Happiness and Sadness -- The Juggling Continues

Last night we had Late Second Quarter dinner guests  and their kids. I mentioned (as I had in my last posting to this Blog) that I had recently been reviewing the Book of Ecclesiastes with another guy-denizen of the Fourth Quarter of life. We had both, in our readings, seen the author who calls himself something like "the Congregant" (Kohelles) as someone who had found peace and joy in recognizing that while he could not change the cosmic processes ... couldn't make great changes ... rivers would continue to their source, in spite of all his efforts and would still fail to fill the seas ... Sun would rise and set ... $ and wisdom wouldn't change the big picture, either ... he might  still find meaning in loving another and in walking in the path of the good or the path that god laid out for him. The lady dinner guest, a therapist, was on board. The guy philosopher thoroughly not, though maybe I wasn't understanding what he intended. Their kids excused themselves a bit earlier with their iPads. I finished dinner pretty happy, if vicariously sad for the philosopher (who chances are didn't need me to be sad).

Then I arose this AM. The butchered man that I thought (again, last posting) I must have met when he was a kid was still dead and his family, I suspect, still in shock and mourning ... along with those crying for the other million+ people whose deaths were recorded in, say, the last week, including my friend, Bill. A 40'ish neighbor who had studied Law at one of the most prestigious American Law Schools had still succumbed to her cancers. My quotidian aches and pains of late middle-age still were just where I left them.

And still ... the cat, Pretty Girl, was thrilled that the living room door had been left open for her to enjoy its heat ... GuntherDog was/is back to his AM dog-napping after peeing and seems quite at peace, especially as our dinner guests are still gone -- poor neurotic fella can't relax around company! And the gifts that I received this week are all still in place. And I'm sitting here pleasantly unwrapping my gifts. 

Gifts? ... Lots of them. Like Kohelles, I find myself rejoicing that some folk, including some of my office visitors and my doctors, friends, kin and two other older guys who see me a fit study partner, shared moments in time with me ... one of them shared a manuscript for a beautifully carved autobiography that moved me to joy and tears ... M still shares a bed with me .... oh! and some of my grown kids are coming over to work with The Old Guy raking the falling leaves.

How does the old song (not) go about raking leaves after the kids have left home?

The Falling leaves

Outside my window

The forty million fucking leaves

That just had to Fall!

Since they went away ...

(you can figure the rest)

Anyhow! It's been about 110 years since Freud tried to make some extra bucks in publishing a book about Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious. Copies of his Dream Book weren't all moving off the shelf (and I think the first printing was something like 200 copies). Anyway! In the Joke book, he concludes that the witticism elicits laughter because of its illicit content ... sexual or aggressive. I've long thought differently ... that pleasure in the well-told-tale is resident in the experience of another person sharing space and time with you -- something first experienced at or about 4 months when the kid figures out that: 

I and Mommy are both here ... 

Right now ... 

I know it ... 

She knows it ... 

We know it .... 

Yeeeeeeeeee-Ha!

Sharing space and time? The great jokester with the punchline or pun-line or tear-jerk-line, for that matter, brings the other to a brief but very pleasurable moment in space-time ... that tiny little shared space that the punchline creates for "just the two of us" and that exists for a fleeting moment in this crazy flow of time.

Thems the gifts ... maybe the only gifts ... others willing to work shoulder to shoulder ... mind to mind ... however ... with rakes? ideas? and occasional romps in a pile of leaves or pages or the hay behind the barn.