Patterns ... Some We See ... Some We Don't!

I'm not an oceanographer but still fascinate when I'm on the beach and play-capture the pattern in the waves that I cannot quite structure in my mind. small ... long ... small .... big .... short ... small .... I say play-capture due to the maybe chaotic manner in which a series of smaller waves, for instance, might follow and/or precede a larger one haphazardly. I know enough to know that I know very little about waves.

Hey, Horatio: Nevermind whether light is a wave or a particle? 

What the hell is a wave? 

It's certainly more than simply a bunch of particles!

But I still play at being able to understand and I find that sufficient, for the time being. And I don't know, for that matter, if I'm witnessing an early childhood fear of being tumbled head-over-heels by the big one? or if I'm trying to bring some rationality to the halcyon world of feelings that visit many of us (they assuredly visit me) when we experience that "beached feeling" after a day of soaking up heat. Huh! Mind over Emotion ... or the mental pretending to hold court in the presence of the emotional.

I suppose I was thinking about the randomness of life as I was opening my eyes after a night of Last Quarter interrupted sleep. If I had my druthers, I'd get 5 hours of solid sleep on most nights ... never waking up during those hours -- I'm not greedy. I don't find in myself, M or in the friends I still have or the visitors who occasion my office that undisturbed sleep is all that common after 60. This morning -- still lying in bed -- my mind turned to a familiar sensation ... one I associate with the coronary arrhythmias that are nowadays more an annoyance thanks to the triumphs of modern medicine. (That's a little joke I have with myself ... like trying to figure out waves. My Father gave me a book called the Triumphs of Modern Electricity ... dated 1895 or something. I can't check on that date due to the Triumph of Forgetting over Remembering where I last saw that reddish book in my library.)

In any case, while I sometimes know before my pump goes into fibrillation by that familiar feeling ... sometimes, it just doesn't happen.  These days, I typically have an episode every week or so, though last week I had three; still,  I thank my Good Comets that while for years my atria would fibrillate about 50% of the time, I'm now down to 5-10% of each week. Count your blessings, Howard!

I'm gonna put this down for a bit and jump on my hamster-wheel/treadmill; I'll be back.

The run was pretty good. Heart Rate went up from its usual 45 Beats per Minute to 150 bpm and is now back down to the mid-60's ... Not bad for a guy past his mid-60's.

But my mind is focused more -- and was while I was running -- on the waves of glee and sadness that visit the lives of everyone I know, excepting, that is, the depressed who feel comfortable in neither unbridled happiness nor in the expectable wistfulness of a life that will always have its share of goodbyes ... and, for that matter, its allotment of illness. I wonder ... or, as I'm prone to say, I fascinate about this often.

The treadmill is a wonderful illusion ... it speaks to me:

Horatio ... er ... Howard ... You can control speed and elevation.

You can control it by left hand and right hand switches.

It's all in your hands.

What a great and dangerous illusion that is. Add to the impossibility of predicting exactly what may occur minutes down one's path ... add to that the presence of another ... a friend, a lover, a spouse, one's spawn and grand-spawn ... and the great messiness of life appears.

I have a visitor coming soon. But as I await their arrival, I recall the rule-to-live-by that sometimes I can follow ...

In a relationship, it's typically best if only one person is crazy, at any given time.

May it be Your will, Oh! Great Monarch of the Universe, that I be capable of with-holding my madness when M is down and out ... and that she be capable of with-holding her own when I've lost it!

There are, indeed, advantages to such a blessing that permits waves to come and go in oneself and in others.

"Psychosomatic?" My &%#

Erich Fromm ostensibly told his friend Michael Maccoby that one could imagine that all illness was psychosomatic -- one could imagine that until one reached one's Sixties (from Friedman's biography of Fromm) ... until one entered the Last Quarter.

Don't ask, as neither John Donne nor John Kennedy ever quite did, for whom the aging image in the looking glass is searching, it is searching for thee.

It often has surprised me how well the young singers of each generation projects into the future the vulnerabilities and vagaries of later life. For Fromm, apparently, it grew from the wisdom accruing from a first myocardial infarction.

(Hey, maybe my Doctors get me? maybe my kids, too?)

Get a Grip, Howard

I saw my oldest child (born in 1966) and my youngest (arrival: 1976) on Saturday night and spoke to Herr Dokteur middle-child (d.o.b. 1967), this afternoon, as I was recovering from an unfortunately incomplete root canal done by my DDS (d.o.b. 1969), a day after my Chair of his Teaching Hospital Cardiologist (d.o.b. 1970) told me that it was likely safe to decrease my heart medication that is supposed to keep me from having too many arrhythmias that may keep me awake at night. And while you may get my drift that I'm still awake after Midnight on a night when I have a 7:30 AM visitor, I have done my vetting of all these young folk -- they all have five unwebbed fingers on each hand and I suspect a similar number of digits on each of their adult feet and all other necessary but covered bodily parts. I do have a GP who is old enough to have been toddling when the Beatles sang on the Ed Sullivan show ... that's a relief!

How do I say this? I need to get a grip on myself. M is just 17 months younger than I and one of my siblings is old enough to have changed my diapers. Judy Collins, James Taylor, the two living Beatles, Joan Baez and  little Bobby Dylan are all in their 70's -- and Leonard Cohen and Tom Lehrer are in their 80's. Oh! And Lee Hayes who liked to sing: "How do I know my youth is all spent, my get up and go, has got up and went"
... poor Lee Hayes was composted well over 10 years ago while Pete Seeger and Lonny Gilbert (I think) are still singing.

Damn it, Howard, get a grip on yourself, go to sleep and keep Playing in the Last Quarter, tomorrow; life is still a blast even if you have to chew only on the right side.

Does anyone out there remember Geritol and Serutan ("Natures" spelled backwards)?

BTW-2

So, M read this AM's posts and doesn't like my French spelling of "accountrementes," says my spelling, in general, is poor, and then says to me: Oh, you're never peevish.

There WAS something in her tone suggesting perhaps-just a dash of sarcasm in her comment.

Perhaps-just a dash!?

(OK ... try looking up Perhaps-just in your Funk and Wagnell ... or was it Wagner???)

BTW

Saw a film with M, this weekend ... The Book Thief .... powerful, beautiful, moving ...

And got done with raking the Autumn Leaves ...  powerful, beautiful, moving ...

Pet Peeves and the Accoutrementes of Grouchiness

Those of you who continue reading along with my rants on "getting older" ... on "Playing in the Last Quarter," as I keep saying, as if one can tickle the Grim Reaper into compliance ... those of you still here may well have guessed that I have a curious preference for getting-out in cyber-words what otherwise might be extruded from my very being like cursewords from a thug on a Brooklyn street corner. "He tells jokes and writes funny little ('little-little) ditties to cover up his grouchiness and his propensity to tell people to bugger-off."

I sort of remember the first time, I gave a visitor to my office "the bird," as it is called. I came to call it and other symbolically aggressive acts "the hat pin." I'm fortuitously in a service business in which there are no absolute requirements to metabolize others' guff. There are boundaries. I don't make love or overt war with my visitors but -- beyond that -- I feel bound only to be of assistance to them in enriching their lives. Zo! When someone comes in all puffed up with their rage, I live under no prohibitive forces that prevent me from asking: "Just what the Hell are you so angry about?"

I don't think it's the dangling participle that gets such people to lay it on me ... It's kinda like opening up a floodgate. The vitriol and venom are forcefully puked out ... oh! ... and typically we both feel better.

I suppose that I'm trying to justify the sundry manners by which my own peevishness becomes manifest ... let me list a couple of my pet peeves:

• People who speak as if they know the truth are on my list and really piss me off. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'm still annoyed by the two women at Thanksgiving who with ease and facility were able to categorize me as a reactionary shit for not having decided how I feel about abortion. I guess I don't like people who know ... err ... I know that about myself.
• There's a similar group of people who reason that if someone disagrees with them, it's because they're wrong. My middle finger wants to snap to attention within ten feet of those folk.
• People without gratitude are center-target for me ... people who one cannot satisfy. I remember at a protest during graduate school days in the 1960's. The students had quite sensible complaints, I think all of which surprised President Marty Meyerson and which he agreed had to be immediately remedied. About a dozen students refused to leave and a huge mess occurred over the next weeks. Yuch! Including Meyerson getting the can for not calling in the National Guard. 
• Then there are the cynics! One of my rules in life, I borrow from the 2,000 year old Ethics of the Elders ... Pirkei Avos, as it was called: Judge everyone to the side of righteousness. Y'know! Innocent until proven guilty. In my mind I've come to call it the presumption of good intentions. I suppose that cynics (not the ancient Greek Cynics but the garden variety type) are those who look for the glitch and that glitch of theirs pisses me off.

But, truth be told, I think I need a guru or someone giving an inspiring Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) to help me get over this disgruntledness or maybe I just need to embrace that part of me that's like Mr. Engler's cane. Old Man Engler would sit in front of his house of W. 5th Street in Coney Island and shake his stick at all us kids ... hey ... just trying to have a good time.

Some years ago, I wrote about my peevishness on a birthday morning:

Being that No One Writes Verse
for Abe Isaacs Anymore

“A mere piss in the ocean, all these years,”
Said Abe, as he trailed down birthday stairs,
To serve birthday kibble to waiting dog and cats,
To fetch birthday coffee, alas! No more birthday cigarettes.
“A day for all to revel with middle-aged me,
How much more pleased could any man be?”

“A cosmic fleck on the Milky Way”
Aside, said he, his fears to stay.
Then appeared in his throat the telltale knot
When noticing the cat’s favorite spot
To shit upon when puss is feeling bitter
That no one had bothered to change her litter.
And while feeding the dog, the wish to run
Realizing that decisions are never made as one
But rather by the rule: my will be done.
“Didn’t we agree on a uniform ban
on inuring the cats to eat meat from a can!?”
Abe found a solution, a tad-bit rash
Abe pulled out his sprinkler and make his own splash.
“I piss on the world! Why the hell not?
Who gives the pussy dominion on that spot?
A day for all to revel with middle-aged me
Please … save your sighs and no sympathy.”

“For I’m no zit on the Lord’s six day creation
Having arrived after all other failed experimentation.
Now, getting’ on, know what I ought’a do”
Abe barks at the rising Sun, “Hey Sun, Hey you!
Most years gone but some remain
Of vigor and charm and hearty refrain
Let all who’ve tasted their own felicity
Come and revel … Mine lives, too!
Inside this protesting but vigorous,
Middle-aged me!”The moral of Abe’s story is plain;
I explain:
Many will scoff when you’re pissed off
And laugh at you if you run off
But if you seek pets, others or missus to be cooperatively compliant
rather than covertly and silently defiant
then the rule is:
He who pisses never misses.

Regards from a Peevish Old Guy

And It Was Evening, It was Morning ... Thanksgiving Day

We dined the Turkey Holocaust with friends, as I knew before. Kids were elsewhere, as were grand kids. Felt a sufficiency of my two richest emotions, happiness and sadness, that day.

I wrote to R and M, afterwards:

Thanks for adopting the us Orphans for the Holy Day.

Just like in CAROUSEL:

The vittles, we et,

Were good, you bet,

the company was the same.

Your grandson is a real charmer. And the three girls are full of life.

The Older Folk could learn how to let the guests clean up

especially because y'knows what they say ... Y'kin lead Miltie

to food but you can't trust'im with the China!

Much love ... Howard

Eating with M & R is exactly like eating with family ... no just-for-show deference shown. Their older sons live 2,000 and 10,000 miles away. The oldest grandchild was there at the table (23?), as was M&R's youngest child (not so young anymore? 45) and a niece from Texas (freshman at College). Somehow the conversation turned to the major social issues of our political discourse: abortion, euthanasia, freedom-to-suicide, and same sex unions. 

I admitted -- not being shy --  that abortion had always been a tough one for me since around 1969. My M and I had two kids when one of her friends flew in from Rhode Island, where abortion was not available. M was busy and I was the obvious choice to drive the friend to a clinic. On the way, she asked how I felt about abortion. I answered that I had never thought about it -- one way or another. About 35 years later when we reconnected with the now ex-pat friend, I still hadn't figured out how I felt about the impact such a "choice" might have on culture. As such, I chose to support pro-Choice voices in elections ... figuring that if I couldn't settle it in my own mind, I had no right to settle it for another ... recognizing that some might say that my thinking should involve the fetus, as well.

I don't know. I began thinking about it when I was barely into the Second Quarter and here I am in the Last Official Quarter -- as puzzled as ever ... true to my Pyrrhonian Skeptic roots. The older two young women quickly labeled me a reactionary shit or some such. 

Alas, the older I get, the less obvious most decisions ... most dichotomous decisions ... become. 

But truly, Toto, there's no place like home ...and when your friends' younger Gens can curse you out in front of a visiting niece and a 6 year old, you know you've made it.

(There's a great song from the Broadway staging of Oliver about adoptive families .... "Consider Yourself.")