When You're (much more than) 64

Mon 19 Oct ... 630 AM:

Have been up for two hours ... No coffee or caffs since yesterday AM. No food.  Goin' for a test. I feel like a dog:

Hey, Howard. Wanna go for ride in Car?

Sure! Woof! Where we goin'? (wag-wag)

Yeah, Where are we goin' without my AM usuals? No food or coffee till half-way through. Drivin' with Ms. M for Fun n' Games at the Hospital.  Ach du Lieber! I'm not really a Dog ... no matter how often I open the car window and bark-hello to my cousins with their heads out the window and their ears flappin' in the wind. Anyhow! My ears don't flap.

Still ... Been here ... Done this, before.

730 AM:

Wonder if M Would have married me in 1965 if she knew I'd be sitting 50 years later in a hospital waiting room till the "guard" comes to get me to take me back for my cardiac stress test today. Checking on Defective Goods, this morning ... a heart that doesn't quite maintain a regular: 

"ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom" 

but, instead, goes its own way. They've already injected me ... nice guy ... had my oldest married young, this guy coulda been my grandson. Good humor ... good IV giver. 

Now I sit for 45 minutes for the fluids to pass into all the arteries that need be seen and wait to be summoned back to the Holy of Holies. Not nearly as much fun as barking-hello to my canine cousins. M is sitting next to me ... most likely worried about the guy she married who grew old (she's 18 months younger than me) and worried, too, about her upcoming joint replacement. I'm sitting here wearing a 1986 T-Shirt that I bought in a Citroen rally in 1986. It has a picture of an early 1970's Citroem Maserati ... an artifact of a Europe that worked on joint projects 40 years ago and the car that Number One Son drove into a curb causing $14,000 worth of damage.

I have on: running shoes, sweat pants, a heart monitor reading 49 bpm and a beret. The wearing of berets precedes M ... When I was a religious Jewish kid growing up in marginal neighborhoods, I found that I was less safe wearing a Jewish skullcap and being recognized as a hated minority than if I wore a beret and other adolescents accused me of being Gay. So, here we are ... waiting for the kid-techs and the relevant Docs to do their magic.Me, M and the Beret.

815 AM:

I get brought back. Been there, done this ... many times. I keep telling my Doctors that I have a stress test every time my atrium does its Wildman Thing its afib. They keep agreeing but want me on the treadmill, hooked up to and EKG and taking Before and After Pictures of the Highways and Biways that carry the nutrients that feed my heart. I begin chugging away on the treadmill while the attending Cardiologist shouts orders to his tech ... 

Doc to Tech: Schultzie, Machen zee elevation higher!

Mach higher, much higher!

Again, Schultze, again. 

Target Zone, Schultze, 130 bpm.

Higher on der elevation, Schultz! 

------

8:45 AM:

The Doc is obviously disappointed. The heart-slowing drugs I took yesterday? The ones my Doctor has me taking? Well. They don't let my heart go as fast as it does when it just wants to go fast ... not as quickly as Doc wants

Doc: We're gonna stop this.

Howard: I'm doin' fine.

Doc: No. It's enough. We'll get you back in 45 minutes for more pictures. See if we caused ya any damage. (Doc titters just a little bit) ... 

"Ah! Just a little Cardiologist joke."

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

Making peace with getting older!  What Does it mean?

M is having Surgery ... joint replacement, aka, Black and Decker Surgery where they -- with an electric rotary saw -- cut out one joint and -- with high tensile glues -- put in a steel or carbon fiber stand-in.  

Wouldn't it be easier to just clone your loved-one with one of those 3-D CAD copying machines? 

And the aging visitors to my office are missing -- one by one -- just about every part imaginable ... and I? I? I still can't remember where I put my memory? 

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

Fri 23 Oct ... The Docs begin calling telling me that everything's OK cardiologically but they saw something on my left lung. 

Howard: That's just peachy. Not quite like Machu Peachy!

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

Mon 26 Oct

Howard brings the films over to a friend. He looks and calls later.

Friend: I'd just ignore it.

Maybe I will.

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

Luncheon time, this week, with two friends who are surviving prostate cancer. Ouch!!

The Psalmist said that our years are 70 but if we're equipped with the trappings of warriorship? then, 80. ... Oh, well! The Cat and Gunther Dog are not likely to be around, but overtime begins for M and H at 80! Maybe, I'll build us a bench to sit upon?!

Blessed are you, King of the Universe, who gives to the weary ... strength.

ברוך אתה, מלך העולם ... הנותן ליעף כח.

Trump and Life Expectancy

When you -- against your own will, common sense and even the advice and "kindness of others"--  enter the Fourth Quarter, your Life Expectancy here in the USofA is 24 years ... 21 if the accidents of prenatal life have blessed you with male genitals. (Freud spoke of Phallic Narcissism ... I suppose all narcissistic inclinations do come with a price! Apparently, a penis costs 3 years.) By 70, you need only plan for 16+ and 14+ years of  light lunches and Depends, respectively.

Lemme cheekily parse that just a bit more. If you're 70, now, you're most likely to live through 4 terms of Donald Trump as President, if you're a woman, and 3.5 terms of his prolonged leadership, if'n you're a man. Admittedly, that doesn't take into account the likelihood that sometime after "the Donald" declares himself the only fit person since Nero to lead America back to Greatness, our little experiment in Democracy may have itself become the recipient of the Darwin Award that prizes those evolutionary freaks who due to their own idiocy have removed themselves from the pool of future evolutions.

It should be said that the USA -- with its own Greatness and Exceptionalisms  -- would, thereby, have become the first country on whom this honorary award has been bestowed. Up to now, it has been reserved for the likes of inventors who put wings on their Stetsons and fly off the Empire State Building, holding on to their hats, proudly proclaiming knowledge of a certain updraft due to come off the Hudson.

Kerrrr...splat!

Now, in fairness to His Towering Trumpness, I recall someone once offering up the notion that: 

anyone who thinks themselves fit to lead the Free World ... 

by the very virtue of that belief ... is not.

But there is a notable difference between the Trumpeter and most of the other candidates for President ... those nobleman and noblewomen who also claim competence in assuming a leadership role in the future of the soon-to-be (likely, in my lifetime!) 250 year old Republic that a bunch of whacked-out radicals put together believing that a Country could be created where  Free Enterprise could be joined together with the Social Contract. 

For, you see, Old Ladies and Gentlemen of the Last Quarter, the others -- by and large -- imagine that their programs and platforms are the moving parts that will lift America and Americans. In his Cult of Personality, Trump -- as he Tramps on Ben, Bernie, Carly, Chris, and Hillary; Jeb, Jim, and Joe; Lincoln, Marco, and Martin -- offers no real platform except his own Greatness and his charming ability to denigrate others. I don't want to leave out all the others that Trump depreciates ... the likes of Senator John McCain, Megyn Kelly, or President Obama ... but there are, indeed, too many, especially if one considers those Central Americans and Syrians who have sought comfort away from the poverty of wars in their countries and that are singled out by him to be seen as No-Goodniks.  

Let me say that I am pretty confident that many of Trump's supporters are good people and are looking for a strong leader to take them out of their struggles and protect them from a Warlike World. Still, I am a little annoyed that I could go out, as well, under one of those leaders that the World has known in the past who say little more than:

I'll purge our ranks of the destructive minority!

I am the only one capable of returning us to the Greatness which is our Right!

And I  -- and I, alone -- have the capacity to Throw Out the Bad 

and to Provide Goodness to the Good by Virtue of my Own Greatness. 

*********

Geez! I'm going with M to see a performance of Antigone, today ... For any who are yet to read/see this Sophoclean tragedy, I can do little but warn you:

Things don't always end well!

Follow the Road

M and my trip to Vermont to visit our Grandchild was in our older son's car. I suppose he lent it to us for some reason other than him wanting me to drive like an old lunatic through the Green Mountains at speeds double my age. Maybe, approaching 50, he gets a kick out of giving Dad the keys and telling him to stay outa trouble and get Mom home at a respectable hour. 

The reversals of life! Thirty plus years ago, he and his brother managed to have three car accidents. The last one was to my Citroen SM ... he bent the passenger side control arm ramming a curb ... disarming the sensibilities of my insurance company when they discovered that the only such control arm would have to be imported from New Zealand. Maybe my son still feels some guilt ... maybe I do for letting a twenty year old drive a Citroen Maserati?

Or maybe? Just maybe? He liked the idea of Mom and Dad having a workable GPS to guide them North and back South. And good thing, too. Heading back, the Leaf Lookers had loaded the roads. Millions of folk NEEDING to see the leaves change color before they drop. Old Folk going to see it before they drop? Any case ... Traffic stopped about 70 miles from the next junction. Inching along ... wondering why my left leg was called into this service of ... clutch ... clutch ... clutch  ... and clutch, again.We gave up!

We boogeyed off the road into the back roads of NE Pennsylvania and back over to NJ ... over hill and dale ... always guided by Phyllis, the name we've given to the female voice of Sonny-Boy's GPS ... Omniscient Phyllis who knows all.

In any case, Phyllis has an expression that she quietly notes as she recalculates the route after her unruly passengers go their own way:

Follow the road.

We did ... and still ... When a 300 mile/5 hour trek morphs into a 380 mile/9.5 hour Road Rally, one has plenty of time to rehash old questions, like:

Why are M and I driving in a 500 horsepower beast?

Why does my husband need to roar by that Corvette LT-1?

Why not drive one of those 

mid-Sixties hydropneumatic boats 

that just float along in automatique?

Why isn't my husband stopping for Gas out here in the Boonies?

What if I don't stop and we really do run out of Gas in Backwoods NJ?

and, finally,

Just what DOES Phyllis mean by: Follow the Road?

Well, I don't rightly know the answer to any of the above questions but I do and we did fascinate about the last one, in particular. Fifty years of marriage ... Fifty years of Following the Road. I know there are folk who plan, plan and plan some more. And M and I must have done some planning in order to arrive at today. But mostly ... Phyllis has got it: We followed the Road. Life is something Mathematicians call a Stochastic Process ... a progression whereby decisions are made not necessarily with a known end in sight but rather by probabalistically making a decision on where it makes sense to go to next. No judgement ... No fault ... Just lookin' out the window as the road unfurls and choosing as best y'can. 

One of the Good Brother Thomas Merton's prayers ... I suppose the one he's best known for ... begins:

My Lord I have no idea where I'm going.

and there's an ancient prayer that maybe expresses the pleasant surprise at having arrived at each seasonal holiday:

Blessed are you, God, King of the Universe, 

Who has Kept us Vital, 

Managed to Keep us Standing 

and Helped us Arrive at this Moment.

שהחיינו וקיימנו והגיענו לזמן הזה

Just Follow the Road, Howard!

Harvest Festival

Not much makes me travel 300 miles, each way. Every passing year and the roads seem to have stretched out. The looming knee surgery for M makes it difficult to drive ... after 50 years of copiloting, M has been demoted to "navigator." And, anyhow, she doesn't much like driving a clutch.

But, hey, our oldest grandchild is in school far away from her  home, her parents and matched-set sisters and her maternal grandparents. The paternal ones live even further away and still we all show up for Harvest Festival at the Kid's school.

I -- maybe twenty years ago -- wrote of how the Wing-tipped Shoes at the bottom of my closet did something towards counting the passing years. This weekend has been convincing in other ways. In addition to recognizing that I have grown progressively sensitive to gratuitous slights coming from others, M and my side-trip, yesterday, to a school just 45 miles East of the Mountain top house we all collectively rented for the weekend. M and I had lived and worked at that school 40+ years ago when our older children were 7 and 8. The mother of the child we were visiting, this weekend, would not arrive for another 5 years and Grandchildren were not yet even among the fantasies. That school was one for very bright adolescents struggling with autisms, schizophrenias and other serious childhood emotional illnesses. We lived there ... M, I, the Boys and Kazimierza Kuratowski the Saint Bernard who had been named after my mentor, the ex-Director of the Polish Akademie in Warczawa. I had, just a year before, given up Mathematics, and decided to work with people ... What a clever idea!

The school outside the then tiny town of Rindge, NH population 75! provided us with a trailor ... thanks to OPEC, that didn't necessarily mean reliable heat. M and I slept with Kaz-the-Big-Dog between us for heat and the boys had refused to get out of bed one morning when the outside temp was -35 and inside was -10. Good memories. M and I, before visiting the school, stopped in a Diner that didn't exist for Sunday eggs. I asked the youngish waitress wearing ink that just wasn't done in early 1970's in Rindge.

Hey, where's the Red Rooster?

The Red Rooster was a bar ... by no means a tavern ... a bar where staff at the school who were allowed to leave for 30 hours a week spent the very few pfennigs they weekly received on getting snockered on 151 proof Wild Turkey to bolster something or other. With kids, I can only recall going once and was privvy that time to a conversation between two young guys ... with a 90 year old farmer listening in.

The kids were describing their love life with their ladies in astronomical terms ... stars, moon, earths moving, ...

The old guy leaned in and looked them down spitting out have his rotgut drink with:

You kids are so full'o'shit.

When I fuck, there are sparks.

The Red Rooster was that kinda bar ... but back to the story. Not only hadn't the waitress heard of the Red Rooster but not the owners or the old diner waitresses, either. Apparently ... 40+ years is a long time. 

After eggs, we drove to the school. The field where our little trove of trailers were settled ... was no more. M explained that a lotta growth comes in 40 years. It further struck us that a goodly percentage of the trees growing in Rindge? just plain weren't there when we were. 

I could go on describing the Town Green that no longer was just Sander's Store and a Post Office ... the school where all the kids except our little ones were Blonde Finns named Aho .... 

Sad ... like the time I went looking for a house in Toledo where I had lived with my parents and sibs in the early '50's. M and I, indeed, were on a road trip to Chicago to visit this same grandchild maybe 16 years ago. M and I found the block that 2410 Lawrence was on ... the block where I first planted a garden of radishes and Swiss Chard ... found the block cut off by a fence overlooking an Interstate that was some thirty feet below groundlevel and running at 65 mph.

I know I'm not the first to discover that you really can't go home ... still, other folks' accounts never quite got through. M and I will head back today ... her surgery is 6 weeks off and our older son turns 50 after the turn into 2016.

I could use a drink.

Hope and Disillusionment

Finished seeing the Visitors to my office, yesterday, and went to see a thoughtful man ... Itamar Lurie ... maybe just beginning the Fourth Quarter ... talking about his work among the damned ... working as a facilitator of groups from the the opposing sides of Middle East conflicts (his and the Others') and the complexity of working with "these Others" individually with their life crises. It was -- no other way to describe it -- moving. I was moved to Tears by the Hopelessness: justified or otherwise ... moved to Laughter by his choice in going on with Good Humor and Love, nonetheless. 

"Those who seed with Tears? With Joy will they gather." 

(from Psalms -- where?)

So much carnage ... M who is having a rough time walking listens to the News a great deal ... me, as well. I see Wars and Hatred most places my eyes point ... Acts of Kindness here and there to act as counterpoint, I suppose.

My visitors often get caught up in wondering what the use of going on is ... They see little but illness and death coming towards them. What can an Old Man say? Those of us blessed enough to make it into the Last Quarter and beyond are not unaware of the reality ... Dark times are "nearer than you think." Yes, yes ... 

"Always think of the Bright Side of Life." 

It's a Good Joke and a Necessary Illusion for continuing to entertain the three things the Writer of Ecclesiastes leaves the reader: The Love of Another (Others?); the Love of God; and the attempt to Lead the Good Life. Everything else the writer who calls himself Kohelles describes as Foul Wind ... as so much Farting.

Is there meaning in this Game of Life? Is their purpose in my life? There was a Mathematician (Conway?) who developed a game that allowed the player to play -- well -- God ... to choose a certain initial state for the Universe of Settlements and then to predict how that initial state will play out in thousands of generations where the only rules are that too close and too far both lead to destruction for the unfortunates that are either ... too far or too near to their fellow folk. I'm quite certain that one can find computerized versions on line but our human propensity to see the Other ... the Ethically or Politically or Racially Different ... as the enemy seems unending. 

Go back to the drawing board, Dr. Conway. 

Life is more complicated than any two-rule Game.

Is that among the anguishes of Playing in This Last Quarter? Knowing full well that our fantasy that Wars and Hatred would come to an end during our Pass-By ... our tenure in Life ... was just that ... a fantasy.

I maintain Hope that M's surgery this Fall will bring her relief from walking-pain ... that my kids and grandkids will thrive and that the sundry illnesses in my family will resolve. I am not-at-all hopeful that the Middle East will settle or that the Libs and the Conservatives will stop their deprecating attacks on each other or that violence will stop in the Americas. 

And since I cannot do anything else, today, M and I will travel to go visit one of our teenage Grand-spawn! We'll get in a car and look at the Autumn's Beauty and pause just now and then to cry over the carnage.

.......

So, here's a fragment from the late Stanley Kunitz's poem, Halley's Comet, written when he was very old:

Miss Murphy in the first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the stormtracks

of the Milky Way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there'd be no school tomorrow.

Funny guy, Stanley!