"A Fig to Thee, Oh, Death" (Edward Taylor?)

I can't rightly say whether I think Death and Loss, in general, have more of a presence in the Last Quarter than in earlier ones. By elementary school, kids get it: 

Shmen-the-Hamster dies ... 

Kazimierza the Pooch got very sick and did, too ... 

My friend's Grandma died, but she was very, very old .... 

Mommy and Daddy won't die for a long, long time ... and

I may not die, forever.

Perhaps, when Fourth Quarter types say that "It passed so quickly," they're referring to the surprise that Donne mentions ... when you hear the church bell toll, don't fret the name of who died, it's tolling for you ... and me ... and stars and heroes ... and young newscasters and camera-folk ... and kids who are at the wrong place or doing some wrong thing ... or police-folk doing their thing ... !

The note came ... they arrive as e-mails these days ... her husband had died ... Father of her two kids ... kids?! L's a Shrink out on the West Coast where they had just recently moved ... and their son's a Dentist. Boris was a Grandpa. Died Tuesday ... the Memorial Service is Today ... just a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. Boris had emigrated to the States from the Soviet Empire sometime in the 1950's ... -- as the expression goes -- without a pot to piss in. He learned English. He went to school. High School, College, Graduate School. He married a nice lady and spent his adult years living and parenting and being a researcher, teacher and Chair of a university department.

M and I will drive to the Ocean, today ... to say good-bye ... to be with others who knew Boris ... to be sad together and with his Wife, Kids and Grandkids. I woke not with memories of what Boris wrote or him chairing meetings in a University Statistics Department or with the happenstance of my meeting him ... I had been running a school for crazy inner city high school kids. A Diorector of the State Department of Education had visited our school and was humiliated by a student over a chess board. I was led to believe that our school with its emphasis on odd subjects would get no more student referrals if the guy with the strange -- even, if very successful -- programs stayed at the helm. I submitted my resignation and went home to tell M that at the end of that year monies would have to flow from elsewhere for us and our three kids ... 2, 9 and 10 years old, then.

Sitting at the table trying to answer: "So what ARE we gonna do, Howard" ... the phone rang and Boris was there ... heavy accent ... "You want to come teach in my Statistics Department, next year?"

Living in a serendipitous world ... pretty cool.

But the image I arose with, this morning, was not of Chairman Boris or anything he published but of Boris at the Beach. He would take off his shirt ... Boris wasn't a tall man ... solid body ... short legs. Then, Boris would take off ... in the direction of Iceland or something. He would run through the shallows, dive into the first wave and keep swimming. Was he running away from Stalin's Russia? or was he just grabbing a piece of life "by the balls" ... Who knows what's in another person's heart?

Boris, in the end, lost a battle to little rapidly multiplying clonal cells that colonized his Liver. But not before he swam through many-a-wave and lived the Good Life.

For quite sometime, my custom has been on hearing of a friend's death to read Alexander Woolcott's homage to G.K. Chesterton and his homage to Dickens. I can't recall -- sitting here with my friends in the front pew who wrote what part of it ... it don't matter ... memory in that first pew seems to be more than a bit foggy ... but here goes:

"We have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant ... 

and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such 

as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant; 

that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel 

but rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy 

which through god shall endure forever. The inn does not point to 

the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an 

ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters, and 

when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern 

at the end of the world". 

"When it came Mr. Chesterton's own turn to die, it was my notion that 

if he was right there must have been great preparation afoot in that tavern. 

I seemed to see Mr. Dickens himself coming down to the desk and making 

a reservation. A good room with a fireplace in it, please. And polish up 

the flagons. We're expecting a chap named Chesterton" 

Hey, Boris: Y'did real good! 

"He Shot the Sheriff"

Still spending quiet moments reflecting on the assassination of Samuel the Squirrel. Reread an article that I've kept on Good Deaths by William T. Vollmann in Harper's ... maybe 2010. So much of the news, these days, is occupied with the Police's Just Kills and the Black Lives Matter movement that was birthed in the aftermath of St. Louis and Cleveland and Cincinnati and South Carolina and the murder in Florida. And, of course, of killings of police officers that is too common, as well. I know the accepted practice in Black Lives Matter is not to say that All Lives Matter, for me they do. Even Samuel's death matters to me.

Someone in the writing of the Sages of the Babylonian Exile, there is the comment that:

Show me a person who won't kill a spider and I'll show you a murderer.

Anna Freud in her work on Normal Development in Children argued, indeed, that Vegetarians are covering up their murderous impulses. I remember 40 years ago, doing a profile for a post=professional class on one of my kids ... a seven year old Vegetarian. Anna Freud's comment didn't do it for me -- at least, not completely. 

In my faith tradition, on the holiest day of the year, we read the book of Jonah during the very lengthy service and while we are not eating food or drinking liquids. Jonah had been asked by his God to travel to Mosul (Nineveh) to help those people to whom he was not related to atone for their sins. Not wanting it to look bad for his own sinning People (if the Ninevites mended their ways), Jonah hightailed it outa town heading towards another city. The childrens' part of the story follows with a Big Storm and a Big Fish that swallowed him and then vomited him up near where his God wanted him to be.

Jonah sits outside Nineveh in the oppressive heat and gets bummed out. God grows a gourd over his head to keep him cool. That night God sends a hot wind and a worm to destroy the story. Then the adult part of the story comes:

God: Jonah, you depressed?

Jonah: I'm fucking depressed.

God: Lookie here, Jo. You're depressed over the loss of a Kikayon (gourd) 

that you put no work into creating and 

I shouldn't be sorrowed 

over the thousands of my human and bovine creations within the City?

Three or more times a day, Jews recite the Credo: 

שמע ישראל הי אלוקינו הי אחד ... 

Listen up, Israel, God is your God ... God is One.

But it's in the second paragraph that follows in which God opines that:

I will give grasses to your cattle in the field an (only then) will you eat and be satisfied.

No taking care of yourself till the non-human creations are provided for.

I have great admiration for 4 of my next-generationals and 5 of my third-generationals who are Vegetarians ... or, maybe, as one who is well entrenched in the Last Quarter, I identify with the vulnerable and those who die unnecessarily.

I feel like saying a prayer for Samuel the Squirrel ... who lived as the best squirrel he* could be.

* ... Note that I apparently can't allow for the possibility that Sammy was Samantha.

The "Beheading" of Sam

I'm just back from a week's vacation. It was good ... a mixture of guests and family who came to visit and some alone-time with M. Some welcome work contacts, too. When M, I and our kids began vacationing on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in 1979, communication was via two pay phones that we knew about. Vacationers would line up in the darkness to call whomever they needed to contact ... How did "ET phone home?" Seems like a lifetime, ago.

Nowadays, it takes work to find places where one cannot make connections. If my oldest Son is in the Far East? We can Facetime. If my two younger (though by no means any longer young) kids or grandkids want to send me a scholarly paper that they've read? "Beep-Beep" and the Cyber-Roadrunner delivers it immediately. Megabytes get uploaded in seconds. 

Colleagues and visitors to my office, alike, send stuff, too, while I'm on holiday. I can now be standing in the Surf ... no land masses between me and the White Cliffs of Dover ... and I can receive a page or 1000 pages of notes in the blinking of an eye! I was notified last week that Arnie had posted a note about the beheading of an archaeology scholar for not sharing the location of the places where ancient artifacts were being hidden from the invading ISIS forces who find those relics perfidious. Arnie, by the way, is a kindhearted and brilliant psychoanalyst in New York; two people had already responded to his posting ... or whatever thingies are called on Facebook. I don't know how Facebook works but occasionally I do press the right sequence of buttons and read some things that appear there. The responses expressed what I suspect most all of us feel. "Shit! A guy doing what he deeply believed was the right thing to do ... protecting the relics of our distant past in Mesopotamia ... being the Good Steward that this 100 year old Science (Archaeology, that took over from the grave-robbers of the 19th C. and before) requires of its practitioners ... and at 80 years old or something is barbarically put to death."

I responded, saying what I, too, thought was pretty obvious (I don't know how to find things on Facebook but I think this is pretty close to what my response was):

True, it is barbaric. But not Beyond the Pleasure Principle that has allowed so 

many to dispel their own anxieties by objectifying The Other ... the other? religiously 

in more or less all people's sacred stories ... the other? nationalistically 

so that after a few brief weeks of Basic Training we can kill the other ... 

the other in the way we betimes treat those who theoretically differ from 

us as alien and worthy of contempt and disfellowshipping.

"What a piece of work is Man."

Some seek blessing in Abraham smashing his Father's idols ... others 

praise the message of the Inquisition's Maleus Maleficarum ... we label our 

conquering Generals and our own Fallen as heroes ... those who die on the 

other side we refer to as Cowards. As Dylan would have it:

Even the Germans had God on their side.

"What a piece of work is man ... how ignoble in reason.

When I read Freud's several discussions on women's conscience (the Superego 

or uber-Ich) ... never quite neatly split between Reason and Maternal Feeling and 

Emotion, I wish for all my Children and Grandchildren ... oh! and Yes ... for 

all the Generals) such an emotion-bound conscience.

We ... I ... all of us ... are prone to forms of Narcissism in which the personhood of the Other is diminished ... at least, compared to our own. Sad. But back to me.

M and I arrived home. Good time on holiday ... a few brief moments where I was confronted by the everyday inhumanities of an angry parent on the beach ... a rude diner acting dismissively to a waitress. But most everything was good. We unpacked the car ... took my 1974 Raleigh International off the car and quickly brought it into safety with GuntherDog who was racing to get back to his digs and the pleasure of his usual backyard toilet. 

We looked at mail. Nothing urgent. Then, I went into the living room to pass through towards my office. Like Gunther, I needed to get back to my own space. Dam! It was a Pagan-awful mess. Had a robber broken in? No. Windows were all locked and unbroken. Things smashed ... lamp shades torn. Indeed, the more I looked, the more damage I could find. A Hungarian piece of ceramic was shattered (my Mom was Hungarian-born and I occasionally have bought Hungarian art ... a way of staying in touch with a long-dead Mother) ... Oak bowling pins strewn on the floor. Some old Indian Corn was in pieces.

Shazzam! It became clear. The top of a very old quilt hanging on the wall was slightly torn. A rug near the entrance door was .. yes ... it was chewed on. The doors were scratched. Aha! An animal  must have climbed the 60 foot Willow and taken a wrong step, fallen into the chimney, and ended up terrified and in a room from which there was "No Exit." I don't know that I was angry at the squirrel I soon found hiding out on the back of a book shelf. There was no reason for bad blood between me and the bushy-tailed rat! I did have some history with squirrels. Some have "squirrelled" their way into my attic from time to time. And it was just maybe three years ago that my Son-in-Law called me upstairs to see Max the Squirrel in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It took two PhD's and a long-handled fishing net maybe three hours to convince Max to leave through a window. All was well, that day.

Any case? I went for the net. M was to be at-ready to open the door and I was committed to not sharing my living room with this guy. Alas! Squirrels are better than people -- even Football's greatest running backs -- at avoiding being caught and Sammy turned out to be among the best. He flew from place to place ... I mean that ... he would propel himself through the air ... "with the greatest of ease" ... squealing with, I presume, terror ... though, I suppose, had things ended differently, I could have thought "maybe Sammy was squealing with delight at his little victories." But realistically? The fellow couldn't have weighed more than a pound to my nearly 200 ... something like me being chased by King Kong.  

Long story short? Things didn't end well for Sammy. Grabbing for him with the net ... trying to pop the net over him as he landed on another hanging rug, the frame of the net hit poor Sam on the head. 

Hear how I put all that in the passive voice ... "the frame of the net did it! Not me!" The truth is simpler than all that. I murdered Sammy the Squirrel ... Must've broken his little neck. Even if not premeditated, I hadn't given him time to find the no-kill trap that I had already baited with peanut butter. I apparently had been unwilling to give Sam time ... I didn't even open a window as Al and I had done with Max ... I assassinated him. I cut him down in his prime. 

It should be said: Sam was doing absolutely nothing unsquirrel-like ... his ancestors had lived in this neighborhood for Lord-knows how many generations ... certainly, long before my home was built as the Protestant Widows' Home in 1904 ... before my family emigrated to the New World less than 100 years ago and ages before I and my little tribe of human marauders colonized Sam's turf ... Long before all of that, Sam's Mom and Dad must have wished him a long and prosperous life and taught him how to be the best squirrel that he could be ... Sammy was cut down in his prime ... by me!

I have no interest in arguing with myself or others as to whether there is any moral equivalence between, on the one hand, taking a squirrel's life to protect my things from damage and, on the other, taking another human's life for offending one's sense of what is and what isn't Godly. But I cannot help but wonder. One of the signs that a youngster is at risk of growing up into a life of sociopathic disinterest in the needs of Others ... of becoming an acting-out Pathological Narcissist ... is the presence of cruelty to animals. How confusing it must be for such kids to grow up in a World in which our heroes ... our best ... kill each other in Wars over oil, doctrine, honor or territory ... hell! in which we slaughter, skin, and package parts of Brown-eyed Bovines ... a World in which our police kill over their own anxieties in stopping unarmed people for traffic violations and in which some people gun down Police as if they weren't children of Mothers, either ... How confusing, indeed, it must be to grow up to believe that still and all it's wrong to torture the cat or kick the dog.

And if some get it, this Old Guilt-ridden Man sitting in his Last Quarter doesn't get it. 

Indeed ... "What a piece of work is man."

Just sayin'.

Sunrise, Sunset

Even if I cannot leave the world behind on vacation and I occasionally feel that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are closing in on me, there is something quite wonderful about having time to watch the Sunset each night and ride to marvel at its rising the next day.

                          And it was evening and it was morning the Sixth Day!

I've long been the kind of person who revels in words ... In English something to CREATE with RECREATE. In Biblical Hebrew the words for CREATION בריאה and HEALTH בריאות have the same roots.

Until now, in my adult life, I've "vacated" for some 5 weeks, each year. I've upped that, now, to 6, planning to eventually arrive at working for 3 weeks each month. I don't yet understand the notion of retirement ... maybe someday I will. I can say that I, well into the Last Quarter of life, feel an impulse  -- I cannot quite call it a need -- to take time for long rests and for short naps.

I listened to a spritely Jimmy Carter, this morning. 90+ years old (I think of 80 and over as OVERTIME) and talking of his illness and treatments with distinct clarity. He stumbled in retrieving one word and one word only ... and now just a few hours later, I can't retrieve it, either. Maybe it will come to me ... maybe it doesn't matter.

The sunrise this morning mattered to me. Out over the Atlantic, it rose into an almost linear array of clouds on the horizon. On both sides of the first rays of light, there were clouds shaped like mice standing on their hind legs, facing the place wherethe Sun was busy starting its trajectory. Two mice on either side ... and me on the Beach. A not-so-large number of other Solar Pagans were there taking in the sight.

Something about watching the Sun rise?! I came from a family whose vacations were visiting Aunt Helen and Uncle Linwood on the Farm. When I began vacationing with my own family at this Virginia beach 36 years ago, I would take my older kids each morning to take in the spectacle ... they were 12 and 13, then, and could share that space and time with me. As a youngster M and I worked with 40+ years ago noted: "When I hit puberty, puberty hit back." Our kids' adolescence temporarily removed interest in the rising Sun ... life IS, indeed, about change. It would've been nice to have my boys out there. Alas. Gatitude is about our revelling in what we have even if our human sense of awarenss and our memory tell us about what no longer is.

Still, I have a great deal ... and for an example of the uniquely human capacity for reflection? I have President Carter. And for someone who sees nothing but his own reflection in the Looking Glass? I will always have folk like Donald Trump.

Exquisite Sensitivity

M and I have both been struggling with some physical ailments but  I can't rightly tell if that has anything to do with my comment to her just before  we closed our eyes. I said that  I was getting more and more sensitive to the witnessing of inhumanities from one peson to another. "It goes right into this hollow feeling in my chest," I commented, "and then seems to quite on its own translate into a cardiac arrhythmia." Then the three of us (GuntherDog was on the floor needing a Good World of loving up his head, too) closed our eyes for the day. Three Last Quarter types done for the day.

It was by no means a bad day. M and I have a great deal for which to feel gratitude. Three kids ... Six grandkids .... I know, I know .... I amuse myself by calling them  my Spawn and Grandspawn in these scribbles ... but they're really quite wonderful. Indeed the oldest child with our youngest grand had come down to spend a few days. But lemme back up.

The ealymorning was fine. I rose and dittled around ... wrote yesterday's Scribble when R came downstairs. K, her 24 year old grand-daughter was sick. Vacation food? Who knows? Didn't sound serious. Gunther had stayed upstairs with his Beloved ... M. He doesn't like stretching his arthritic  legs until the Sun is nearly up. I spent sme time wiring some lights ... each day replacing a few that the years of salt air had corroded. M came down ... walked the Old Guy ... and we spent an hour. I cut up fresh fruit, tossed in some dried fruit and added a good helping of Arugula. I'm on an Arugula kick and a beach salad like this has my fingers twitching with some perverse joy at my freedom to eat such a salad anywhere I like and with my fingers. As if the fork might create a profane and violent barrier between my receptive mouth and God's best Greens. We packed up and I did my usual ... biked the 6 miles to the lifeguarded beach we frequent, meeting M there. She was already on the Beach. I did my thing ... my ritual. My 1974 bike, the Raleigh International, "the one that I love" (as in God's description of Isaac) gets stood up in the sand. One pedal is lowered to the bottom of its orbit and bolstered with sand ... acting as a kind of kickstand. Chairs, umbrellas? go up.

I did the Pater Familias stuff. Went back to the car ... got another chair and umbrella and little folding Army shovel ... and set up camp. M and I have been coming to this beach since 1979 ... I think we missed one year when we vacationed with B and his crew ... B who just had very serious surgery and may still be in the ICU. I do accept that my Friends and I are aging and there is a reason the National Park Service sells you a Lifetime Pass for only $10 right near the beginning of the Fourth Quarter. All was as good as could be. R and K would show up when they would and our new guests would arrive in their time, if not sooner. Reminds me ... Isaiah ends one of his chapters with something like בעיתא אחישנה ... "In its time, I shall hurry it."

Any case ... My ride to beach began in cardiac arrhythmia and ended in normal rhythm and all seemed good as we planted ourselves not far from a quite active Atlantic Ocean. There's a song in Carousel about a Clambake that has a great lyric: "Then, at last, came the clams." I've never tasted clams but moments after we arrived a rare family -- rare for this beach -- arrived: The King Crab, his silent wife and the three kids. He was round, tatooed and verbally violent with his kids.

                        "you damn well get up from that chair because I say so."

The rest is commentary and I'm confident you can imagine the rhetoric. We didn't endure very long and I decided it would do no one any good for me to confront him ... not him? he wasn't gonna change because an Old Man set him straight..... his kids? would likely fare worse for their vacation ... and I would be Charlie Horsed in the County Jail for weeks if I tried to show him what it was like to be physically challenged by someone who thought that schmuck should be sent for a good tan to Guantanamo!

I thought about it as I sat and read about one of those mystics who had a dark sexual side ... "None of us are perfect," I thought ... nah! I obsessed. M and I solved our problem by moving our gear 30 feet Southward but even the finger-fed Arugula couldn't quite take away the shadow and the darkness of that overfed, tatooed, sonofabitch or the annoyance of an arrhythmia that would come and go.

Oldest and Littlest came; it was great. Son took his Dad for an iced triple-shot espresso in his triple-shot Car ... zoom-zoom. We talked. All was good.

Later ... in the evening ... we went out for a bite .... someone spoke abusively to a waitress. It was like "a kick in the nuts" .... pardon, the obvious anger ... "who would I like to kick" and what locks it inside of me, getting my smooth musculature to abandon its usual pattern .. 40-45 beats per minute ... "nice and steady, as she goes."

Trump's critical rhetoric I can metabolize and evacuate, like ... well, you know like what. George HW Bush used to speak about softer times ... I like to dream of them.

Any case? I immediately felt it in my esophagus .... and I could feel my heart rev up erratically to 4+ times its usual rate.

An old friend/ colleague whom I had no contact with for some years had started my day by emailing me a paper she was writing about teaching kids to respond to others' vilnerabilities and not their masks. I had started well. Alice Maher is on a mission to teach people how to tussle without hurting each other.

                                           "God bless you, Alice."

The day ended with a dream about a Big White Car that I don't and have never -- except in this dream -- owned. The car was  towed even though it was in an OK parking zone. Maybe there never was a Big White Car!


Odd ... how Gratuitous Enmity ... שנאת חינם ... can pass directly into my heart .... the surgeons would like to interrupt that pathway ... I'm not yet so certain that I want to dam up that river that makes me so exquisitely sensitive.

"Some are Pretty on the Inside"

Mr. Rogers was this Minister on TV in the late Sixties and for couple decades thereafter who talked to little kids ... and chances are pretty good to their "stoned" parents ... about similarities and differences ... about life and death .... about kindnesses and solicitudes .... and especially about sharing. I'm pretty confident in the likelihood that "The Toddling" (Steven King's missing masterpiece) were, indeed, busy hearing about cardigan sweaters and "the Land of Makebelieve" which you arrived at by Trolley, the Moms were busy sharing intoxicants and the Dads were being Dads ... mesmerized by the beautiful young assistant .... maybe her name was Lady Elaine?

Ah, but Fractals. Fractals emphasize the Similarities. In Sierpinski's Triangle, you see, each of the Little Right-side Up Triangles is identical to the whole ... isomorphic to it, as one of the founders of 20th C. Topology would say. I only met, by the by, Warclaw Sierpinski once ... musta been 1968. He, Kazimierz Kuratowski and another guy -- I think his name was Janischiewsky -- decided that, if Lil' PostWar Poland was to make a name for itself Mathematically, they would have to specialize in some area ... and they chose Topology. I know about this due to a barter. When I was a kid, I worked out a deal with Kuratowski when he was on a speaking tour of the USA. I would drive him in my Volvo and on the way to these talks, he would teach me about the History of the Polish Akademie of Sciences ... Poland's MIT. Fractals? I don't think were discussed until some years later.

For any geeky enough to be interested, I think Sierpinski's interest was in a curiosity that such a triangle might posess. For you see, while the above Triangle covers a bunch of ground, when you take into account all the pieces that have been removed, it's area appears to be "zero" .... Ah! But Get ye Curious Geeks to a book on Measure Theory and all will be explained

OK, OK ... paraphrasing what one Vice Presidential Candidate said to another:

                              Howard! You're no Kazimierz Kuratowski!

Yeah, yeah! But in some sense, I've taken on his-KK's age when I remember him, borrowed his nerdy style of dress and arrived at his inability to drive,  as well. Ask M! Ask'er about what it's like to sit in a car at a Green Light with some Last Quarter type while he waits for it to turn Red! (shhhh! I haven't had the heart to tell M that she's Fourth Quarter, too .... .... Don't tell!)

But back to my point. I think it was Jack Paar who would motion his finger in waves from shoulder to shoulder and asked his guest.

                                               OK! What's that?


The guest's 'I dunno' would be responded to with:

                                 Well, I dunno either but here it comes, again.

So, here I am ... no longer the youngster chauffeuring an old man on a trip to give talks on his lifetime of work ... reflecting on "how I didn't but might've known" about this unbroken circle hat Ecclesiastes fascinated about 3000 years ago, still writing a little and munching on rice crackers slathered with Nutella that rightly belongs to M and my houseguest, sleeping upstairs with likely no clue of how such Fractals just keep comin' .... again .... and again!

'Little Fractals on the Hillside'

Heard from an internet buddy who is visiting with her son, I think, and grandkids in Oregon. She lives in London and grew up somewhere in post-War Germany. She's very active, as I understand, in developing programs that bring Death into our lives, as a natural and beautiful, perchance, closing act.

An antidote, perhaps, to the anger that many of us fear about needing to end the party ... like the Colonial poet cried:

A fig to thee, Oh, Death.

I toast her work!

In any case, I was particularly taken (I've just arisen from the Land of the Great God Sopor and am still soporous if not still stupefous ... or just stupid-fous) by the request from her son's cohort that she (we aging folk) move nearer him .... to Oregon? ... and her response about her life being back in UK. The Fractal part that came in J's life still HAS life even if its newer model has become its own. M and I are back at our place in Virginia ... one kid and grandchild coming for a bit but right now a 70+ yo friend and her 24 yo granddaughter are our only guests ... oh, and GuntherDog. The kid has had a rough ride with her parents (I've known her Dad and GrandDad for 47 years)  and oozes into the orbit of her Grandma between grad school semesters. In the midst of a quiet dinner,  I commented about what I thought was a quotidian antipathy between children and their parents ... suggesting (a la Loewald, Gibran, and many  others) that part of 'the job' of kids in growing up is to make the parents progressively irrelevant. Loewald said it stronger. Something about his belief that 'on the plane of
psychic development, killing off the parents is a developmental necessity. Fuck the Buddha on the


road .... the parental functions need be superceded ... Y'gotta learn how to put spoon to mouth, clean your own butt, balance your own checkbook, read your own stories ... and ... yes! ... eventually write your own stories. 

"Well the parents don't become entirely irrelevant," the non-M Grannie opined.

Sure, sure and OK ... not ENTIRELY irrelevant ... but pretty much so.

Irrelevant was the word that worked for me. I was refering to, I suppose, relevance as a set of characteristics that have past, present and future attached to them. I live in Philadelphia (well, thereabouts). When do I follow the spawn into their own living fractals? Do I?

I do want to believe that I'm more than my sore back and Funny Old Grandpa who will teach Chloe how to throw a pailful of water at the beach, today, and the guy who rewrites songswith clever lyrics.

Hey! Long live life in London, Philadelphia and God bless Tiny Tim and all the little spawn wherever they've built their own places of relevance!

BTW ... I tossed in this notion of Fractals and some of you may have never looked at such geometric oddities.  Fractals -- loosely speaking -- are geometric constructions with a curious quality. No matterhow much you magnify them and wherever 'in the graphic picture' you search, you keep
finding new versions of the same template. Some of them that you'll find online look like ferns where each sub-piece looks like the whole picture. Get thee to Google, and ogle pics of Fractals. They'll
(maybe) blow your aging mind!


Life reproducing itself?


Maybe not the most beautiful but among the cleanest in lines is Sierpinski's Triangle. I'll see if I can
find a picture.

An afterthought. I'm pretty confident that the grown Grand-daughter at dinner has noidea that her Grandpa was one of the folk who thought through some of the convergence theorems that make the
construction of these figures possible .....

Sometimes: "There Really Ain't No Contradiction"

The Writings of the Babylonian Exile comprise hundreds of years of discussions on how to interpret the Scriptures these exiled folk and their kids and ancestors brought with them into the diaspora. The Sages often disagreed on how to read those texts. But ... Pages following pages of disagreements are not untypically settled by one of two brief expressions:

לא פלוגתא ... (Lo Plugta) ... 

There really is no contradiction, at least if you look at it right.

and 

תיק׳׳ו ... (Taiku) .... 

A complete answer will, alas, have to await the arrival of Elijah, 
(ie, "no time soon," inc ase you were waiting on a quick answer.)

Like Sextus Empiricus, a founder of the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, these Masters were willing to accept that a question, after all, is most often either too complicated for there to be a single answer or, else, the answer to complex questions often arrives in only-apparently contradictory semantic packages. Message? It's not necessary to know the absolute Capital-T Truth! 'Specially since y'can't.

I'm not rightly certain about what this has to do with getting on in years but I seem to have less patience as the Fourth Quarter deepens for witnessing gratuitous enmities that arise from a conviction held by this or that believer. Taliban smashing Buddhist Idols. Abraham smashing his Dad's! It's my birthday, today, and I feel surrounded in this World by folk who are thoroughly convinced of their rightness ... of their truth. And when I even hear about such folk -- never mind when I meet them -- I feel a pain in the area of my heart ... or is it my esophagus. I don't imagine to know, for certain, but I experience this heaviness which sometimes seems to drive me right into a cardiac arrhythmia.

Now! That really sucks.

After all, I can't do much about it but, still, it seems to upset me ... makes me sad. Chances are it's only obvious to M ... and to myself, of course ... and to those who may read my words.

It may be very different for other Last Quarter types ... they may choose a different path than becoming a radical Skeptic. I'm radical, that is, about not being radical about my beliefs ... except that Olde Time Skepticism!

I guess that was Howard's Paradox, but -- off the cuff -- all the following really get to me.

Radical -ists of any religious ism, including Aetheism ... except, that is, Skepticism.

Radical Laborists and Radical Capitalists;

Radical Animal Rights folk and Rabid Meat Eaters;

Radical Choicests and Radical Lifers;

Rad Democrats and Rad Republicans;

Jingoed Nationalists and Unwavering Internationalists;

Angry Whites and Angry Blacks; and

Pissed off Feminists, Susan Schaffley and Male Chauvinists.

I could go on. Maybe I will? ... ... My better angels say: Nah!

I'll just sign off ... and plan to head off to Babylonia for my next Birthday.

With luv ...

Angry Olde-Birthday-Man Howard

"Ricki and the Flash" & "Night Train to Lisbon"

I recently watched two movies that moved me in different ways ... The first was about a rocker that never made it but tried. She had left her husband (Kevin Kline) and kids 20 or so years prior to the now of the movie when she returns for two brief stays to help. Brought me to near-sobbing and that uncomfortable throat feeling that follows upon childhood tears. Meryl Streep -- this time with her daughter -- "knocking me alive," once more. Thanks, Meryl!

The second film was another recent one ... "Night Train to Lisbon" ... about a Swiss teacher who precipitously leaves his world when it accidentally intersects with an artifact from the now historical revolution in Portugal that had occurred in the early 1970's. I couldn't move away from the Lisbon film, either, but the Streep-Kline-RickSpringfield piece really got to me -- Ricki and the Flash! Both films about leavings and wishes for reunion. Goodbye's and Hello's. Sadness and Glee! Both quite beautiful, in their own right.

I suppose the films -- both about Third-going-into-Fourth Quarter types -- intersected with my life and with M's ... and, maybe, with the tragedy that surrounds Donald Trump (I nearly wrote Donald Duck) and his rather undignified and disrespectful clown-walk in the direction of political power. I can't imagine Trump's story having an ending that will be satisfactory for him -- that's sad, too; the protagonists in these crafted stories find their own resolutions ... no happily ever aftering ... but resolutions, nonetheless.

Even for those of us who manage not to live solely in the inalterable past or to be terrified by its unpredictable kin, the future, our present has its connections to those distant Worlds. One of my kids just got back from vacation with her family and another is leaving, today, with his. Our third kid (a kid who should get his invitation to join the American Association for Retired People, that is, will be turning 50 pretty soon leaves on business trips to the Lands of Very Far Away every few weeks. Three kids?  No more throwing our kids into the backs of a 1969 Volvo wagon for M and I ... Our kids' turn to do so (this time with baby seats and -- when the grandkids grew -- seat belts and cars that regularly start), I suppose. And, now, not likely to be too many more all-family vacations. I'll miss that, am sad about it but hopefully still able to celebrate how my kids have built their own rituals ... their own lives.

In brief, I suppose, the Good Life includes the layering of life's times:

Allowing Oneself to Miss the Past,

Vigorously Swimming in the Present

and

Fascinating -- even if betimes, nervously -- about the Future.

 Stanley Kunitz commends the readers of his poem, The Layers, indeed, to:

'Live among (those) Layers

(and) Not (just) the Litter.'

What an opportunity it is to live! 

Chronos v. Superman

Lightning strikes outside ... Haven't paid attention to whether they're getting closer or further away. The trajectory of life may have us believing that the destination is always moving closer. Many visitors to my office, yesterday, were busy pondering "what's it all about" ... I think I typically sit and fascinate about what is ... and leave it at that. 

My metaphor for Life, as I've mentioned before, is to a stretched canvas with its size and shape partially pre-determined ... and to a palette of paints. I get to paint on it. I can never quite get off what has already taken form and shape ... and dried on my canvas. Oh! I can paint over it but it is not  easily -- if ever -- to be removed. Superman flies backwards around the Earth ... really fast ... and can turn the clock backwards and bring his Lois back to life and then change the History going forward. Some manage to reason through arguments purloined from Quantum Physics that there are parallel universes and maybe even orthogonal ones. Y'think there's one where the L4-L5 in my Lumbar Spine never herniated back in August of 2011. 

Yeah, Superman. You're never around when we need'ya!

I need a SuperGuy or SuperGal to go back to the Monday before the Friday when it all went crazy and the EMT's came and trucked me to the Emergency Room. 

"Hey. Y'want the sirens, Sir?"

Nah. Skip the drama. Just drive fast.

That was a Friday in late August 2011, but it was that Monday night when, in-between two visitors to my office, I went outside to check on something. I was walking in one moment ... then, on the ground and amused just a moment later. They call it "a slip and fall." There was no pain and a great deal of amusement, much like when coming home from an evening meeting this past Winter and walking towards my front door, I lost my balance and fell into the azaleas. In both situations, I found myself tittering with amusement. Maybe the canvas is fuller than I thought.

But back to 2011 and that Friday 97 hours (who's counting) after the fall. Fall? Like a Fall from Grace or just the Fall that is the Fourth Quarter of Life. Dinner was fine even if I began to have twinges in my legs and lower back. M and my youngest was there with her family ... Al, the Ancient Philosopher, and their three kids. By the end of our shared meal, there were more than twinges and within a half hour of their leaving, I was trying to crawl to my car so that M could drive me to the ER. I made it through the front door ... and that was it. Moving or not moving? both came with body-armor piercing pain. 

The wailing old man with his wife attracted neighbors by the time M called 9-1-1 and the rest need not be recorded in any Chronicles. I, as I noted, got limo service to the ER and with enough narcotics I was able to eventually go home. I slept for the next few weeks draped over an ottoman in my office and after some shots in the back and a few months, I was walking pretty straight. I suppose, now, that I believed that I had erased that episode ... that L4-L5 herniation had been expunged from my record. I think it was Joni Mitchell who years ago sang "I was a Free Man in Paris." 

Whenever I believe that I've erased something from my canvas, Chronos eventually shows up to set the time and date straight. 

Afraid! I need her cousins Ortho and Chiro just to stand up, these days. It was most-of-Quarter, ago, that I began realizing that the paint on my canvas and the ink on my letters are both indelible. Feeling a bit sorry for myself ("poor, Howard"), I moaned and kvetched and wrote:

Witnesses (July 1994)

On the bottom of his closet, like two soldiers they stood

A layer of dust demanded “You’ve seen these before”.

Witnesses for what he now couldn’t and once could

When he bought them.

Was it nineteen sixty four?

One at a time, he picked each up, turned it around,

“Look! The pattern on the toes is just the same,

The leather’s still good, the color still brown,

And inside

The author hadn’t changed his name.

Yet they spoke of different times and of a different man

Who wore them then more than a quarter century ago.

These shoes were now witnesses to god’s sinister plan,

That from vibrant forms,

Takes man and transforms him to Lore.

I won't here apologize for feeling a bit sorry for "poor Howard" who -- once again and for the time being -- is wincing with something other than sheer delight each time he stands up. It would do little good and Chronos has, in any case, no Sympathy ... and, just again and for the record, there ain't never no Superman around when y'needs'im!