But I Miss You Most of All

I like trees. I like leaves. I can muster up an affection for leaves ... falling ... from trees. 'But I miss you most of all, my Darlings' when Autumn Leaves must be raked.

Many of the folk who visit me and seem to capsize -- one way or the other -- their boats, either into manic mischief or a depressed pseudo-death, rather than a juggled mixture of of sadness and glee, have, indeed, suffered great losses. Their World treated them as things ... as objects. They were abused or shamed and often came to treat themselves as if they were inert things.

The make self-destructive decisions in one or the other of these postures ... Whirling  or Bed-bound -- as if Dead.

The Last Quarter has its abandonments. I once had children working shoulder to shoulder on raking and blowing and moving those leaves.  It's true! I admit it. I have moments when I have passing reveries that I've been deconstructed like an Old Shed -- left to rot behind the garage. The sense that the 0-55 crowd don't give much credence to my having had a complex past ... or, hey! ... a future conjure up in me maudlin thought.

The Sun is just coming up. Norway Maple, Sugar Maple, Oak, and Willow leaves colored by some Red Japanese Maple. I need to greet them with a recognition that my once-indentured Spawn have found their own families and emancipated themselves. I need to go out there among those leaves ... having been left.

Long live freedom!

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch

Was hanging out (old folks hang out, too) with mostly other oldsters at a meeting down in Florida. There are so many different ways to be Playing in the Last Quarter. I was there with Marsha ... the dog was with our youngest Spawn and family up in Philadelphia, and the house and cat were being catered to by a neighbor just about our age.

Others at the meeting were living other models.

One, long divorced and living alone ... not certain if she adopted us or we adopted her. I went to her talk ... she to mine .... Living the single, professional, I'm-pushing-70 life in a big city. Another just lost his wife of 40 some-odd years. All were puzzling the complexities of a less cooperative body, a mind that processes more slowly, retirement and the looks of the 25-60 crowd ... "Lemme get that door for you" ... or ... "Get outa my way Old Bald Man in the Slow Lane." Jugglers ... at least those with whom we hung out.

I don't know how it looks to the youngins, but I found a Dignity of Everyday Life in many of the 60-85 folk, there .... an embracing of where we/they were/are ... sometimes even a chuckle ... often some beneficent envy for the younger with their toned bodies (I know, I know ... there are the Young Untoned, too) and Big Sky futures.

My compensation? My major decisions have been made ... I cherish them ....

People don't like my decisions .... "Ah, well" .... or, if they really irk me, a heartfelt wish that they spend eternity indulging solo-horizontal erotic aerobics .... (the lenth of that cuss often quiets them down)

Gotta get back to what it's like for those who cannot juggle glee with sadness. Will do so. Promise.

After I recover from two plane rides.

Last chance to kvetch, for a bit

"Leaving on a Jet Plane," as the song goes, but not till tomorrow.

When I began writing these bi/tri-weekly notes, thought it good way to stay in touch with myself, particularly, but with M and "the Spawn," too.  I had found that journaling without potential witnesses had its drawbacks. Aloneness and a 'slow-creep-factor,' an ooze toward fiction. That others might listen in to what it was like Playing in the Last Quarter, I thought, might keep me honest. I did have some experience in this, before.

When my first grand-spawn was due, I began writing to her by e-mail. She had no name. It became a series of "Dear Cletus the Foetus" notes sent to her entourage .... future grandparents, parents and uncles and aunt. It was a first for the entire entourage ... first grandchild for all four of us ... first child for the parents .... first niece for the older uncles and aunt, to be. Other members of l'entourage joined in .... betimes, with new advices for Cletus ... how she might choose to appear or when or what she might do when she did ... even how she might shop.

I have had other experiences in self-disclosure, including some online-published and very personal reflections on my visions of retirement ... in the form of doggerel. I'd been writing "Ditties et Lettres du Abe Isaacs," short (well, mostly short pieces) and whimsical poems about an old guy in my field. Of course, Abe is a close relative of his author ... very close.

I'm still enjoying this.

While away, I'd like to write a bit about those who don't dance ... who cannot, to try another metaphor, juggle glee and sadness, the good with the bad .... Here, I need to work things out in my head.

I have a favorite bit from Scripture ... from Leviticus 19 .... maybe 19:20 or so .... It defines the difficulty I have in proceeding: Traditionally, the first half of the passage goes:

          Don't go loose-lipped among your people, (but) don't stand idly by as your neighbor bleeds;

The passage traditionally has a much terser second half:

          I am God.

I have a right to discuss my own stuff, but the confidentiality that I owe to others is -- if you take Scripture seriously -- no light matter.

Going away to speak and to think.

Dancing is rhythmic

When Does the Dance Stop? The kvetch begin?

My life is a commercial for one or another NSAID that will, perhaps, soon prove to be dangerous ... or, at the very least, has 'been reported to cause death,' as they are prone to say.*  

'Do you have atrial fibrillation without heart valve involvement ... we Docs call it a-fib because it's so cool.' Oh! Those docs are so .... so cool. I had one tell me not to really worry about an 11% chance of "a silent stroke or better" for a certain procedure that his hospital would love to do to me. I was supposed to think that 11% is a small number, a little probability. And it is. If I had an 11% chance of losing $5, I'd be 'cool with it,' too. But if one has an 11% chance of sliding off some iced mountain pass, it is best to sit on one's ass .... at home.

Any case, I woke up yesterday in a-fib, spent the day in a-fib, and woke up, today, in the same place. Once or twice a week for 5 years, now, I travel through this strange country. For many of us Playing in the Last Quarter, atrial fibrillation is one of the unwritten 'benefits' that comes with life's contract.

Ah! but we danced. We did. Marsha got her Chloe-Fix (= time spent with #6 grandchild and our oldest child [who didn't spawn till his early-mid forties] and his wife) and we visited Chloe's Mom and Dad, too. Did I mention that?

Got home early and did some gardening and then worked on a talk I'm giving Down South in a few days on why people in my field seem to hate each other -- particularly when they get into cybergroups. I do feel the mischief, familiar to me as it is, coming on! I do suspect that the audience might explain to me -- in dramatic detail -- why we don't like each other. Even got to pause to cry a bit during a tribute to Andy Rooney that M was watching.

Could there be a better day? OK, ok! My Resting Heart Rate is usually 40 beats and steady and today it was bouncing from the mid-70's to 160 something -- quite on its own schedule. (What to say? The Old Guy or his heart, at least, "ain't got no rhythm).  But the Sun WAS shining, the sunroof WAS open on "Little Beast," my car, Chloe was shyly figuring out if maybe and after all there could be room for both Grandma AND Grandpa, and ... people in the stores we stopped into were in a good way.

Shew!









* I have a strong interest in ancient religious writings and have been long-impressed with the manner in which the Writer of the Old Testament plays with the Ancient Hebrew. In the story of Er and Onan and the same hot widow, Tamar, that they left behind, the Writer uses a similar construction: va'Ymisuhu .... and "He made him dead."

Stop Kvetching ...

It's hard to stop kvetching, Playing in Any Quarter -- the tasks are many for each. Indeed, as I think about it, my grandchildren and children have many more things to keep them busy .... Who to love ... How to behave ... Who to become ... Who to love ... How to behave ... and ... Who to become... all in some chronological repeating order. I don't know how many times it repeats; I think at least twice. I remember the dizziness of this process in myself, though I'm still working on/with Marsha, my first wife, the lady who has arisen with me and whom I've arisen with some 16,500 times, not including naps!

I have, like other Players who have been Blessed/Cursed with making it to the Fourth Quarter, gone through many incarnations ... a Poet Laureate called them "The Layers" in a poem he dated for his 95th birthday. Stanley Kunitz, too, recalled: "I have walked through many lives/some of them my own/and I am not who I was/though some principle of being/abides from which I struggle/not to stray." He wonders: "How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?"

For Kunitz, he had a "nimbus clouded voice" directing him to '"Live among the layers/not on the litter."' I think some Popular Psychologists call this "getting on with life." Kunitz can no longer be asked what he meant and his contemporary Archibald Macleish, once Librarian of the US Congress, already warned us "That a poem does not mean/A poem is," but I don't think Macleish, himself, was recommending against finding our own meanings in others' words.

For me, the call to "Live among the Layers" is a recall to remember all the incarnations ... of those we loved and of who we became and, perchance, to smile about how we behaved. Happy/Sad are the recollections.

Happy/Sad are the choices we make Playing in each Quarter.

There's that other voice that may speak to my kids and grandkids ... "Kvetch! ... Don't Kvetch ... but remember to Dance!"