Babes Spooning in Lap(p)Land

I had a dream last night about a competition. I think M and our kids were at a table listening to the gaming rules and pleased that the Dog we were to train for this (maybe) sled-dog race was a happy but beefy mix of German Shepherd with Bernard -- a winner, if ever there was one. (We had Bernards for many years until the last one, Sweet Mitzie, died of a seizure -- but that's old news.) There was a twist in the dream, though. When I went up to finalize details with the head of this school-like meeting, I/We were told that our dog was to be another, this Scrubby Old Runt of a Mutt ... more like GuntherDog than Klondike King who led Sgt. Preston of the Royal Mounties on his treks in the North Country to hunt down criminals. ... But somehow that was going to work for us in Lappland. This Scruff was going to lead us to victory.

Making Lappland and this little scruff work and thinking about Playing in the Last Quarter?  "Only the Shadow knows." Whatever happened last night in bed before the dream, my heart had gone where it has so many times before ... out of rhythm. I didn't bother to take my (not) resting heart-rate but it was > 140. Ah! It's no longer a particularly frightening experience ... more a signal of another time to reflect.

Hey! It's 1:34 AM and there's little else to do but reflect. The body? I could feel M's knees just touching the middle of my thighs. I turned and so did she, but only for a moment. I found my right hand resting on her right shoulder. Soft. The air smelled right. I remembered that on our just completed trip, M, two of our kids, a grand-daughter and I were sitting somewhere in an Italian Piazza. A woman walked by. I commented -- surprisingly to my fellow Pilgrims and perhaps somewhat inappropriately: "These Italian women smell delicious." And, now, the air around M smelled the same. We turned, again. Her knees once more touching the backs of my thighs. It occurred to me that it was just about 50 years, now, of this quotidian and nocturnal dance. People call it spooning, but spoons are objects ... and these dancers are relational beings ... sharing something more than heat.

Reflecting on it more ...  there I was ... not sitting on M's lap but laying in her lap, nonetheless. I laughed. Laps -- or are they Lapps -- are different than Lascivious Loins, aren't they? Still ... Maybe those are two of the central structures of a long marriage: Laps and Lascivious Loins. I liked my little mid-night joke and smiled.

I suppose 65 years ago, both M and I were sitting in laps ... the backs of our thighs perched on the knees of our Moms ... both gone, now ... Moms and their laps. And 50 years of the dance with each other, now ... two old folk folded like babies ... fetal ... 

"You lie in my lap." 

"No. You lie in mine." 

I fell back asleep and can't recall who, at that moment, provided -- and who was provided with -- a lap.

 

Finding Delight: Embracing the Good/Living with the Bad and the Ugly

I remember maybe twenty years ago traveling to Istanbul with my sons. They would've been late 20's, at the time. One night, we got lost in a seedy neighborhood but, to our delight, ended up in a charming restaurant. A form, I suppose, of 'lost but found.'

I've never particularly liked planning ... I have a certain degree of faith that tells me that it is not so much the specific choice made that carries the day but rather how one navigates through that choice. My sense is that many an unhappy Soul's misery is connected to a belief that the game of life can be won -- whatever that means -- by making optimal choices, as if life was a one-independent variable optimizing problem of elementary differential calculus. One hears the hints of such thinking in such expressions as "the one," in the notion that there is an ideal mate or lover just waiting to be found. Many a recent television or film production or, I suspect, romance novel surrounds the notion that someone has or hasn't found "the one." I wonder how much disappointment hinges on the belief that one has failed to solve that elementary optimization problem.

  "If only I had" or "If only I hadn't." 

One day, my fellow travelers and I were wandering through the streets/canals of Venice .... pretty lost. Stumbled upon a restaurant ... La Zucca ... maybe it means the Pumpkin ... but all that matters little. Venice has the look of a skid-row-scenario ... dirty from age ... untidy from the centuries. It was 12:15 and M and my knees and legs were raging in pain from climbing up and down dozens of staired bridges that cross its canals. The restaurant was to open at 12:30 but we had no reservation. Reservation!? Is someone kidding. There was a Swiss woman sitting out there and she had no reservation, either. La Zucca! 12:30 came and we were fit in and then began a series of walk-ins and phone calls. "Do you have a reservation? ... Sorry but we're full. Maybe the end of the week?"

Stumbled upon a wonderful moment ... camaraderie between M, I, two of our kids and one of our 6 grandkids.

We're back, now, feeling quite heartened by the whole experience. From the beginning where one of us had the idea that a trip was particularly important for one of us who is ill ... to travel as Pilgrims ... not seeking cure at some Grotto or Shrine ... but seeking wholeness in la Familia.

I don't see how the trip could've been better. Much love from inside our group and from without. Each hotel permitted us a home base ... even one in Florence that could've been called Domo d'Charles Adams. Dark rooms ... and curious hotel staff. A little spooky. Apparently was home of first Italian Assembly after the Italian Cities unified.

Indeed, on our last night, a colleague whom I only knew from the internet picked us up at a hotel ... he and his wife. First they drove 4 of us to the church in which he and his Father prayed ... the church where a Leonardo "Last Supper" was on display. Walking in was entering a sacred space, even though the church was heavily involved in the Inquisition that didn't treat my ancestors with kindness. Then to their home ... Two of their five kids were there and Neo the Dog ... a thoroughly whacky and happy pooch. (Love dogs ... No chauvinism except with their loved ones.) He's a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst ... she a homeopathic physician. Three of their kids were away; two there. The 17 year old youngster came in wearing a sweatshirt that said:

Nobody Reads

Your

Fucking

Blog.

I'm committed to having one that says:

Very Few People

Indeed

Read

My Fucking Blog!

The 21 year old daughter was charming ... a sculptress full of interest, like her brother, full of interest in the world. And dinner with them all? Was beyond anything we might've imagined. Oh! The food was wonderful ... hand-made spaetzle and foods that were on my daughter and grand-daughter's diets ... but the simple sharing of caring and ideas between strangers filled us even more than the Italian Hospitality we had already tasted with a sense of the goodness of the world ... while the News of the Week on CNN International raged about us during the week as Simon and Garfunkel's Silent Night had nearly 50 years ago. What a wonderful evening: comradeship and true joy (Alexander Woolcott?)

Leaving the next day from our hotel ... I received an e-mail from an internet buddy, accusing me of Lord-knows-what. The fellow was interpreting something I said about not understanding a cartoon as being off-putting. No. Actually, I was caught up in the Glee and Sadness of a trip that functioned in the former embracing of the Good while realizing that, indeed, one of us was ill.

With my colleagues in Italy, difference was something to be toasted. With my internet buddy, it was to be interpreted.

Many blogs ago, I wrote of my Abby Rule. Abby had been a university student of mine whom I mocked once coming into class one morning late after two absences. She ran out, to explain later that she had just a week before come home to find her Dad dead on the floor. The Abby Rule is a recommendation that we meet everyone with both "a presumption of good intentions" and a provisional assumption that, like us, they're dealing with what the kids called in the 1960's: "Some pretty HEAVY shit."

Any case, the holiday was wonderful, restorative and full of caring, even if M and I are both just a bit worn and lame-of-leg!

Blessed are You, God, Monarch of the Universe, 

who brings Goodness and Glee 

to be celebrated by Mortals.

Half-way In

This is to be a brief holiday ... plane ride was long but unevenful, though one of my fellow pilgrims (one of the young ones) was grossd out by my brushing my teeth in my seat after a mid-flight nap. I suppose that which is disturbing ("gross") to the young may lose its unsavory quality by the Last Quarter. So much fetid water passses over the dam by late life that a little mid-life teeth brushing carries little weight. M and I landed in Rome on Sunday and Monday were Vaticanized with a different group of Pilgrims. Our older son -- still a mid-3rd Quarter Player -- arranged for a guide, Angela ... the Art Historian. Angela is a proud Roman and very knowledgable both Theologically and Art-Historically. We should've been honored to be taken about by such a wise 40 year old ... and we were. But by day's end and after two trips up the Spanish Steps, M and I were both lame as a horse run hard enough for his final trip to the barn. Read the Rome Times: Old Well-Fed Couple Euthenized after Day in Vatican and walk about the Colliseum. Curious experience for me. In my faith tradition, prayer was typically done in modest venues. The smaller venue, the Sistine Chapel, and its big brother, St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican left me no place to meditate ... להתפלל ... to wonder at myself. Awe accrues to my experience with silent listening ... found it difficult to feel the wonder in such beautiful spaces. When M and I visited a Benedictine Monastery on Lake Magog in Quebec, there was space to experience the wonder and I suspect that I might have found the same in any of the 300 churches that Angela referenced in Rome. Ach du lieber ... we were tourists and not Pilgrims, after all. The Sistine Chapel did in a curious way remind me of our kitchen at home, the upper walls of which are covered in MY icons ... in pictures of my family, ... kids, grandkids and M and I, as we have aged with our progeny. Memories ... so much for me is about memories. It was about 45 years since M, I and the two older kids visited Italy ... and then only the North. The kids were 3 and 4 ... and M and I were kids, too. We stayed on Lago Maggiore ... a tidy little family in awe of the mountains up North ... dreaming and unaware of the life that would unfold or even about our youngest child and her 16 year old who were accompanying Grandma and Grandpa on this excursion. We hobbled out of Rome on Tuesday ... taking a train to Venice where M and I stayed back while 49/38/16 roamed the streets of Venice ... getting lost for a bit. They came back excited to find M and I beat and taking pain pilss for locked calves or calfs ... which is it? My own Mom and Dad would make a Hungarian dish called P'tcha ... made of calves' feet jelly. Our legs had, indeed, turned to P'tcha. This is, also, not a typical holiday for M and I. We most often find a place or go down to a place we own in a little backwater town in Virginia and gather our chairs to spend day after day on the beach. No problem finding that awe in God's backyard ... just in God's putative home. No. This trip is different ... few days in Rome ... now Venice ... then Florence and a brief meeting in Milan with someone who thinks about the spiritual side of depression. Then back home to where our Spirits really live. Sunday we go home and Monday I go back to greeting those who visit me in my office. Dear God: May I have the privilege to live long and prosper sufficiently to travel, again, with M and parts of our progeny.

Time Passes

Couple of hours being shuttled to JFK by Mohamed ... 34 year old man from Tunisia ... Here since he was 19 ... Two toddlers and a wife at home. Lots of traffic ... everybody in the car just a tad manic. I'm traveling with women ... the grandmother I sleep with -- M, herself .... our youngest child -- therapist, Mother of three, Wife ... her oldest, sitting in the airport lounge reading Dawkins' Selfish Gene. On our way somewhere ... Curiously, it matters to me little where that destination is ... Right this moment, sitting here trying to comprehend the mystery of it all ...

Do I really have a 16 year old grandchild? Yes. I do, indeed, have a grand-daughter munching on Dawkins' treatise ...

Three generations of women and Me, the oddMAN-out ... Husband, Father, Grandfather. No longer a Son ... people don't seem to like when, in the Last Quarter, one identifies themself as an orphan ... but I do sometimes think of myself in those terms. Complicated: this living in the Fourth Quarter. So many identities have collected about what once was so simple.

                                                        "Mom, Dad ... C'est moi ... It's me."

I don't imagine to know what these women are thinking ...

I suppose I never knew what the clergyman's daughter and the WWII soldier boy were thinking, either. As children, we expend preciously little energy trying to ferret out Mom and Dad's thinking ... their dreams of the future.

                                  "God put Mom and Dad on Earth to birth and provide for me."

Maybe, on this trip I'll find the visceral fortitude to ask ...

                                                  "What do traveling ladies think about?"

The Art of Exquisite Sensitivity

There was once a young man named Jim who wrote fiery articles criticizing his colleagues .... He grew into being a middle-aged psychological therapist in the world of Jungians in Switzerland ... He ran away from their conservatism (he ran away landing in Connecticut, curiously, and as I recall) and began calling himself a renegade and refused to "tow that barge" of any particular way of thinking. Jim went his own way. One of his books coulda been called "100 years of doing psychotherapy and we know shit and dittly-squat," though he chose a (only) somewhat tamer title. 

Jim grew old and before dying he wrote a book called The Force of Character. There, he went on about how Old Folk get more and more like they are/were, more and more as they age. Qualities get exaggerated and the now-grown-children confuse this, at least according to Jim, with new characteristics: 'Nah-nah! It's just an exaggeration of what was there all the time.' 

Truth be told, I'm not prepared to argue with the dead and I admired Jim Hillman for many reasons. Any case, I do recall certain circumstances cavorting about in public with folk who were older than I was, at least at that time. Lemme rip off a few.

Old Addie was a retired Bio-Chemistry Professor and a much-beloved friend of my wife. There were times when her loud anti-Bush (Bush der Junger ... der Shrub ... W ... or is he Bush-the-Middle?) comments came close to getting us kicked out of restaurants. Her wish was to live to see W dethroned ... Alas, she missed by a year.  I do wonder if the NSA, especially now that Addie is dead for seven years, pays any mind to the emails that came from the Old Radical to me which she predictably signed, each time: 

"Fuck Bush." 

Ach! May I not end up being sentenced to a good tan at Guantanamo for associating with this Krazy Octogenarian Killer who, I suspect, was among the kindest but strong folk that I've met. I remember: I had never read mystery a novel but when Adelaide demanded that I read one, in particular, I replied with a salute, a courteous "Yes, Ma'am" and a chosen day to read. I'd like to think -- or maybe I mean that I wouldn't like to think -- that Younger Addie was less testy than in her years walking with one of those fold-up walkers. I always wondered if at the bottom of her walker, there might not be two guns, activated by triggers in the hand-grips, somewhere ... kinda like Steed from the Avengers TV series from the early 70's (??) who had a weapon built into his very stylish umbrella. Imagine how Sean Connery's 007 might've been weaponized had he been allowed to stay on long enough to belly up to the bar and order: 

Geritol: Shaken but not Stirred. 

Reminds me of another friend, Ephraim. We were in a training program, together, 40+ years ago. I was 30'ish. He was nearly 60 and about to be widowed, at the time. He had a sharp and critical mind. He eschewed all the rituals with which he had grown and showed those behaviors quite openly ... wore it proudly. He was argumentative and ended up leaving the program, though we remained friends. We (M, Eph and I) would meet for lunch and this oh-so-very-educated 90 year old would routinely rip the waiter a new one for some formal error. Once, the college-aged waiter brought him lunch coffee before his ordered sandwich:

Are you just plain stupid, my young man. Sandwich? First. Coffee? Later. No-o-o-o!

I, when we had finished, excused myself to the bathroom and maybe-slightly-embarrassed slipped the waiter a $5.  He said thank you but added: 

Y'know. He's just like my Grand-pa. 

I'm not certain Jim's pattern always holds but I just got a letter from Maxine -- quite alive and still quite herself. ... I think Max is 93. When I was a Principal in the 1970's of a school for students that the Kotter show called Sweathogs and she was a teacher of these same high schoolers, I remember one scenario, in particular -- though it was typical. Max was already a Grandma when a student named Darlene arrived for her class, perhaps, 5 minutes before it was over. She looked at me in the doorway as she was patting the maybe 16 year old's head and said:

"You just mind your own business. 

Back to your office. 

Darlene showed real effort in getting here.

Away with you!"

Maxine, if she had a wish for absolutist justice or revenge, never showed it. Maxxy was a great teacher. Oh, she was firm in her thinking but open, too, to new ideas. And the letter I just received was clearly not written by a ghost-writer! It was Maxine ... in the flesh! Talking of how lovely her new surroundings were, how she was knitting afghans for her kids and grandkids and how while she may miss being able to walk about to her downtown haunts, she still very much enjoyed her new surroundings. Older and more positive ... warmer, even than she was when she would embrace one of our very sweet heliots (even if they didn't clean up, as they say, very well) in a way which would get people nervous, today, who hold firmly to the 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt never hug a student!

I'm confident, others in the Last Quarter know of what I speak. As I sit this morning in the midst of a cardiac arrhythmia that will pass, soon, I'm confident or at least fascinating about whether what Jim was reporting might not be related to an increased sensitivity that attends Play in the Last Quarter ... a sensitivity heightened by an increasing urgency about getting it -- whatever "it" is -- and getting it right ... sensitivity about time and dealing with the embarrassment of not being who you once were. Little stuff hits hard. After my last experience of replacing a toilet in my office waiting room is not likely to occur, again, and I tremble at the thought of having to give up shoveling and chopping ice on the office path.

On the Fullness of Ink

The bottle of ink

Was but half-full.

Missing were the words

That once filled

The fullness

Of the empty top half of

The Bottle of Ink. 

(from Ditties et Lettres du Abe Isaacs)

"They say it ain't easy." The Older Adult (what a f%&#ing useless euphemism! -- oops ... Sorry) has had scopes put into most if not all their bodily orifices ... They should have a museum in Florence dedicated to pictures taken by Docs of our insides -- The Orrifizi. I suspect its in house cafe would serve up a fine menu, including salsiccia or "stuffed derma" and yesterday's road-kill ... Internal Exams on Women and Men "Stetch 'em, bend 'em, take a deep breath".... Colonoscopies for all! ... Ears, Nose and Throat .... Urinary orifices intubated ... Have I missed any of the Oriffizi? ... "Better not touch my eyes, Doc! Not if y'know what's good for ya."

Then there are the molestations executed from -- and maladies appearing on -- the outside: Pressed breasts against cold glass plates to see whether those breasts need to be radically reconfigured . .... the Litres of Chalky yuch we need to swallow so the Docs' cameras can see ... Toes that no longer feel ... Genitals that no longer regularly do their thing .... Minds that forget ... Friends that die or worse ... waiting for your bladder or bowels to give up their holdings ... bladders and bowels that no longer hold. Sphinctors that just don't fully-pucker-up anymore ... gate-keepers that have forgotten how to keep that gate fully-closed

Yesterday, I was talking to my 75 year close friend who is beginning to exercise, tomorrow. I wondered if he had thought of Yoga, too, and if he remembered ... actually, I'd never say that to another Fourth Quarter person ... "I remember," I said, " when we vacationed together one Summer, part of your family and part of mine." I said, that is, that I remember my youngest (who was then only 6) watching him exercise. He was stretching out a bad back after a herniated disc that immobilized him for quite a while. My daughter watched this just-about Last Quarter denizen ... 

Long stretch ... joined by fart. 

Leg extension ... accompanied by you-guessed it ... 

The two laughed. 

Maybe this increased sensitivity leads to using those methods that we know best to protect ourselves from thinking about these vulnerabilities that accompany us during this period of life when -- consciously recognized or not -- embarrassing limitations have crept up on us -- like a thief in the night.

Funny ... My heart seems to have gone back to a steady sinus rhythm as I wrote these notes, in spite of my having gone out after the first few paragraphs to attend a Yoga class. I drove the mile, walked up the stairs and found the door locked. I didn't freak out ... I'm not all that prone to freaking .... more just my friend ... the heavy feeling of disappointment that travels right down the middle of my upper torso ... an Old Man's cry.

Maybe the trick to dealing with Old Farts is simple.

Listen to what's being requested.

Figure out if it will hurt anyone or take too much energy.

Realizing their sensitivity, try getting to "yes."