Naked in Bed

Well, truthfully speaking, this posting has nothing to do with Old People ... Last Quarter Types ... getting naked in bed ... Really just wanted to get your attention or something.

Practices of old age are really not so different ... We cook the same but not as much. We exercise but not as much. We spend about as much time naked as younger folk. And we have the same problem fumbling for and making fine language distinctions.

Pairs like Guilt and Shame. All of us would like to keep them separated in our minds even if the boundary between them gets fuzzy. That's it: "fuzziness." Envy and Jealousy are like that, too. We're envious when another person who we can't come to love has characteristics that we'd like to have. (I like to split between toxic and beneficent envy ... but that's for another posting.) Jealousy is what we feel when, for instance, another person is the recipient of certain sentiments from a third person that we'd like receive from them, instead. And, hey, Love and Marriage may go together, as the song says, like a Horse and Carriage ... but, still and as the song recognizes, they're not identical. Aye. Distinction is all!

(I must be straining to get to what I want to say for some reasons ... y'think? ... get on with it, H)

So, this AM, both M and I arose with disquieting dreams. Mine were forgotten but M reported that in her dreams I had been indulging synchronized horizontal aerobics with a young woman and that she was left out and behind selling some wares in a Mart or something. Being a Last Quarter Player, I was honored to think that M'Lady could still have fantasies about me being the lustful object of someone less than half my age. Pretty cool. The fact that the good time I was having was in her dream didn't totally escape me. Some people have a hard time separating the dreamworld where their lover is cheating and reality. M has a good hold on reality and I do, too -- not to say I didn't enjoy being cast in her fiction.

Any case, M and I went on with our activities. I had something to do in my office and then we had some liturgical duties that had a religious flavor and .. then ... we came home. We ate some corn ... noting, sadly, that Summer is ending. Then the dream came up, again. (Me'thinks the man protesteth ... overly ... what's his beef?)

H: So, about the Dream? Was I having a really good time?

M: Well, yes. What about it.

H: Well, next time, you could do me a favor ...

M: What's that? 'Keep it to myself."

H: No ... No ... No.

M: Well, then what?

        H: Maybe you could take better notes.

Old couple? Still talking and smiling together about 49 years watching each other age ... hopefully with bits of humor. "Tears and Laughter" ... LIfe can be good.

A Vacuous Ditty: Uber-Dog to Goober-Dog

Older folk not only seem to downsize their living quarters and lose a couple of inches in height during the Fourth Quarter, they not infrequently downsize their Dogs, as well. Cannot quite imagine trying to win a leash pull with a St. Bernard, at this time of life. But I can still pretend to be Master to a peanut-sized Dog.

I know. I know. There are still older men just waiting to call their Doctor telling the Doc that the Cialis side-effect finally happened ... that four hour anomalous "amorization" ... but yanking a 180 pound pooch who wants to go that-a-way instead if this-a-way ... is not the same. One might cause myocardial infarction .. but the other .... losing the leash thing with a Dog? brings public shame. The uberDog after pulling you over does a happy dance .... Anyway .... Gunther is no uberDog ... maybe 40 pounds ... with droopy ears and something other than a commanding presence.

Mornings? He still refuses to move from the top landing of stairs until I pet him vigorously on the head and apologize for taking him away from M, his beloved. Gunther often groans -- I can't tell if he learned this from us or came upon it rightfully and on his own -- whenever he changes position on the couch he calls his own, at least when he hasn't commandeered a chair in which I more often than not sit at the end of long days ... and he kvetches there, too.

He does still snarl when I enter a room in which he and M are spending quality time .... but the GooberDog lets out these long groans and often has a gas-retention issue, to boot. As I write, he's on his couch with his head and one paw drooped over one arm ... and is snoring quietly.

Bye ...

I better go to work ... things could be worse ... I could be draped over the other arm of the couch.

Count your blessings, Howard.

More Hopeful

While I'm afraid to look at the News-feeds, this morning, I do feel more hopeful. Maybe it's related to my having seen all my 6 grandchildren over the weekend ... and all my kids, too.

Life has its rhythms. A Good Thing!

Read two postings to a discussion, this AM. A Grandma visiting from 8,000 miles away is expecting another grandspawn and reported that her son had told the child that he could come out now. Another Grandma responded that obviously this baby knew what was best.

Combination of past two postings brought back memory from early e-mails days 15.5 years ago. I had been sending daily e-mail to my youngest who was expecting her first and our first grandchild. The letters were directed to Cletus the Foetus, the yet unborn-greatly-awaited Chosen One by all four grandparents and uncles and aunts. After 100's of these e-mails from the child's "entourage" collected, it was near time. The doctor told the Mother-to-be that the baby was 7 pounds and could come, at any moment. I posted a comment to Cletus, suggesting that it was fine for her to appear whenever she felt ready. My So. African counterpart ... the other Grandfather ... was not entirely pleased. He was/is a neonatologist and didn't I know that everyday in this womb without a view (my shtick ... not his) was a blessing towards development. I did my best to apologize for not paying a sufficiency of attention to how the baby might impulsively choose premature birth. But all who read these scribbles know my thoughtlessness, already ... I won't belabor the point. Truth be told, S was a very smart baby and child and young lady, even if she failed to read in utero and took me on a lengthy shopping spree to find a certain brand of Kiwi-Strawberry Pink Lemonaide that she and her friends favor and that looks suspiciously radioactive.

Odd -- it is -- that all these years later, he (the other Grandpa) was in favor of her popping off to a boarding school 300 miles away from her Mama (later, this week) and I was the one advocating that she stay put for two more years untill college while I continued to try to inure myself to the fact that her Momma was old enough to have a child old enough to shuffle off to school away from home. 

I'm glad that life has its twists and today's is towards hopefulness.

"I Hate You" ... anyway ... "All of My Folks Hate ALL of Your Folks."

In his ditty which he called "National Brotherhood Week," Tom Lehrer pointed out that in this inter-religious and inter-national world we live in, hate is "As American as Apple Pie" and pokes fun at the idea of vitriol and venom being suspended for one week each year when the Republicans of his Day (late 1950's - 1960's ... "When we were young") might dance with dose Dems.

I have experienced the past week+ as exhausting. Not much able to write. Feeling more like nesting inside my own little space and tribe. Napping more than usual.

Dammit!

Someone should give two hoots .... nay! two shits ... about how tough it is for the very young to hear and/or experience the broadcast hatred ... how upsetting it must be for those who spawned these youngins ... how sad for the Last Quarter Boomers to realize that each generation's attempt to quell gratuitous animus and avoid "justified" wars has been futile ... empty ... fucking vacuous.

After WWII, there were -- as there had been before after other Wars -- a bunch of anti-War movies and Broadway productions .... good songs, too. In the melodic South Pacific, the lyricists tossed into the mix "You have to learn (or be taught) to hate." Oklahoma was about the absurdity of the range wars ... "One man ropes a cow with ease; the other steals her butter and cheese ... but that's no reason why they can't be friends." Poor Jed still and all ends up dead. Some films had no lyrics ... just the pathos of similar men being taught and coming to question why they were poised to kill the different other; it wasn't until the second time when I was a bit older that it became clear that the American Battleship Captain Richard Widmark saw everything about himself in "The Enemy Below" and its U-Boat Captain played by Kurt Jurgens. Too bad Richard was sent to blow Kurt out of the water.

Then we had the latest version of Romeo and Juliet played out on the West Side of New York City. The exquisite staging of balance between the two sides ... the Sharks and the Jets ... with love being one of the obvious victims. "Good Morning ...Viet Nam" ... Boys killing boys at Kent State. Freedom Riders buried by the side of the road .... maybe for daring to blur the lines between White Jews and Black Christians.

"I take my scotch neat ... Don't fuck with my 50 year old single malt Glenlivet ... "

Years of trying to learn about each other in the Old City of Jerusalem? ... 

broken into pieces.

Centuries of Jeffersonian experiments in melding modified capitalism with the social contract? ... now, unacceptable ... "Keep m'Scotch neat, Boy."

The borders that blood were spilled over? 

No longer acceptable.

The right to differ religiously? 

Settled on wars with automatic weapon fire.

The duty to witness and journal? 

Punctuated by beheadings.

225 years to the appearance of an Ebony and Ivory leader of the Free World? 

Met with stonewalling hatred.

And all the talk in America about the conversation we need to have about race? That conversation ain't gonna happen, nor will the one about gender. A conversation requires the willingness of each party to imagine seeing the other side and coming out with different beliefs. Not in the World that I imagine to see, today!

I know. I know. It's gonna come together. "Keep your eyes on the Prize ... Hold on ... Hold on." This morning I feel utterly hopeless and disillusioned; optimism is in short supply. My thoughts turn to the tears shed by some who were visiting my office, this week ... crying for all those "For whom the bells toll" (Donne's bells) ... for the helplessness and they we feel. An ancient prayers cries out: l'Saken Olam b'Malchus Shadai" ... to better-refashion the World according to the Kingdom of God. 

We cannot, I hear myself saying, be speaking of a God (neither Real? nor Ideal?) who sees the Other as the enemy painted in Basic Armed Forces Training ... as that nonredeemable Demon who must be buried alive, beheaded or driven onto a Mountain-top high or into the Depths of a Sea. Maybe this is the Saturn-God Devouring his Children in Goya's bloody portrayal.

Sorry, readers ...

With any luck, this Older Guy ... me ... will recall all "the Summer dreams beneath the Tamarind Tree" (Poe) that in my dark moments I feel have been stolen from me and are lost to me -- if only temporarily.  

Frost's Unspoken Third

Three Quarters down, a tribe of consanguineal affiliates, some pieces published "out there" in the World of the Cogniscenti, and things are still quite puzzling to me. One would hope that an Old Bald Guy would have it all figured out.

I mean, I'm not without a clue. Some things don't feel all that strange. I don't find it odd, for instance, that folk like to identify with certain categories ...Bahai, Buddhists, Christians, Druize, Hindus, Jaines,  Jews, Moslems ... who have I missed? Many, of course. I don't find it particularly odd that folks divide on matters that have little to do with substance ... whether they marry or not ... whether they have children or not ... what kind of pigments are in their skin .... where they came from ... what kind of spices their Mothers used in their soup (I haven't been able to learn to like the spices of Scandinavia) ...

What I find odd is that differences are so very dividing that we kill on the basis of them and may even be willing to kill or ostracize when an outsider or "a traitorous insider" articulates these differences. I remember taking a then 12 year old grand-daughter to see a professional baseball game. Before the game began, a guy in front of us had already consumed maybe 80 ounces of beer and was loudly complaining that if anyone said anything positive about this guy, Pujolz, from the opposing team, he would "bust their face." My grand-daughter thought it best that we not stay too long and, indeed, we left by the end of the second inning.

Hating the other! Hating anyone who speaks up for the other.

I wrote now some 20 years ago in response to Woody Allen's piece (Reflections of a Second Rate Mind) that called for a totally achauvinistic World in which categories didn't exist ... I wrote that I 

thought it not possible but did believe there were gradations in Chauvinism ... I listed 4:


1. A state in which the existence of the Other is seen as intolerable ... the battle cry of this state of being is: "Don't convert ... just die."

2. A slightly more progressed state of being is represented by the Crusader's and ISIS's call: Convert or Die.

3. There is a 3rd state in which the right of the Outsider to disagree is maintained ... Lip-service is paid to the right of the Other to indulge their stupidities but no respect for the possibility that the Other's position may be well thought out.


4. The highest form, I suggested, was not achauvinism, not giving up my special relationship to my own thoughts, friends, neighbors or kids, but rather what the Latinizers call a Primus inter Pares ... a First among Equals point of view. In this mode of thinking and being, I come to recognize that others' relationships to their Gods and Thoughts and Relationships are just like my own to mine ... enormously special.

Watching the World fragment into warring factions in Irbil and in Syria, in Korea and St. Louis (Ferguson) calls into question for me Frost's suggestion that there are but two ways that the World may end ... He was, need I add, speaking of a more basic one (differences "worth" killing to defend) ... Frost wrote:

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

'Just the Three of Us' or 'Why Don't We Three Get on the Ro-oad!'

Getaway Weekends are wondrous .... M, I and GuntherDog heading down to the backwater town, 195 miles door to door, to where we have a little place on a bay not 7 miles from a beach we have frequented since 1979. Not much of a chance of getting lost here. Even if I take other than a direct route by Bike, M always finds me ... bike propped up on one buried pedal in the sand ... usually a hole in the ground that serves as a support for back-leg position we humans adopt while sitting or reading. Nowadays, M brings the internet to us on the Beach and city papers and foods. I used to revel in making special leftover sandwiches and finger fruit for the time on the Beach ... if it's just the two of us (the culture has not relaxed sufficiently to permit GDog to the Party), M buys a sandwich somewhere.

The trips to such getaways used to be painful and the 195 miles seems to be stretching out. Whatever Dog we brought-with would inevitably bark whenever s/he could along the road. We finally figured it out. See .... While I left Brooklyn in 1954 in a family that never learned how to vacation other than visiting Aunt Helen on the farm or Grandma and Grandpa in his very religious home, M and I never quite got it that our dogs' palates were not as sophisticated as our own and their howls were for fast food. GuntherDog, since our enlightenment, enjoys an egg and cheese on biscuit going to "Gunther ... Y'wanna see the ducks" and a burger coming home. This quiets HIM down but I haven't quite learned the lingo in these dining palaces.

"Supersize it?" .... 

is greeted on my face with questions of whether 

this is a test to see if I object to 

all the oversized people attending 'The Golden Arches.'

and

"Wanna coke or fries with that?" .... .... 

No thank you, y'see GuntherDog is watching his cholesterol intake.

I think of it as M's way of getting back at me for 49 years of howling with the dogs on long trips. 'Lookie, here, M .... Lie Down with Brooklyn Dogs, wake up with both fleas and the Sounds of the Wild." Any case, Gunther has come to enjoy the road trip and has stopped asking whether the hamburgers are Kosher. Indeed, we know very little about Gunther's religious background in the quick-kill shelter from which he was rescued, though we suspect he was forced to listen to Sunday Morning Gospel Hours before AM Kibble. He never presses for fish on Friday, either. Perhaps, he was a Quaker. Are there Quakers in Kentucky.

Last night, with me in a-fib, a fact that I kept from M until after my bike ride, we watched a rented movie ... "Mr. Morgan's Last Love." Can't say that I recommend it ... While it's about a Player on the border of the Fourth Quarter and Overtime, it's confusing, if sweet. It involves loss and love and finding meaning and grown sons who fall in love with girlfriend. Hard to look at Caine old enough to be Alfie's Grandpa ...

What's it all about, ... Gunther ... 
Is it just for the hamburger we live?

Any case, good to hang out with M who came in 1965, the Pooch who arrived in 2001 and my Second-Favorite 1974 Bike. And good to have a heart that decided to return to a normal sinus rhythm and beat ... ready for answering calls from the office and then hitting the road on the bike.

Yisgadal, v'Yiskadash, Shmei Rabbah

Woke up to a mess in my head ... storms ... whirlwinds ... ill-defined ramblings of late middle age.

The week. The Yazidi stuck on the Mountain for being different ... or for praying differently. The Comedian's kids left with a memory of their dripping father hanging as "Strange Fruit" .... The political animus and the talking head spinners ... or are they head-spinners. Couldn't get one of the great Bass Paul Robeson's songs out of my head ... the one about people gratuitously and grandiosely justifying the killing of other peoples. I suspect it will play in my head all day ... the pathos in his voice as he mourns -- maybe with irony towards his God -- for the massacred many ... Yisgadal, v'Yiskadash Shmei Rabah ... May the One with the Great Name be glorified and sanctified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bcini9XJTo

Maybe if the Popes and the Dalai Lama and all us Players in the Last Quarter pray together, the Yazidi will not have to die on the Mountain where myth tells them that Noah's Ark landed .... where the Dove of Peace finally found dry ground  ... may they not have to die with no one left to bury their babies!

Sad week.

Why Do We Go On?

There was a curious synchronicity between my plans for yesterday, my birthday, and hearing -- the previous night -- that Robin Williams had died. Two weeks ago, plans were set with a friend to meet and discuss a piece written by Annie Pink Reich, first wife of the colorful -- if crazed -- psychoanalyst Willhelm the Mad.

Well, that's not funny ... when a young medical student in treatment with a rather grandiose psychiatrist gets married pregnant, as the biographers claim occurred in 1922 or something. In any case, by 1949, she wrote a piece about a young lady who would use physical comedy to impersonate and embarrass other women, while capturing the attention of other men ... the paper was in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, KS and was called something like 'Notes on the Grotesque Comic Sublimation.' Maybe, it's out there on line somewhere.

In any case, thinking among analysts was different in those days and had a lot to do with one's genitals ... their form and function. I tend nowadays to fret maybe-silly but different questions, like:

How might the American Constitution (or any other, for that matter) read 

if it had been written by a bunch of Fourth Quarter activists ... 

say, the Grey Panthers?

How might the theories of the various psychoanalytic schools read 

if they had been written by somewhat older folk? 

Freud wrote his 

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality a year or so before he turned 50. 

Similar conditions existed in other schools. 

Melanie Klein wrote her scathing judgments 

about the grotesquerie of thoughts unconsciously 

-- or so she claimed -- buried in the minds of her own children. 

(One might not be surprised to hear that her daughter, Melitta, 

chose to present to a scientific meeting rather than speak at 

"Mother, My Dear's" funeral.) 

All this is to say that much is written by the young 

at times when they are caught up in the helter-skelter 

parts of raising kids, earning a living, 

and continuing to prove that one is still hot.  

I have no idea why Robin Williams decided that it was preferable to leave himself for witnesses and survivors hung, rather than continue into that Last Quarter of Life that he had just begun with all that it entails.

Those who have been reading my senescent notes for these past several years well know that I believe that continuing to Play in the Fourth Quarter requires a juggling of glee and sadness ... Each of these two very basic emotions -- one representing the dog's wagging tail at saying hello to a friend and the other the inevitable downward tail when GuntherDog or his cousins are left home alone or when he has to leave something behind and buried -- has two forms ... one of which, I would say, makes one vulnerable to feeling it's just not worth it.

The two forms I refer to will, again, be familiar to those who have been following my path through these scribbles. Either Sadness or Happiness can be used to bring others closer. The Baby calls out in the middle of the night with tears and cries that speak volumes:

Be with me. 

It's lonely in this room and -- lookee here -- 

I haven't figured out how to come to you or feed myself, yet.

Please!

In much the same way, the happy child invites others with his or her smile. Eventually, "the kid" learns that when two people share the same space and see the same thing at that moment, there is pleasure, and "the kid" learns the Art of bringing another to that same spot ... learns the Art of the Punchline and well performed physical comedy routines that bring them into the same space-time moment as the other.

The dark flip-side of both these human capacities -- sadness and glee -- uses these same capacities to push the other away. Depression is not, as the TV Big Pharma ads portray, mucho sadness. No, depression is sadness coupled with a wish or propensity to push the other away.

Life sucks.

I'm going to my bedroom to play dead.

I prefer that human shaped bottle filled with the golden nepenthe of life to you.

Wake me up when the game is over.

Your presence makes it no easier to accept the crazy vagaries of living ... 

excuse me but I need to go hang myself, ... now.

And we all know how humor can be used as a distancing activity ... we've all been the victim of sarcasm, facetiousness and obsequious-flattery-with-a-knife's-twist ... "ha-ha!"

I don't know Robin Williams' story. I was moved to tears and laughter for 35 or more years by his portrayals of a whacked out but warm alien (watching with my own youngest whacked-out pre-school spawn), a good neurologist, a therapist, a teacher ... a father in love with his children -- I was quite moved by Mrs. Doubtfire. Wish someone had been about to convince him that there were enough people out there who could be close with him... enough, that is, to make it worthwhile to go on for another twenty years with physical aches and emotional pains that attend playing in maturity.

Or maybe his story is very different -- I don't rightly know.

Annie Reich in her 40's knew the answers to such questions. The answers have significantly complexified since I left the age of courtings and begats. Playing in the Last Quarter is, in no small part, about learning to live without answers.

"They Say It's My Birthday"

How does the Beatles song go ... "Gonna have a good time ... Yes, I'm going to a party, party ..." Oh, my God! Half of the Beatles are dead and the other half get let out of Nursing Homes hopefully on the same day other Last Quarter Denizens -- those, that is, who still want to hear them perform "Memorial Concerts" for dead Beatles -- get day-passes to sniff-in the dope-smells of their adolescent years at the concerts.

Well, as far as I know, M didn't get us tickets to go listen to Ringo and Paul (I wouldn't be a Fourth Quarter type if I didn't rattle off: "Do you know what concert tickets cost these days to hear Sir Paul sing in suspenders and Depends?" ...  You say I've gone off the Deep-End! OK ... I'm too old to argue) and I know of no parties for either myself or my 6 year old Alter Ego, Melmo, about whom my youngest grandchild opined: "Melmo's not Real; he just lives in a Stump." Not quite 5 year old C-A was referring to the 7 foot Totem I carved in the back yard when Melmo was just turning 4. 'Melmo ... Big Boy, now.'

No. No parties. No parties, as far as I know. I did survive the sort-of race car driving experience two days ago that I mentioned in an earlier posting. M took pictures of me on the track driving like an Old Man with Colitis running to a roadside bathroom ... Old Man goes "zoom-zoom." There was a guy next to me quite often, Tom ... about half my age with an obviously uncontrolled appetite who was trying to prove that we could still get killed even if it wasn't a real race. When Tom's my age, I suspect he won't fit into a panel van. There IS justice in the World.

Well. Maybe that was my birthday present from my older son, C-A's Dad (Oldest spawn produces youngest grand-spawn ... I'll leave it to the imagination to figure out his game) ... same C-A who thinks Melmo isn't real. Or maybe it was his way of limiting the probabilities that he's gonna have to get me another present.

Old Man Bitching ... OK, I'll stop.

On a positive note, I got what couldn't be much better of a birthday present. D, who married a dear friend (also, D ... indeed, they go by the handle D&D) about 20 years ago sent me a note: 'Ah! You're the author of the Old Fart Blog. Luv it! Read it all the time.'

Well, thanks D ... I needed that.

Maybe D

Will agree

Some time

To post

That would be

Fine.

She has all the bona fidies. She's Fourth Quarter. Just got back from France, i.e., she's still Playing in this Quarter. And she's married to someone who in my counting of 20-year-long quarters is still Playing in Overtime. Pretty cool! And, at least one person must be getting tired of my painfully tired humor ... besides M.

OK. Enough; I could take a nap, now. It is after 5:30 AM ... There is a house-rule never to nap before 6:00, but it is my Birthday.

So, with a grateful nod to M who has stuck by me for 49+ years and has been kind enough not to show me pics of me in a racing helmet (maybe, if I'd've been wearing Spandex), this orphan is gonna go to his office (Oh, I'm already there) to work and then go hunting for a gluten, dairy and sugar-free birthday cake over which candles can burn ... in part to celebrate me ... in part to commemorate the years that my youngest learned of the joys of good humor watching Mork and Mindy.

In Memory of Robin Williams (1951-2014) 

who stopped Playing much too soon.

  

Feeling ....

Thanks, Skittlesbrain, for you comment about the expression "I don't care" -- when expressed with feeling. Shandor Feldman, a long time ago, comment similarly that most often when the word "just" was invoked, that it represented a denial of "much more."

So, maybe we could offer up a general hypothesis about admitting to hurt or any sense of being moved by something a great deal.

One of my most frequently brought-to-mind examples has to do with mourning. One is in the midst of burying someone or saying goodbye to someone near and dear, and someone comes up and says one of two things:

A. It was a blessing that the died so quickly and didn't suffer.
B. It was a blessing that Mortimer hung around long enough for you to say your goodbyes.

Apparently, there's C., but I don't know that that would be that Old Mortie hung around not long enough to suffer but long enough to say 'ta-ta'  or that he stayed just long enough to suffer but missed good-bye by a couple of hours.

OK, OK ... I'm beating up a Dead Mortimer on a Blog about getting Old.

In any case, the older I've gotten, the less likely I am to answer questions cavalierly, as if I wanted to express a wish for more substantive communication. Someone comes to my office with the requisite "so, how are you?" It's become my habit to think about it briefly and to tell them.

So, SkittleBrain, I appreciate your reaching out to me; Indeed, just a moment ago and as M is still sleeping, I told GuntherDog how good it was to have responses from the world. BTW, his only response was to call me a schmuck and to go back to sleep.

Any case, folk .... I'm off to play Old Man Racer with my oldest child who is, also, too old for playing Bumper Cars in serious race cars. M is coming to watch and if I don't come back, it's been, what to say, "just right." Life is -- to my way of thinking -- a canvas that we are given when we arrive ... with the option to paint; I feel blessed to have had and to have taken some opportunity to paint upon it.

There are tricks, by the way, to not disintegrating against the wall on a racetrack .... But foremost among them may be not abandoning a decision to follow a certain line around turns. Decisions must be made and some of them kept to ( even if it leaves a preposition or two dangling).

Vaia con Dios!

Come, Again? Whaddya'say?

Language, noun (fr. Latin: Lingua or tongue) -- any one of many specific sets of rules by means of which a group or multiple groups of animals miscommunicate (and betimes communicate).

I recall wondering about language in my early years of studying sacred texts and old languages. How could it be, for instance, that Sacer, in Latin, could describe something that was either Sacred or Profane. Or how could it be that Kadosh, in Biblical Hebrew, means Sacred, while Kadesh -- spelled identically the same in Scripture -- identifies a Male Prostitute. And what, I wondered, did it mean when one person says to another: "you made me angry." I remember being pleased in one of those unisex bathrooms of the Sixties when I found penned on a column the following successive messages which at least questions the meaning of such constructions as "you made me angry":

 MY mother made 

me a homosexual.

  If I get her the wool, 

will she make me one, too?

Or as an easy ti find example, in my scribbles on this so-called Blog, I seem to travel without fanfare from speaking of The Last Quarter and The Fourth Quarter of Life, as if they were the same ... with but a summary nod to the possibility of Overtime when invoking the Blog's second title. Language as miscommunication or am I communicating something about the specific unconscious connection in my mind between getting old and dying.

So ... some quick (and dirty) examples.

Today, in the Jewish faith traditions, is referred to as Sabbath Nachamu ... sometimes doubly mistranslated as the Sabbath of Consolation or Sabbath Comfort. Indeed, the word "sabbath" should never have been rendered as the proper noun "Sabbath" but was used pretty clearly in biblical writing and is best rendered as the common noun "restfulness."   Secondly, the word Nachamu, used by Isaiah quite a long time ago, so fascinated me that it, to this day, it appears as 'the plate number' of my roadster. Everyone who sees it suspects, I suspect, that NACHAMU is not likely a number, by the way, and some-not-so-few make the mistake of asking this Word-Nerd what it could possibly mean.
...
...

Glad you asked.

....

Think I'll tell you.

...
...

Handl's Messiah, performed so often during the Christmas Season, begins in its English translated form of Isaiah 41 (?): "Comfort, Ye! Comfort, Ye, my People!" In Isaiah's language: Nachamu, Nachamu Ami!

As a young Seminarian, this troubled me, for in Genesis when God is pissed off about his sinning creations, the same root-word (va'Yi'Nachem) is used right before God decides to knock off all his creations except Noah and his seafaring zoo ....  but it's meaning is more or less antithetical to comfort. "And God became disillusioned about his Creations."

As neither a linguist nor a lexicographer, I made peace with my own sense that the word, in its many forms, referred to a moving from one state of mind to another ... from mourning to comfort ... from pleasure in one's Creations to disgust .... I came to translate it in my mind as CHILL or THERE IS ANOTHER WAY and thought it appropriate to, therefore, adorn my roadster ripping down the road with its license plate: NACHAMU! .... TAKE A CHILL PILL, BABY, AND GET OFF MY TAIL! (The fact that no one would understand? Hell! I need some humor in my life, too.)

In any case, my interest has long been in language ... its communications .... its miscommunications.

This week has been no different in terms of easily-mined examples and during what seemed a never-ending 7 days, at least the following has stopped my thinking for a moment or more. I won't belabor the point of how these represent miscommunications ... it would, I fear, too often lead to further miscommunication.

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"I have a different way of seeing things."

This expression pretty uniformly is heard as 

"I think you're wrong."

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Indeed, the "I" in the above ... in "I have a different way" 

is not infrequently heard as 

"I think anyone but an ass agrees with me."

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"I consider what you said offensive"

is often heard as "I feel hurt or offended by you."

Now, that's a good one, as it puts the purportedly "offended party" 
in the position of being asked to explain.

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Flipping some of this over:

"You made me angry"

often ignores the principal reality of "I am angry" 
and situates the feeling firmly in the other person's behavior.

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"I heard you apologize"

is misunderstood as

"I accept your apology," 

an idea somewhat foreign or -- at least -- complex to me.

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Indeed, the whole idea of forgiveness needs a tune-up to my way of thinking. Many a visitor to my office has struggled with what that means when someone asks them for forgiveness and I've never left such explorations feeling satisfied.

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"I love you but I don't like you or what you did."

It was maybe 50 years ago when my kids were young that the Psychologist Ginott wrote a book recommending such communications to kids. 'Focus on the behavior,' he would suggest. That works for me, too. But the idea that I continue to love something that I don't like is not so easy to take in. Maybe, if hate and love weren't seen as opposites, but rather both seen as opposites of indifference, as some Viennese Doc once said, maybe things would be different. 

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Hey! If you have other examples of language used as miscommunication, I'd love to hear from you ... here or at hhcovitz@aol.com. I'm confident there are examples-aplenty in the above posting.

Mass Murderer

I talk a great deal about balancing Sadness and Glee ... juggling these feelings, together. But there are lots of human experiences that require such balance. I think of a few that come quickly to mind:

Self Love vs. Love of Others

Others' Perception of Us vs. Our Own Sense of Ourselves

Humility vs. Self-Esteem.

many others.

This weekend was full of a great deal. My oldest grandchild is going off to school ... Sadness and Glee for a whole bunch of more or less obvious reasons. We had a party ... parties are good. Years ago, people on both sides of her family would show up, especially for Birthdays and Holidays. She was the first grandchild for all the four grandparents and the first niece for uncles and aunts, alike. We called ourselves her "entourage" and would arise like devoted fans regaling a rock star or like Pilgrims bringing presents to our Princess or god. And she was/is a pretty cool kid. A blessing!

The weekend was, in addition, full of discussions (that's a nicey-nice word for knock-down-verbal brawls) about the World's situations ... well, frankly, its Wars and Killing Fields. The cyberworld and the dinner tables both were easily caught up, particularly, about the Israeli incursion into Gaza and the nearly 2,000 who have been killed ... and the rebirth of Russian Nationalism.

A visitor had already reported being more or less ostracized at work for her sympathies for the non-combatant Palestinian deaths. A head of the Political Arm of Hamas had already disinterred the blood libel, accusing all Jews of baking their Passover Matzahs with the blood of non-Jewish children ... I suppose, accusing them of transgressing the rules of being Kosher, at the same time. A colleague online had shot off the classic anti-Semitic shot across the bow: Jews are the chosen people and therefore subject to different rules, a benign comment that historically has presaged the terrorizing or killing or ostracizing of Jews. Another colleague thought it a good joke.

The world was abuzz with discussions and arguments about who was at fault in that little piece of land that seems to foment so much argumentation ... I refer to Israel and Gaza and the West Bank ... a strip of land that represents barely a Piss in the Ocean amongst the great nations of the Middle East ... 1-2% of the land-mass ... 2% of the population. The World, as I said, was abuzz with this when I sat down for dinner with M, my closest friends, and their eldest grand-daughter. Right or wrong, I had expressed my belief that in spite of the devastation and killing of nearly 2,000 Palestinians and the bombing of schools and at least one hospital that the Israeli response was restrained by Middle Eastern standards. After all, the Syrians had managed to destroy cities and kill 150,000 while displacing millions. Hossein had gassed the Kurds. The Iran-Iraq War claimed over 1,000,000 -- many children, in the count. ISIS was on the rampage and Mosul had just been emptied of Christians ... denizens of Nineveh/Mosul since forever.

The young woman began interpreting my comments as approval of the results ... I was a baby-killer and a hospital-bomber. She screamed. She hollered. Her grandmother screamed at her. Her grandfather quietly disagreed with me ... well, maybe not so quietly but respectfully. After all, we have been friends since 1968 and, in that time, he had ample opportunity to consider whether I was in favor of killing babies. And he was 73.

I make a point of saying that he was 73. There are advantages that accrue to living in the Last Quarter of life. I could certainly understand a 24 year old's fervor and even admire it. Still, the years make it more likely that we develop what I call "The Presumption of Good Intentions" ... the propensity for allowing the possibility that the Other -- the one who disagrees with me -- is coming from a position in which s/he has  maybe-not-perfectly-thought-out but still not thoroughly unreasoned systems of thinking.

Ah. The 24 year old will grow to consider that Great Uncle Howard might not have been a perfidious advocate of infanticide ... whether those children are from his ethnic group or another. Howard will have gone to his reward, sadly, by then.

Cry for Howard!

Metaphors and Similes and Similar Mixed Messages

I was restless during the night ... cardiac arrhythmias are a bitch .... yesterday had its comfortable and uncomfortable interactions and matters of wellness in my future generations has set off a series of waves that come through the rest of my existence periodically and with sadness. The waves are coming right now every hour or two and warm my eyes .... I don't have any inclination to rid myself of these waves nor do they cancel the similarly periodic appearances  of playfulness and glee. It's like so many days on the beach when waves come to the Atlantic Ocean from both the NorthEast and the SouthEast. The waves of later life in the Fourth Quarter don't seem to be prone to the cancellation of competing waves in childhood and youth. Maybe that's what can sometimes be confused with Wisdom .... could be that it isn't related to great insight but to the capacity to juggle glee with sadness.

Anyway, two metaphors or are they similes came into my radar, yesterday. One was from a book on mindful living by Meng Tan, one of the early workers at Google. He focuses on mindfulness (both meditative and during activity), kindness and the hopes for World Peace -- the third being a long term aspirational goal. But talking about mindfulness, he compares it to riding a bike c. p31). When you learn how to ride, the central balacing act, he says, is learning that when your bike is falling left? turn right. And, indeed, that is the intuitive action to take. Alas, this is one of those times when intuition just doesn't cut it. If you follow Tan's method, almost immediately, you'll be scraping your skin off the pavement.

No. When learning how to bike, one needs to train the body to act counter-intuitively .... when falling left? turn slightly toward the left and the bike will right itself. This may well be among the many things people must learn when they're concentrating or focusing or meditating and an errant thought pops into your mind. When that occurs, one learns -- again, counterintuitively -- to note -- even to pay some attention -- to the interfering thought ... otherwise, as on a bike, all may be lost.

The second turn of a phrase came from an online discussion. Someone opined: I approach people like they were a coloring book. Duh! Do you bring your crayons, I thought to say ... No, again. I prefer to borrow from WR Bion who suggested that you enter a meeting with another "without memory or desire" ... and, I might add, without your own crayons that may speak of rigid expectation for the encounter or of the other. Perhaps, among the highest joys is watching someone else (a child? a grandchild? a partner) play with coloring in their own pictures ... in the early morning light .... in the bleached out afternoon Sun ... and even in the dusky richness of light that shows special coloration quite late in the day.

The rumor that the Old are Wise is questionable -- to my way of thinking ... That they may accept the counterintuitive and can often wait a bit as pictures fill out on their own may, nonetheless, appear to be so.

Happy Birthday

M and I have two older kids ... err ... middle - aged men who are both within several years of eligibility for membership in the American Assn for Retired People, ie, nearing 50. Our youngest turns 38, today. She was born the day that the Pope* visited Philadelphia in 1976. We were/are not raised in the Church of Rome but one could only revel in watching the devotion that his adherents brought to their laying eyes on their Pope. Devotion and Kindness and Loving Mothering to her children, her pets, the visitors to her office and her near and dear are inseparable from my image of my daughter and, indeed, represent who she is.

Happy Birthday, J.

Much love ... Dad






* ... Mismemory ... Pope didn't visit till she was three. Wonder?