Disgruntled, Again

There's just a little snow, thusfar, this morning. The number-size of the catch in the 5 live-catch mousetraps seem to have reached its maximum and begun coming down. M & I seem to have increasing body pains and somebody asked me why I write these blogs. I kinda snapped back: "Why are y'askin'?"

I don't know how many years it's been, now. Was it Judy Collins who sang "Time Passes Slowly Up Here in the Mountains" and lots of people have said that "Time flies when you're having fun." Abel and Old Doc Freud both talked of the similar meanings of antithetical (opposite in meaning) primal words from antiquity. In Latin, Sacer means both sacred and profane. In Hebrew, Kadosh can mean adjectivize something with its sense of holiness, while Kadesh from the same root refers to a male prostitute. Most people translate the Biblical and Prophetic word Nachamu as "Comfort, Ye," as in the Handl chorus so popular around this time of year. But the Writer/writer of the Bible, also, uses it to refer to "changing one's mind towards disgust," as it is used at the end of the Creation Myth in Genesis: And God 'despaired' about the creations he had brought forth.

Over many years of being and teaching, I've used "I'm brighter than I look" and "I'm not as bright as I look" almost interchangeably. Perhaps, I've used it to tell the person I'm addressing that it's time to consider the what of what I'm saying rather than worrying about the who of its origins. Geez! And why do I say it in such a convoluted way rather than just coming out and saying ... "Hey, you. It don't matter. The imprimatur of my brilliance is not the issue here. Just, stick to matter at hand, if you would."

Why, why, why. Hey, it's kinda like "Whine, whine, whine." 

Lemme go back to Biblical languages. In Hebrew, there are two words typically translated as why. Lemme riff on them for a few minutes and then go shovel the little snow. Don't ask me why ... Actually, the line from HAIR was "Don't ask me why, I'm such a hairy guy" or philosophical questions, for that matter, on why men are born with nipples. Y'know! Some things just come along for the ride.

Back to Hebrew:

(Word 1.) LaMah ... comes from the join of two words .... the preposition L' ... meaning towards ... and Mah ... meaning what. Pu'im together and they spell -- more or less: Hey, Bro ... what were you trying to get at (when you cracked the egg on your little Sister's head, or somesuch).

(Word 2.) MahDuah ... again,  comes from the join of two words ....  Mah ... meaning what and Duah (not from scat but rather) from the word  La'da'as, to know. Kinda has the intention of: What were you thinking?

I suppose, I can answer that. When I began blogging, it was right around the time that I showed up at the Gym at around this time ... roughly 5:00 AM it must've been. A conversation, a brief conversation occurred between myself and Gina who was my age, maybe a little older ... the lady at the desk.

H: Hey, G'morning.

G: G'morning. How ya doin?

H: Not bad.

G: No. Y'can't start the day "NOT BAD" ... life is great.

H: Yeah, life is great but my back does hurt and I thought you were actually asking how I was doing.

G: Well, I am!

....

What to say? It got worse. It occurred to me that there was a kind of expectation that A would ask B and then B would ask A and both would respond: "GRRRRRRREAT." I saw it at professional conferences. I remember when a colleague showed me his new kitchen that cost 50 times what my first new car cost in the early-mid 60's and 12 times what my parents' first home cost in 1961 and told me that it made him feel great.

Made him feel great. Really. Made him feel great? Wow! About 1970, I saw some graffitti on the bathroom wall in the Limelight Coffee House in Buffalo, questioning that construction: "made me feel ...."

                              Someone had written: My mother made me a homosexual.

              Someone else penned just below: If I get her the wool, will she make me one, too.

Nevermind the political correctness, for the moment. 

This morning, Gina, I feel shoveling-sore and I feel if not everyone of my days, then most of my years. I know what's written in my appointment book about visitors scheduled to come, I intend to see all of those that trudge through the slushy snow, I have a half a dozen tasks to do including allowing the dentist to finish a root canal, I just am finishing a posting to my blog, and I don't tend to preface any of these tasks with a "why bother?"

One of the simplest definitions of health comes in three parts, like "Gallia in tres partes divisa est," at least according to General Julius in his Gallic Wars.

Part One: Recognize a desire to do something.

     Part Two: Figure out if doing it will hurt you or others.

          Part Three: If not, Jump in and do it.

for if you wait too long, especially in the Last Quarter, the opportunity may never reappear.


It was Brother Thomas Merton who began one of his prayers: Dear God, I have no idea where I'm going (and if Brother Howard may add, no justification for going there. [tomorrow, I may think differently.])

Vaia con Dios, Amigos.

Struggling

It's 5:00 AM on a Sunday Morning. Some slushy snow outside indicates a third more or less minor storm has passed in just less than a week. Heart is coming back toward normal rhythm and rate after being wild at rising .... just wrote down a nondescript dream about being on an army base in the late 1960's or early 1970's. For some reason, I knew that this store (or whatever went on behind this counter) was a good place to have one of my 1950's Eversharp pens refitted with a new bladder (the bladder is the rubber reservoir that holds the ink .... arranged by squeezing a lever in the barrel). The old barrel came apart pretty easily ... no tear in this bladder! ... though odd ... and,yes, for some reason it was time to change that bladder.  Handed it over and someone said that it might be hard to fit ... 60 year old fountain pen .... couldn't guarantee a finish time/delivery date. Woke up to pee. Guess that makes sense? but who is Eversharp? Dunno.

Been having strange dreams. During a Siesta on Friday with M ... awaiting the arrival of afternoon visitors and visiting grandchildren, later .... In the dream, M and I were looking to figure out which room would be available and best for us ... entering and exiting at least one.  I or we were at a conference and everyone was to stay in their own room. No significaant commerce with others. I guess it got worked out ... next thing I knew, I was driving slumped over to the left in a left-hand-steering car ... slumped over, exhausted ... too tired to pull myself up ... too tired to stay up enough to see where I was going .... scene faded out ... some fear I coukd crash.

Woke up (and did, indeed, arise) to find GuntherDog looking at me pathetically ... "Yoh, Amigo ... this is not small town Central America or Mediterranean village ... get up and work, you bum ... My life depends on it." (I actually thought he called me something less friendly than 'Amigo').

I know dogs don't really talk ... still ... the look on his face spoke volumes. 

Neither dreams were accompanied by anxiety ... maybe resignation ... parts wear out like my cardiac rhythm-maker ... the thing that gives the right ba-bomp .... ba-bomp .... ba-bomp ... I think it's still called a sinus-bloc(k) .... .... oh! and my back .... my aching back that my yound Doc manipulated the day before ... Guess he found the spot that hurts. A week, today, M will have tolerated me in a state called matrimony (really!? one Mother ... Mater ... monium) for 48 years. 

I think jokes about anniversay gifts lose their tonus after a number of years. 

                                M to H: What you gonna get me for our anniversary.

                                              H to M: What kind of sex shall we have.

Jokes get stale and worse! They begin to smell like lost cucumbers in the back of the fridge, like potatoes giving off poisonous gasses in their Winter lair.

Thought of getting her a Bernese Mountain Dog ... thought better of it.

I could box myself in a big cake? jump out like Jack! Ah! Jumpin' Jack Flas has lost some. Any ideas welcome? 

'Snow, beautiful snow ... I'm anxious to shovel some' was not exactly the lyric from Oliver on Broadway and it just ain't true. 

Geez, my back hurts. There's a Holiday party at an organization to which I belong .... long ride for an old crippled guy. Maybe I'll take A siesta and try to get back with M to that conference center,

That having been said? It is quite beautiful outside ... GuntherDog likes it as long as it's not raining.

Go, Gunther!

Leaving

Thoughts of Leaving Someday

From ditties et lettre

of Abe Isaacs

Six bookcases lining the wall and filled on the inside with jacketed books and above with two philodendrons (one split-leafed),  two sensaveria that bloom every third year or so, an old microscope, test tubes on a rack, an oak bowling pin, a bulb that he found on the beach, and a glazed bookcase from his grandfather -- a shaman of a different ilk -- that one filled with sacred books. On the wall were diplomas and certificates and pictures of der alte hexenmeister from Vienna. Then, again, there were five chairs, a desk, a couch and an intention to leave this office some day.

Last Quarter Blues: The Beadle is Tired

Thirty Five years of accepting visitors to this office in which I sit, now, and write. But more than that .... 35 years of keeping the office tidy-enough, the bathroom clean-enough, the flowers arranged, the books and art in some order and the path clear.

I am the Beadle in this church ...
Hey! I am the walrus!

At least, this morning, I am lumbering about like an old man .... my back hurts ... my back hurts a bit every morning but today it hurts considerably. I took on cleaning and arranging and organizing ... concerned that my notes and writings are very private. Lev 19 has it that confidentiality is akin to Godliness ... or maybe goodness ... and is only to be broken in life threatening circumstances. The path is a different matter, entirely. For these 35 years, the Beadle has arisen whenever leaves cover the path or those beautiful blankets of snow.

Maybe the Walrus should describe the office ... the cave in which he has dwelled for half a lifetime.

Structurally, the office has three rooms ... a waiting room/ante-room and a bathroom, as a visitor enters through a now-somewhat-cloudy sliding door which the I-Beadle maintains. A couch and two softish Danish chairs afford sitting in the waiting room. Some samovar/water-heater was there for the first 30 years with fixings for tea; that has now been replaced by a Keurig ... How very modern, Howard. The waiting room gets cold and, anyway, my mind is full of memories and, as a youngster, my first mentor, my Grandfather, would entertain street people and congregants, alike, with a glass of tea and a listening ear, as he first might counsel them before my Grandmother, betimes, interpreted their dreams.

The bathroom is not. Actually, there's a sink and toilet, artwork and some posters announcing awards for a variety of more formal writings than Playing in the Last Quarter. One wall is covered in books, in case the waiting room selection proves inadequate. Some pretty heady books, I've been told, occupy that wall and another bookcase that holds others and plants on top.

The office is bigger. A desk in an alcove holds computer and printer. It's kept out of sight by the glassed bookcase that my Mentor told me I could have on his deathbed (age: c. 99) ... a bookcase which held his sacred books and scrolls for 70 years after his arrival at Ellis Island. One of his scrolls is still in it but I did follow his expressed instructions: It's for you ... fill it with your perfidious writings. (Actually, I've snuck some sacred books in there, as well.) The wall opposite my chair is long and hold about 3 dozen shelves of books which now, as the years and technology have unfolded, could fit on a thumb drive. Even if up to date? an anachronistic library of volumes that -- each in their own way -- pretend to capture the glee and sadness of standing erect on this Earth. In front of the bookcases are two arm chairs that have sat there, except when moved by a visiting couple. There's a chess board there that I made in 1958 and somewhere there's a chess set on the bookshelves and an ottoman that could hold that board when necessary.

There are certificates and diplomas that pretend to attest to competence of the named. There is also artwork and a picture of an old Dokteur from Vienna, now mostly hidden behind a Sensivaria and a rangy Philodendron (named Daughter of Mathilde) ... I guess for those who love the tendrils and dendrites of rangy plants.

To my right is a book table and after that a fainting couch that I found in an Antique Barn in Central Maine, brought back on top of a Citroen Station Wagon, and had recovered in a brown leather ... and that almost touches one end of the book wall. There's my chair and a very similar one across from it. Some tables. Some mostly Turkish rugs ... a 19th C. Yahele Prayer Rug on the wall over the couch.

I am the Beadle. I care for these rooms and prepare them for meetings.

That's the inside. Outside from the curb is a short brick path leading to three stairs and a long brick path with encroaching vines that I must trim ... more often than I do. Visitors, not infrequently, must take refuge on the lawn for a bit to avoid being consumed by those bushes and vines. Three more steps with handrails and 30 more feet of path to the sliding door and the waiting room.

I am the Beadle. I clear the path of leaves and snow. I've kept the path clear for 35 years and, this week, with two relatively minor snowfalls (each about 6 inches), I was leaning on my snow shovel remembering 28 September 1993 at 3:05 PM when a tornado came from above the path leaving someone else's Beech tree strewn on the house ... going up three stories above to the chimney ... leaving the trunk vertically in the waiting room ... through the roof. Fond memories of the Beadle with his chain saw ... two weeks of clearing debris.

But leaning on the shovel and anticipating the back-ache I now have, it became more than obvious that the Beadle needs help. The slaves (who built the 100 foot path with me years ago), my sons, are now looking at 50 and are not likely to show up with shovels to help me dig out before a 6 AM visitor. The Beadle needs help and a bit of acceptance that someday he must leave this office.

Categories: Yours and Mine

Thinking of Mandela ... A man for whom opportunity arose to take extraordinarily consequential action ... and who took it. When Jonah had the opportunity to bring the Word of God to sinning Nineveh, he hightailed it outa town on the red-eye to Tarshish; it took a Big Fish and the Lesson of the Kikayon (the gourd) to get him back to the action. I suspect when the call comes, most of us turn to Fox or MSNBC or one of the Reality shows where others act and we get to munch on Tortilla Chips. When opportunity called on M'diba to take actions that might break down the artificial categories that separated the various colors of So African folk, he answered the call.

For me, people define themselves by the categories that have meaning for them. Race has never been a category for me, anymore than height. I smile imagining a culture in which people are segregated by their height, especially now as I'm in the shrinking years ... my putative Last Quarter. I can tell the difference between the sexes ... usually. But that, too, doesn't get my category juices flowing ... Y'know ... Us and Them. or ... Us, Them and Those.

Over the past going-on twenty years, I've joined many others in the world in online discussions. I find them enlivening and maddening ... like much of life. Recently, I stumbled upon someone who theoretically differed from me; this is a bunch of folk in the helping professions. (I DO remember an expression from childhood years: Gournichte vil helphen ... ain't nothin' gonna help ... oops). We wrestled about some theory ... Lord! It was fun. He was an older guy like me and, just perhaps, a bit wiser. After maybe 6 or 7 postings, he worried out loud that we might be inducing yawning in the rest of the crew. Frankly, I was sad to leave the play. This guy who lived 5,000 miles away and was in the "the grandkids are gettin' older" years, like I, ... this guy enjoyed playfulness. It was like Summertime (between postings, tho, I was shovelling the walk to my office) in the 1950's and I was out playing catch with my neighbor, Ronnie C.

Then, a Grinch came ... to explain to us that what we had been doing was irrelevant, pedantic, of no value, and argumentative. Why couldn't we be like Rodney King implicitly recommended in his "Why can't we all get along." (Damn! I actually ran a conference titled that ... wondering why practitioners in my own field tended to hate each other). I thought I and my Austrian collocutor were getting along just fine. In fact, I thought we were having a great old time.

OK, OK

I had an "aha! moment." I'm not willing to categorize based on Color or Height and I don't want poor or heavy people restricted to Walmart. I'm willing to talk with Conservatives and Liberals, alike. I think Men and Women both have cool-potential. I live an economically comfortable life but don't see natural boundaries set up with $ figures. I feel like the luckiest kid from Brooklyn ... not the most deserving ... not even more deserving ... but fortunate with a natural amount of willingness-to-work.

But I do see an Us and Them between, on the one hand, those who are willing to play and willing to allow others to play and, on the other hand, spoil-sports and those who when they are not included begin "playing rough."  "Ruff to you," I say! Woof!

So, OK ... I figured myself out. I love to play. With M, with my Kids, with my Grand-kids and with people I've never met who show up in the same cyber-cubicles and with friends and visitors. That's it. I think it was Winnicott who said that Herr Dokteur Freud got it two thirds right in saying that health was the ability "to love and to work" ... he missed, Winnicott opined, "and to play."

I feel better, now. I can go back to bed.  (Actually, it's time to salt the icy office path ... but I'll play, later.)  

Amour

A friend lent me a copy of the French film, Amour. I decided to watch it in French, thinking that the words were not most important in understanding the odd combination of gifts and curses that we members of Clan Anthropos face in living. We have inherited all the vulnerabilities of being a living thing among other living creatures, along with the awareness of these self-same vulnerabilities.

Amour centers on a gifted couple Playing in Overtime, I suppose. She begins "to lose it," as we say. Is it a series of strokes or Alzheimer's that has her cascading into oblivion? Maybe the subtitles would have explained that. What becomes so clear is that the world not immediately involved in the day-by-day end of life realities doesn't really, as the kids say, have a clue. Seemingly impossible decisions have to be considered and made. The experts, I imagined, who've preceded them down this road aren't talking ... cannot talk ... have already, as we say, gone to their rest. The thanatologists which the film doesn't introduce ... our scientific experts about death ... they have, indeed, accompanied others on the road ... but they haven't really been there.

And while watching the movie doesn't bring you there and cannot bring you there, either, it may sensitize one? me? us? to consider the trite recommendations offered up by perhaps those living in the Third and Fourth Quarters. I don't know what she said but the rather warm and solicitous daughter of these folk knows that the Old Caretaker is not doing it right for himself or for her Mother.

I often fascinate on how people seem to believe they know the truth. I once presented a talk about words and how they become more specific and, as they do, lose their meaning. Sabbath, Mammon, and Science all became locked into specificity and -- or so I claimed -- lost their original meanings. The fourth word I chose was truth. I was speaking my truth, indeed, when I suggested that its earlier meaning was not some abstract and profound statement about the Universe, but rather the willingness to give witness to the reality that one imagined they perceived ... nothing more.

I do think the people who put together this film were speaking about their truths. I thank them for me.

 

The 50 Year Old Mind

In the aftermath of Mandela's death at 95, M and I were treated to a wistful memoir of someone growing up in So. Africa as a youngster. I don't recall all the details ... I can't say that I recall ALL the details of anything, these days. But he was born in the very early 1960's and left So. Africa in the early 1980's to pursue other dreams. He spoke of how his Father, a White of perhaps Roumanian or Lithuanian extraction, worked defending folk in the ANC ... memories of some of the quiet that, of necessity, I suppose surrounded those details ... memories of the time one of his Dad's legal colleagues had visited their home, as he often had, and was to travel the 4 hours to his tribal-lands, only to be found in the subsequent days chopped to pieces .... memories of the belief that Mandela would never be released and almost forgotten, as a presence ... remembered more as a myth ...

R, the speaker, wove these and other disparate memories and thoughts about liberation and the world, in general, into a cohesive narrative of a man's life that brought at least two listeners to a wistful appreciation for his sharing the memories but, also, for one of us, at least, an awe of his capacity to bind the together into a whole ... as of one piece. The man is not a historian in the professional sense of holding some position in an academic setting and, yet, his mind (without notes) is able to synthesize smoothly complex and betimes dissonant threads. His wife is of the same vintage as R and as I recall her sitting in a graduate class I was teaching maybe 10 years ago as she was changing careers from Law to one of "the helping professions" (Hey, wait a minute! don't lawyers help?), I recall an equally articulate lady ... ah! but I wasn't in the Fourth Quarter, then.

It is the contrast between my slower Central Processing Unit (CPU) of today and that of say the time I was teaching that class that is so striking. There are, in my estimation, three types of envy:

There is a pernicious/toxic envy that seeks to have what the other has 

that is of value and/or to make certain that they don't have it;

There is a beneficent envy that moves us to appreciate what another

 has and to seek to attain something similar ... maybe that is more 

"emulation" than envy; and

There is another beneficent form of envy that values what the other 

has, realizes that it won't come or (maybe) return to you 

and sits back and enjoys the show.

May I revel in the successes of all the late 40 and early 50 year olds (and some older folk? but maybe not me) whose turn it is to now put together the next wave of cogent ideas to come, as they, themselves, inch towards the Last Quarter ... watch their kids leave ... their parents die ... in this unfolding and beautiful fractal of life.