Trump and Life Expectancy

When you -- against your own will, common sense and even the advice and "kindness of others"--  enter the Fourth Quarter, your Life Expectancy here in the USofA is 24 years ... 21 if the accidents of prenatal life have blessed you with male genitals. (Freud spoke of Phallic Narcissism ... I suppose all narcissistic inclinations do come with a price! Apparently, a penis costs 3 years.) By 70, you need only plan for 16+ and 14+ years of  light lunches and Depends, respectively.

Lemme cheekily parse that just a bit more. If you're 70, now, you're most likely to live through 4 terms of Donald Trump as President, if you're a woman, and 3.5 terms of his prolonged leadership, if'n you're a man. Admittedly, that doesn't take into account the likelihood that sometime after "the Donald" declares himself the only fit person since Nero to lead America back to Greatness, our little experiment in Democracy may have itself become the recipient of the Darwin Award that prizes those evolutionary freaks who due to their own idiocy have removed themselves from the pool of future evolutions.

It should be said that the USA -- with its own Greatness and Exceptionalisms  -- would, thereby, have become the first country on whom this honorary award has been bestowed. Up to now, it has been reserved for the likes of inventors who put wings on their Stetsons and fly off the Empire State Building, holding on to their hats, proudly proclaiming knowledge of a certain updraft due to come off the Hudson.

Kerrrr...splat!

Now, in fairness to His Towering Trumpness, I recall someone once offering up the notion that: 

anyone who thinks themselves fit to lead the Free World ... 

by the very virtue of that belief ... is not.

But there is a notable difference between the Trumpeter and most of the other candidates for President ... those nobleman and noblewomen who also claim competence in assuming a leadership role in the future of the soon-to-be (likely, in my lifetime!) 250 year old Republic that a bunch of whacked-out radicals put together believing that a Country could be created where  Free Enterprise could be joined together with the Social Contract. 

For, you see, Old Ladies and Gentlemen of the Last Quarter, the others -- by and large -- imagine that their programs and platforms are the moving parts that will lift America and Americans. In his Cult of Personality, Trump -- as he Tramps on Ben, Bernie, Carly, Chris, and Hillary; Jeb, Jim, and Joe; Lincoln, Marco, and Martin -- offers no real platform except his own Greatness and his charming ability to denigrate others. I don't want to leave out all the others that Trump depreciates ... the likes of Senator John McCain, Megyn Kelly, or President Obama ... but there are, indeed, too many, especially if one considers those Central Americans and Syrians who have sought comfort away from the poverty of wars in their countries and that are singled out by him to be seen as No-Goodniks.  

Let me say that I am pretty confident that many of Trump's supporters are good people and are looking for a strong leader to take them out of their struggles and protect them from a Warlike World. Still, I am a little annoyed that I could go out, as well, under one of those leaders that the World has known in the past who say little more than:

I'll purge our ranks of the destructive minority!

I am the only one capable of returning us to the Greatness which is our Right!

And I  -- and I, alone -- have the capacity to Throw Out the Bad 

and to Provide Goodness to the Good by Virtue of my Own Greatness. 

*********

Geez! I'm going with M to see a performance of Antigone, today ... For any who are yet to read/see this Sophoclean tragedy, I can do little but warn you:

Things don't always end well!

Follow the Road

M and my trip to Vermont to visit our Grandchild was in our older son's car. I suppose he lent it to us for some reason other than him wanting me to drive like an old lunatic through the Green Mountains at speeds double my age. Maybe, approaching 50, he gets a kick out of giving Dad the keys and telling him to stay outa trouble and get Mom home at a respectable hour. 

The reversals of life! Thirty plus years ago, he and his brother managed to have three car accidents. The last one was to my Citroen SM ... he bent the passenger side control arm ramming a curb ... disarming the sensibilities of my insurance company when they discovered that the only such control arm would have to be imported from New Zealand. Maybe my son still feels some guilt ... maybe I do for letting a twenty year old drive a Citroen Maserati?

Or maybe? Just maybe? He liked the idea of Mom and Dad having a workable GPS to guide them North and back South. And good thing, too. Heading back, the Leaf Lookers had loaded the roads. Millions of folk NEEDING to see the leaves change color before they drop. Old Folk going to see it before they drop? Any case ... Traffic stopped about 70 miles from the next junction. Inching along ... wondering why my left leg was called into this service of ... clutch ... clutch ... clutch  ... and clutch, again.We gave up!

We boogeyed off the road into the back roads of NE Pennsylvania and back over to NJ ... over hill and dale ... always guided by Phyllis, the name we've given to the female voice of Sonny-Boy's GPS ... Omniscient Phyllis who knows all.

In any case, Phyllis has an expression that she quietly notes as she recalculates the route after her unruly passengers go their own way:

Follow the road.

We did ... and still ... When a 300 mile/5 hour trek morphs into a 380 mile/9.5 hour Road Rally, one has plenty of time to rehash old questions, like:

Why are M and I driving in a 500 horsepower beast?

Why does my husband need to roar by that Corvette LT-1?

Why not drive one of those 

mid-Sixties hydropneumatic boats 

that just float along in automatique?

Why isn't my husband stopping for Gas out here in the Boonies?

What if I don't stop and we really do run out of Gas in Backwoods NJ?

and, finally,

Just what DOES Phyllis mean by: Follow the Road?

Well, I don't rightly know the answer to any of the above questions but I do and we did fascinate about the last one, in particular. Fifty years of marriage ... Fifty years of Following the Road. I know there are folk who plan, plan and plan some more. And M and I must have done some planning in order to arrive at today. But mostly ... Phyllis has got it: We followed the Road. Life is something Mathematicians call a Stochastic Process ... a progression whereby decisions are made not necessarily with a known end in sight but rather by probabalistically making a decision on where it makes sense to go to next. No judgement ... No fault ... Just lookin' out the window as the road unfurls and choosing as best y'can. 

One of the Good Brother Thomas Merton's prayers ... I suppose the one he's best known for ... begins:

My Lord I have no idea where I'm going.

and there's an ancient prayer that maybe expresses the pleasant surprise at having arrived at each seasonal holiday:

Blessed are you, God, King of the Universe, 

Who has Kept us Vital, 

Managed to Keep us Standing 

and Helped us Arrive at this Moment.

שהחיינו וקיימנו והגיענו לזמן הזה

Just Follow the Road, Howard!

Harvest Festival

Not much makes me travel 300 miles, each way. Every passing year and the roads seem to have stretched out. The looming knee surgery for M makes it difficult to drive ... after 50 years of copiloting, M has been demoted to "navigator." And, anyhow, she doesn't much like driving a clutch.

But, hey, our oldest grandchild is in school far away from her  home, her parents and matched-set sisters and her maternal grandparents. The paternal ones live even further away and still we all show up for Harvest Festival at the Kid's school.

I -- maybe twenty years ago -- wrote of how the Wing-tipped Shoes at the bottom of my closet did something towards counting the passing years. This weekend has been convincing in other ways. In addition to recognizing that I have grown progressively sensitive to gratuitous slights coming from others, M and my side-trip, yesterday, to a school just 45 miles East of the Mountain top house we all collectively rented for the weekend. M and I had lived and worked at that school 40+ years ago when our older children were 7 and 8. The mother of the child we were visiting, this weekend, would not arrive for another 5 years and Grandchildren were not yet even among the fantasies. That school was one for very bright adolescents struggling with autisms, schizophrenias and other serious childhood emotional illnesses. We lived there ... M, I, the Boys and Kazimierza Kuratowski the Saint Bernard who had been named after my mentor, the ex-Director of the Polish Akademie in Warczawa. I had, just a year before, given up Mathematics, and decided to work with people ... What a clever idea!

The school outside the then tiny town of Rindge, NH population 75! provided us with a trailor ... thanks to OPEC, that didn't necessarily mean reliable heat. M and I slept with Kaz-the-Big-Dog between us for heat and the boys had refused to get out of bed one morning when the outside temp was -35 and inside was -10. Good memories. M and I, before visiting the school, stopped in a Diner that didn't exist for Sunday eggs. I asked the youngish waitress wearing ink that just wasn't done in early 1970's in Rindge.

Hey, where's the Red Rooster?

The Red Rooster was a bar ... by no means a tavern ... a bar where staff at the school who were allowed to leave for 30 hours a week spent the very few pfennigs they weekly received on getting snockered on 151 proof Wild Turkey to bolster something or other. With kids, I can only recall going once and was privvy that time to a conversation between two young guys ... with a 90 year old farmer listening in.

The kids were describing their love life with their ladies in astronomical terms ... stars, moon, earths moving, ...

The old guy leaned in and looked them down spitting out have his rotgut drink with:

You kids are so full'o'shit.

When I fuck, there are sparks.

The Red Rooster was that kinda bar ... but back to the story. Not only hadn't the waitress heard of the Red Rooster but not the owners or the old diner waitresses, either. Apparently ... 40+ years is a long time. 

After eggs, we drove to the school. The field where our little trove of trailers were settled ... was no more. M explained that a lotta growth comes in 40 years. It further struck us that a goodly percentage of the trees growing in Rindge? just plain weren't there when we were. 

I could go on describing the Town Green that no longer was just Sander's Store and a Post Office ... the school where all the kids except our little ones were Blonde Finns named Aho .... 

Sad ... like the time I went looking for a house in Toledo where I had lived with my parents and sibs in the early '50's. M and I, indeed, were on a road trip to Chicago to visit this same grandchild maybe 16 years ago. M and I found the block that 2410 Lawrence was on ... the block where I first planted a garden of radishes and Swiss Chard ... found the block cut off by a fence overlooking an Interstate that was some thirty feet below groundlevel and running at 65 mph.

I know I'm not the first to discover that you really can't go home ... still, other folks' accounts never quite got through. M and I will head back today ... her surgery is 6 weeks off and our older son turns 50 after the turn into 2016.

I could use a drink.

Hope and Disillusionment

Finished seeing the Visitors to my office, yesterday, and went to see a thoughtful man ... Itamar Lurie ... maybe just beginning the Fourth Quarter ... talking about his work among the damned ... working as a facilitator of groups from the the opposing sides of Middle East conflicts (his and the Others') and the complexity of working with "these Others" individually with their life crises. It was -- no other way to describe it -- moving. I was moved to Tears by the Hopelessness: justified or otherwise ... moved to Laughter by his choice in going on with Good Humor and Love, nonetheless. 

"Those who seed with Tears? With Joy will they gather." 

(from Psalms -- where?)

So much carnage ... M who is having a rough time walking listens to the News a great deal ... me, as well. I see Wars and Hatred most places my eyes point ... Acts of Kindness here and there to act as counterpoint, I suppose.

My visitors often get caught up in wondering what the use of going on is ... They see little but illness and death coming towards them. What can an Old Man say? Those of us blessed enough to make it into the Last Quarter and beyond are not unaware of the reality ... Dark times are "nearer than you think." Yes, yes ... 

"Always think of the Bright Side of Life." 

It's a Good Joke and a Necessary Illusion for continuing to entertain the three things the Writer of Ecclesiastes leaves the reader: The Love of Another (Others?); the Love of God; and the attempt to Lead the Good Life. Everything else the writer who calls himself Kohelles describes as Foul Wind ... as so much Farting.

Is there meaning in this Game of Life? Is their purpose in my life? There was a Mathematician (Conway?) who developed a game that allowed the player to play -- well -- God ... to choose a certain initial state for the Universe of Settlements and then to predict how that initial state will play out in thousands of generations where the only rules are that too close and too far both lead to destruction for the unfortunates that are either ... too far or too near to their fellow folk. I'm quite certain that one can find computerized versions on line but our human propensity to see the Other ... the Ethically or Politically or Racially Different ... as the enemy seems unending. 

Go back to the drawing board, Dr. Conway. 

Life is more complicated than any two-rule Game.

Is that among the anguishes of Playing in This Last Quarter? Knowing full well that our fantasy that Wars and Hatred would come to an end during our Pass-By ... our tenure in Life ... was just that ... a fantasy.

I maintain Hope that M's surgery this Fall will bring her relief from walking-pain ... that my kids and grandkids will thrive and that the sundry illnesses in my family will resolve. I am not-at-all hopeful that the Middle East will settle or that the Libs and the Conservatives will stop their deprecating attacks on each other or that violence will stop in the Americas. 

And since I cannot do anything else, today, M and I will travel to go visit one of our teenage Grand-spawn! We'll get in a car and look at the Autumn's Beauty and pause just now and then to cry over the carnage.

.......

So, here's a fragment from the late Stanley Kunitz's poem, Halley's Comet, written when he was very old:

Miss Murphy in the first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the stormtracks

of the Milky Way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there'd be no school tomorrow.

Funny guy, Stanley!

Looking Back ... aghast!

It's approaching the Four Year Anniversary ... of my beginning to write down these thoughts about living in the Fourth and Last Quarter of Life. 

It was the 16th of October in the year 2011. 

And no god spake unto Howard, saying:

"Write down ye thoughts, Brother!"

It was four years ago, some 9 weeks after the fall in the Garden that changed my habit of occasionally writing a ditty ... a bit of doggerel ... about the accumulating years on my Birthday Cards into this more frequent and formal -- still sometimes humorous but occasionally and arguably MORBID -- set of reflections on my dotage. I began:

If you're reading this, I'd like to think you were open-minded 

and moving through your fifties or sixties. 

If a good long life is 84 years (four score and four .... 

about the time it took a fledgling democracy to produce the Gettysburg Address), 

then the Fourth Quarter begins at 63 or thereabouts. 

Need I add that we have no way to know for certain how much time we have left 

(one of the curses of awareness ... knowing that we don't know) .... 

My grandchildren are keenly aware that I'm 

-- in the order of things -- next to go, so to speak ... 

that I'm an orphan ... 

that I strain when I do hard labor around the house and 

that grandma is forever warning me not to work too hard (more about that later) ... 

and that I'm a little slow on the comeback (more on processing speed, later, too).

Zo! Now, being maybe 3 Blog Postings away from my Happy 4th, it seems fitting to spend some time reflecting on these four years. I am committed to rereading the 400+ postings over these weeks ... I am a little fearful of what I'll find. If I'm true to my age, I fear, there shall have been a great deal of repetition ... telling the same story over-and-over, again ... Sorry, if that turns out to be true. M and my kids would tell us how my Dad would retell his jokes and his stories about being an older soldier in WW2. Similarly, I wish I could say that there hadn't been any changes in my functioning ... but there have been. My Driving has deteriorated ... ask M. My body has acquired new consultants ... among them, a kindly Cardio-Electrophysiologist who looks like he could date my oldest grandchild ... and others, too. My Pill Hotel has grown additional floors ... My Central Processing Unit has slowed ... and the Photographic Memory I once has dead spots on its hard-drive ... kinda like the Starter-Motor on a '56 Packard. 

So, off I go ... Older than all the Republican Candidates for the 2016 Presidency ... still near the same age or younger than the leading three Democratic contenders ... Hillary, Joe and Old Man Bernie. 

Off to reread my ramblings ... a little afraid of what I'll find.  

Spotty Contradictions

The Last Quarter  

A Spinning Compass  

Pointing now to the Past full of Kindnesses  

and 

Now to Old Sins from and against those Near and Dear  

--- Now and Then ---

Have I given up on figuring out the Sum of Kindness and Sin? Maybe that's part of being a Denizen of Quarter Four. The Kids say: It is what it is! I guess: It's gonna be what it's gonna be!

The new technology is pretty cool. My youngest Grandchild and her Parents gave me a wristband that calculates my steps and my sleep ... My sleep? It tells me how long I've slept and how long I've been restless and how long awake. Is it good to know these things? Maybe. I get to go to a website each morning ... I just did ... and find out the Sum of my steps and Sleep and more. Soon, I suspect, it will calculate details of our sex lives ... duration? thrusts? peak moments? Peek-a-boo!

The Pope is coming to Philadelphia ... Wish I was going to join the throngs of devotees who will follow his words. He does seem like the Good Shepherd. Instead, on Television, I get to watch those devoted, first, to this political whacko and, then, to another. Have I become jaded? Is the whatever off the rose? I dunno.

Here, in Amerika ...

Can there really be a Candidate for President 

who thinks he has nothing to do 

but claim magical powers to heal the scars of the 7 Billion?

Can there actually be multiple Candidates for President 

who proudly pronounce their ability to smash unions?

How many Candidates for President are there 

who think there can is reason not to elect a President 

whose idea of The One God is a hair-different than the WASP ideal? 

How many Candidates for President do, indeed, tell me what they really believe?

Hell! How many Talking Heads are willing to tell me what they believe?

I listen, each day, and have little to no idea what is articulated belief and what is Spin? Spin has become OK. Spin is Reality and Reality is Spin!

Amerika? The Land of the Free and the Brave. Anyone can become anything, here in Amerika. Just look at the composition of the recent debate: A child of Indian Immigrants ... a Black Man who grew up in poverty and became an acclaimed Pediatric Surgeon ... a couple of kids of Cuban Immigrants ... a Woman who rose from being an Administrative Assistant to great prominence in the World of Business ... a Billionaire who thinks the World of Himself, though maybe less of all the others for whom he, nonetheless, professes Great Love .... a number of Illuminaries -- Clerical and Lay -- who have such Faith in the Creator that they see no need for Birth Control or Science ....  

Wow! (or Whoa!) 

My wristband tells me that I was Restless for 32 minutes, last night. I don't expect the day, necessarily, to be much better. 

Maybe I'll have time to ponder a question that Maimonides toyed with about 800 years ago: If Christians, Jews and Moslems (listed lexicographically) are all monotheists, believers in One God,  that is, must they not -- of necessity -- all be singing the praises to and beseeching kindnesses from the same God?

It was quite narcissistic of me, I suppose, to have imagined -- as I suspect I did and maybe do -- that all the pettiness and hatred of the World would have come to an end during my tenure standing erect here on this planet. Children and old folk (like me, thee, the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis) are, I suppose, a bit naive.

Alas!

Trump and the Man in the Beard

M and I moved from Southern New Hampshire to Philadelphia and it Suburbs in 1974. I was to teach and run a school and make the transition from being a Mathematician to someone who works with people and their heartaches. We had taught and worked at a school there that housed about 70 very bright but very disturbed kids in the Woods of Rindge, NH. It was a mixed bag ... the area that is. NH had been run by the Manchester Union Leader in the 60's and early 70's ... William Loeb. He was a Law and Order, Gun Rights sort of guy and anti-Labor proponent. Really disliked the school. As due to libel suits (there used to be Libel Suits) it wasn't good for him to be in the state, he sent some henchmen to examine the school. I forgot the exact words in the article of the Union Leader but it was something like:

A skid-row scenario run by Hippies.

Actually, the school was run by an Olde Newe England couple, Henry Curtis Patey and Adelaide Patey. Everything that went on at this wonderfully crazy place had to be cleared by Henry. Henry had hired M to work the Library and run reading programs. I was to be a Chaplain, Math and Philosophy teacher, and builder of Geodesic Domes. Together, we did relief houseparenting and were expected to be on-campus for 144 hours each week and were allowed 4 other hours of individual leave. 

True! There was a somewhat permissive attitude on campus. For instance, the 13-19 year olds (the school population) were not prevented from hanging pin-ups of that day --pretty mild in  comparisons to today's still and moving crotch-shots), leading to a confrontation between one of Loeb's henchman:

Henchman (pointing to a picture on a dorm wall): "That's pornography."

The Kid responds: Hell! I don't even own a pornograph.

There still is -- moreso than in Verrrr-mont -- in New Hampshire a pretty Conservative minority and a lot of inbreeding, as far as I know.

All this by way of preface. Last Thursday night, The Trumpster famously listened to a man accusing President O'Bama (I can't resist making him Irish) of being not an American, un-American, a Muslim, and by implication someone who was allowing the setting up of Radical Training Camps, while he was -- with a broad brush -- demonizing all followers of the Muslim faith. Trump gave a number of reasons for not responding in the style of John McCain in 2008 when McCain made it clear that his opponent was a good family man, a patriot American, etc., even if on important principles they disagreed and he was seeking to unseat him due to those differences. Trump had said nothing.

What struck me was not only his willingness to say nothing -- he later said that he had no moral obligation to defend the President (whom he typically calls Obama -- after all, Trump has really never given in on the President being a citizen). But his explanations.

1) He hadn't heard the offensive parts.

2) Obama was carrying on a campaign against Christians.

3) He was not obligated to defend each nasty remark about Obama.

Now, the flip side of his excuses might be thought of, as follows.

1) There was a bearded young man in the audience quite a few rows further away that Trump shaking his head in disbelief and, apparently, hearing quite well.

2) The example Trump gave before a group of Evangelical Christians to demonstrate that there was a war on Christmas (I thought his calling the Eucharist "My cracker and sip of wine" was a mocking of among the most sacred of Christian practices) was that walking into Macy's at Chistmas time, one was confronted, presumably, by an attempt to make one's visit into the department store a seasonal one for all Americans and others, too). How odd! Beyond that, O'Bama comes across as a man who embraces the Gospel of Peace as laid out in the New Testament ... and its general ethos, that espoused, say, by our visiting Pope Francis.

3) Maybe this one puzzles me most. Do I want someone representing my country who: 

offends women; 

corrects for the same by saying that he cherishes them or that they're beautiful;

cannot apologize for his frequent verbal flatulence;

criticizes one of our soldiers from Viet Nam 

who lived in captivity for years and served his Country for decades;

feels no "moral obligation" to defend our President 

who must for another 16 months lead the world through troubled waters;

says thigs like 

"They say they'll take care of you but I KNOW HOW to do that and 

THEY DON'T ... BELIEVE ME;" 

(I don't, BTW, believe anyone who says "Believe me.")

attacks ethnic groups by playing a statistical game ... by generalizing from individuals to the entire subgroup of those living in the United States; 

who keeps saying that he loves us and that he doesn't have to tell us how he'll make Amerika great; only that he will; and

hasn't apologized for anything.

True, even in the Bible (which he claims to understand ... maybe I'll come to believe him ... but I'd bet against it), it takes 37 chapters in Genesis for anyone to take responsibility for their actions (Judah in the story of his twice-widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar ... where Judah says צדקה ממני ... "(In this matter), She's more righteous that I am."

I won't belabor his pandering to the religious ... Gag. 

Prayer: God give me the strength to live through the horrors of the World with its 34 Wars raging AND a Trump Presidency or the finances to relocate to New Zealand.

Apology: This Old Man Blog is supposed to be about gittin' on in years .... and here I am wagging my cain at Trump der Chump, the man who feels he can be elected on Promises and Believe-Me's.