"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!