For some years, now, I've -- at least from time to time -- been haunted by a tune and some lyrics from, I think, the 50's ... the 1950's. Something like:
Take away the past
It will bring no relief
Only heartache and grief
Take away the past!
The tune is pretty fresh in my mind but The Google -- as I've heard some of my older confreres call the search-engine that has supplanted the Funk n' Wagnall's -- has failed me, this time. Old Man Freud suggested that neurotics "suffer from reminiscences." Well, maybe, not just neurotics.
I do, as a therapist, get to accompany people on their reappraisals of their own lives. There are times, certainly, with denizens of the Fourth Quarter that I have shared my sense that we all do, indeed, suffer from our appraisals of our selves, our accomplishments and even our relationships. I find myself dealing with a sadness that I indulged my interests ... many of my interests. Scriptural Texts, Mathematics, Teaching, Administration, Psychoanalysis and Writing have collectively joined to take up much of my time since the 1960's (not the 1970's which we call the 1960's!), alongside Husbanding and Parenting ... and for the past two decades ... Grandparenting.* I wonder about the balances that I worked out or that fortuitously or infortuitously worked themselves out over the first Three Quarters. I don't fret much about it and it has been, for me, a pretty good ride.
Still, I suffer from disappointments. I think I mentioned this in a blog posting during the last election cycle. I suspect there is a universal experience that relates to a fantasy that in my mind plays out as:
I thought I had that problem solved.
As a trivial example ... M and I live in an old house that once was a Presbyterian Widow's Home. We've been here for 37 years. While in some sense, we own the house ... in another way of thinking we are more like Landed Immigrants and/or Temporary Residents. We have a sort of Green Card which allows us to play house. Frankly, the mice have a more permanent lease and every so many years they appear and make that more obvious. I think it was a Bedouin who I once heard saying that the Middle East quibbling over who owns this or that land is pure silliness. His ancestors had been occupying the Middle East just about forever.
Ach! It's not the mice, though, that tickles my mind, this morning. I was thinking of my curious thoughts about our toilets. We have maybe three times as many toilets as we have butts to sit on them ... if you don't count GuntherDog, anyway ... and he -- mostly, anyhow -- is an outdoor plumbing kinda guy. Any case ... I grow up in a family where my Father fixed our stuff and, I suppose, felt it was among my tasks in life to fix them ... raised as I was at Papa's knee.
I never quite learn. Each time I fix a toilet, I imagine that it's fixed for good; and each time, I experience disappointment when the next time comes and the flush/ballcock valve or flapper or wax seal or ... gives up the ghost and requires attention. I get over it ... I do!
More seriously, though, and every four years, I get to deal with other psychic shit. I'm referring to the neurotic disappointment I feel when I realize that my belief that certain things in society have been corrected -- once and for all, so to speak -- was fool's gold, at best. M and I shoulda learned by now but we haven't. We sit and listen to Cable News pundits (who call themselves "pundants," for some inexplicable reason) describing a grotesquerie of madnesses in the newest cast of characters from a bad Charles Adam's Horror-Comedy.
Can it be that one of the presidential candidates says
horrible things about Mexicans and considers general
policies that act against a religion that represents 25%
of the World's population?
Can it be that another one of the presidential candidates
advertises support from two guys who speak of hunting
those members of my .02% religious tribe who might
not accept his messiah or another who advocates
executions for gay folk?
Can it be that still another one of the presidential
candidates openly says that a Muslim can't be
President of the USA?
Can it be that yet and still another one of the presidential
candidates sees nothing wrong with taking a million dollars
in speaker fees from a company that the taxpayers had to
bail out after really nasty and dangerous business practices?
Can some candidate who offends and insults and
says -- more or less -- nothing actually be leading
the polls in his party? A common school yard bully
and rabble-rouser?
And can it be that a mixed race President can be
treated with such contempt for 8 years?
Any case ... Toilets are not fixed forever, the flow of political shit seems to show no signs of easing up and my Psyche seems to fight against both of these realities. And still, this sometimes naive guy is surprised/shocked that all this wasn't fixed -- once and for all!
By the way ... In the name of full disclosure ... Like the other readers here who have endured more and much more than 60 years, I have lived under the administration of some ten Presidents. For me? Obama has been the first with whom I have been able to identify. A guy who thinks well ... a married guy, like me ... a dad ... and unlike many of our Presidents, he seems to keep his trousers buckled when appropriate.
* Grandparenting? Among the more strenuous Synchronized Olympian Sports!
