Nevermind Just "What do Women Want" 

but 

What Do We Want in the Last Quarter

COVID-19 has us, as they say, Locked Down. In our homes! Alone or with family. Down to basics? I suppose for some but not for all. Still, most of us have slowed down. There's a scene in the 1950's Thousand Clowns, just as the movie opens. As I recall, Jason Robards is looking down from a very high window or maybe it's the moderator, himself, panning Wall Street with throngs of bug-small people moving about going somewhere. The plot wonders if maybe they're going nowhere. Perhaps, today, we'd call it a Gyph! A graphic trope! Matters little but it goes along with the plot-line centered on a man who is coming against a burgeoning society that was beginning to move in the direction of these earliest -- but pre-COVID -- months of the 21st Century. Madness! Entropic energy! We worry about the parents who bury their kids in music and math and dance and karate and baseball and ... and a neverending and unfolding of hustles and bustles competing only with the TV Adverts that move at five times 78rpm, betimes so quickly that one begins before the previous one has ended.

In my good COVID moments, I think of these seven weeks in the way 19th C. Sampson Raphael Hirsch thought of the practice of restfulness ... of sabbath. He reasoned that the biblical prescription for a day of rest helped humanity recognize that, in spite of their aspirations for greatness and creativity and a Porsche in the driveway, we members of Clan Anthropos are creations, just like the dog under the dining room table and the slug in the garden. We pretend to create. Judy Collins, the Kohelles-like chanteuse of a generation, sang: "Everything comes and goes/Marked by lovers and styles of clothes!" So, too, after some 50 years of labor and writing and building, I get my months -- funny they should come in the Last Quarter -- of reminders that, in some sense, we and I spend our time pretty much just moving one pile into an apparently neater one.

Still, even if we're doing nothing more than being born, rearranging some furniture and dying, we have some good times. We Eat and we Dance and we Sing and we Make Love and some of us choose to reproduce and raise our spawn "in their Good Times and in their Bad." And lest anyone reading this seeks to have me sent off for a Rest Cure for some Deep Depression, let me say that I've had a very Good Ride with lots of fun and occasions for both sadness in saying goodbye and some pretty whacky glee in times that I've been able to play with my fellow travelers. No way I'd choose not to have been born or to live a shorter life. I say: Bring me More of the Same!

Good enough. So, what do I want from this Last Quarter and however much Overtime I get to have. The Biblical character Jacob asked for "some clothing to wear and bread to eat!" In his last hurrah, standing before Egypt's Pharaoh, he whine: I'm an Old Man and my Days have been Just Awful. In the scriptural readings in my Faith Tradition, I always like getting to Chapters 48-50 in Genesis. It means, frankly, that I don't have to read any more, this year, about poor Old Jacob and his self-absorbed misery. Miserable people are, well ... miserable. 

There is essentially one and, perhaps, only thing about which Dennis Prager -- he is a Conservative Trump-and Fracking Supporting thinker who also is a Happiness Speaker -- and I agree (my Sister suggested I listen to Prager on Happiness): 'expressions of happiness are a gift we give and a debt we pay to others. Withholding it is nasty.' I don't think it's something, by the way, that we owe others every moment ... but often. Indeed, one of the greatest gifts I receive is when one of my near and dear or even an actor on stage shares their deep sadness with me. Sadness is not Depression (unless you're Big Pharma selling pills). Depression, like Anger, pushes people away. Sadness welcomes people to come near and hold. And so does Happiness. And Sadness is not Unhappiness and can often commingle with Happiness. I am, let me digress, quite sad that a dear old friend is dying and M and I cannot visit her during COVID. Still, I am quite Happy to hear her on the phone playing cards with her 24 year old grand-daughter who came to help Grandma and Grandpa when Grandma was diagnosed last year. Maybe those are Wedding Tears ... tears of joy. One sees the Bride and Groom celebrating Future and, like Proust, we're sad that we cannot quite ever again experience that transcendent feeling of a Big Sky Future.

So, in my extended Months of Sabbath, I hope for some joys, too, but something else, as well. Interesting how our News Programs often end with this other shared sentiment. I'm referring to Kindness. I'm not certain exactly what Kindness is but as a Justice once said about Pornography: "I know it when I see it." Show me two people interacting with each other and I'll tell you whether there's Kindness, in the mix.

We're not born Kind; we're born Needy. "His Majesty the Baby" (Freud's 1914 way of noting the demanding neediness of the infant and baby) has Needs and Others either fulfill those Needs or FAILS to do so. Somewhere in the first three years, the child begins to realize that Others are not only different than s/he but also very similar. They, too, have Needs. Until that moment, Others are mostly like Chess Pieces manipulated on a Board to the end of satisfying some Pleasure or Need. They have no Subjectivity as Subjects have their own Needs and Wishes and Motivations.

That Moment when the Child recognizes that it's possible to be motivated-to-action by others' needs or wishes moves the child from a narcissistically-hedonistic state of being into one where it is sometimes possible to be motivated to act due to the wishes of this Special Other ... Parent? Sibling? Child? Friend or Homeless Person. The Hairy Little Caterpillar becomes a Butterfly, a being that not only hides itself protectively with its patterned wings but brings Beauty to some Others. The Butterfly's beauty is truly only apparent in the eyes of those who can behold and reflect on what they see. 

I don't know what Kindness is but it is nonetheless what I think I most crave Playing in the Last Quarter. But of some things I feel certain:

• Kindness is about sharing one's beautiful wings with another;
• Kindness is about being motivated to make others Joyful;
• Kindness is about not raining on Others' parades;
• Kindness is not Greedy but seeks to Share; and
• Kindness IS the the stuff that Bonds us Electrons, together in these teaming madness that we think of as life.