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."
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