"Out of my Dreams"

Pretty song from Oklahoma. Then, there's Edgar Allen Poe's poem where he muses to himself whether "Life is just a dream within a dream." As one of the Dreamers, it's hard to ferret out whether it is as we imagine it to be. I'm afraid the Modern World isn't conducive to drawing these lines ... 

Weekend of 19 July ... Reality vs. Fantasy .... 

Smoke and Mirrors. Catchy phrases seem to be the rule. I don't know how it is for other folk somewhat dazed in their treks through the Fourth Quarter of Life. Lots of things seem to get under my skin, these days. It's been a busy weekend in the USA and a busy one for Howard, too. On my side ... M and I had a really good weekend, together ... enjoying sharing space and time with each other. Kinda snuggled together -- but not just together -- in late middle-age. We were ten at dinner Friday night and Sunday. M & I, and our Oldest's and Youngest's families. Oh, and GuntherDog and PrettyGirlFreud le chat. Four of the six GrandSpawn visited ... it was particularly moving on Sunday. Maybe 35 years ago, indulging I suspect a fantasy that everything could go on just as it was forever, we had a pool built and Sunday the four girls and most of the adults were splashing about ... to be away from the heat? Yeah. But to be together. We bought this float that everybody immediately saw as an 8 foot penis. A certain embarrassed part of the 6 adults may have wanted to be all grown up about it and hide the titters; the four girls ... well, particularly the three younger girls had no hesitancy in their amusement. Gunther was a little depressed about having been thrown into the pool, once, and the Littlest One, Princess C, really didn't want to get out. 

There's is an old book by Westropp and Lake, as I recall, on Ancient Phallic Worship; FORGET THE ANCIENT! ... ... ... It was fun!

Maybe the pool doesn't really act as a binding agent to keep the family together-forever, but something real brings us together and I was near-moved to tears, yesterday, watching the water bacchanal. Everyone seemed to get the biggest kick out of the three males (me + a near-50 and a near-40) falling into the drink off-of the Ride-Em Penis. Again ... it all felt real. And Saturday night, we cooked for friends and in the afternoon a struggling friend stopped by for support. Great weekend, to my way of thinking.

That having been said, I find that I have less and less patience for the Talking Heads who deliver the NEWS and, also, report all kinds of disappointments for and from those whom I respected but who have gotten roped into one-sided political polemics and/or National Inquirer kinds of stories. And the fuss made over words is getting to me. This was the weekend that Donald Trump went after John McCaine, claiming that the real heroes were those who were never captured. Laughable that Trump can play the role of a 7th grade class clown when maybe it would be more age-appropriate for him to be advertising Geritol or Cialis. But I find it tragic that the newsfolk get all caught up in this. War heroes? they're folk who the culture recognizes suffered for them or put themselves in harm's way for the benefit of the Country ... either or both. Words! Silly arguments about words. John McCaine certainly fits the bill.

Look! There's no hiding that I live on the more Liberal Side of the Street. I'm certainly no Party-Liner but I for many years found myself in most-often agreement with MSNBC's young crew of news folk ... Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and others. Really smart and well-informed. I could adopt them? Hearing them covering each and every mass shooting and Bill Cosby's marital indiscretions gets to me. I know, I know. Cosby may have been involved in rape and if he's found culpable will be prosecuted if Law allows us to do so. And 30 seconds of "Bill Cosby has been accused by dozens of women of repeated non-consensual sex and serial infidelity" would be acceptable to me. But hours of rehashing details while the Middle East burns and Africa starves? C'mon.

And y'know, who the phuck cares?

And, so ... for weekend 26 July we toddled off to backwater USA ... Conservative, lots of Fundamentalists ... M, I, our ldest and his 6 year old adorable one. The beach is simpler but hard for M to get to with her bad knee. Our oldest son likes to keep things neat ... I don't mind at all if he neatens things up. I like the Sand and the Simplicity ... "Tis a Gift to be Simple." Didn't do much work ... replaced a rusted-out lamp. The salt water is unforgiving. Me and the 6 year old are kindred spirits, though she fusses food. We like singing funny made-up songs, together, and she's of the age when knock-knock jokes are funny for some reason that has nothing to do with what makes them funny on occasion to adults. We'll leave, this Morning and by tis afternoon I'll be sitting in my office with my bad back, numb feet and occasionally thinking about next time I get to go down to VA ... next time with GuntherDog ... this tme he bedded down with my youngest and her family. And Chloe, the really young Grandspawn, she doesn't care about the wars, the unfaithful celebs and has only "now" and "dreams for tomorrow" to keep her going.

"knock knock"
     "who's there?"
"shoes"
     "shoes who?"
"shoes walk to town"

Freud missed out on kids' knock-knock jokes. Figuring out the unbewusste/unconscious parts ain't easy .... The kids that age just want love and rock and roll. And she gets both from her parents, especially her middle-aged Dad. And she sings (and don't talk politics ... more like Bernie of Brooklyn and Vermont!):

Bugga-bugga-bugga, my Grandpa's m'schugga

But he don't tell no lies.

Bugga-bugga-bugga, my Grandpa's m'schugga

And he eats Pizza Pie! (Song and Lyrics by Howard and Chloe)

It's 513am ... time to go watch the sun rise.

"Ooh, Ooh, Pain is So Close to Pleasure"

The French actually have a word for it ... Jouissance ... the kind of pleasure that is so intense that the boundary between its pleasurable parts and its pain becomes blurred. Freddie Mercury and Deacon musta been pretty young when they wrote these lyrics. It's part of the mystery of life that these lyrics that get down deep into the experiences that frequent our lives in a profound way were often written by folk in their late teens and early-to-mid twenties. How can that be, the Denizens of Quarter Four ask, that mere children so accurately represent experience that either -- or so we assume -- doesn't begin till later or those that we may forget have been lifelong. Here are part of the Mercury-Deacon lyrics:

                            "Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure, oh yeah,
                        Sunshine and rainy weather go hand in hand together all your life,
                                 Ooh, Ooh, pain is so close to pleasure everybody knows,
                   One day we love each other then we're fighting one another all the time,
                                          When I was young and just getting started,
                              And people talked to me they sounded broken hearted,
                                        Then I grew up and got my imagination
                                     And all I wanted was to start a new relation,
                                         So in love but love had a bad reaction,
                                        I was looking for good old satisfaction,
                  But pain is all I got when all I needed was some love and affection,
                             Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure, yeah, yeah,
                 Sunshine and rainy weather go hand in hand together all your life,
                              Pain and pleasure, Ooh, Ooh, pain and pleasure."

Oops: Just checked. They recorded this song when Freddie was 40 and not all that many years before he died. I should, by the way, point out that I would have never known about this particular genre of music if I hadn't "hooked up" (as they say) with M some 20 years before the song was recorded. Credit where credit is due. I was never meant to be "a Rocker" and never became one. We're fortunate when we find someone who brings a dimension to our lives that we don't and weren't ever likely to possess. It was Teddy Reik who years ago pointed out (claimed?) that both Love and Hate begin in envy ... in realizing that someone has something that you will not ever have. 

                              "Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure."       

What appears to be "the fact," though, is that a whole crop of humanity find this situation too painful to bear. Love and Hate ... Pain and Pleasure ... have to be kept apart ... compartmentalized in such a way that when one is ascendant, its natural partner is not to be found but is, instead, denied or hidden. 

I was thinking about this, this morning. Recently, my back has hurt everyday, upon waking. Getting out of bed hurts. First feet to floor? hurts. Figuring out how to get my feet through the openings of my skivvies is a challenge made possible only by holding one hand on the wall of the bathroom and managing not to "tilt" like a cheap pinball machine. Still, there's a smile that comes on.

                                                   "Howard ... dammit .... feel it ... you're alive!"

Yeah, yeah! I'm alive and well enough even to contemplate cutting down some trees this weekend (we'll see if it happens) ... trees that are beginning to intrude on the path that my visitors take to my office ... a path that I and my two adolescent sons built 36+ years ago when we all had good backs ... when mixing dozens of bags of Portland to sit on top of a sand-base was a weekend job. No! No more mixing lottsa bags of Portland Cement without the certainty of intensifying the AM back aches ... for my sons, as well. And this coming Winter may be the last one during which I can shovel that 100 foot path. (Maybe it's time to let it grow over and become forest-bound like some fairy-tale ogre?)

But back to my visitors. It may well be the most serious sources of emotional disequillibration that I see: I refer to the inability to juggle Ole Freddie's "Pain and Pleasure." Many of those who toddle up the path that Howard et fils built function on the guiding principle that when pain is present, there can be no pleasure. Whenever I witness this splitting of reality into "The Good" and "The Ugly," I remember my conversations with Corbett. We hadn't known each other all that long. We met in a discussion group that dealt with the writings of some guy named W. R. Bion. Corbett lived with his family in San Francisco; I and M lived here on America's Atlantic Coast. Corbett decided one day to come for lunch and on another occasion arrived for a week with his son, Zach. Ain't the internet grand! Any case, we became friends.

What Corbett didn't decide about his life-journey was his discovery at about 60 that the pain in his hip was a very aggressive, galloping osteo-sarcoma, one that would only be satisfied when it commandeered his whole body and killed him. Within a few months of diagnosis, he was in a hospice somewhere in San Francisco looking at a two month window given him to say goodbye. We spoke, more or less, each night for about an hour. Sometimes, Corbett and I kidded; betimes, we philosophized about a variety of writers; sometimes, we cried, together. Most of the time, there was more than a bit of each. Corbett was no splitter. He didn't use this method of compartmentalization to quell anxieties. He welcomed the Good and accepted the unavoidability of the Bad. 

                                        Ooh, ooh, pain is so close to pleasure, oh yeah!

This morning? I miss my old friend and simultaneously toast his life-well-lived! And you, my aching spine that has supported me for roughly 70 years? I toast you, as well! You both did real-good!

"Fly Me to the Moon"

My (and M's) youngest spawn and I presented a film to a graduate school class, last week. We've done presentations such as this before and have arrived at a style of working. I do a very brief introduction, we show the film, and then she talks about some of her patients and I sit in awe at how articulate and smart she is. Maybe among the nicest things about the Last Quarter along with Welcoming Grandspawn to the Table is getting to see just how smart these newcomers are. I join the discussion as another member of the audience and let the kid rip ... brings tears to my eyes, each time. I mean ... even people at the cusp of the Second and Third Quarters got smarts. How can that be? I remember having a typical reaction to her birth ... she had ten fingers, ten toes and all the hopeful signs of life to come. We parents do silly shit like counting those toes ... yep ... 1, 2, 3, ...., 10!

Thus far, we've shown films about bullying (like Ben-X, a Belgian film) and, this time, Richard Donner’s Film: “Radio Flyer” (Columbia Pictures, 1992).

A simple if painful tale! A father (played by Tom Hanks) of two preadolescent children tells his own pre-teen sons about his memories of childhood. He had been witness to the physical and verbal beatings endured by his somewhat younger brother at the hands of a violent and alcoholic stepfather. The film bleeds violence. The story takes on a fanciful and mythic quality as he recounts how he and his younger brother, Bobby, fashioned a flying machine from found parts jerry-rigged to their Radio Flyer wagon. The now-grown-up-father’s story ends. The younger brother, assisted by him who cannot protect him and with their pet turtle, Sampson, aboard, builds up a head of steam racing down a hill and takes flight over an airfield and into the night. The father (moderator and story-teller) tells his sons that while Bobby never returned home, again, he did stay in contact via postcards sent from faraway places to their mother (Lorraine Bracco, who in later roles would become known as therapist to Tony Soprano). 

This would indeed be the end of such a simple if painful tale that a father might recount to his children, the end, that is, if not for certain comments and if not for a singular inconsistency ... a kind of cinematic slip. The father makes a point of reminding the children that “history is in the mind of the teller” and that “truth is all in the telling.” These rules  do not fail to impress the children, as one asks: “Dad, is that how we got Sampson?” The movie ends without any fanfare and without discussion of the obvious. If Sampson, the pet turtle, didn’t leave, perhaps it is also reasonable to assume that Bobby never left, as, just perhaps, there was no Bobby. In the “tale,” the older brother explains to his mother: “he made it; he’s gonna be OK now; he’s safe.”

In 1919, Freud expressed surprise  at the frequency of a certain fantasy presented by his neurotic patients — ‘A child is being beaten.’  Freud  interpreted these fantasies consistently with his belief that these images were the result of a denied cruelty and not based in historical abuse.  He was interested, as well, in an alternative version of this same fantasy (p 181) — ‘a small child is being beaten on its naked bottom.’ He concluded that (p 186) the essential character of “the phantasy now has strong and unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it and so provides a means for sexual masturbatory satisfaction” — a primary trait of perversion. Had Freud chosen to emphasize “small child” over “naked bottom,” his paper may  have read differently and been more to my liking. 

In any case, while Freud had great admiration for writers and playwrites, we cannot know whether he would have been impressed or rather dismayed by Donner’s implicit dramatic interpretation of  “Ein Kind Wird Geschlagen,” which after all means “One Child is Being Beaten.” In Donner’s film (or, in any case, in this interpretation of his work), rather than confront the memories of abuse, a child or a child grown to adulthood may choose to split-off and thereby protect a vulnerable (younger) part of himself, One child becomes two. One child is exiled while another is numbed. Vulnerability dies and mastery survives. Alas,  such splitting, always comes at a cost and that cost is, in part, the relinquishing of small bits of reality and, perchance, a denial of the impact that such abuse may have on future generations; one can only wonder how Donner viewed a father who recounts horror stories to his children.

The media and people of the 21st C., in general, expend great energies trying to understand trauma and abuse. In a recent study done in Philadelphia, 25% of adults reported being sexually abused while growing up. Lord knows how many are physically abused? 

Still, I'm confident many of us have the opportunity to bathe in the glory of our kids' smarts and accomplishments as they grow in their own lives. My Littlest One not only speaks well but has raised three of her own ... 16, 11, and 11 ... each one a little miracle. I've cited Malachi's comments before but once more can't hurt:

Behold, I send to you Elijah the Prophet

Before the Great and Awesome Day of God.

(And what's his job?)

He'll return the hearts of the parents onto the children

And the hearts of the Children onto their Parents.

Geez! Life can be so good.

"Nobody Knows the Trouble I feel"

Nobody knows the trouble I feel? 

What narcissistic bullsheet*! 

Ah! Jest kinda jesting. 

I was thinking this morning about the Hubris of Misery. The very thought that I, alone, have reached the bottom of the barrel in the level of my misery seems to me to be the height of such hubris. I -- perhaps, it was last week, in one of my wordy postings -- began a list of the unattractive feelings that folk use typically as weapons against others. 

"I am the victim and some rich swine out there, therefore, must be my victimizer!"

                                                Nobody knows m'troubles! 

                                                              yeah, yeah!

                                                         Glory, Halleluyah!

Late Middle-Age -- or what I call in these ramblings The Last Quarter -- assuredly has its aches, pains, disappointments and realities. My back does ache, this week. My wrist ain't so hot and my feet are numb because -- or so the Docs tell me -- the nerves in my legs aren't choreographing and conducting the way they once did. My heart has its own mind as to how often it chooses to beat and I need to spend more $ on sunscreen, these days, due to the thinning of my groundcover. One might abbreviate: Life has turned out well but not exactly, perhaps, as I might've planned it had I been fully in charge. Oh, and when I see the young folk, I know that I can't be quite like they are -- never, again. No more Big-Sky expanses of futures full of promise. True enough ... but it's really neat watching them get going.

There really -- at least, tio my way of thinking, is a kind of hubris, egotism and arrogance in assuming things should be different for me than say for any of those folk who came before me. My parents and grandparents had their aches and the Colonial poet Edward Taylor fretted the end of the story, much as I do, as he screamed:

                                                          "A Phig to Thee, Oh, Death.****"

Moses, too, the Great Liberator of his people begged his God to let him go on just a bit longer in order to see the wonders that this God had begun to show him ... and, I suspect, in order to go on just a little longer. All those who live face their own mortality and suffer pain! That's the gig!

**********************

But let me go back to envy. It is, after all, among the only type of thought that is considered sinful in the Old Testament Theology.  The Ten Commandments and all the rest proscribe against certain actions ... while envy is singled out as the only thought sin. 

Pentateuch avoids the policing of other thoughts ...  And the proscription covers a lot of bases. One is not supposed to envy one's neighbor's ox or his house or his ass or his wife. (It says nothing, might I add, about envying your neighbor's wife's ass ... ah, we can leave that for a different day!)

So, what's the problem with envy?  Why is it so troublesome that it would be, perhaps, the only outlawable thought, at least in the Pentateuch? That's been preoccupying my mind, lately and this AM, as I arose. 

(I do hope that someone gets into my boat and rows a bit with me on this complex issue, but, in the meantime, I'll take a stab at it, myself.)

Here's a  list of some Grateful Forms (Sunshine) vs. the Envious Forms  (Green Algae and Mold):

Thanks to all those who have helped me along the way: 

I feel great about waking up, today. 

Harvey and Linda got this great house: 
6-car garage and $100,000 kitchen.

Thanks to all those who have helped me along the way: 

Dinner was great, Mama.**

Mary and Dick got this great house: 
6-car garage and $120,000 kitchen.

Thanks to M for hanging out with me for 50 years 

and continuing to share my bed: 

Dinner was great, Mama.**

Ray and Charley got this great house: 

6-car garage and $150,000 kitchen with radiant floor heating.

Thanks be to all: 

I have more than I ever imagined and some of our kids 

and grandkids were over last night for dinner.

Our oldest kid has a great car, a young wife and a really cute kid***;

They're (exc. for the car) in Paris having a great time; 

and they're not silly enough to own a big old house.

Thanks be to Anima Mundi ... to whatever brings the World to Life: 

I have pretty M, GuntherDog, PrettyGirlFreudleChat, 

and I'm the Always Agreeable Aga of my family.

You get the point; I won't go on. Envy is ugly ... butt-ugly ... it scours and shows disgust for what isn't ... It's like one big fart at a gala. It denies the value of the gifts received and undoes all sorts of goodness  ... allows no good to stand by imagining that The Good resides in the hands and lives of others. Envy criticizes the Other for not being or bringing enough. And ultimately envy pushes one's Others away as they recognize how little they are being appreciated.

Gratitude, on the other hand, is appreciative, as it beautifies the one carrying it and thanks all who are near and dear for giving all that we, indeed, have. Gratitude costs nothing.

************

Well. I'm feeling blessed, today, to have received three kids, three full quarters, and a beautiful and tolerant wife ... oh! and a roadster, even if it's slower than my kid's beast of a car. I've long seen life as an expansive canvas on which I get to paint till the painting's done ... pretty cool to have that opportunity. Pretty cool. Too bad the Grateful Dead don't get to play forever.

*************

Damn! I'm so preachy!

*I think that's Greek for Hubris!** My grandfather would end each dinner with that form of thanks to my grandmother and a kiss on her forehead, even when Mama's Kapusta tasted like leftover Road-Kill/
*** I mean: my youngest grand looks great in Paris!
**** "Fuck you, death" in Colonial-speak.

Link from Szandra H of Hungary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_nFuJAF5F0

"When You Walk Through a Storm"

Independence Day in the USA

M tends to keep me informed about the goings-on in the World, as rumor has it that, while I may be adept with building and fixing things like walls and cars, I tend to have my head in the Clouds or as others might say "up my Ass." In any case, like the partnership between the pragmatic tribe of Zebulon and the ethereal one of Yisasscar mentioned in Moses' blessings at the end of Deuteronomy and the last day of his life, M and I have forged a partnership in such matters.

This week, she told me about the dying of Sir Nicholas Winton who made a decision many years ago to forego a skiing holiday with his friend and to go save, transport and place 669 young Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to Britain. Apparently, by the time of his death, the number of Souls that came into being due to the extraction of these kids from the pretty certain fate that was awaiting them under the Third Reich's Final Solution program was estimated at on tenth of a percent of all Jews living today ... about 15,000 Souls. Nicholas was then just 30 years old.

By the way, as I recall, Bob Simon shortly before his untimely death during the past year did a 60 Minutes spot on Mr. Winton's accomplishment which he had not bothered to discuss until a family member found a box of letters in his attic relating to this "transport." And, as another aside, the famous and very important Kinder-transport and Schindler's accomplishments made famous by Hollywood rose beyond the level of Nicholas Hinton's accomplishment ... but Hinton did this more or less alone. I suppose Schindler did, too.

When I think about his Mosaic redemption of these kids, I think about what the young comedic singer-keyboardist Tom Lehrer used to say about Mozart ... something like:

'It's humbling to realize thast when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was my age?

He was already dead 15 years.'

It's difficult not to feel the same humbling comparisons about Nicholas Winton. Still in the very middle of the Second Quarter of life, he saves 669 kids ... doesn't make any fuss about it, at all ... then 50 years later at the end of the Fourth Quarter is dimed out as a hero by a relative, is eventually knighted by the Queen, and goes on to live another quarter Century into, in my jargon, a Second Overtime Period.

Lest we've waxed complacent here in The Land of Milk and Money, not only have we Last Quarter types lived through many storms, but the Storms -- maybe different ones -- rage still. A racist youngster massacres the same people studying their Bible who invited him in to join in this study ... some World Cities are poised to Explode and Burn with anger as Watts and Detroit and Paris did nearly 50 years ago (talk about Shock and Awe) ... the Syrians are on track to kill as many of their own as the Iran-Iraq War did ... the Gazan Palestinians are bombing Southern Israel and the Israelis are bombing Gaza ... Putin and the European Union are sword-rattling and more ... China, Japan and the Koreas are in a potential Death-lock ... Too many major cities are covered in increasingly dense smogs ... and the Seas are threatening to break the tentative peace they've maintained with the shorelines that contain the large majority of the World's major cities.

I wonder: Is there room for a Schindler or a Winton in our World, today. M tends to watch the National News here that for so many years was presented by Brian Williams. At the end of each show -- now, as well, with his replacement, Lester Holt -- the news has a feel-good story ... not untypically about someone doing things for others. Maybe, there's still hope that Good can continue to exist inside raging shit-storms.

I don't wish to idealize a mere mortal such as Nicholas Winton and, yet, one cannot but be impressed by such a man's accomplishments at such a young age ... seeing a problem and doing something about it.

Rogers and Hammerstein have Nettie Fowler, starry-eyed Julie Jordan's cousin in Carousel, singing out about such fortitude in her deep voice, recommending that she take on what she can in the face of life's pains:

When you walk through a storm hold your head up high

And don't be afraid of the dark

At the end of the storm there's a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind

Walk on through the rain

Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on

When you walk through the storm hold your head up high

And don't be afraid of the dark

At the end of the storm there's a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind

Walk on through the rain

Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on with hope, hope in your heart

And you'll never walk alone

You'll never walk alone

You'll never walk alone

******************

May the memory of a righteous man be a blessing to the World ... זצ׳׳ל

The Party's Over

Judy Holiday, the brilliant physical comedienne who died much too young, sang "The Party's Over" in the romantic farce, The Bells are Ringing. It was a sentimental story of a switchboard operator in a Brooklyn Answering Service who saves and is saved by Dean Martin's character, a writer who has hit the skids and couldn't finish a screen play until his muse shows up. I like movies like that ... happy endings ... good music ... and an optimistic view of life.

As I was driving away from vacation back toward my office a few days back, I found myself singing that song. It's not as if I have spent the past 45 years Working Nine to Five for bosses who have looked over my shoulder at every opportunity.  And while for many of those years, a 40 hour workweek may have seemed to be, as they say, a breeze, in spite of having put in very lengthy weeks, I feel blessed to have been able to do the work I did ... Opportunities to run schools, to teach in universities and post-professional institutes, to talk to many audiences before this silly blog about getting old, and to welcome people into my clinical office to work together with them on figuring out how they've made sense out of standing erect on the surface of this Good Earth. Geez. Pretty cool to have been thus blessed.

Still, driving away from the land of vacation, the little backwater town on the Eastern Shore of Virginia where we have vacationed for 36 years ... driving away and for at least a bit leaving M, one of my kids, one of his, and two other grandkids behind comes with a degree of wistfulness. "The Party's Over" ... at least for the time being ... and I was singing. To drive about, those left behind were  in need of a wagon and my son twisted my arm into driving his monster Porsche home. I had previously criticized the beast (the car, not my nearly 50 year old son) for its clutch and shift-linkage ... but, indeed, it was a blast ... in spite of its defects. I am somewhat embarrassed about my apparent need to teach a lesson to some Third Quarter type driving a Suped-up Pony Car. 

In any case, the car got me home and no Trooper hailed me over to discuss the present state of US Highways Infrastructure or anything else. Indeed, I find that the police seem to avoid stopping me for speeding much, anymore. Perhaps, they have pity on old men driving cars that are clearly meant for quick-reflexed younger folk. And when they do stop me, they don't seem to give me tickets.

Smokey: Take it easy, Old Fella

In fact, while I've been stopped dozens of times since entering the Last Quarter, I haven't been penalized. I attribute this to something other than being Handsome, Brave and Intelleckatektual. As soon as I see the police car -- preferably even before it lights up -- I pull over. Like a dog, I suppose, lying on his back, taking the submissive position. When the policeman asks:

Smokey: Do y'know how fast you were going, Sir.

In spite of my chagrin at having been called Sir, and my inclination to call him on using that expression with a "Sir, my ass," I respond carefully adding 2 mph to whatever was actually my speed:

H: Well. I didn't know how fast I was going until I saw you. 

I had been thinking about &^$@#%&* and

then I saw your car and I looked at my speedometer and it read &%$ mph ...

Geez! That is fast.

Smokey: That is kinda fast, Sir.

H: Yeah, it is.

My intention is not to cause any friction in Smokey's life and to leave an impression that in words might sound like: "I'm guilty as charged and actually more guilty than you might've thought, Mr. Smokey, and whatever you say is right." 

I remember several situations, in particular. On one such stop, my older son, the Guy with the Monster Porsche, was trying to encourage the policeman to ticket me for speeding and another time when my Father (we had just buried his brother) similarly encouraged a Trooper to fine me for going through a Red Light. Apparently, it pisses off people that I don't get tickets and they do. But my favorite interaction was in Summer of 1994. I was attending a seminar and bunking down at a Monastery inland from St. Augustine, FL. I had three people in the car with me and was traveling some 70 mph in a 35 zone. We were on our way to see the sunrise at a beach. When pulled over, I gave-up 73 mph with something like:

H: Really felt a need to see the sunrise. 

Living at this Monastery and listening to people rattle on about Ethics for day after day, 

we really wanted to see that there still was a Sun in the Sky.

After the requisite several minutes in his car ... I imagine, ascertaining that I'm not an escaped felon ... he reappeared:

Smokey: Follow me, Sir. I'll escort you to the beach. 

But you be a good ole boy from here on out.

H: Yes, Sir!

All this was flashing through my mind driving this 7 speed - 500 hp monster up Route 113 through Maryland and Delaware and thinking how easy life is in the Modern Western World if you just obey a couple of simple rules, live within what are very broad boundaries and don't cause others too much heartache.

And, still, I was coming home to an empty house ... just me, the Dog and the Cat. Alas. I shall vacation, again.

Ride, Captain, ride!