Roll Over Beethoven

When John Lennon was shot in 1980, I had a dream that he was sitting in a circle in heaven with my father and my Uncle Jerry, two fabulous small Jews who had only just died in the late '70s. He seemed to be giving them some valuable pointers about how to get along in the new neighborhood. Mind you, I don't believe in heaven in the angels-with-harps sense of the word, but there he was with one mustachioed New Yorker on either side of him, holding each by the hand and OM-ing away. It was a great comfort to know that my father, a non-believer, and my uncle, a conventional shul-on-Yom Kippur Jew, would be supervised in the world-to-come by someone with spiritual chops. I'm thinking about John because just recently Chuck Berry and Jimmy Breslin left us and it reminds me that the older you get, seventysomething in my case, the more you experience celebrity loss as well as personal loss. The people who have most impressed themselves on my awareness are at least as old as I am and are, in the nature of things, shriveling and dying off like garden lettuce in mid-summer.

It's always noteworthy when two famous figures die within a few days of one another. It causes a shift in the planetary angle of inclination. Certainly, Carrie and Debbie had that effect. Or Robert Mitchum, the compelling noir actor, whose obituary was vacuumed off the page by Jimmy Stewart who died the next day. The public can only digest one forkful of nostalgia at any given time. At the moment, I imagine Chuck and Jimmy in some smoke-filled celestial backroom chomping on cigars and telling outrageous self-aggrandizing stories. I don't know if Chuck Berry was aware of Jimmy Breslin, but you have to think that Jimmy appreciated Berry's high-wire act on the guitar. Celebrity deaths have the same day-glo vibrancy as unexpected celebrity encounters in life. I once saw Mohammed Ali walking down Seventh Avenue. Not only was he the most enormous person I had ever seen, but the wavelengths he radiated didn't seem to belong to the normal visible spectrum. He was literally larger than life.

Ordinary, finite beings like us are fascinated by death because it's where we go to play catch with the infinite. Otherwise, we have to settle for contemplative practices and certain chemicals that give us a taste of the vast, boundlessness from which we came and to which we will all return. But most people sober up the next morning and go to work or the dentist. Life on this plane imposes a great many demands. Because we don't have the luxury of time to consider death as a philosophical construct, our ideas remain under-cooked and tough from the urgency of fear.

People seem to think of themselves as separate units of consciousness and death as something wholly other, a complete departure from life that comes at the end, in the bottom of the ninth. This is the temporal equivalent of flat earth theory which is enjoying a comeback. You just keep going until you fall off the edge. The story I tell myself is different. I imagine one all-encompassing, integrated web of life and death with colors and forms transmuting in and out of kaleidoscopic designs. Strawberries and tigers come and go. Birds, friends, mothers, rock musicians and journalists. I saw this in another dream some years ago. I'm standing in the middle of a field and all the people I have ever known are flowing past me from the right and from the left like a complex traffic pattern. They keep gracefully arriving and departing. They keep sprinkling me with the fairy dust of their natures. I am the hub of this particular wheel, one of an infinite number of wheels. I am also ephemeral, like you, like all the people coming and going in the dream. Like Chuck Berry's last squealing guitar riff. But the reverberations of that insistent sound, the bridge that it builds out of Beethoven and over the troubled water will go on and on. Moonlight Sonata meet Maybelline.


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Abundance

Almost every day we order pumpkin soup. The soup is such a revelation, we go back for it again and again. Setting down the bowl, aromatic with cinnamon and nutmeg ground fresh from local plants, the young waitress asks the same question another waitress had asked the day before. "Por favor me pregunto, do you think it's expensive here in Costa Rica?" We give a shrugging answer. "Sometimes, but never as expensive as it is at home." She tells us she grew up in Manuel Antonio, but is now one of the many dark-skinned Costa Ricans who can't afford the rent in her own village. Business is good...people speaking English, French, and German are arriving in droves at the hipster restaurant, Café Milagro, hungry for arepas and thirsty for Imperiale. The Servers in black shorts and red t-shirts, the Served in various states of undress. Great Barrington in the jungle.

The tropics are a different state of mind, a different context. Animals and plants in myriad arrangements proliferate as you approach the equator. You can see the density and diversity, the abundance of life forms, when you walk in the rainforest. Packs of monkeys, iguanas and striped frogs, blue morphos and many other butterflies, vines entwining trees interlocking to create the canopy. You can see it in the variety of shells that wash up on the beach. Mother-of-pearl and tangerine and iridescent green. A guide at the reptile preserve where we visit caymans and crocodiles at a safe distance explains. At this latitude, the seasonal variations are not extreme. The temperature only changes a few degrees from month to month. The diurnal rhythms also barely vary, resulting in twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness in every twenty-four under a sun that breathtakingly disappears into the sea every evening at 5:45 like clockwork, as they say. People on vacation briefly detach from their mojitos to watch this spectacle and actually applaud the divine magic trick as if Someone were taking a curtain call. Life seems to flourish when there is enough light and heat to go around, when scarcity isn't the prevailing mindset, unless you're serving tacos or harvesting mangoes. Then, it can be a great effort, a contest, as it is the world over.

Here in Amerika, the struggle for survival - between classes of people, between people and the earth that nourishes them - has now been orchestrated to a crescendo. Everything has been brought to a boil, to mortal combat that comes from the mistaken notion that there isn't enough for everyone. This is a lie, of course. Just look at the fruit hanging from the trees, the fish teeming. It's the lie to end all lies. It keeps us locked inside our own virtual fall-out shelters, unwilling to open the doors of perception to other people, other cultures, other species. Our whole country sometimes feels like a giant kindergarten classroom where for some reason there aren't enough cookies to go around. Someone will be left in tears, empty-handed. No dialysis, no decent schooling, nowhere to go when you're old. The fear of scarcity and the anxiety about diversity travel together. The pressure they exert is stunning.

Why else would Spanish-speaking people be rounded up and herded into vans by ICE agents as if they were less than human? As if they were so profoundly other that their parenthood, their sisterhood had no value? Why else would small children sometimes come home from school to find that their mothers and fathers had been taken away? What's wrong with this picture? Everything. All ways of being that deny abundance promote the distorted notion that there isn't enough, that we are playing a zero-sum game where if you get something it means that I lose something. The rainforest tells a different story. Layers upon layers, generations upon generations of life interweave, giving birth and dying off, providing nourishment for each other, sustaining the whole. Embracing abundance is foundational. It's the first prayer of the day and the first lesson we need to learn if we are to live in gratitude and generosity.


Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.