S/He Gifts Energy to the Tired

Diogenes purportedly claimed (I've looked for where I saw it but haven't yet found it .... or the set of keys to the ladder-lock, for that matter) that the Man from the East, Sock-it- to-Me Socrates, would rise in the morning and recite blessings ....

               Thank You for not making me a barbarian ....

                      Thank You for making me a man ....

There is a liturgical tradition that begins the day with such 'gratitudes' and concludes with one that has found more and more favor with me in the Last Quarter.

                  Thank You for gifting energy to the weary.

It's been a week of beachiness... Riding in the morning on the 1974 orange colored Raleigh International .... With it's drilled out brake handles -- just in case I wanna drag race .... With it's double-butted high tensile steel frame -- just in case I need that slightly more flexible than carbon fiber feeling .... With it's Brooks Saddle .... Just in case I forget my appointment with my urologist.

This ritual has been going on for quite a while. It was preceded by trying to wake up my kids to go shelling in the first trough of the ocean .... that space between the shore and the shelf that is forming the next barrier fifty yards out. I'd wake them a half hour before the sun would rise .... we'd drive to the beach and watch the Sun arrive from Western Europe ... express! Sometime during the older kids' adolescence, rising with Dad before Daybreak was just further evidence that -- nevermind what Dad did for a living -- he was at best a Loony Toon trained by Genghis Khan. So, biking took shelling's place.

This morning, the 6 miles seemed much longer. M took me over the first bridge where cars whizz by at 55 .... Couple miles later, going over the second bridge, I musta looked pale ... Or was it imagined pity that I saw in the young eyes coming the other way.

I guess the Fourth Quarter is governed by conspiracies. My Docs are all pretty young and my PCP when he gets a call from me saying that I have an Upper Respiratory thing in a little backwater town South of the Mason-Dixon Line decides that designer antibiotics and steroids are the order of the day. I seem to recall that he lost his Dad when his Dad was young ... But that could be my fantasy.

All this to say ... I need God to gift this weary man some energy. A friend recommended a book by

Meng, the Happy Guy at Google who with Goleman and others put together a meditation course

called Look Inside Yourself .... whose goal is consistent with many a Miss America's ambition:

WORLD  PEACE.

Maybe reading Meng made me tired. Don't get me wrong .... In my estimation, it's a good book and fine read. I did get caught up on two areas where I disagree or something. Cantankerous Old Man on Beach!

The one is important to me and the other maybe is silly. So, to the first. Meng believes that Happiness

is the Default/at rest position for humanity. As anyone following here knows, in my estimation a

sinus rhythm between hello's and goodbye's ... Between happiness and sadness is the steady state of being. Maybe as he has to yet produce World Peace, he'd give me that one.

The other (p31) has him using a bicycle analogy for meditation. 'If you're falling left? Correct by

turning right.' That is the intuitive thing to do and will get you cleaning your skin off the road surface.

No .... when falling Left, the body has to learn the counterintuitive slight turn to the left in order to bring the bike back to balance. And so it is with meditation, prayer and free association. If one is wandering, one needs to pay attention momentarily to that curious detour in order to know how to go on. .... Any case ...

Dear God .... 

You gave me energy for much of the week while Spawn und Grandspawn were underfoot .... and now you gift ability to feel fatigue. 

May I be appreciative.

"And the Heavens and the Earth and all their accoutrements were completed. And God was finished by that Seventh Day of all the creations that he fashioned. And He rested on the Seventh Day and Blessed it."

Just as He blesses the youngins and the day of rest,

so may S/He bless us minions of 

the Last Quarter and occasionally gift us energy.

Reality - Outa the Mouths of Babes

For a number of years, now -- I don't know how many -- I, like I'm pretty certain is the case with other Grandpas, have an alter-Ego with his own voice and, in this case, his own totem. I call him Melmo ... Not Melmo the Magnificent ... no ... just Melmo. Melmo has a squeaky voice and seems to stay just 60 years younger than I. Some day soon, indeed, he'll be old enough to ride a bicycle without training wheels.

Melmo can be annoying. Like the time Grandpa and Oldest Grandspawn went out to pick up Pizza and Melmo showed up unannounced and according to Grandspawn 'unwelcomed.' Complicating matters was the lateness of the Pizza, leaving Maybe 11 year old S to deal with the embarrassment of being in a store with a balding, social security aged 5'ish year old muppet with a squeaky voice for a half an hour, or so.

Yesterday, though, it was the youngest who laid things straight, though leaving Grandpa thoroughly befuddled ... a state of mind he has accepted as not so alien to the Last Quarter. A little background is in order. Some years ago, Grandpa saved the bottom seven feet of a Black Cherry tree from the chain saw and with that same saw carved a likeness of Melmo. By the time Big Time Cute was old enough to visit the Melmo Totem, a common Ivy had grown to festoon his head with more hair than Grandpa will ever, again, present. Melmo with a Fro! Whoa!

In any case, yesterday, Big Time clarified all.

                  "Grandpa .... Melmo is not Real. 
                Melmo just lives inside a Tree Trunk."


I can tell that Youngest's Husband, a PhD in Philosophy, has finally been put to the test and his laughter, indeed, attested to his hard work. I could imagine him pondering:

                 "If Melmo isn't REAL, 
          how can he possibly LIVE anywhere, 
                 tree stump or otherwise."

I think Melmo will go to the beach, today. Good to have philosophers and four year olds Travelling with you on vacation!

Vacated

We arrived about three days ago. Two of the kids, an in-law kid, and four grandkids in tow. Not quite 'in tow' .... Rather, under their own steam. I guess we're not "Little House on the Prairie" which I've never seen but many have described to me ... but there's lots of love and caring and some squabbling, I suppose.

I'm sitting out on the porch with GuntherDog and 5 bikes; everybody else is asleep, including HaviDog, Gunther's spinster girlfriend ... They're both gettin' on in years and, as rescue dogs, they're both, as we say, "fixed." Maybe M and I and Gunther and Havi all need some 'Puppy Uppers' or some Geritol or Serutan. Night before last, M and I were just climbing into the only bed left and Gunther laid down to a three second groan. Arthritis? Likely.

Yesterday, was a typical day here in backwater Virginia for Howard and his family. About 730, it was agreed that A-the-Older would do the beech food, Howard headed out the three plus miles to a pedestrian and bike path to meet Youngest, her husband and their younger kids ... ten year old twins who just learned how to ride ... and A-the-Older. A-the-Younger and his family who just moved 200 miles closer to our usual haunts couldn't make it. I waited for the riders' car at a bridge ... Lots of bridging goes on in families ... and when they didn't get there went onto the path for one quick three mile loop. As I was coming back, the four of them were just entering the loop. Youngest and I had done it, yesterday ... Indeed, the only sin Santa Papa has ever committed (as in "ha-ha, don't give up your day job, H) was not really teaching Youngest how to ride well. While yesterday she was white-knuckling, she's coming along fine, today.

Any case, the Twins and their Dad went on, ahead, and Youngest and I went along at her speed.  It was good .... Rabbits, a deer, no ponies, lots of birds with names like "big white bird with legs that
hang during flight" ... Afterwards, they packed up their bikes and went back. I headed the -- again -- three miles to the beach. Stood my bike up with one pedal locked in the sand .... Just as I have for decades ... I rode the better 1974, this morning ... dug a hole for my feet and sat there waiting for my family to come. True enough! This year not all were present ... but I WAS waiting for the gathered, nonetheless.

..........

It's tomorrow, now. Oldest has gone with youngest grandspawn back to leave USA and do some work in Istanbul. Now, it's just H, M, and Youngest and her Husband and crew of three ... a fifteen year old and no-longer matched ten year olds. M and I both have upper respiratory things ... colds ... we'll survive, I suspect  ... and today will be much like yesterday, though someone else will prepare lunch for the beach and Oldest will be gone with the little one that I call Big Time Cute.

It's pretty quiet here, right now, except for the birds.

Vacating

Near that time, again, when I vacate my office for a bit ... just a week, this time. So many different ways people choose to vacate or, as the modern word goes, to vacation.

to vacation ... verb, intransitive ... 

(1) to leave one's usual regimen and enter a new one, 

not infrequently playful and intended to be restorative.

I came from a family that vacationed by going to see another part of the family that was at a distance and not accessible during the rest of the year. The South of France was not in the cards dealt to my parents. I don't remember my Dad's first car that could carry us away from Brooklyn but his second was a 1951 Mercury. Mom and Dad up front. Four kids on a cushy back seat or on the floor. In 1952, a couple of years before the family moved briefly from Brooklyn to Ohio, we were 4, 8, 9 and 12  -- three WWII babies and a boomer. The four of us in 2014 are all still kicking, if not up-and-at'em ... lookin' for our "get up n' go." Grandparents, each with our own tribe. In those days in the back of the Mercury and on the way to Uncle Linwood and Aunt Helen's farm in the Virginia hills, we fussed and each of us wanted an opportunity to be promoted to the front seat or wanted a window seat in the back. Reminiscent of the ten pups our Bernard gave birth to in 1972 ... ten pups and 8 nipples. Like Yuppies bellying up to a bar looking for nurture.

Pecking orders and food chains. 

The Mercury morphed into a 1955 Pontiac Star Chief and then into a 1963 Grand Prix. Not certain whether Mom and Dad morphed much and I never got to drive Dad's car till the time at 80+ when he fell asleep and ran off the road and up a grassy hill knocking down signs -- on his way home from his Brother's funeral. M and I were in the back seat when the off-road adventure began ... I seem to recall a joke:

I wanna die like my grandpa, comfortably asleep in the front seat.

 Not like the rest of us in abject terror,  screaming in the back.

Dad -- in the 1950's -- was still the angry soldier-boy who came home from the Big War and Mom was still the demure daughter of a religious leader and scholar ... capable of more than a little sadness over her losses in that same War.

Trips, before the interstate Highway System was in place, were lengthy; cars didn't always start (especially not in wet weather); and bathrooms on the road were far less genteel than what one comes to expect in the antiseptic 21st Century. In 1956 -- I think it was around St. Patrick's Day -- we had visited Grandma and Grandpa in New York and were returning home on the newly built Pennsylvania Turnpike in about two feet of snow. I really had to pee and there it was ... the orange roof of the Howard Johnson's. Oh, the orange roof and the depressurization that it promised, until, that is, all hope dissolved with the 1955 Pontiac skidding into a snow bank.

Choice? To let it rip and piss off my Dad or to hold it in. Lucky me ... I made it ... the Tow truck came and I got to pee like a big boy ... in the urinal. Funny! How much of everyday life one brings on a vacation. In the 1980's, I took my youngest and two of her friends to the Beach. As we got there, I was engaged by the three youngsters in "I'm thinking something and it's a secret." My secret was that everyone brought their backside to the beach.

M and I didn't begin vacationing with the kids right off  when we got married. But by the time they were 3, 12 and 13 in 1979, we stumbled on a sublet in a backwater beach-town called Chincoteague (pronounced Shincoteague). A colleague, Anne, sublet a week to us that she and her family couldn't use. (Anne died last year, though we had lost touch over the many years since we trained together.) All but two of the past 35 years, we've vacationed in that town ... Some years later, we bought a house there with one of our older kids who loved the island and its memories.

Chincoteague is connected to the bottom of Assateague, a  perhaps 35 mile long barrier island that once was twice as long, till a storm broke through ... leaving the Assateague of today with its herds of undomesticated ponies that got there somehow and enchant young kids with stories of Misty of Chincoteague. There are entrances to Assateague top and bottom and no roads between, leaving the beaches away from these entry points more or less empty. There isn't much to do in Chincoteague and, with no commercial or residential building allowed on Assateague, there's just beach and bikes and walking except for the parking lot areas. It's sufficiently quiet so that I was able to run a seminar on the beach for 4 days in 1994. and back in town, there is a book store.

Directions? 'Walk to Beach. Turn left and walk till you only see geeky-looking folk. Sit."

It's 195 miles from my office to Chincoteague but each trip that distance seems to increase, as does the distance from the Bay to the Beach. Used to be 6 miles in lowest gear ... no more.

I have no plans for the week and my schedule remains pretty much the same. Usually, prepare some foods for the beach and then head off, alone, on bike. One long bridge ... 3 more miles ... a shorter but steeper bridge ... and another 3 miles. I sing to myself songs from David's Psalms about Creation ... Mah Gadlu Ma'asecha ... How great are your creations, O God .... M'od ... Greatly ... Amku Machshvosecha ... Deep are your Plans.

Memory? I remember songs and the people who taught them to me. Then, I dig a hole and pile the sand to form a seat ... I bring a book. This year, someone recommended a book on inner voices and world peace. With any luck, the postman will deliver it in a few days while the 37 wars rage on in the loud world away from Chincoteague. That's about 9 that I arrive on the beach. By 3, I'm beached out and ready to head home with the same songs on my lips.

Dear God! The Winter was long and hard and I need a vacation.

Lifnei Karaso? Mi Ya'mod? Before his icy chill? Who can stand?

"Timothy Leary's Dead" and so are ...

M introduced me to much of the music of the Sixties, including the Moody Blues and their curious song about Timothy Leary. Truth be told, I fared far better at the Moody Blues concert that I was invited to attend than at Hockey games in Buffalo or Montreal or Providence (where I saw my first Hockey game in 1965 with M and her Dad, who died in the mid-late 90's). Unlike my Dad who died just nine years ago, Murray knew about professional athletics. In spite of that -- may I add -- I thought of him as a nice guy. He worked as a dispatcher for a beer wholesaler who in the Winter hired the second stringers of the hockey world ... American League Hockey Players ... farm-leaguers for the NHL teams. The Providence team was named after some local chickens .... The Reds, or somesuch. When M was young, the player/truck-drivers would skate her around the ice, laying the groundwork for her devotion (obsession) to the games. I grew up in a home where I had two sets of male models ... one (my Father) did plumbing and carpentry and construction when he wasn't a printer. The other (my maternal Grandfather) was a religious leader who didn't know a Band-Saw from a Bushman. One made me comfortable around indoor woodshops and outdoor masonry, building and chainsaw operations on big trees and the other got me to cite arcane scriptural texts and introduced me to contemporary biblical exegetists. Carl, a local psychiatrist and friend, used to say that I was the only person he'd met who could cite "The Gita, the Talmud, the New Testament and the favorite words of Joe the Guttersnipe ... all  in a single sentence." Haven't heard from Carl in a number of years ... hope he's still with us.

So many people have blessed my life and have gone the way of all of us 4 dimesional creatures who live and die in Space-Time. I'm so thankful to have known them.

A lot of the visitors to my office are Fourth Quarter orphans like me who've said goodbye to many ... to what feels like too many. I've sometimes -- to the consternation of my near and dear and my visitors -- made a point of my discomfort with words like "overwhelmed" or the expressions that deny the possibility of being overwhelmed (God and His/Her "opening windows" that compensate for closed doors or never giving anyone more than they can handle). It has long seemed to me unhelpful language. After all ...

"If I can think about being overwhelmed, 

the shit of life must, indeed, be piling up but I'm still on top of the pile."

and ...

"If I can speak about it, it may've not knocked me over and kept me down for too long 

but I'm still truckin', Mamma".

One of my next generations is quite ill with a poor prognosis. It saddens me and sometimes makes me angry. It troubles me so much that when I pretty clearly dream about it, I always replace that sick person with someone outside my immediate family ... Howard's unwtting/unconscious/unbewusste voodoo of passing the curse along. And when the doctor told me and M that the loss of vision from the glaucoma in one of my eyes would not get better just as the nerve damage in my legs wouldn't disappear, I found myself trying to cheer up M and the Doc.

Do we become resigned to loss in the Last Quarter? I suppose what brought it up in my mind recently ... what brought up these cracks in the delusional expectation that life goes on uninterrupted and just continues to get better ... was a request for the records of a student from long ago who attended a post-professional training facility that I ran in the late 80's through the 90's. I began reading the names in the student and faculty files ... Anne, a friend? gone. Mimi, not a friend? gone. Harold and Gunther? both co-faculty members and both gone. .... And yesterday WAS 9 years since that guy who taught me carpentry and so much more finished his tenure on this Good Earth.

I know I'll get some worried notes from readers that I must be in mourning or something ... or depressed?

No. I keep telling my readers that -- to my way of thinking -- the Good Life requires an ability to juggle ... to keep all the balls in the air, at the same time ... but especially to drop neither glee nor sadness from the quotidian experience of life.

So, hats off to all who have walked with me ... Adolph, Alan, Anne, Annette, Arthur, and all the B's, C's, D's, .... who honored me with their presence and gave so much to me ... and hats off to Timothy Leary and Benedictus Spinoza and Sampson Rafael Hirsch and Rogers and Hammerstein and Irving and Laura and Janis and ... and Otis and Pete and ... and all the thinkers and singers and songwriters who've given me portable ideas and melodies to carry with me when I go out to trim the hedges after I check for spelling errors in this happy little dirge in a few minutes.

Hey, in my Book, y'all did real well!

LeBron is Going to Cleveland

Yay!

I wish I knew who LeBron was and then my "yay" wouldn't be quite so vacuous. It's not an essential part of Playing in the Last Quarter that one doesn't have a clue about who LeBron is ... or Katie Perry ... or Justin Bieber ... or all the people with one name. Indeed M knows who all these people are. And my friend, Milt, could chances are tell you a whole helluva lot about people in Sports. 35 or so years ago while I was trying to get my 12 and 13 year olds to focus on something other than baseball, Milt was in process of moving his family from Buffalo to Philadelphia. In the interim, Professor Milt moved into our home. I would come home and find the two guys and Milt stretched out in front of the TV watching business-men -- some in pin-striped suits from the Bronx -- competing with well-defined rules about which there could be arguments. I don't think LeBron plays baseball but I'm confident that my 47 and 48 year old sons and Milt could tell you what he does and how he does it.

And M? M and I have a mixed-marriage ... she from a family where Sports-watching played a role and mine where playing was cool but watching other people have a good time was considered voyeuristic. So, M would know, too ... that is, she's know who LeBron was. True. We both have gaps in our memories caused, perhaps, by overuse but we remember different things. I have tried to get with it, over the years, but have failed. M doesn't particularly like it when I tell this story but it is instructive.

It was maybe 1971. We were living in Buffalo ... indeed, that's where I met Milt and Ruth. Any case, M found out that the Bruins were coming to town with a guy named Bobby Orr ... not Robert or Roberto? No, he was a Bobby. The Bruins were playing the home team, the Sabres. There were three bad-guys on the Sabres called the French Connection, named, I suppose, after the heavy killing movie of the same name. One of them, "checked" Bobby into the "Boards." That means, they pushed him violently against the wooden and glass boundary that was there to make certain that only people on the ice would be killed by flying pucks. Now, I knew that Bobby had bad knees and checking him like that into the Boards could end his career ... and M certainly knew this. We were in the nose-bleed section ... Standing Room Only. M began screaming for revenge like a Legionnaire -- sabre drawn -- going over the hill ... or the ledge? That's when a beefy guy three rows down -- obviously an athletic chauvinist -- turned around and screamed:

"Shut da bitch up."

Yeah. That's I blew it ... not having a clear notion of protocol, I said the only thing that came to my mind:

"I don't even know da bitch."

And that's why Howard hasn't been taken to many games but -- likely -- has nothing to do with why "he don't know a phu**in' thing about LeBron."

Hey, just sayin' and if anybody wants to tell me why the lead story in most venues while the World blows up is about Mr. LeBron moving to Cleveland. Damn! What happened to "Bonzo Goes to Washington?"

"on the Beach"

Before me are people and colors ... profusion of colors ... blankets and umbrellas and patterned garb ... Beyond those? the roar ....

To the right of me is my 40 year old Raleigh with its Brooks saddle that looks like an old cowboy's face ... the saddle that affronted parts of my body on the way here to the pulsing edge of the Atlantic, just a few hours ago. Hail to thee, O Bike .... I left your fancier Sister back home away from the sand and the rain. But you have carried me further than she has ... To you I owe much.

To my left is M, in whose presence I have led most of my life ...  49+ years-- as she has done with me. Curious that two people would presume to commit all their eggs to one basket .... Curious that some don't. Life is curious, in general. Neither of these histories (Bike or Wife) can be repeated ... there just isn't enough time. Do it or don't ... just get on with what you will.

Our spawn and their spawn couldn't join us, this weekend. One is doing business in East Asia .... another moving his family as they start a new midlife adventure. The third wasn't feeling great and is separated from her kids who are away in programs hither and yon.

Back in the house are our oldest friends and two of their grandspawn ... 7 and 25 years old. The 25 year old told me that patriarchal matrimony and its deleterious effects on women will soon be gone. She did a wondrously cogent riff on some writing I've been doing, as well. The 7 year old is resisting the beach, today, waiting for his Dad to pick him up. His Grandpa who was my graduate school professor more than 45 years ago hates the beach. Milt is a modern day Socrates ... just sit'em down in some square without sand and surf and share ideas with him ... he's Happy! or give'em an old movie ... in fairness, he brings his own. Can't redo my relationship of 45 years with Milt and his 50 year lady, Ruth, anymore than I can with Bike or Wife. (Some compulsive ass will wonder that I've given top-billing to my Raleigh over my Spouse and friends ... Bike over Wife. What to say? Hurry that compulsive to your neighborhood shrink ... tell'em to get a life ... or a bike? or friends or a wife, themselves.)

I'm alternating people-watching and reading a paper by Hans Loewald ... he died in the early 90's and wrote the paper in the 50's ... everything about me is old. The people are further testimony that life goes on. People are strutting their stuff and their kids. Most are good to their kids ... then there are the old people whose stuff has surrendered to gravity and the gustatorial sins of the flesh and other Older Adults who still look like they can proudly strut that stuff at 5-10 mph on the treadmill at the Gym.

I particularly gaze at the young and happy families ... betimes, multigenerational and multifamilial. They/we come with our chairs and foods, with our tents and canopies. Such attractive people bringing their kids to places where the dangers of everyday life are reduced to making certain that the kid doesn't go too far out into potential rip currents. The children wander and pay attention to the family umbrella and it's distinctive colors ... 'home base.' They wander and build and get dirty with impunity.

These kids are respectful to an old man's bike, too ... they give it distance. For as long as I call to remember, I walk my bike onto the beach ... dig a long furrow in which it stands .... lean it gently into the direction of the wind .... and compact the sand about a downward hanging pedal giving it a 'stand.' Cannot recall a child whose knocked it over. People get along on the beach.

We've been coming to this beach since 1979. When we first arrived, it was essentially all White and mostly Christian. Today Jackson's Rainbow Coalition have added dimensionality to this Virginia Beach. "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!' It warms me that Hispanic and Asian and European rhythms and styles have arrived at this beach that I and my progeny think of as the place we go. Assateague Island is one of those sandbars that have vegetated over centuries. It's about 30 miles long with an entrance on the top in Maryland and one 20+ miles South of that in Virginia. There are no roads connecting the top entrance to the bottom and the overwhelming majority of people are found at these entrances. Want privacy? walk a quarter mile away from these entrances. It's a strenuous full-day walk from Virginia to the Maryland fence and back, again ... a good 14 hours. Politics keeps the wild ponies that occasion the North from the South .... different Park Services ... same Island.

The Last Quarter? Complicated to be a witness to cultural evolutions. Much has changed ... since I crawled out of the Sea of childhood ... like some reptilian ancestor did long ago. Here, where I've never heard an angry word .... I feel a sort of peace and pride in most of those changes that I've witnessed. It's been 50 years since Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and I've been blessed to be called to witness these changes.

Psalms: How great are Your creations, O God .... Deep are Your thoughts!