Masonry and Decisions

One helluva curious day. Some visitors to my office. A meeting with spiritual kinds of people. Four/five hours of working as a sort of stone mason .... carrying and mixing bags of cement ... ending with a path from my youngest's new office to the bathroom entrance. Showed my son-in-law with whom I've done many "projects" (calling them projects is like young Docs calling colonoscopies or cystoscopies "procedures" ... betimes, I'd like to "procedure" those youngins, m'self ... giv'em a little bit of their own medicine, aye!) with my philosopher son-in-law who arrived in the family with little appreciation for either the shear joyful madness of invention that comes along with "winging it" or a belief system that had a sufficiency of Faith that "projects" of this ilk might be complete. By the time the Last Quarter rolls around, one acts "as if" the only thing that can intrude on completion of the project is an unexpected myocardial infarction. Much still to do but the path Deo Volente (God Willing or Im Yirtzeh ha'Shem) is done.

By the way ... Did you know that with the percentage population boom from us Old Farts, there came the creation of the 60 pound bag .... less than 85-94 pound bags of mortar, concrete and Portland that twinged my back for its first three Quarters. It's as if some Marketing MBA knew that 60 pounds in the Fourth Q feels much like 85 pounds in the Second and Third.

All this having been said, I woke up, today, with a memory of some old guys and feeling, if not my age, then my back -- whatever! Yesterday was a good day.

Moments like these (liturgies, camaraderie, helping kids, cooking crazy-good stuff for Grand-spawn, playing with Portland Mud-pies, ...) take on new meanings in the Fourth Quarter. Woke up with this memory of walking in a retirement area with M, my Oldest, his wife and the youngest of the 3rd Gen
Spawn. They went in to an ice cream store and I sat down with a bunch of mostly guy-retirees. One made fun of me for still working.

"What y'waitin' for, Kid? 

For the Wheelchair, Walker and the Viagra?"

Get it while y'can." 

Cute, I thought. Members of my Generation of Fourth Quarterniks quote Janis Joplin or Freddy Mercury.

Another was sitting with his arm around two women, roughly his age.

"This is Tuesday and this Hot Lady is My Gal Friday."

Right! this time, I thought, cheekily. This guy has a hard time gettin' up from the bench never mind rising at playtime. Others bantered about where they came from ... apparently, most had arrived here from Chilly Toronto and were enjoying their new somewhat warmer playground and new and old playmates.

A third oldster looked less ebullient. He was without some one woman to play with. He was sitting right next to me; he had just broken up. He ashamedly whispered that his Lady had aged and now only wanted to sit at home in front of the Tube and he was thinking that Tube and Tomb could be pronounced the same by someone with even the slightest speech impediment.  Maybe they'd get back together but he doubted that his guilt would trump his wish to continue living. Who knows what Old People will do? (Watched an Old Episode of the Brit-Com "As Time Goes By" ... Lionel gets followed home by a Shaggy Dog and all fall in love with the Scruff.)

John and Yoko said it:

Christ, y'know it ain't easy,

You know how hard it can be,

The way things are goin',

They're gonna crucify me.

I guess we quote Lennon and Ono, too. (LOL)

Ach du lieber! Life, in every Quarter, has its tough decisions. The Young Docs likely have a pill for that, too.

A Waitress in a Donut Shop

Maria Muldaur sang and maybe wrote a song about a Waitress in a Donut Shop:  

I'm a waitress in the donut shop

I see him on his morning stop

He talks with a buddy speaking of his sweetheart
She gives him a rough time
He gives me his dime

And then parts

Soft sighs

Soft and pretty moans

In dreams I can make you my own

She gives him a rough time

He gives me his dime

And then parts

Truth be told, I don't know anything of the life of the waitress who served us. M had us 

looking in search of Indian Pudding ... a mix of cornmeal and molasses and milk, maybe 
.... but certainly a mixture of memories she keeps ... eating at a restaurant of her childhood when her Father and Grandfather were there to eat with her. We were in an old New England roadside diner that had shellac covered curved wooden ceilings and was populated mostly by Players in the Last Quarter. Across from us was a couple. He once was maybe 6'5" and 250 pounds .... Once a big guy. Now, he walked carefully with a  limp ... jeans and a heavy plaid shirt. She was thin ... maybe 75 years old and maybe too carefully dressed and coifed for this particular Greasy Spoon. They were taking care of each other.

The waitress? She was maybe half their age and said all the right things to that couple, 

to M and I, and to everyone else she served. She was not unattractive and maybe when 
younger was very much so. But it was not her shape that attracted my attention but the manner in which, after saying 'the right things,' her freundlich demeanor dropped and was replaced by a cold disinterest, as she moved to her next customer. 

What do I want from some poor lady trying to earn a living ... it must've been some time on an afternoon ... Maybe four days into our trip. Someone last week, an old friend, suggested that the waitress was suffering 'whiplash' .... she was being compared by me to the other waiters and waitresses that we had along our roadtrip. And I suppose my friend was right to point this out. Who says that our waitress had to measure up to some standard that I was establishing? She assuredly didn't. She was, to use my own 

language, a subject in her own right. I suppose so.

So, what is it that I want? wanted? not that I deserve or am entitled to for a $6 tip. But what do I want? I was, indeed, comparing her to a French Canadian Chocolatier who had served us coffee, tea, a scone and what appeared to us to be a genuine smile in her Inn in Southern Quebec.

Genuineness! Can a waitress in a donut shop offer up genuineness to dozens of 'easy overs' and burgers with and without fries day after leg-cramping day? And what is genuineness, anyway.

Many of the visitors to my office arrive asking something about how I'm doing ... I typically pause and think ... How am I feeling? Is it OK to answer honestly and genuinely and then to ask the same: "How are you?"

Are a psychotherapist and a waitress bound by the same rules of genuineness? And, if so, are we all? The day by day interactions ... the quotidian meetings in the supermarket, at the fish monger, walking to work in the morning and passing by another worker going off to work and watching the Fall leaves swoop across the street by a light morning wind ... is it possible we do, indeed, owe that other, that stranger, a genuine nod, a hello, a 
recognition that they're there.

There is a magical moment that parents get to witness at just about four months. Little Jane or Johnny suddenly recognizes that Mom or Dad and the infant not old enough to take a first step or put spoon to mouth knows that a space is being shared ... a moment when two people stand in the same moment of time. Some have called this the Mirroring Phase ... I, in my mind, call it the Yee-Hah phase ... The little one is so thrilled by this recognition of simultaneous presence that a Weeeeeeee sound or a Texas Yee-Hah is let loose.

I suppose for me ... Here, in the Fourth Quarter, it still means all for me to know that
another is willing to share space and time with me. That's what I ... M and I, I dare say, want ... nothing more .... To share a piece of space time on this crazy journey we all take ... mostly alone.

Nothing more.

Old People Saying Good-Bye

There are many ways that the Last Quarter ends ... Indeed, some exit quietly and others don't "go quietly into that long dark night." It must make a great deal of difference to those left behind to try to understand ... for trying to understand is the best ride we get towards understand the great mysteries ... something from nothing birth ... and something to nothing death. Don't get me wrong ... I don't count or discount reincarnation that would explain where nasty little Mortimer arrived from ... hell! He couldn't have come from me! or whether God eventually decided to take Old Mort back into her arms. I have no great proofs and generally don't seek them. Am pretty happy with my thinking that I get this big canvas on which to paint .... I've come to consider myself an C+ painter on my canvas and that's pretty good for me. I'll go on painting, I suspect, till my arrhythmias go BANG or something else catches up with me. It's been a pretty good ride, thusfar, thoughI have moments when I do wish I painted gloriously like one of the Moderns or like Artemesia Gentileschi who chopped off Holifernos's head in a wall size painting ...

But there are those who cannot wait .... I've been involved in an online discussion recently about suicide ... began with talk of Robin Williams' awful mess that he left behind. I have wondered 'why so angry?' Why not take a car and miss a turn or mistakenly walk into traffic instead of making a statement.

My trip to Quebec was full of my chipping Psalms: mah gadlu ma'asecha, yah? .... how great are your creations, God!

The conversation about suicide is like most online conversations between psych-types ... like the mystical snake Oroboros eating his own tail ... everybody, including me, ending up where they began. Last night I wrote:

"I think the human animal considers suicide ... They consider it because they CAN consider it .... .... akin to what they say about dogs licking their genitals or butts ... Being human came along with the possibility of reflecting on the worthwhileness of continuing the process. In transcending instinctual behavior, much has become possible .... I think it was Kurt Eissler who used to point out that perversion is uniquely human ... that is, doing something that one CONSIDERS one oughtn't do is uniquely human or as I once wrote I've never met a Cur who required candlelight to mount an estrous bitch. We humans don't rightly have even an instinct of self preservation ... hence,for instance, Freud used the word Triebe and Triebregung rather than Instinkt. If'n you can reflect on it, it is no longer instinctual."

I'm here for the long haul but do get those who like the song says "take the easy way out."

Sacre Bleu ...

Spending time in places where time may have not stopped but certainly slowed down ... Southern Quebec in the Lake Region ... Mountains in the background. Neither Lakes nor Mountains are Alpine ... but beautiful. Maphromagog and Massawippi ... happy people waiting for Winter, I suppose, without obvious fear. A Benedictine Monk's Cathedral in Albert .... sat listening to Chants ... rising and sitting with the celebrants ... robed and otherwise. Late lunch in North Hatley ... a turn in a road barely on the map. A B&B that was a chocalatiere downstairs ... sweet young, lovely, unpretentious person .... Earlier ... We sat outside the Benedictine's place overlooking Lake Maphromagog eating some cheese from the monks and an apple from the roadster.  Sister came over and spoke in the best English she could muster ... lovingness and kindness in her face/eyes. We've stayed in an old B&B without breakfast near the center of Magog. Manager was willing to be helpful and was Kind woman... just 60 ... just barely in Last Quarter. Waiters in restaurants seemed happy to be.

Leaves are just about to peak in color ... nasty arrhythmia that lasted for a day but didn't torpedo the joy of being here in beautiful country.

Vacating -- Memories of a Friend

To vacate ... to leave someplace ... sometimes, 

to make null and void, as in vacating a decision.

Vacation ... the act of vacating, 

temporarily leaving the work of a job or routine, 

generally, for the purpose of rest and relaxation.

About once every Season, I arrive at a state of mind where I feel the urge to vacate my office and take a vacation from the routine of meeting with the visitors who frequent my office to explore their own difficulty in vacating some life-pattern that brings them something other than pleasure. The vast majority of my time is spent with people who are near, into, or well-into their Fourth Quarter. They, like I, have developed certain stylized patterns of responding to life's sinus rhythm of pains and pleasures; we all develop habits -- how could it be otherwise?

To vacate a pattern of responses ... at least temporarily, to try something new.

I am, by profession, a psychotherapist. I suppose that has been implicitly obvious to those who have been reading through my verbal gambits here on Playing in the Last Quarter. I imagine that has been apparent -- that and the fact that, like others, I prefer making peace with my aging processes rather than denying them. The alcoholics, in the Serenity Prayer they borrow from one of the St. Francis's, reason that there is an important distinction to be made between those matters that we have little choice but to accept and those others that we can change. People seek out my services when either their patterns of response to the ups and downs of those waves of good and bad, happiness and sadness, possibilities and impossibilities or pains and pleasures have become overly rigid or, else, have become self-destructive. Loosely, they either cannot accept what is immutable or they fail to act on their ability to change what is changeable. 

I've caused some distress in people near and dear to me by fussing over the use of the word overwhelmed. "Hey, if you were overwhelmed, you wouldn't be standing here with me!" Silly distinction? Maybe and one I've made too often. I have no difficulty invoking this word when a person has lost a battle to a terrible illness ... but even then, it's complicated. Right around 9/11, the killing of 3,000 plus non-combatants in a culture-war that may never end and the disturbance of many more people who experienced loss in this early major battle of this maybe never-ending war, I met someone in an online discussion group for people interested in the writings of a then-already-dead therapist and thinker, WR Bion. Corbett was an engineer who migrated into computer engineering and then into a responsibility for managing groups of engineers in a large firm. Corbett became interested in the studies of group behavior and Bion was one of the early scientific thinkers about groups. Bion had been a wartime psychiatrist who was being asked to treat more people than he had hours in a week ... and so necessity mothered invention and he found that he could help struggling soldiers by meeting with them in small groups.

In any case, the online discussion brought Corbett together with me. Indeed, sometime into these discussions, Corbett found his way twice from San Francisco, where he lived, and Philadelphia, where I lived. Once, he even showed up with his teenage son Zachariah and stayed for a week. All this is to say: we became friends. As a kid, I had a baseball-catch friend, named Ronnie. We'd throw a baseball for hours during the summer vacation. Corbett and I exchanged ideas in much the same way.

About 10 years into our friendship, Corbett began experiencing pains in his hip joints and was rather quickly on his way to hospice-care with a terminal bone cancer. Corbett wasn't there long but during this time he was visited by pains that morphine barely touched. We spoke more or less daily. Whatever one may say of the 21st Century and its technology which Corbett was involved in developing, inexpensive -- for some? unlimited -- phone service is something for which, perhaps, we can be grateful. One day, Corbett didn't answer the phone and a hospice worker gave me the news.

What does friendship bring? Not a cessation of pain, certainly. Some light on the darkest of nights? perhaps. When Montaigne's long-time friend, Etienne de la Boitie died, he celebrated their conversations by refining the essay form of writing ... conversations "as if" to a friend. As I sit here poised to break my daily habits with a Seasonal vacation, Corbett magically came to mind. I don't imagine to know why he popped up in my mind this morning ... maybe it was as simple as remembering that if insufferable pain (that's a word like overwhelmed ... oops!) and even the recognition of mortality does not necessarily remove the possibility of pleasure -- as in, "it's 5 O'clock, M ... it's time to call Corbett, tonight" ... then maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to relish in the experience of being here ... now ... alive ... feeling the air filling and emptying my lungs. Geez!

Blessed are you, dear God 

and visitors, 

who allow me to take some time off each Season!