Prince of Light/Purveyor of Darkness

Is it possible that, after all these years, I am still surprised by the acts of kindness that I witness and receive and the curious acts of pettiness with which I'm confronted? Apparently, so. One might think that with entrance to the Last Quarter of Life, one gets a card that reads:

Long-lived and Seen It All 

And, while I suppose I/we have, seen it all that is, the sense of surprise remains.

Kindness requires so little. A asks B to do C or shows B their need to receive C and B -- if s/he has the resources to do so -- says "sure." I suppose this applies in Spades to promises made, but applies just as well to these quotidian requests that seem to arise often enough in a day to provide both the Giver and the Given-to a sense of hopefulness about the future.

I haven't been writing much, lately. I think I've been witnessing too much of the darkness. Indeed, I've come to recognize a certain sense of pressure and heaviness not in my heart but right down the middle ... esophageal mourning of some sorts. I think it an old feeling but still one that I've only recently come to fully experience. It happens routinely when I witness A asking B to do C and B almost reflexively needing to say "no" before agreeing to the requested favor.

Por Favor!

My visceral response goes beyond the heaviness down the middle of my chest. Glimmers of tears
warm my eyes. My entire body feels heavy. My speech becomes difficult and words don't come. We were mere children when the lyricists of Hair, the Musical wrote:

How can people be so heartless?

How can people be so cruel?

Easy to be hard, easy to be cold

How can people have no feelings?

How can they ignore their friends?

Easy to be proud, easy to say no

And especially people who care about strangers

Who care about evil and social injustice

Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?

How about a needing friend? I need a friend.

Frankly, I think it may be altogether too obvious to anyone reading these notes -- about an aging-guy's attempt to deal with a World that leaves too many behind -- that the author got mud-stuck in the romanticized ethos of the so-called Sixties. And even though he may not be hunched over the keyboard smoking dope, it is still the case that he mourns.

 Just these weeks on both the world-stage and locally in his four cubits:

Beheadings and Burnings.

Hate speech about others who are different.

Failures to keep promises to Near-and-Dear.

Sharing by a friend turning into shaming by others.

Lovers gratuitously saying "no" to each other.

Politicians squabbling with and slandering other politicians.

I thought about this outloud with someone I consider a kind friend. They cited a poem by Rainer Rilke that -- as far as I allowed myself to hear -- spoke of the need to befriend the reality of the shadowy and aggressive and powerful parts of our personality. Maybe it was his Hymn -- frankly I was too busy thinking in my own head about the horrors that I just noted, above:

For the first time I see you rising,

Hearsaid, remote, incredible War God. 

How very thickly terrible action has been sown

Among the peaceful fruits of the field, action suddenly grown to maturity.

Yesterday it was still small, needed nurture, now it is

Standing there tall as a man: tomorrow

It will outgrow man. For the glowing God

Will suddenly tear his crop

Out of the nation which gave it roots, and the harvest will begin.

At last a God. Since we were often no longer able to grasp

The peaceful God, the God of Battle suddenly grips us,

Hurling his brand: and over the heart full of homeland

Screams his crimson heaven in which, thunderous, he dwells.

I found it hard -- whatever the poem -- to take it in and rather reflexively suggested the reading of Lagerkvyst's (one page) The Venerated Bones to act as counterpoise:

Couldn't get a link to it but it's online and very brief, if you're curious.

Indeed, I know! I do know that I'm a hopeless romantic here in another loving-and-brutal century in which I do not feel quite at home.

Sam Hinton -- I think he was a Biologist and Folk singer but, anyhow, I seem to recall listening to him with M. at the Newport Folk Festival in maybe 1965 -- used to say:

The Choice can be no clearer: Peace to the World or the World in Pieces.

Cheer up, Howard. Fifty years ago, today, you and M met.

Hear! Hear! A Toast to that brave Soul, M!

  

Eyes that Warm in the Last Quarter

Can't say that a week has gone by in many years in which I haven't seen a child (we have three), their spouse, or their children. Friday nights -- typically -- 2 families of my clan show up for dinner ... a shared ritual. That I feel loved? is not in question. The mind is a very messy place, though, wherein conflicting feelings intercalate ... interweave ... interloaf ... intertwine .... ... as the kids say: 'get into each other's shit.' 

It was last night. One child with their spouse and three kids (one young woman and 11 year old twins) came over for a snack on their way to a school concert. I was glad to see them but oh! so complex are the stirrings inside. After they left, M and I watched the Musical production of Shrek. It was great but, still, Shrek "in the tongue of a foreign nation" (the great Old French scholar Rashi would abbreviate that wordy idea with four letters ... בלע׳׳ז) means to scream and a minority voice in my head could've voted for just such a scream. I was -- if only for moments -- Shrek whose eyes filled with tears as he feared that his only love would marry some feckless and Shrekless King-Schmendrick-Wannabe. No. I wasn't worried that M would run off with some small-person-with-a-crown-and-an-Ego to fit it! M was there for the long-haul ... We got together 50 years ago and the bond we formed on our first walk from Summit Avenue to her home on 5th Street in Providence holds to this day ... as our hands did.

It was different. M and I had run out to pick up a Pizza and a Greek Salad, knowing they'd be in a rush to get their nuclear clan to the acapella fete. We set the table and did what grandparents like to do. The oldest child is home from school on break and we'll not see her, again, for 4 weeks or so. The youngest two are quite civilized ... but, what to say: they're 11 years old. They eat with gusto ... they talk over each other ... they can never quite get over the penchant for keeping their world waiting ... they behave like the not-yet-born children of Mother-Rebekkah in Genesis: "And the sons ran about inside of her" .... May they compete for many, many joyous years. And they -- with no doubt -- do wonderful things for their grandparents. It was nothing they did that had me wistful.

How to explain?

There was a doctor named Hans Loewald who didn't die so many years ago. He once wrote that in the very act of growing up and becoming competent ... of feeding themselves and independently walking and talking and running and writing and becoming googoo-eyed over cute boys ... in doing what they're supposed to be doing, these children are making their parents irrelevant ... OK ... you wanna say "Less relevant?" I'm good with that, too. The very people who once did all for their spawn and whose ministrations to their little rugrats were seen as the major duties in life ... those very people were now -- so to speak -- unemployed. Loewald described it as psychic parricide ... doing in the parents by no longer needing those functions that once had made life itself possible.

When this occurs .... 

Very disturbed parents look down at their children and what's clearly discernible in their gaze is: 

Well! You don't need me anymore. 

So, hit the road, Jack ... and Jill ... and Jennifer!

I don't need you, neither.
Vaia con Dios!

Deluded parents who remain oblivious of any pain associated with their children's imminent departure into autonomous adulthood pretend:

Oh! Isn't that wonderful.

Look. You don't need me anymore and never will, again.

How much happier can a parent be?!
(is there an emoticon for 2 fingers down the throat?)

In my own understanding of the unfolding of life, the parent closer to their own feelings communicates with warmed eyes:

I'll always love you.

I think you're doing great.

Still, I miss those days when you curled up in my arms.
They were wondrous.

And while you don't need to be in the crook of my arm any longer,

You always have a place, here.

I'm coming to learn that there is a variant on these options that apply to Grandparents ... us frequent denizens of Life's Last Quarter. Last night, I watched as my youngest child and her family had come together as a cohesive and cohering family ... with their own way of being ...

For Grandparents? No longer is it the child drifting into a successful independence, but now each of the new families created in these folds of the life lived that moves into its own World.

Hokey! Hokey! Hokey, Howard!

OK! I knew this all before and, yet, each time I witness my own response to such situations ... Joy and Sweet Sadness mixed together with Pizza and Greek Salad ... or Cassoulet (cholent) and Potato Puddings (kugel), I choke up just a little like Corny Old Green Shrek when he fears that Fiona is gone for good ... and truthfully? I wanna scream ... I wanna Shrek .... No-o-o-o-oh!

So goes it! Enough!

I long have been a fan of Gibran's comments on parents and kids .... I think they apply to Grandma and Grandpa's feelings, too ... mutatis mutandis.

On Children

 Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, 

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, 

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, 

but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children

as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, 

and He bends you with His might 

that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, 

so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Tears and Laughter (again)

Nice weekend!

Family! People who might as well be Family!

Thirty Five years ago, M and I had a surprise party for Milt, Alu and Boris, three friends who were all turning 40. One of them had then just recently had a coronary and the gathered guests in our home spoke a bit before the arrival of the guests of honor ... "How loud?" "What do we do if he has another myocardial infarction?" "Now that would be hard to explain!"

Now Milt and Alu were turning 75 and M was celebrating a birthday, as were my daughter-in-law, another M, and a number of M and my grandchildren. No surprises, this time, and Boris had gone over to the dark side -- he retired/moved, that is, in/to Sunny San Diego. No. No surprises. At 75, one doesn't take chances. It's likely a sufficiency in the Last Quarter to take such chances during sex and sex may be better than Surprise Parties ... hard to say. I digress!

It wasn't a huge party but big enough to fill up three or four rooms.

Connections?

Our kids, A, A & J (we coulda had a PB&J) forever, beginning 1966 

-- at least, as forevers go.

And their tribes!

For M and I, we've known Milt and Alu for a long time ... 

Milt and his lady, the Unflappable Ruthie? since 1968.

Bill knew them longer and M and I have known Bill and Phyllis since 1968.

Alu? only for 40 years and his wife Bobbi for half that time.

D&D couldn't come. D was turning 85.

Leah, my beautiful niece? for all 48 of her years. Her family? as it grew.

Our neighbor, Patti, for only 33 years.

The Grandspawn? as they came.

I could go on. I found it difficult to toast the crew. Made some silly witticisms. But mostly spoke of being struck by being at a moment in my relationships with many that was special in that it couldn't be repeated. Maybe the Buddhists are right about never stepping into the same river twice and maybe, just maybe, these situations are only dramatically different. Who knows? Do know that I love these people and the many others who came with their Souls ready to Sing in celebrating these moments with us.

M and I met in February 1965 and were married not long after: there is no repetition of a 50 year relationship. Milt, Alu and Bill? The odds of us getting together 40 years from now are dismal ... as the commercial for MasterCard has it: "irreplaceable." The joy of meeting this Sunday? ...

Wistful tears and (enlarged) belly-laughs of a band of Merry Pranksters and Serious Souls that once were and, in many ways, still are? Tears and Laughter, food a-plenty and a half case of wine.

May the Playing in this Sacred Fourth Quarter continue.

By the way ... 

10 hours from now and some many years ago, 

M appeared to her Mom and Dad for the first time. 

Happy Birthday, M.