OK, OK

"I give."
         "Uncle"
                "I didn't mean to say it in the first place."
                       "Really sorry, (Wo)Man."
                               'Won't do it EVER, again!" .... (Well, none of that's true.)

That piece, yesterday, on impermanence? Went over like a Funnel Cake flattenned by a Semi at a Country Fair. Road Kill! Good I didn't show it to those of my progeny who made me swear that I would never leave this house ... AND HERE I AM in my office next to the house we've lived in for 35 years. Good thing one of my inlaw kids came in to carry the 50 pound bags of ice-melting salt for the next foot of shovellable crystals that are due to begin appearing in about 60 hours. Big strapping Pater Familias with a 50 pounder on each shoulder is a thing of the past and my new hero is the person who decided on mass-marketing 50 pound bags of Portland Cement rather than only the usual 80 pounders. Bet s/he was over 60.

But as to the onslaught of criticisms that came by e-mail, claiming that I'm maudlin, melancholic or just plain mad for obsessing about all these matters? I say stick it .... like the kids say ... "where the Sun don't shine."

I remember ..., it was 21 years and seven months ago to the day ... my youngest's 16th birthday. We were out celebrating, realizing full-well that my Father-in-law's lung cancer was responding neither to Surgical Infantry Attacks,  to aerial x-ray bombs or to chemical warfare. Murray was dying and everyone around him was handing out "diner fare" that said something and in many different ways like: "You gotta keep thinking positive. You can't give in to the feelings." At that point, I'd been his son-in-law for over 37 years and felt it OK to whisper in his ear something about how tough these times must be for him and how feeling the feelings seemed to me perfectly "onside" ... (Murray was a hockey-fan who got stuck with a geeky son-in-law who grew up studying Scriptures with no penchant for watching others have good times ... at least not when they were crashing into "boards" or "helmets," and not when they were getting it on sexually. "Murray ... it's ok to feel shitty about all this. I'm willing to cry with you."

My comment was obviously loud enough to get Annette to bawl me out for being being on my "high horse" and for trying to depress her husband. My youngest doesn't reflect back happily, either, on the kerfuffle that ensued and assuredly does not  refer back to it  as a "sweet sixteen party," But, it's not just matters of life and death that deserve the gift of allowing in wistfulness for losses observed and for those crouching and waiting to surprise us and, arguably, pounce on us.

So many of the changes that we Last Quarter Players have incorporated into our daily routines and thinking have been all but imperceptible. The changes in our kids -- if we chose to spoon and spawn -- as they grow up. Being no longer the feeder and the changer, as toddlers learn to feed themselves and wipe their own buts. The holding hands in parking lots that is no longer. The being the expert on Arithmetics and Geometries and Writings and handling our kids relational catastrophes. And there are similar losses for those who've decided not to reproduce.

I remember when M was unpacking that same youngest into a Dorm Room and I was weeping in the College Courtyard, outside. I recognized those losses, too, and wrote:

Once Before the Altar

The skies above were clear

His eyes were sore,

No pause for crying anymore.

McDowell, Randal, and Campbell Halls

Sycamore trees above a mall.

She’s inside

Unpacking her childhood and leaving behind

The dolls and toys that  filled her mind

For eighteen years that came before

When she and dad played on the floor.

Not at the altar he gives her away

But today

To McDowell, Randal and Campbell Halls.

The Sycamore trees above the mall

Can offer neither peace nor solitude.

No time for age old platitudes

From Dear Old Dad and what he’d say

To take his little girl’s pain away.

But a few more words, he’ll pass her way

Before they hug and wish good day

No matter what, you’re not alone.

Don’t forget, you’ve still a home.

And please, oh please,

Use the phone.

 Sad and joyous to let them go, kids, friends, parents and grandparents. And then there are the losses of function that go beyond not being able to swing about 50 pound bags of this and that. More than the recognition of mortality, there are the losses in memory that so many tout ... the progressive inability to recall names out of our aging hard-drives. My 15 year old grand daughter last night, as we cut her birthday cake, averred that if someone asked her to to smoke pot, she'd respond: "No thank you. I don't want my brain to shrivel up into a head of dried cauliflower." (Guess she's not moving to Colorado for University Studies.) Well, Kid, that Gourd eventually dries up, anyway. No, beyond all those cognitive losses are the reasons that on Cialis commercials, the old folk have forgotten that sex is better in one claw-footed tub ... rather tan in two. Hell, it was better in the back of a '65 Corvair!. 

What happened to spontaneous erections and lubrications? Twenty percent of the male population is just waiting for an erection that lasts more than four hours ... Busting at the seams to call their doctors: "Doc: that little blue pill y'gave me? Four and a half hours and no myocardial infarction. Feel like I was 15, again, riding the subways and getting excited about anyone wearing a skirt. You think 2 pills would translate into 9 hours?" 

No. You naysayers who think I'm lost in depression, are missing out on all the pleasant and titillating memories of the first Three Quarters of Play and those of the Fourth Quarter, too ... at least, those that I can still recall. Any case? You can keep your comments ... stick'em, as I suggested earlier.

OK. Enough! ... I have forgotten the first sentences of this riff and will accept as a given that it went somewhere ... as I sign off.

Carpe Diem, Old Folks, Carpe Diem! ... and, BTW, keep the keys and the tissues and the Ginkgo Paloba (and the Little Blue Pills, if y'need 'em) where you can find them.

The Illusion of Permanence

I was out doing errands with M ... picking up a birthday cake for a 15 year old wondrous grandchild. Took a back way to avoid the main-drag potholes. Potholes are the talk of the town as March approaches ... potholes and the cold and snowy Winter. We drove by a house ... Pennsylvania field stone. It was for sale. I thought to myself ... "Another family moving on."

I wondered about their story ... the story of the family that moved on. Of course, in the Modern World, it would be rare to be acquainted of the story of this family that moved on. I knew two people who lived not far from that house but it was unlikely that either Danny or Ilsa would have any information. And I'm not certain that I know them well enough to ask.

It was ... I should say ... it is a big house. Well maintained with stone walls surrounding parts of the property that contained the home of the family I didn't know. It was certainly big enough to have housed parents and a bunch of kids. The driveway was large enough, too, to have held cars ... for parents and adolescents. "Maybe," I thought, "the kids grew up and found girlfriends or boyfriends ... and schools and jobs and were having kids of their own. Maybe Mom and Dad were downsizing, as the euphemism would have it."

Curious how we just don't know. Wouldn't think of knocking on the door to ask ... not in the 21st Century ... not in these times of alienation. "Maybe one of the parents died ... or has Alzheimer's ... or maybe they're ex-hippies moving to Denver to smoke legal Pot ... or to Arizona, now that Gov. Brewer vetoed the bill that would permit restaurateurs to deny them a seat at a counter due to their unconscious homosexual fantasies." I laughed at my thoughts ... quietly. If Emile Zola opined that he came to life to live loudly, he lived in a different county. Here in this shire, we're quiet. And we don't knock on strangers' doors for fear they might shoot us thinking that we had come to shoot them. Was it Hannah Arendt who spoke of living lives of quiet desperation?

I drove on reminding myself ... quietly, need I add ... that even the best of houses are only on loan. ... and loans must be repaid, in spite of any illusions to the contrary. I've lived in our present home and worked in the attached office for 35 years ... We came with three kids, 2, 12 and 13 years old. They grew up. Someday, we'll have to leave.

Tomorrow, M and I will have been together for 49 years and tonight we'll have cake with a 15 year old writer named Sophie and her younger Sisters and her Mom and Dad.

It's not all "play" in the Last Quarter but there are times for that, as well.

They Come and Go

Grandchildren came and left, today.

Grandpa and GuntherDog both need naps.

The Disenfranchised

Do I have a vote in what we do? Should I have a preference. More and more of the visitors who occasion my office -- statistically speaking, older men and younger women ... but both genders -- should to question whether it's cool to have wishes, nevermind demands.

Maybe it was yesterday that I dropped a riddle on line in a discussion group:

                         A Carpenter, a cook, an electrician and a gardener go into a shower naked
                         and ready to clean up after a long day. Only one man comes out. Whazzup?

A 60'ish woman posted back that she didn't get it. I explained.

Sorry, Josefine .... It's the male version of the harried wife
syndrome. For those of us blessed/cursed with longer lives and spouses
that hold on till "The End of Days," there is what appears to be a statistically apparent
difference between men and women's lives.

Women, many of them here in this Culture, are the great jugglers of the
early years. They wear a half-dozen different hats and this is often
the case during adolescence of the kids, as well. When the kids leave,
some of that changes. The Old Guy is home more often ... sharing the
cooking and feeding of only several mouths, unless a previous
generation moves in or one of the orbiting kids loses altitude.

Many men, myself included, until the kids moved out could use the kids
as indentured helpers .... When they're gone (again, I am speaking in
grossly general terms), shoveling the walk, electrical jobs, replacing
subfloors,  roofs, just something as simple as carrying big non-hardy
plants in at the end of their outside season .... all these tasks are now
-- at least sometimes -- solitary ones.

The riddle plays on all those jobs (and throw in work, if not retired) falling to
the same person .... the pater familias occasionally mourns that all
those tasks fall on him and the kids leaving has more than an emotional
component.

I, for instance, when I'm doing electrical work or need some editorial
assistance would appreciate and, indeed, mourn the missing set of hands and/or eyes. As to the
cooking, M did most of it from 1965-1994 ... The years we had kids
running around or bivouacked in the house, anyway. I took over my half
of that from the mid-90's. ... And kept the electrical, tree-trimming
(not talkin' tinsel on a cut tree but chainsaws on a fallen one),
carpentry, inside and outside gardening, ....

The riddle is me feeling a bit for myself, I suppose.


So, there I was Wednesday night .... the zone-valve on the furnace was bad ... need to remove and refit a new one and wire same into the thermostat system.  Struggled for a bit. "Do I just hold screwdriver in one hand and light in other?" "Do I ask M to come down into the Belly of the Beast to assist? ... 'Be my Valentine, please, and be a dear in our old cellar!"

Any case, I'm finding more and more men caught up in feeling they can do it all ... or must do it all ... and must never -- I say never -- ask for help. Including cutting up that cherry tree that fell under the weight of the ice-storm .... shoveling -shoveling-shoveling ....cooking .... Nevermind "chewing gum and walking, at same time," what about "Balding and wielding a chain saw in the same moments of our tender lives, just before consulting with your kids on the complexities of middle age and taking off the requisite tie at the end of a long day."

"OK, OK ... Just feeling a little sorry for myself. I'll get over it."

WOOF

Health

Yesterday, the theme of what constitutes the Good Life seemed to find its way into many of interactions that came my way ....

In meetings with visitors in my office, existential questions arose over "Is it worth it?" .... "What's it all about" .... "How can we possibly integrate all the years that have gone by and make sense of them" ....

At a reading group, I was I was the irritant, after those visits, who kept wondering about why the specialists in treating Mental Illness spent so little time focusing on the differences in the way health is conceptualized.

Then, this morning, M told me that visiting kids and grandkids spotted a red-red Cardinal foraging in the Rhodies and Azaleas. I don't know the Big Answers, but that Bird needs to fly South out of this brutal North Eastern Winter .... And so do I.

Woke up, yesterday and once again, to snow. I'm gonna get me a possum rifle and go shoot Puksatawny Phil ... whatever his name is.

Disgruntled and Too-Tired-to-be-Witty in Philly.

Storms in My Head

It was one of the people that Dr. Freud wrote about who talked about having "storms in her head." Houses may or may not be haunted but the minds of Members of Clan Anthropos are occupied with no shortage of ghosts. This weekend, M and I watched three movies ... all about haunting memories ....

Brickman and Allen's Annie Hall
A Spanish Film: City without Limits
An Indy-Israeli Documentary Film: The Flat

Thinking just of these films where a neurotic New Yorker has to deal with loss -- in a sense, all memory is about things-lost -- of a lover and, in the latter two films, where adult children work, after a death of a keeper of secrets and memories dies, to uncloak ghosts of their ancestors' experience ... in one, memories relating to the Spanish Civil War, and, in the other, memories of the Holocaust of WWII.

Linkings ...

Memories, Secrets, Loss and the ability to produce Narratives are all part of the equipment of humankind. It was the same weekend that an Internet collocutor sends a hyperlink to Odetta's Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child. Listening to the first couple of bars of Odetta singing immediately kindled both Odetta's version and Paul Robeson's.  The mere mention of the Woody Allen/Marshall Brickman film set off memories for a dear friend of ours ... telling us of how ashamed we should be for owning a copy of one of Woody Allen's films. The Spanish Film set ablaze memories of my Grandmother lighting tables full of candles to keep the memory of all of her relatives who had been slaughtered. As that memory fired, I began thinking of the generations who would remember all the recent massacres ... in Iran and Iraq during their war ... in Syria ... in a half-dozen African countries ... in Serbia ... in Armenia ... in Hungary and Poland and the Ukraine .... in Stalin's Russia and in Mao's China. Memories flood .... chain ... couple ... overtake the mind.

I suppose it was in an attempt to bind these memories that I became stuck on a song that I occasionally may have thought of in the past 50+ years ... a meditative and haunting song ... "The breath is Yours ... and its body is Yours ... Have mercy, please have mercy on Your handiwork."

The haunting melody came to me after the Spanish Film on the way to have dinner with M and my friend and his wife who hates Woody Allen because of what she remembers about him. I drove singing it ... I walked about the house singing it and humming it ... M had to remind me that toning it down -- just a hair -- might permit other voices to be heard ... I woke up and was humming it in the middle of the night ... and then in the morning? it was there, once again.

I remember (there it goes, again) using Tiger Balm for headaches 40+ years ago. An Old Vietnamese remedy ... mostly camphor, I seem to recall ... a spot placed in the middle of the forehead to move the focus of the pain from the vascular system to the skin. Memories ... Storms in my Head ... maybe are arranged in such a manner as to cover collections of more painful memories. They same Doctor from Vienna called these "Screen Memories" .... for me? I suspect I'll sing that song in my head for many days until some of the more painful memories have flown away ... "like a dream flies away."

Two of our grandchildren from far away will be arriving later, today, and will help drive some of these storms offshore ... the storms will begin their orbit around the Seven Seas and -- I have no doubt of this -- will return.



 

"They rain and snow on everyone"

A cyber-friend sent to a little discussion group to which we both belong a hyperlink to a Last Quarter Joni Mitchell singing "Clouds." Years, ago, it seemed so much safer to write about my Wing-tipped shoes that were gathering dust in the bottom of my closet ... I wondered then how a totally impersonal time takes "a man and turns him to lore." Some details have accumulated in the twenty years that have, since, gone by.

Here's the hyperlink

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ

My friend reported how moved she was by the depth of the older "Joni" ... 'even if her performance now lacked the high notes.'

Joni, I guess your clouds don't only "rain and snow on everyone" ... much more. We watched you when you -- and we -- were kids, playing and frolicking in your youth and ours. Indeed, "They rain and snow on everyone." When I was very young, we moved about, as my Dad was seeking to earn a living and as my Mom took care of her brood ... spread out over eight years ... born from 1940-1948 ... all now grandparents ... all now orphans. We lived in places with stoops and then in houses with porches ... places from which neighbors could be heard and spoken to. 

I've pissed and moaned a lot about shoveling -- I called these storms -- 'The Snows of Killa-ma-Mojo" in honor of the back-aches and arrhythmias my shoveling managed to produce.... Curious, though, how it takes bad weather, these days, to emancipate many of us from our heated and air-conditioned homes into the social street.

                                                            "Some storm, aye?"

                                                                 "Lotta snow."

                                                              (It's mid-February)

                            

                              "Did I get a chance to wish you and yours a Happy New Year."

                                                "Aw. Things just got busy, I suppose."

M talks often about her wish for a big wraparound porch. Her childhood house was built in the mid-1950's with a porch built in the back ... a screened-in porch from which neighbors could barely be seen. That's not the porch which, I suspect, she has in mind.

Don't know. Woke up this morning with a memory from the post-9/11 Winter or Spring, I can't recall. M and I were to pick up my Mom and Dad and take them to a wedding. My parents, in their Last Quarter and Overtime, lived in Northern New Jersey and the wedding was in Brooklyn ... a half hour to the Lincoln Tunnel and then over one of the midtown crossings from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

We arrived early ... Dad was in a huff. Mom, already pretty bald and lost in the haze of beginning dementia, got something ... maybe pleasure ... out of hiding things from her husband of 60+ years, at that time. This time, she flipped and hid her wig. I think M found it but Mom refused to put it on. Dad was beside himself ... dissociated with helplessness and frustration and, I can only imagine, disappointment. It's hard to keep in mind that clouds really do "rain and snow on everyone."

Told my Dad:

                                                            "Let's go. I got it."

Dad had not been there (ex-WWII soldier boys left a lot behind in their theaters of war) and, other times, had been there. 

                                                             "I got it, Dad." 

I put on Mom's wig and gathered everybody into the car, chauffeuring them through cities and towards tunnels and bridges protected by young men bearing automatic rifles ... soldiers keeping our streets safe, as Joni also reminded us of years ago, "for our wives and our daughters."  

New York, I guess, is New York. No one stopped the guy in the wig driving his accomplice and two old farts through these "hard targets." 

"All's well that ends well," I suppose. When we arrived at the venue, Mom willingly donned her wig and, now, "wigged out," as she assuredly was, went in to see her great niece get married. Mom walked in on her own steam and on the arms of her husband and son, escorted by her daughter-in-law who by now was far more daughter than in-law.

Perhaps ... just perhaps ... sleep is disrupted in the Last Quarter in order to permit us quiet time to remember. This morning I remembered driving through the Lincoln Tunnel with more hair than I've had -- or likely will have -- in these days, and months and years that have followed.

                                            Life rains and snows on every living thing.