Limitations

A friend pointed out Willie Nelson's "Penis Poem," about which he notes:

"I've outlived my pecker."

He then goes on to elucidate the world about what does and what doesn't work in his pants at 75 years of age. Funny piece, I suppose. Worth a look-see.

I've been feeling tired ... Maybe, the title of this blog should be changed to "Napping in the Last Quarter" or, even: "Dragging my Ass in the Fourth Quarter."

Most days, I arise with a wish to play and a feeling that I can; not this morning. I laid in bed quite a while at a time long before GuntherDog was interested or willing to come downstairs for his morning toilet in the yard. I have a weekend coming up ... a talk ... a book-signing a hundred miles away ... hanging out with M ... meeting my Spawn und GrosseSpawn for brunch somewhere, also one hundred miles away. And I, once again, feel like Deflated Mouse and not at all like Strauss' Flying Bat ... der Fleiter Maus. Wondered if I haven't given too many people -- including myself -- the impression that I can do it all ... like the Ph**king Energizer Bunny! Fooling oneself is a dangerous thing. Frankly, I don't know how Old Man Bernie Sanders has kept it up (sorry for the pun, Mr. Nelson) for so long.

The Fourth Quarter is not necessarily dominated by no energy but is occasioned by low energy. There are two prayers in the faith tradition in which I grew that come to mind.

ברוך אתה ה׳ אלוקינו מלך העולם הנותן ליעף כוח

Blessed are you Ruler of the Universe who gives strength to the weary.

and

ברוך אתה ה׳ אלוקינו מלך העולם שהחיינו וקימנו לזמן הזה.

Blessed are you Ruler of the Universe who has livened us up 

and kept us standing erect and helped us reach this time day.

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As Porky Pig repeatedly opined: "Th---at's all, folks" ... at least for today.

And the Seasons They Go Round & Round

Joni Mitchell, as I recall, stopped discussing those Seasons after 20 years of age ... so much, indeed, does occur in those 20 or so years during which time we're learning that we can pretty-well figure out what we need to figure out. At the close of High School (I'm so glad I never graduated), lots of kids take on the patina of those dances we observed in Mom and Dad. Some kids go to actual dances, to Proms ... Gowns and Tuxes, Corsages and Boutonnières, drunk and out till dawn  ... just like Mom and Dad, or, at least, as their Mom and Dad may have dressed up in their costumes.

I suppose the next Quarter of Life's Circle Game, as she called this progression of stages, is spent in actualizing those things that we figured out or thought we had in the earlier one. We build our little fortresses and some of us have babies. Oftentimes, things go pretty smoothly. Kids until the age of 5 or 6 can be picked up by their pants-belt and carried off from protestations about not wanting to leave Grandma's house or not ready to leave their play ... outside ... in inside play-areas ... or on the beach. M and my first two kids were less than a year and a half apart and I must've felt pretty darn cool to be able to carry them off the beach, together.

Sometime during our Third Quarters they begin leaving and proceeding in their own Circle Games. Nasties trick of Creation? They do that just as we're losing our parents ... we begin to or actually say good-bye on both ends ... to the totable kids and to the parents we carry in their repose. Indeed Khalil Gibran was on the cusp of the Second Quarter yielding to the Third when he wrote his piece on ... or made peace with ... the Children he apparently never had.

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, 

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, 

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, 

but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children

as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, 

and He bends you with His might 

that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, 

so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I woke up, as I have so many times in the past 30 or so years, thinking of my role as a Father. How many songs have been written since Malachi suggested that the Messianic Days for which he longed were dominated by his God's ability "to return the hearts of the parents onto their children and the hearts of those children onto their parents." I think it was the mystics of Bobov who put Malachi's closing words to an intoxicating song. Indeed, I recall being intoxicated on more than one occasion as a young man singing and dancing to those lyrics. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young asked that we Teach Our Children Well and Tim Hardin -- the guy who Bob Dylan called the best of the songwriters of that era bemoaned the fact in a song whose title has been lost to the Fog of Middle Age that what the Father feared most was that he would repeat precisely what he, himself, had done as a youth.

Song after song confirms that belief that we cannot know or appreciate our children's lives. I was reminding one of my middle-aged kids of a conversation we had had 33 years ago. He walked in the front door ... I was sitting and reading in the next room during an afternoon break in my work. I offered up: 

"Hey, how was school."

His response was pithy and to the point:

"Don't gimme any of that psychoanalytic bullshit."

There is, I suppose, in each generation a certain sense that we took ethics and values, wit and wisdom, decency and tolerance ... to their final and finished form. Dammit ... We got it figured out. We were strong, like T-Rex. We knew just about all there was to know like my friend T-Ruth. And we were about as vile as T-Rump. And we had it all figured out, solved, and tied in a bow and then our kids hit puberty ... puberty hits back ... and we get force-fed a dose of our own limitations and a spoonful of humility.

Two brothers I knew and admired ... two psychoanalysts ... both dead, now ... Harold and Abe Feldman each told me (they didn't talk much to each other when I knew them) that one of their Dad's favorite expressions was:

"In this World, y'gotta take your medicine 

but y'don't gotta lick the spoon."

Joni Mitchell, again ... ".... and the Seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down ... we're captured on a carousel of time!" I wish my kids an easy trek through the late adolescences of their kids ... through the years of Pubic Shock and Awe!

With love ... 

On the Exquisite Sensitivity of The Last Quarter

I -- with great fondness -- recall my friend E. He died when he was in his mid-90's -- not all that many years ago. E and I met on my first day of psychoanalytic training. He was in his late 50's or early 60's and the oldest person in the class; I was in my 20's, still, and the youngest. We had little superficially in common. His two kids were my age, already, or nearly so. Our third wouldn't be born for a year and our older kids were 8 and 9. Funny, as I begin to put the picture together and realize that the older one of M and my kids is 50, now, I realize that this was 41 years ago.

E and I became friends and years later, after he had already retired, we were still doing lunch, together. In his late 80's, he would drive to whatever restaurant we had agreed upon. Then, his kids coaxed him into giving up his ten year old unmarred car to one of his grand-daughters who was struggling to get life together. In his remaining years, he mourned the car lost to late-adolescent "it wasn't my fault ... the cop-car hit me." Come to think of it, neither of my older kids ever had an accident that was their fault. One car was hit by a police van, in another "it wasn't my fault" mishap his grandma's car was assaulted by a pregnant woman who was driving too fast, and, in still another, my Citroen SM was driven off the road by one of the Rough Riders.

Ah, but back to the restaurants. It was at least on a number of occasions that E would order a sandwich and coffee. If the waiter could divine the future, he would've always brought the coffee, first, for, when he did, he would get cut a new one by E for being so stupid as to bring the coffee first. Not so bad, as on each occasion, I would excuse myself for a moment, find the waiter and slip them a fiver while apologizing for my friend's rudeness. E was -- even later in his 90's -- among the brightest people I had known but still, had he a cane, he woulda been one of those cane-shaking old men criticizing a perennially young World that was leaving him behind ... leaving him behind at something like Mach II. 

...........

Truth be told? I should get me a cane, just as E shoulda. This election year, I feel particularly sensitive. Each time one of the candidates for the American Presidency accuses another of voting for something that was part of a larger legislative bill that they felt compelled to vote for or, alternatively,  of voting against something that was packed into a larger bill which most good-willed folk might feel obligated to block, I want to shake my Grandfather's cane and scream at the accuser. Each and every time I hear a candidate misrepresent another's behavior, I feel -- even if quietly -- enraged. I tell myself that the USA could solve its debt problem if tickets were sold for public beatings of politicians who misrepresented to the American public. Yrs, indeed. This Old Guy would pay to watch the misrepresenter get his or her ass whipped!

Maybe, as a younger man, I would have shrugged off such politics ... well ... to politics. As the shadows grow longer, I feel more and more sensitive to the quotidian sins of the World. And more generally, when any A asks whomever B a simple question and B tries to bite-off A's head -- especially, if I'm A -- I get really pissed inside. Maybe Playing in the Last Quarter is closer in levels of sensitivity to being a child ... vulnerable and at least a bit  more needy than once-upon-another-time in the First Three Quarters.

Crotchety is another way of saying Sensitive, I suppose.

"On the Rivers of Babel" ... We Wept

Oh, my Lord, what of "The City on the Hill?" What of the dreams we never let go of after the Civil Rights movement?  How can it be that playground bullies are sought out ... guttersnipes and confabulators/prevaricators are followed? "How shall we sing the song of the Lord on foreign soil?" Indeed, how? Waking up to the Primary Election results here in the USA ... Oh, my! My generation of Fourth Quarter types? Many of us mourn, this morning!                               Psalm 137 1By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, we also wept when we remembered Zion.		אעַל נַהֲרוֹת | בָּבֶל שָׁם יָשַׁבְנוּ גַּם בָּכִינוּ בְּזָכְרֵנוּ אֶת צִיּוֹן:
2On willows in its midst we hung our harps.		בעַל עֲרָבִים בְּתוֹכָהּ תָּלִינוּ כִּנֹּרוֹתֵינוּ:
3For there our captors asked us for words of song and our tormentors [asked of us] mirth, "Sing for us of the song of Zion."		גכִּי שָׁם שְׁאֵלוּנוּ שׁוֹבֵינוּ דִּבְרֵי שִׁיר וְתוֹלָלֵינוּ שִׂמְחָה שִׁירוּ לָנוּ מִשִּׁיר צִיּוֹן:
4"How shall we sing the song of the Lord on foreign soil?"		דאֵיךְ נָשִׁיר אֶת שִׁיר יְהֹוָה עַל אַדְמַת נֵכָר:
5If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget [its skill].		האִם אֶשְׁכָּחֵךְ יְרוּשָׁלִָם תִּשְׁכַּח יְמִינִי:
6May my tongue cling to my palate, if I do not remember you, if I do not bring up Jerusalem at the beginning of my joy.		ותִּדְבַּק לְשׁוֹנִי | לְחִכִּי אִם לֹא אֶזְכְּרֵכִי אִם לֹא אַעֲלֶה אֶת יְרוּשָׁלִַם עַל רֹאשׁ שִׂמְחָתִי:
7Remember, O Lord, for the sons of Edom, the day of Jerusalem, those who say, "Raze it, raze it, down to its foundation!"		זזְכֹר יְהֹוָה | לִבְנֵי אֱדוֹם אֵת יוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם הָאֹמְרִים עָרוּ | עָרוּ עַד הַיְסוֹד בָּהּ:
8O Daughter of Babylon, who is destined to be plundered, praiseworthy is he who repays you your recompense that you have done to us.		חבַּת בָּבֶל הַשְּׁדוּדָה אַשְׁרֵי שֶׁיְשַׁלֶּם לָךְ אֶת גְּמוּלֵךְ שֶׁגָּמַלְתְּ לָנוּ:
9Praiseworthy is he who will take and dash your infants against the rock.		טאַשְׁרֵי | שֶׁיֹּאחֵז וְנִפֵּץ אֶת עֹלָלַיִךְ אֶל הַסָּלַע:

"der Fledermaus"

Alas! I'm feeling much more like "DeFlated Maus" ... than der Fledermaus! No wind under these  bat-wings, today ... Anyhow ... Nothing like Strauss's Bat ...  Feeling, I fear, the Burn of the Fourth Quarter. And a burn there is to this getting on in years crap.

It wasn't GuntherDog showing his age or M's surgery or helping with her recovery that got to me ... just, I fear, the years ... my years. When I began these postings 3 years ago, it seemed kinda funny. "Playing in the Last Quarter! Yeah! I can do this forever." Well, today it feels like "not forever."

Two nights ago, had dream that included a house being blown off the shore ... under water. That's it. I am temporarily underwater. Wonder indeed, how Bernie Sanders keeps up the pace of running for POTUS. 

Bernie ... You're my hero. While all these clowns (excluding the Gov of Ohio) 

are playing seventh grade taunts, you just keep up a pace made for younger folk ...

and with a kind of Old-Guy-from-Brooklyn verve. 

Verve and Nerve ... 

that's the Old-Guy-from-Brooklyn RIGHT STUFF! 

Trump can't decide ifhe likes support from David Duke! 

Rubio intimates that Trump has a small trumpet! 

Huckabee is afraid to challenge Trump for ... well ... for being Trump! 

Cruz is getting off on spreading rumors!

And poor Dr. Carson ... can't tell what he's up to.

Considering the pace Sanders is keeping up, he'd be better off having a Cardiologist on stage for the debates rather than a Pediatric Neurologist ... just in case. Ben is better for the Nymph Infants on stage ... the Phucking Babies ... they could use some neurosurgery ... maybe a rostral leuchotomy ... hey, maybe a lobotomy? Trump, Cruz and Rubio playing in new release of the Living Dead!

But me? Little things are energically-speaking, bankrupting me, these days. Showed and discussed a movie (Radio Flyer) about child abuse, yesterday, to a bunch of friendly clinicians? ... came home tired. And the little stuff that I'm not supposed to sweat:

• Did the laundry? I fretted to myself about turning shirts inside out.
• Garbage day? Again!
• Peeling a Winter Squash? Maybe I need to sit down.
• Time to wake up, today? As my Hungarian Mother would say: Yoy, Ishtinem!

Any case ... I have every belief that I'll get my Old-Guy-Brooklyn-Mojo back ... but not today! Today, I'll have to live vicariously through Bernie! Hillary is likely to beat yer ass but ... yer all I got ... 

Go, Bernie, go!

The Naive Blogster!

For some years, now, I've -- at least from time to time -- been haunted by a tune and some lyrics from, I think, the 50's ... the 1950's. Something like:

Take away the past

It will bring no relief

Only heartache and grief

Take away the past!

The tune is pretty fresh in my mind but The Google -- as I've heard some of my older confreres call the search-engine that has supplanted the Funk n' Wagnall's -- has failed me, this time. Old Man Freud suggested that neurotics "suffer from reminiscences." Well, maybe, not just neurotics.

I do, as a therapist, get to accompany people on their reappraisals of their own lives. There are times, certainly, with denizens of the Fourth Quarter that I have shared my sense that we all do, indeed, suffer from our appraisals of our selves, our accomplishments and even our relationships. I find myself dealing with a sadness that I indulged my interests ... many of my interests. Scriptural Texts, Mathematics, Teaching, Administration, Psychoanalysis and Writing have collectively joined to take up much of my time since the 1960's (not the 1970's which we call the 1960's!), alongside Husbanding and Parenting ... and for the past two decades ... Grandparenting.* I wonder about the balances that I worked out or that fortuitously or infortuitously worked themselves out over the first Three Quarters. I don't fret much about it and it has been, for me, a pretty good ride. 

Still, I suffer from disappointments. I think I mentioned this in a blog posting during the last election cycle. I suspect there is a universal experience that relates to a fantasy that in my mind plays out as:

I thought I had that problem solved.

As a trivial example ... M and I live in an old house that once was a Presbyterian Widow's Home. We've been here for 37 years. While in some sense, we own the house ... in another way of thinking we are more like Landed Immigrants and/or Temporary Residents. We have a sort of Green Card which allows us to play house. Frankly, the mice have a more permanent lease and every so many years they appear and make that more obvious. I think it was a Bedouin who I once heard saying that the Middle East quibbling over who owns this or that land is pure silliness. His ancestors had been occupying the Middle East just about forever.

Ach! It's not the mice, though, that tickles my mind, this morning. I was thinking of my curious thoughts about our toilets. We have maybe three times as many toilets as we have butts to sit on them ... if you don't count GuntherDog, anyway ... and he -- mostly, anyhow -- is an outdoor plumbing kinda guy. Any case ... I grow up in a family where my Father fixed our stuff and, I suppose, felt it was among my tasks in life to fix them ... raised as I was at Papa's knee.

I never quite learn. Each time I fix a toilet, I imagine that it's fixed for good; and each time, I experience disappointment when the next time comes and the flush/ballcock valve or flapper or wax seal or ... gives up the ghost and requires attention. I get over it ... I do!

More seriously, though, and every four years, I get to deal with other psychic shit. I'm referring to the neurotic disappointment I feel when I realize that my belief that certain things in society have been corrected -- once and for all, so to speak -- was fool's gold, at best. M and I shoulda learned by now but we haven't. We sit and listen to Cable News pundits (who call themselves "pundants," for some inexplicable reason) describing a grotesquerie of madnesses in the newest cast of characters from a bad Charles Adam's Horror-Comedy. 

Can it be that one of the presidential candidates says 

horrible things about Mexicans and considers general 

policies that act against a religion that represents 25% 

of the World's population?

Can it be that another one of the presidential candidates 

advertises support from two guys who speak of hunting 

those members of my .02% religious tribe who might 

not accept his messiah or another who advocates 

executions for gay folk?

Can it be that still another one of the presidential 

candidates openly says that a Muslim can't be 

President of the USA?

Can it be that yet and still another one of the presidential 

candidates sees nothing wrong with taking a million dollars 

in speaker fees from a company that the taxpayers had to 

bail out after really nasty and dangerous business practices?

Can some candidate who offends and insults and 

says -- more or less -- nothing actually be leading 

the polls in his party? A common school yard bully 

and rabble-rouser?

And can it be that a mixed race President can be 

treated with such contempt for 8 years? 

Any case ... Toilets are not fixed forever, the flow of political shit seems to show no signs of easing up and my Psyche seems to fight against both of these realities.  And still, this sometimes naive guy is surprised/shocked that all this wasn't fixed -- once and for all!

By the way ... In the name of full disclosure ... Like the other readers here who have endured more and much more than 60 years, I have lived under the administration of some ten Presidents. For me? Obama has been the first with whom I have been able to identify. A guy who thinks well ... a married  guy, like me ... a dad ... and unlike many of our Presidents, he seems to keep his trousers buckled when appropriate. 

* Grandparenting? Among the more strenuous Synchronized Olympian Sports!

"Who Can I Turn To? When Nobody Needs Me?"

It was more than 50 years ago that M and I went to see Anthony Newley and Cyril Richard do their magic on Broadway. I can't recall whether we ever saw Stop the World or whether "Who can I Turn To" is in Stop the World or Smell of the Greasepaint; Roar of the Crowd. With my memory as it is, these days? it could be in neither. 

Any case ... Stop the World? ...  Story of Littlechap, from birth to his death. Poor fella has one reaction to more or less everything:  'Stop the world!'  I sometimes think I know what he means. For him? Being born, going off to school, working as a tea-boy, and marrying the boss's daughter, after getting her pregnant ... each time screaming: 'Stop the World.'  Not quite so common in the Sixties as today, this out-of-wedlock pregnancy thing ... not sure the expression still exists in the Oxford English Dictionary ... I think it went the way of carburetors. Littlechap works for her Dad taking care of wife and two daughters. He keeps looking for a woman, tho, that will make him happy. He does becomes rich and famous ... runs for public office. When he's old, he gets it ... what Ecclesiastes said ... that most of life is bullshit except for relationship (Ecclesiastes' 'love of a woman')  what he always had—the love of his wife— was more than enough to sustain him. The writer of Ecclesiastes added: Fear of God! After Littlechap's wife dies, he is watching his daughter give birth to the son he never had and gives himself over to Death to save the little guy. Sad story. Sadder than Walter Mitty and ... with great music! 

The play I'm certain we did sometime in early 1965 was "Roar of the Greasepaint." Maybe "who can I turn to" was there. In any case, Anthony Newley's stuff was on my mind in the middle of the night listening to M struggle with the pain from the knee replacement. I think I've been averaging a couple of hours each night of sleep ... enough to sustain me. Maybe I'm learning to appreciate what is ... like Littlechap or Cockey, in the later play. Sleeplessness does give me time to remember songs ... I do a lot of songs in the middle of the night and have most often over the past several quarters arisen with "A Song in My Heart." I have, I suppose, my own little i-Pod of songs recorded ... religious ones, silly ones, Broadway tunes and crooning Croons. I think I must have them on some special kind of unconscious Shuffle that picks an appropriate melody to match the latest events ... residue from the day's madness (if you follow Freud).

It's been more than a month since I sat here writing about "gittin' on in the Last Quarter"  ... last time was day after M's first post-surgical trip .... 6+ hours in the car followed by considerable pain. Progress is slow with these surgeries and my nursing duties continue. To paraphrase Delmore Schwartz, With Last Quarter Comes Responsibility. Maybe Achebe Chinua had it right: Things Fall Apart!

Any case ... "I will be back."