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.