lead to Walker-Races (6 legged races!) culminating in catastrophic injury. Maybe movies will work ... we'll see.

All that led me to obsess upon waking about how Last Quarter folk are seen and -- before getting out of bed -- the macabre ... are there 101 uses for retired old folk?

     Had an image of integrating a stuffed oldster with self-activating stop and go signs at a traffic circle?

     How about a front hall hat rack?

     With hands projected forward, maybe an umbrella holder?

     Extras in movies where action is to be centered on the young ... maybe seated in theaters?

     Certainly, if mechanized, the source of voters in close elections.

 
"Never-you-mind," I thought, "felines have far more cute value ... living or dead."  ....

Ah, relevance is more than it's cracked up to be (now who's cracking up?)

Just sayin'.

 (got better recycling ideas? leave me a note or contact your township solicitor.)

 

Double Overtime

Was reading a brief piece about a man that the online article claimed was the Oldest Man in the World. A Chemist, Dr. Imich who was in a horizontal position but still talking, had spent several years incarcerated in a WWII Russian Camp. The article avers that: "He thinks his longevity has to do with a combination of eating well, not drinking, being very active and not having children."

Formulas. How does someone get to be 111 ... smack-dab in the middle of the sixth quarter or double overtime? People seem to love formulaic answers to impossibly difficult questions. One octogenarian who used to visit my office, a physician, suffered to find an answer to what happens after death. He had kept notes of his fantasies for nearly 50 years about his fantasied journey with exotic images of people, places and things ... and lots of women. He was blessed with great intelligence from early on in life and felt ... no 'believed' ... that answers should be accessible to him that were inaccessible, or at least inaccessible to generations of most-likely equally intelligent Souls.

I sit here in my office opposite a wall full of books mostly written in the past 100 years. Then, there's my grandfather's bookcase that I received upon his death after his 99th birthday. Grandpa had filled it with the wisdom of his people's religious tradition and I reserve it for "the Sacred." Mostly Old Books and a scroll that he carried when he emigrated from Hungary a bit less than 100 years ago and that was, perhaps, his grandfather's. I think of myself as intelligent but am not confident that I'm anywhere but in the middle of the pack ... lower end? higher end? who the Hell knows .... somewhere under the normal curve.

So, Dr. Imich, I don't know what's helped me arrive into the middle of the Fourth Quarter. I haven't found any satisfying formulas. During Woodstock, M and I were caught up in traffic due to a concert that we might have known about were we not figuring out how to deal with two toddlers in diapers. Maybe had we not been foolish enough to have a second child 14 months after our first ... just maybe? we might've been caught up in some radical causes or worse? the drug world of the late 1960's. Nevermind that our third child, born some 9 years after her brothers, would have never been there and kept us from getting lost in other madnesses of early midlife. Life's the most glorious of all crap-shoots.

Deuteronomy says it simply: The apparent things are for us and our children (to know); the hidden matters are for the Master our God forever.

What are all those stories about climbers who crave the words of wisdom of some mountain-dwelling and saffron-robed Sage who utters -- after deep reflection ... "There's no free lunch." (I think that was Bill Cosby's version but I don't remember). But no matter how many times we/I hear it, we humanfolk expect to get what we cannot receive ... answers.

Indeed, the Wise tell us that we reap what we sow but for this Last Quarter player and many others, life has been full of surprises ... like one who scatters seeds of unknown origins and waits to see what will grow. When I moved into my office, I noticed that little Japanese Maple saplings were growing outside my office ... brought there in bird shit, perhaps, like the 60 foot Pin-Oak not far from that spot. I don't know but now 35 years later in Spring, the area outside my office is a Japanese Maple forest. I suspect there are visitors to my office who imagine that I planted those Maples.

Zeh Nehenneh ... This One is Pleasured

We folk who have made it to the Last Quarter, to play, therein, with a sufficiency of health and wish to pleasure self and others have, perhaps, gone through many -- may I call them -- incarnations. I am not specifically speaking of the typical developmental and maturational growths that go along with early childhood. We learn to re-situate our own bodies when in discomfort and to respond to others. We crawl and then toddle and then run and then walk. We ask for things with single words and suddenly are found speaking -- not in tongues -- but in sentences. We scratch itches, publicly clean our nostrils and eventually learn the secrets of using indoor plumbing in ways that fail to elicit disgust in those who have been placed on this Good Earth to care for our needs. We even begin to have some sense that others have needs and develop the sense that we may disturb others and even feel sadness when that occurs.

So much happens in those early years. And then -- with these skills under our wings -- we take brief flights from the nest and Mama ... and seek out a sequence of our own provisional nests and caretakers. For me, I flew about studying religious texts and then Mathematical ones. I took partial leave from those and tried teaching and running schools for a bit before settling into being a counselor of sorts and health care provider. I was never good at relinquishing the old ... Old interests die hard for me and continue on (epigenetically) informing these future incarnations.

So, the religious readings from my youth remain, even if the balance I learned in toddlerhood has occasionally been compromised ... Hell! I'm not complaining ... I haven't fallen off a bike in 50 years.

So, yesterday, I was pissing and moaning about how things don't always turn out the way one might have hoped for in the beginning and ended by suggesting that I would return to my chief bugbear, today.

To begin ... There was, I think, about 1100 years between the time Jeremiah preached "incoming" and doom to the completed writings of the Babylonian Talmud written when at least part of the Kingdom of Judah was exiled as a result of early skirmishes and wars in the Middle East. When we were kids, we learned about Golden Ages and Crescents ... ah, but what a mess. In any case, during the latter parts of those many centuries, scholars in the towns of Sura and Pump'disa put forth civil and ritual codes of practice. There were lots of details ... indeed, enormous numbers of details but generalities, as well.

Among those general principles that I recall, central are the rules for -- if I may -- the moral endpoints of the toddlers learning that there are his or her own pleasures and then the nuanced responses that they may elicit in others. An example: You're walking outside the fence of an apple orchard, whose owner has gone to Aruba for two weeks of R&R. There's an apple on the ground. You pick it up and eat it. The Masters would ask: Are there damages in this situation, after all (and in their language): Zeh nehenneh v'zeh lo chasser (this one has pleasure and the other one has no loss). They conclude: No, A having pleasure does not define the loss in B. The worms would've eaten the apple and the fruitman had no loss.

The Masters suggested (as my aging memory at least partially recalls) different situations that required a careful approach to determine civil responsibilities in these matters (Tort Laws): here are those that I remember (in volumes Kiddushin and Baba Kama .... interestingly, the first being a tract on marriage) ...

Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Mitztaer .... This one is pleasured and the other suffers.
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Nehenneh ... This one is pleasured and so is the other one (pleasured).
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Mischayev ... This one is pleasured and the other incurs a debt.
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Chasser ... This one is pleasured and this has a loss.
Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Lo Chasser ... This one is pleasured and this one has no loss.

My bugbear is the one that, as far as I can recall, they missed and that yet seems part of the web of possibilities of human relatedness.

Zeh lo Nehenneh v'zeh Yichasser ... This one has no pleasure but carries out whatever act in spite of the expectation that it will cause someone else a loss. I suppose, to carry the earlier analogy ... I'm walking in or near the orchard on picking-day and I reach up and grab the sweetest apple that anyone has seen, throw it on the ground and crush it underfoot. Doing harm to others when there is no gain to oneself ... those same Masters referred to a certain human capacity to cavalierly cause others harm without any gain except the knowledge that the other has lost ... Sin'as Chinam .... gratuitous enmity.

In 40 years of working as a healthcare provider, it remains the hardest personality characteristic for members of Clan Anthropos to overcome ... revenge? In the Fourth Quarter or in earlier ones, we look upon those so much better equipped to Dance in the Vineyards ... when we look upon them with love and gratitude, we hum along and remember when we danced just as vigorously. When we spy the vineyard dancers reveling in their youth with envy, either because we never so-danced or because we no longer can, we generate a disruptive din ... we turn the radio up as high as it can go, rev our unmuffled engines and remain unhappy ourselves.

Zeh Nehenneh v'zeh Nehenneh ... to paraphrase Rodney King: Why can't we all get pleasure?

Unconditional Love

I guess I know more about Unconditional Limits than Unconditional Love. I think it was the Humanistic Psychologists -- maybe most notably Rogers (that's Carl, not Fred) -- who spoke of Unconditional Positive Regard. In lots of professional relationships, we have certain unconditional limits ... notably ... we don't make love and we don't make war. And, indeed, with the students in my classrooms and the visitors to my office, I've managed not to beat anyone over the head and to keep my pants on. Yeah, Howard!

But this unconditional love thing? That seems less and less appealing as the years pass by. Oh, I accept the pressing need to love a baby whether it has a full or a clean diaper? ... says mama or papa first? I accept a similarly central kindness in accepting our children and, indeed, loving them even when they mess up. As my kids were growing up I had the notion of a FUB board (yes! that's Fuck Up Board). I told myself that the Three Little Spawns were entitled to Fuck-Up royally 135 times between them before I let'em have it with the Wrath of Howard. I succeeded quite a bit and -- by my calculations -- they only Fucked-up 87 times. I could tell myself, therefore, that I was blessed ... and I HAVE been blessed.
\
Still, in the Last Quarter something shifts. If adolescents consider themselves immortal then their parents fore quite some time imagine that the kids have an equally forever-time to get things straight. Early marriage is like that, too. The Beatles said: We can work it out.  They preached to us about the brevity of life and the foolishness of fussing and fighting. And it's more difficult to be quite that forgiving -- for some reason -- with kids who are soon to be AARP members!

Boundaries and limits creep up on you in the Fourth Quarter. There may be a lot of time to get it right ... but it's not forever. I do my best to still offer up to those near and dear to me "the presumption of good intentions." The Ethics of the Fathers -- two millenia ago -- admonished all to judge others to the side of righteousness. Innocent until proven guilty.

Fair enough but nobody has forever to get it right!

Fly right, my fine feathered friends, fly right.

I'll talk of my biggest bugbear, tomorrow -- if I can remember it.

Vaia con Dios ...

What DO Old People Want

Can't figure out what Old People want ... I had a Dream, last night. I and M were taking someone who was struggling with finding meaningful work to two other people ... one who we had known more through her husband and who was successfully engaged, now, and another who was still having difficulty. Then M woke up with a leg-cramp and the dream ended.

The Last Quarter is jam-packed with quotidian little details ... Living ... Working .... Doctor-visiting .... Grandchild-chasing .... Detailing (like Gardening and Bill-paying and all the little madnesses of life). Today, M and I are spending a couple of hours as Special Peeps at grandkids' school. They do all these cutesie things like interviewing Old Folk like they came from a different planet.

"Grandma, Grandpa .... 

When you were young, were there newspapers? 

Did people smooch at the Malls? 

And just what was smooching?

Was it like Twerk-free Twerking" 

How do I tell them that there were no Malls, except that strip mall just outside of Athens which we called the OEdipus Complex? Old age is about bad jokes, too. Jokes that nobody gets. How do I tell them that free-range hormones flowed through our bodies in most ways just like the hormones that are driving them to think of lots more than the Quadratic Formula .... with its funny looking +/- sign and thiggamajigs called square roots.

"Grandma, Grandpa ... 

I know where the square root button is on MY calculator."

Yeah, yeah, Kid. Lemme tell you about my Slide Rule. It not only did logging but even anti-logging. It was ecologically sensitive (another bad joke) ... didn't require any of those batteries that fill up landfills and it had a middle slider that twerked with the outside one all day and it could multiply or divide and if you were really turned on it could do powers ... 'May the power be with you.'

"But Grandma, Grandpa ...

 You said it didn't require power or batteries ... 

Maybe the power wasn't with you."

Yeah, yeah, Kid. Wish my expressive aphasia wasn't handicapping my speech, so that I could explain it to ya. Hey, Sweetie, I'd go find my Slide Rule if I could remember where I put the Ginkgo that would help me remember what drawer my slide rule ... nevermind. Nevermind. Next time yer in the Science Museum, ask about ancient computational methods and the comeback of Orgasmatrons.

The truth is -- you got it -- when we were young, we never twerked or smoked any whacky weed and your parents were conceived with the help of a Turkey Baster and we spent our first twenty years reading non-fiction geological studies while we ogled rock formations in our boy and girl scout uniforms

(I don't have the heart to tell these Lil' Spawnsters that it was my son-in-law's and their Daddy's mouth that, as far as I know, first uttered the words: A Sperm is a Terrible Thing to Baste! Think I'll go make another morning cocktail: Serutan with a goodly dash of Geritol and a Prune Juice chaser to make life sweet.)

Well, youngins. It's 6:36 ... dog's walked ... dishes put away ... time for a morning nap. I'll see your cousins on Sunday. Think I'll tell'em about the discovery of the two speed osciullating fan and other techno breakthroughs.