A Backside kinda Day

Old people like to Play even if it is in the Last Quarter. Well, there is a backstory ... Or, considering my yesterday maybe I should call it a 'backside story' .... It began when the mail and three of my grandkids came over at the same time. The 14 yo found a professional magazine in the mail and, as a writer, turned to the creative section which included a rather ribald and lengthy bit of 1994 doggerel that bore the name of her grandfather ... Not her other grandfather, the dignified Doc from Rhodesia but the Brooklyn Kid. She was shocked ... 'someone published this smut.' I began singing Tom Lehrer's 'Smut ... I want nothing but ... Smut' .... I was on a roll ... Then there was the same author getting in what So. African Jews call a feribble on line ... And folks from Appallachia call everyday battles between the Clampetts and the 'who was the family they were fightin' with' .... there was sniping between two typically quiescent Musers ... one of them, you guessed it ... Grandpa. So, Grandpa while he's makin' an omelet with onions and mushrooms, says to his-self ... 'Grandpa ... Why doesn't you send ya friends on line an invite to enjoin some days of the the Dear Lord's Sabbath from aggression' just like brother Cuckoo bird did in N. Korea ... at least according to Andy Borowitz's online piece in yesterday's New Yorker. ... and he did. But can you imagine if we ever instituted a day free of aggression online ... I explained the compatibility of this to my grandchildren with the span from Holy Friday to Easter Ascension Thursday. Anyhow ... Last night was a monthly meeting of a professional group ... Not the youngest reading group in the Resthome for Retired Healthcare Pro's, either and we were checking back over an old writing on Sadism and masochism and feelings of omnipotence. I can only say that I came back around 10 pm cowboying in the roadster like Bronco-Barry with a big smile on my face when my lady, M, right outa the blue says: OK, Howard ... What'd you do, tonight? Suffice it to say that somehow Goethe's comment was cited in German ... his Mach es kurz,am Jungsten Tag ist's nur eine ferze ... (make it snappy for on the Day of Judgement it's little more than a singular fart)was brought to describe the state in which a bunch of unassuming 'old farts' each thought it appropriate in their lives to have their names affixed to lengthy and complex writings in hardcover, at least once. New song .... Is it Waites or Cohen or Barry MacGuire .... Monday is a backside kinda day. Today is last Day of Passover, Remembering the Dead Service for Jews, and Easter Wednesday. "Shame on you, Grandpa!" and have a good day!

Odd Friday

Aramaic bits come back to me, this morning ... images from last evening. Lo Plugtei ... it was never an argument in the first place. Mai Nafke Mina ... what difference does it make this way or that. A a strange day for me ... Last minute cancellation by older Shrink who comes to visit me ... said he was in GI pain and distress ... I don't know what it's like to be in mid-80's and having given up most of my patients to "the years" .... Another person couldn't make it ... wanted to talk on phone ... trauma victim from early hospitalization and verbal torture .... forever in trauma .... an interview by a reaeacher during my lunch break on what it's like to witness the pain and trauma and stress narratives of those who have been seriously hurt earlier in life. ... The interviewer was about a third my age and, still, seemed so very tuned in to her research. Wasn't like I wanted to say, a la Ronal Reagan, "I won't hold your age against you " .... maybe I would have had I better "speech writers" on a staff .... at 6 O'clock before our welcoming in the Bride of Restfulness .... Come Bride, Come Bride ... accompanied by her entourage of angels ... just before then ... while M was heating up the Entree and the stuffed peppers and tomatoes that I had made early in the AM ... my eldest grandchild came to the office. She is leaving to the Holy Land in a week and wanted the names of our relatives who had "d. Auschwitz, c. 1944 " next to their names in a list of relatives. She wanted to carry them with her to the retaining wall that remains from the Temple. We talked about a competition between my Grandfather and his cousin for the love of my Grandmother. "Oh, a Soap Opera," she said. No, I responded. A soap opera is more common on cyber-listservs. "I know," she quickly peeled off from her young head and its CPU. In listservs, I typically come to like some and have "antipathic" relationships with others ... that's kinda like antipasto, only yesterday's antipasto left out to fester on a lonely corner of some kitchen counter... Sometimes, but rarely, I have both experiences with the same person. Last night I was visited by other angels ... my dead parents' dead neighbors who owned a cemetery monument business that chemically etched the names of my parents onto a shared stone. They owned a diner, in my dream ... and looked nothing like they had. There was a bar, there, too. I didn't engage with the clientelle in the restaurant, nor did I eat ... I was just passing through and spoke to my dead parents' dead neighbors; that was a sufficiency. I imagine, as I write, that someone will ask something ... ask for details or "why" questions that I dislike but I will have given as much as I wish to give. Is anyone ever satisfied!? Today, I shall cantillate from Ezekiel and offer Praise and Gratitude for all that comes to me this Spring ... a friend and I agreed to share such senses in song. The unfolding fractals ... they continue to unfold. Where is my buddy, Kohelles and his pages of Ecclesiastes, when I need him. The phone will ring ... It's already 630 and none of my visitors have called.

Reverie on entering Holy Days

I once wrote in a volume on men: He thought he saw an argument That proved he was the Pope He looked, again And saw it was A mottled bar of soap ... A thought, he said, He faintly said said, That left him without hope. — Refrain  from  the  Gardener’s  Song in  Lewis  Carroll’s  Sylvie and Bruno, 1889   I sometimes imagine an array of mirrors. Some of these surfaces are fine reflectors while others are foggy or cracked or but partially reflective due to some aging process in the surface’s material. Some face each other and others face away. Diagonal, orthogonal, pairwise skewed — a congeries of mirrors set in a never to be replicated  pattern. I imagine choosing a spot in a singular mirror upon which to focus my gaze. I shall have arrived at this moment and this place and this choice of spot after years of trekking through many other such mirror mazes. Still, I shall now marvel and fascinate at the array of sequential visions that are visible through this chosen spot in this mirror. The images will stare back at me at that moment. Not simple images, but compound ones that, if I look with care, may include me, the intrusive observer who has inadvertently been cast as a shadowy figure in his own observations. And after all is done and looked at, what shall I know of what I see? What is? What is smoke and mirrors?  And what may be contingent on the choice of the chosen spot arrived at here at this random point in the midst of travels? And what shall be known of the identity of others who fortuitously may be looking in on this maze of mirrors just as I do? Still and all, we participant-observers draw conclusions about the observed and write up these conclusions following consensually acceptable professional-literary guidelines in well-parsed sentences. Some of these conclusions are communicated to others. Some are maintained in silence. Many such conclusions that arise from such observations are responsive to queries relating to who I am in the diverse roles that I come to play in life. Who am I as child to parents? Sibling to brothers and sisters?  Friend to friend? Lover to lover? Parent to child?  Among them are those relating to who I am as a gendered other to my others. Male to Female and other Male? Female to Male and other Female? Walzer, while attempting to define criticality in social thought, opined that (1987, p. 49-52):   “Criticism requires critical distance. But what does that mean?... critical distance divides the self; when we step back (mentally), we create a double. Self one is still involved, committed, parochial, angry; self two is detached, dispassionate, impartial, quietly watching self one. ... Self three would be better still ... We form a certain picture of ourselves and the picture is painful. But this is most often a picture of ourselves as we are seen or think we are seen ... by people we value. We do not look at ourselves from nowhere in particular but through the eyes of particular other people. ... We apply standards  that we share with the others to the others.   Walzer has, in some sense perhaps, captured my dilemma. I feel a compelling need for attachment to a multiplicity of constituent  parts of me that meet the World. These allow for the possibility of experience and feeling that are birthed, in part, by some repeated internal feedback mechanism from the others who populate my World and who appear peering back at me in and from my maze of mirrors.    Like Carroll’s befuddled and befuddling Gardener (above), I may come to imagine that the organization of my visions about myself and about who I am represent a structured argument about the observed. These may be thought to have the infallible force of the Mathematics that Carroll, the eccentric teacher of this subject, presented as Tutor to Christ College. Like the Gardener, however, who mouths these words with tears rolling down his cheeks, I must be prepared to consider that, in fact, I typically find aught but a cursorily assembled handful of miscolored fats that may well melt away under the pressures of a lone trickle of water.  A voice calls out to me from an inhospitable and poorly landmarked wilderness: Change your focus in the mirrors and change your reality! Maybe so. In any case, I shall take this opportunity to reflect on a number of matters that relate to the interweaving of my senses of myself as a person and as a male person. Particularly, I find myself drawn to matters connected to my perception of myself as another to another. I shall be hard-pressed to separate out what others perceive in me from what I imagine they see in me. Therefore, I shall be unable to unambiguously separate between the two that I continue to consider the standard equipment that I bring to any and all considerations of this kind. I shall be satisfied to have shared the views of a singular male who qua child, sibling, lover/husband, father and male has arrived ... somehow and somewhere or other into the Twenty First Century[2] .

Emancipation

  As considerably more than half of the people who visit my office are 55-85, I am (without Virgil's experience of having preceded Dante into Dodge City or wherever they dared go, together and long ago) guiding/walking-alongside a number of folk who are restructuring their lives and using words like retirement. People who feel the need to restructure their lives in the aftermath of however far we or they have managed to get in the realization of their young person Dreams (much, to my way of thinking, as Levinson and Sheehy (using his data) demonstrated beginning in the 40-50 year old period when people begin a process of redefinition.)  For each of my visitors  and assuredly for myself it's complicated. One woman whose patients began complaining (she over 80 and a physician doing meds mngmnt and therapy) that she would forget to file a prescription for them or would nod off during sessions. For another woman, it was realizing that she was exhausted every night after her varied clinical hours. "when is it gonna be my turn?" she kept asking. She, like me, had a-fib which cut into energy levels and during paroxysms disturb executive functions, as the brain is tricked into thinking the erratically elevated heart rate is because of anxiety subsequent to danger.  My own case seems typical. My functioning has been limiting since the early 90's when I began cutting back. At that point, I was administering in a variety of places, teaching in a University full-time, supervising a lot of different kinds of practitioners and in clinical practice. My. Kids were all pretty grown, two well out of college and one on her way.  'something's gotta give ... Something's gotta give.'  Over the next 20 years, I pared it down, leaving only a half time private practice of < 30 hrs/week and some writing. By the late 90's, physical symptoms of middle age were expressing themselves. I no longer thought as clearly as I once did ... There was no misfunction ... Just less function. My sleep was less regular. I began breaking metatarsals interrupting the loneliness of my long-distance running. Sexual appetites modulated. The intensities of the young and of early middle age lessen and are replaced by a joy in the mutual pleasurings of The Last Quarter. Intercourse is no longer simply Freud's release of sexual products ... poor Papa. He missed so much. Memory was not the memory of childhood. Retrieval, need I say, was not the last guest to leave the party. Teaching, organizational supervision, administration were slowly disengaged from. My only major piece of writing appeared in the late 90's and I walked with a cane for two months after rising from that labor of writing some 500 pages.  Both university teaching and administration were the ones that had to give. Now, I lose a goodly % of each week to afib ... Less with new meds. All these other Souls are in my life .... Grandchildren and inlaw children! Running has become walk-running .... Recognition is still strong but retrieval really sucks, now ... energy is lessened ... Loving feelings are increased ... Dinner with my longest-standing friends, last night, was heartening. Milt just retired from a life of Univ teaching ... Just two months, ago. Ruth retired years ago. It's clear that the four of us take care of each other. That's become important.    Maybe that's it ... Theoretical differences and nuance become less important .... A form of Caritas has grown, in it's place.  ...Christians, Hindus, Jews, a far left octogenarian feminist and a radical vegan anti-vivisectionist will be led in a liturgy compiled from various sources (including a hagaddah written by Velikovsky and anotyer lost friend) by my 14 yo grandchild based in gratitude for the upcoming holiday ... Or, at least, that's what I requested. She and that family of hers will be elsewhere but her liturgical presence will be felt.  Life is always about change or else it's about  Refusing to change.  Existence, for me, is always 4 dim ... with the 4th dim being time or change, take your pick.  Life would've been different had M and I had children later ... Retirement would have been different, as well. But every single thing past alters the cone of possibilities whose point opens up wide into the future, ay? So it is! So, be it!  I have changed. I arose this morning at 4 due to change in the sinus bloc of my life-pump, my heart ...  I think the rest of the day is about cooking.  Tomorrow and the next day about the experience of gratitude for freedoms, in particular, and life, in general. What a gift, even if my prefrontal cortical area and it's good memory and careful thought are following my hairline out the back of my head.

Without Memory or Desire

Once upon a time, there live a man who wrote about the complexities of being human. He lived many years and treated the wounded in Wars .... there were, as there were in those days, too many wounded by a growing and perfecting arsenal of weaponry and, so, he began treating them in groups. He compared the human mind to the excavations that had been done at Ur .... by Monty, I think, one of the early scientific archaeologists. Some may not know that archaeology (the study of finding 'the old') like Freud's archaeological digs of the mind, is a young Science. Before last Century (the 20th, that is), archaeology was -- more or less -- grave-robbing ... stealing and marketing purloined antiquities to the British Museum and its many cousins. But back to the man ... his name was Bion ... I suppose his followers are Bionic Men and Women .,... and he was prone to say that when you approach the mysteries of another's mind, the best way in is to bring with you 'neither memory nor desire.' _______________________________ The Last Quarter brought me cardiac arrhythmias ... wild rides into the unexpectable. Our youthful hearts and the predictable rising and falling of the number of beats our hearts take in every minute determine a no-longer quite rememberable regularity of life. Each series of beats moves blood from chamber to chamber ... about 60% each time. If that drops much lower due to a weakening of the heart muscle ... our little squee zer ... indeed, our 'main squeeze' ... we are in what the young docs call heart failure. For years, I would run and get my heart rate up from its resting rate somewhere below 40 bpm (beats per minute ... da-dum-da-dum-da-dum) up to 180 or so. Now, I don't have to run ... and betimes sitting still (dammit! Still my heart!) my rhr (resting heart rate) will go off merrily on its own ... up over 200, down to 35 ... over hill and dale. ------------------- During these times (like right now) I finally attain Bion's state of, at least, limited memory ... and, frankly, the Girl from Ipinima could go walking by ... and just keep walking. ................. Ah! The Pleasures of Playing (or trying to play) in the Last Quarter. ______________________________ Think I'll rest a bit. Adios! Back, soon!

Sleep

Most of the people in my life are near or in the Last Quarter or else are related to me. The majority of them have ailments; most of them complain about sleep. When Levinson wrote The Seasons of a Man's Life(1978) and the Seasons of a Woman's Life (1990-something) and when Gail Sheehy, using some of the same data, published Passages, I don't recall sleep being a major issue. Then, again, my memory is another one of those issues I keep hearing discussed. But sleep seems to become more and more elusive. I shouldn't have neen surprised, I suppose: when a friend spent nearly $5,000 on a mattress set; when there are so many ads for hypnotic drugs on the television; or that one company is advertising a bed set for 90 times what I paid for my first new car in 1965 (can a mattress really cost $175,000 US). Levinson and his colleague's research done at Yale in the early 1970's showed that people (men, orginally, were studied) tended to -- by their 40's -- started to count backwards and either recast their earlier vision of life (The Dream) or became melancholic or depressed. He didn't take the easy way out and assume that this was just a matter of "rounding up" after one passes the half way mark in life. But still, Levinson and Sheehy didn't talk much about sleep. As the King in The King and I says: "It's a Puzzlement!" There are notes left over from the Wednesday evening meetings that Sigmund Freud had in his apartment suite in the first decade of the 20th C. There was one fellow who appeared for a short time at these meetings ... Schwerdtner. Sometime in 1907, he, in one evening, asked two questions that stick in my mind ... I mean 'stick' in my mind. Read them years ago. Maybe the expression has to do not just with stickiness in its gooey or adhesive sense, but more like its penetrative sense ... like a pithed frog in the Biology laboratory ... it's stuck to me. The first question had to do with why people tend to have difficulty maintaining opposing feelings towards the same person? Why do we tend to turn ambivalent love into hate? or love? Why can't we accept, as Freud himself was to argue much later in the 1920's, that the opposite of love isn't hate but the opposite of both is apathy. Schwerdtner's second question had to do with why sleep is necessary, at all. Nobody has a good answer for either of his questions, thus asked in Vol I of the Minutes of the Vienna Society and Schwerdtner is gone by the near-end of Vol II. He doesn't even seem to be indexed for Vols III or IV. What was it that Shakespeare or Kohellet said about our brief parade through this life. Ah! but to sleep ... perchance to sleep? on a good night? maybe for more than four hours? I hear (sometimes, I tell not-so-funny) jokes about sleep. My favourite is the guy who defines death as the only "natural" cure for middle age insomnia. Well, actually, it is not an absolute insomnia that the Last Quarter crowd seems to specialize in ... more like odd-somnia. Broken sleep! Watching movies at 3AM, one lady reports, and napping at 3PM. An hour at a time ... "I need to check the clock once an hour to make certain it's still running." ... Big joke? To make certain "it's" still running. When that first baby comes home, we peek into their rooms to make certain their breathing. Our bed-mates wish we would stop that middle-aged snoring long enough for them to get some sleep. "Aye, Matey! Put a cork in it or I will!" Perchance, to sleep!

More on the Dignity of Everyday Life

I am so often impressed by the capacity to carry on demonstrated by my fellow Players in the Last Quarter. Facing new understanding of stale expressions (eg, "when one thing doesn't get ya, another comes along to bite you in the ass" .... "I never seem to catch a break" from _________________ .... "The doctors look like they're in Middle School ... well, Junior High School, as I think we called it 'back in the day'"), they limp off to their daily tasks with their crippled friends or spouses, with whomever, that is, is still among the walking. Silly. I'm more thinking of myself, this morning, and M. Am I ashamed ... oh, I suppose so. Out of the Blue, as they say, my left foot feels like its hiding a broken metatarsal. I can't recall running, as my cardiac arrhythmias lately are just showing signs of calming down after a new medication was prescribed that has the blessed effect of bloating my belly and making it particularly difficult for my heaviest-ever body to find a restful position (I was never > 168 pounds until these meds arrived and my running slowed to a walk and then to a hobble ... think I'll do a new Tolkien series ... Bored of the Couch, The Hobble, ...). I could try leaning on M as I walk but her back is out and she'd fall over and then who'd get whom up? Who could pick up both up. Not, assuredly, GuntherDog, that wimp! I remember my paternal grandfather ... a nasty old guy who was sour about growing old and who lived with my parents towards his end. My father had built a downstairs bathroom so this cantankerous guy who refused chicken ("you feed me pigeon?")didn't have to walk up the stairs. One morning he fell ... my Father was at work and we were either too young or afraid to pick him up from between the wall and the loo. We called the Fire Department. A young fireman came in. Fireman: Mr. C, can you get up. Grandpa C: If I could get up, you fool, would I be lying here? I gotta admit, from a purely empirical philosophical point of view, the Old Guy had a point. So, I hold my coffe cup high this morning and offer a toast (though I think I'm sensitive to most grains) to all those of my aging colleagues who rise this morning to indulge silly puns that no one quite gets and to engage the world ... from the shores of Montezuma! ... remember ... hold on to the railing and don't Tripoli down the stairs! ... there may be nobody strong enough available to pick you up! Feel like going back to bed. I won't ... well, not until nap time.