Do the Math

My sister was in a Kaiser hospital in Oakland navigating a sea of numbers. Low oxygen levels, low red blood cell count, high white blood cell count. At the same time, The Clown was in Walter Reed trying to make sense of his own mathematical matrix. High fever, rapid heartbeat, antibody levels, total amount of taxes unpaid, possible no votes in the Senate. All this was taking place while the scent of Yom Kippur was still lingering in the air with its Leonard Cohen "who by fire" actuarial table clinging to my consciousness. I was furious at Trump, not only for the usual reasons of being entitled, mendacious and criminal, but also now for distracting me from my sister's medical situation. I wanted all my attention to be focused on her wellbeing. But he occupies my awareness like a ghoul on Halloween trying to frighten me with his spectral duplicity, the constant fog of suspicion surrounding him and his motives. He is stalking me in his familiar costume, his head a jack-o-lantern. Is he just saying he has the virus to distract from his dismal debate performance? Is he looking for an excuse to withdraw from a race he appears to be losing? Is he trying to cancel the election? How much more obfuscation can we tolerate?

I remember October as a time of exquisite clarity. The gold and red maples stood in the foreground against the wedgwood sky. The apples were crisp, the cider cold and tart. The arithmetic of that time cloaked in innocence involved batting averages, on-base percentages. Day after day, the great postseason dramas unfolded in places like Cincinnati and the Bronx. Now in the Time of Covid, baseball is a ghost of its former self, played without fans, without context, without the ritual of following the stats in the sports pages.

Numbers themselves have become inflated into something called metadata, ripped out of reality, as if they are bloodless straight and curved lines appearing on the screen with no beating hearts in them. We bat them around like whiffle balls. Part of our necessary work in this time of moral crisis is to re-animate the statistics so that we maintain an awareness of the real lives extinguished in the past months. Think of the 20,000 folding chairs set out in the shadow of the Washington Monument, each one representing more than ten people lost to Covid. This man from Honduras struggled to learn English working on the line in a meatpacking plant in Texas. That woman left her three kids behind in Rockaway every night to wash floors in a hospital in Flatbush. My friend and spiritual companion, Virginia, shared her faith with countless seekers before she carried it with her into the nursing home in New Jersey where the virus hunted her down.

So many lives erased, so many stories buried in the landfill. We know that Tom Seaver, who graced the field in Octobers past, died of Covid. But so did thousands of sandlot ball players, some of whom voted for The Clown in 2016 and look where that got them. It got them a front row seat at a circus where the cult of personality plays in a continuous loop day and night. Banana republic balcony speeches are televised but stimulus packages lie dormant. Doctors have become indistinguishable from used car salesmen. Terrorists plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. We are all spectators at this pageant, witnesses to grand larceny, national identity theft, and all this while the ordinary sadnesses of life continue on as before. 

My sister is home now, but it takes three people to transfer her from her bed to the recliner. Her passion for food has faded with the challenge of getting the enchilada from the plate to her mouth. She sleeps all the time and dreams about autumn days back-to-school on West End Avenue in the forties when Roosevelt's guests slept in the Lincoln bedroom. I set aside some hours, some minutes to remember her as she has been. An advocate for justice who brought refugees from El Salvador into her home. A natural musician with all of Tin  Pan Alley in her fingers. A savvy storekeeper with a big presence in the East Bay antique business. The author of All Grown Up, a book about getting along with your adult children. Mother of three, grandmother of six and my sister, with or without Donald Trump. In the quiet center of the constant clamor of numbers, electoral demographics and rates of infection, she is there. My sister. I only have one. 

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.

I Know Where I'm Going

A hospice colleague once advised me to imagine that I was burying all the suffering I had encountered deep in the earth. I had no idea what she meant. I was stretched to capacity trying to be present to the depth of the pain of many patients. "Give it over to the earth," the nurse said. She, the one we call Gaia, is the greatest witness to decay, to struggle, to death. She will receive it and transform it into new life.

At the time, I was clueless. I knew nothing about the source of hope in the woodland counterpoint of the birds, the wildflowers welcoming the bees, the joy of the grass drinking the rain. The earth itself was and is increasingly under siege, of course. But since that time, I have discovered that in spite of the earth's own suffering, the briefest embrace of her extravagant generosity and resilience has the power to inform me and straighten me up when I start leaning into despair.

No choice is more defining than the choice between hope and despair. We are, in this time of orange skies over the Golden Gate and masked children learning their multiplication tables, called to make this decision every minute of every day. Should I acquiesce to the awfulness, admit defeat or should I make way for ducklings, write postcards to Michigan, take the time for my fingers to tango with a dragonfly visiting on my MacBook? It has been revelatory for me to observe how easily I cross over to the dark side. I've always thought of myself as a basically optimistic person, even posting on this blog on December 19, 2016 speculating that I inherited this tendency from my father. "I have friends whose fathers survived the Holocaust and friends whose fathers were blacklisted," I wrote. "Mine was neither. I am a child of optimism, raised in a household blissfully ignorant of rage and despair. I have no prior training in catastrophe." This was six weeks after the last election, before the forecast fully clarified the velocity of the advancing storm front.

Now, I am being tested. We are all being tested, no matter how many times we're told that despair is a luxury we can't afford. I find when I'm honest with myself that I am sometimes resistant to hope. Returning to my origins again, I see that despite my well-intentioned, gentle family, I was still a child of the city, imprinted by the hard edges of the sidewalks, the racket of the subway, the fear in the dark streets. And I'm late to the party. While I was walking through the urine-soaked tunnel to transfer from the IND to the Broadway local at 59th street, catching a Godard double feature at the Thalia, the grass was trying to grow under my feet, the crickets were chattering. Understand that coming of age in Manhattan, I had no idea that the natural world existed except as a place upstate I was forced to go to on airless July weekends when it was considered salutary. The countryside was associated in my mind with polio. People went there, then as now, to escape the virus.

I didn't know it, but I was alienated from the earth. Well into my forties, I cherished a romantic image of myself as an exile in this world, complete with pallor and dark circles under my eyes. The city, for all its throbbing diversity, its art, its language, had imprisoned me. It has taken that snake a long time to shed its skin, to let go of the scales of cynicism and separation, to take up the mantle of creatureliness. Now only the insistent green of my soft, caressing late summer walk comforts me in the midst of the nightmare and greets me like my cat used to do waiting in the window for me to come home. I have received a gift late in the day. It tastes like soup and smells like babies. It sounds like the bedtime story I don't remember hearing from my mother. It gives me a glimpse of hope and offers me the grace of belonging in the world, belonging to the world.

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com. I will also reply to comments posted on this blog, so check back if you choose to carry on the conversation here.

 

Time Out

It was poignant to re-read a blog piece I posted on May 7, 2016 entitled "Tomorrowland." It described my childhood in the fifties, a veil of unwarranted optimism draped over the reality of hunger and racism at home and colonialism in the global south. In this purdah, featuring floor wax commercials and shiny Chevrolets, we invested in the future. We ate it, snap, crackle and popping, three times a day. Our lives were predicated on progress, the belief that things would continue to get better, faster, more efficient and that we postwar kiddos would inherit a synthetic paradise that met the challenges of mid-century with a phalanx of plastic action figures. We shrugged at infectious disease and spoke in hushed, reverential tones about the miracle of antibiotics with long, musical names. Erythromycin.

Of course, that world was long gone by the spring of 2016. We had survived the harsh future-become-present of Vietnam, of Watergate, of the Reagan years, intoning the litany of the High Priest Ram Dass. We told ourselves and one another to Be Here Now. But recall that was before a pathological electorate, racing headlong down the yellow brick road, handed over the reins to a man with less courage than the Cowardly Lion, fewer brains than the Scarecrow and no heart at all. The present is an open wound. It's painful to be here now and, as for the future, some days we can't bring it into focus long enough to believe in it. Absent the present and the future, we sometimes wallow in the mud puddle of the past, but you can't live on re-runs, tempting though that may be. You have to consider the possibility of another paradigm, a new way of looking at time.

For me, it's useful to remind myself that linear time is a convention that can be sent packing and replaced by a different model. Why not? I keep two in my back pocket like spare masks. The first is the ancient idea of circularity. the eternal return. In that mindset, I'm in touch with the planetary orbits, the cycle of the seasons, the phases of the moon. Think of the profound implications of straightening the circle into a line, creating out of the sundial and even my five-and-dime analog alarm clock, the wall calendar from the auto parts store. Everything changes. Where did we get the idea that nature is calling us to march forward in military formation until we get to next year and then keep going? Why do we think time keeps pointing ahead until for some reason it doesn't? Ridiculous on the face of it like a Mickey Mouse watch, circularity gone bonkers.

My second and even more beloved paradigm imagines the past, present and future existing simultaneously. That's the understanding behind the Hebrew name of God which is the interbeing of was, is and will be. It accounts for Proust, for hallucinogenic experiences, for dreams. How else to understand the splintered grammar of dreams except to see that before and after have no inherent meaning? How much more nuanced time becomes when it interpenetrates the ground of being like water, sinking as rain and rising as vapor. I say that this paradigm imagines time — homeless and wearing its various changes of costume one on top of the other — because I can't really know if this is true. Still, I sense that there is a level of consciousness where the dance of the days and years warrants a much more complex choreography than I am normally in touch with when I say "Today is Monday, August 10, 2020 and things are not looking good."

I like the idea of options, creative ways of looking at time. Entrapment in linear time increases my anxiety and not only because mortality is the beckoning future. Linear time is the lab where regret and worry are cooked. Looking backward in this paradigm, I'm plagued by grievances that cannot be addressed, amends that cannot be made. So much hurt imposed on good people now gone, leaving its after-image in my memory. Looking forward, I'm trampled by lurid images of our leader finally getting that parade of tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue that he has been jonesing for. I cannot afford the linear paradigm. It's bad for my health. Give me a labyrinth. Give me dreams and poetry. See, I have time on my hands and tears in my eyes.

For more on new paradigms of perception, check out this interview with cultural ecologist, David Abram.
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-ecology-of-perception/

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Little Tobago

Artwork by Joan Giummo

First there was Trinidad, the big island, sweltering, teeming, dangerous. You could get lost forever at the market on Frederick Street in Port-of-Spain, a warren of stalls. There, Black Caribbeans, the descendants of slaves, and Indo-Caribbeans, coming from the subcontinent as indentured servants to work the sugar cane after emancipation, stood shoulder to shoulder selling costume jewelry and transistor radios in the imperial postscript.

Then there was Tobago, the smaller island, breezy at the seaside with callaloo and steel drum. Germans, bleached and blistering from the sun, invaded the coastal villages in Lufthansa battalions. But the jungle interior was still thick with childbirth and family resentments. Brothers fought over tiny scraps of patrimony. Sisters nursed each others' babies. On steep, narrow roads winding through tropical forest people hung off the porches of broken-down shops called snackets that kept the whole place awash in rum and curry.

And finally, there was Little Tobago, a tiny dot in the sea colonized by boobies, geckos and hermit crabs. A British businessman and naturalist bought the island in 1908 to create a sanctuary for birds- of-paradise, magnificent creatures that were at risk of extinction. London milliners coveted the feathers to make hats for ladies to wear to Ascot. The naturalist engaged a man named Roberts to manage the real estate and keep an eye on the birds. He must have been lonely in his quarantine, Roberts, because one day he succumbed to an excess of rum, fell into the sea and drowned.

I didn't know this story when I traveled from Speyside at the eastern end of Tobago to its little sister some thirty years ago with Frank and our friend, Wilford, a fisherman-philosopher. Speyside had an end-of-the-world feel. It seemed as if the stain of modern life had been scrubbed out of the air, leaving a blinding, pre-industrial sparkle. Just waking in the morning at the Blue Waters Inn was astringent. It was all salt and sand and lime and glare. Off shore, the sea was Navajo turquoise and in the distance Little Tobago sat waiting for us. The local man who took us out in the boat distributed orange life vests. He suggested there was a spot out in the middle of nowhere we could try some snorkeling, see the coral and the sea urchins and the parrot fish parading across the deep.

I slathered myself with sunblock. The boatman called the sides of the boat gunwales. I held on to them with the fierce intensity of a woman in labor as the boat rocked up and down, back and forth. It wasn't far to Little Tobago, but it was far enough to entertain myriad final thoughts. I wondered if I would be swallowed by the waves and left to the mercy of the sharks. What would a watery death feel like and what would become of my body, my breasts, no longer buoyant, my mother's blue eyes? I recalled the conversation with Wilford over breakfast. We were eating cornflakes and he was cheerfully talking about death and reincarnation...how the soul moves on when the body dies, to be recycled later on for further use in someone else's body. I wasn't sure...which of us is ever sure...but I thought it sounded like a plausible plan.

In one flowing motion, I lifted the snorkeling mask up on my face, yelled some kind of theatrical battle cry like "I'm going in" and jumped feet first into the sea. For a moment, the three men looked at me in stunned silence. Then, they waved and cheered. The boat seemed to be floating away in the wrong direction, but now that I was submerged in the drink, I felt a strange calm. The only thing I knew with certainty was that the boatman would not let me drown. The sea was his language and while I was in it we spoke the same dialect. He was connected to me, the way, if we pay attention, we are all connected to one another.

I put my face in the water to see the fish, but the sandy bottom had been agitated and I couldn't see a thing, not the coral, not the promised rainbow of colors. All I could see was my life relocating to a new city.

Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Dragon Lady

Written while reading Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility.

"You like the girls? Vietnamese girls pretty."

The man stared into his plate of spring rolls. He didn't like to encourage her. The food in the restaurant was ok, not great but ok, and it was cheap and it wasn't pizza. He and his wife liked to eat there once a month or so, but you had to put up with the owner, a sixtyish woman who liked to talk.

"Where you stay in Vietnam?"
He thought of the jungle and the base and the GI bars and the whore houses.
"Saigon," he said, still not making eye contact. She had that high-pitched whiny voice he remembered and she always called him by name.
"You like Saigon, Frank?"

"It was ok. I was just a kid. Never been away from home. Can we order now?"
"Sure. You want rice noodles with shrimp, Frank?"

He and his wife pretended to be in deep conversation when the Dragon Lady came back with the food. He didn't call her that to her face, of course, but that was how the guys in the barracks had referred to Asian women back then and it rolled off his tongue. He watched her out of the corner of his eye in between mouthfuls. She was a worker, that was for sure. Never sat down, not once. On her feet all day, keeping up that patter with the customers coming and going, bringing the orders into the kitchen, bringing the food out, ringing up the checks. Her husband was back there steaming the rice, making the pancake. Every now and then, she would say something he couldn't understand to her grandchildren, always underfoot, glued to their video games. The restaurant was open seven days a week.

It was weird how this white bread New England town had two concentrations of Vietnamese, one in the restaurant and one in the nail salon around the corner. He'd never been inside the salon, but his wife went a few times a year when she had to look good for some special occasion. She told him she didn't like how it felt, lounging on the recliner with an Asian teenage girl sitting on the floor fondling her feet. At least in the restaurant, the Dragon Lady was the owner. Frank knew something about being a small business owner. The stress, the hours, the endless headaches with suppliers and employees. Thinking about it made his stomach tighten up around the rice noodles. He had at one time been the proprietor of a shoe store where he spent his fair share of time sitting below the demanding customer, easing a pampered foot into a boot, hoping for a good fit, a sale. He could relate to how hard she had to work, but he still wished she would shut up every so often so he could eat his dinner in peace.

"You want duck now, Frank?"

The small restaurant remained a fixture in the town for quite a few years. He watched the owner trudge back and forth to the kitchen, work the credit card machine, wipe her hands on her apron. It seemed to him she was on the old side when he first went in there, but she didn't seem to get any older. She was just out on the floor day after day and because the place was always open and she never took a day off, you could always count on her and her whiny voice to be there.

In time, the restaurant went out of business. No more spring rolls, no more rice noodles. He didn't think about it very much. The shoe store had lasted seven years. It didn't close because the business went bad. It closed because he was tired of bullshitting the customers and caressing their feet. Maybe the woman who never stopped talking went back to Vietnam. He imagined her in retirement, surrounded by sisters and cousins. He could see her going home with a fat wad of dollars to live out her remaining years in comfort.

But then one day, he had to pay a visit to a friend in the hospital. She was a little crazy, his friend, but he wanted to do the right thing. While he was sitting at the bedside, the Dragon Lady shuffled in wearing scrubs and plastic gloves. She stripped the second bed of its urine-soaked sheets and threw them in a bin. She emptied the trash and wiped down the night table and swept the floor. He watched her and held his breath, unsure of what to say.

When she had finished cleaning that room and was ready to go on to the next and then the next, she moved toward the door, turned and said to him like an old friend he'd lost touch with.

"How you doing, Frank? I always like you."


Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Voice of the Prophet

A friend in high school told me that his little brother, eleven or twelve years old, sat bolt upright in bed one night and said, "The populace is exploding into bushels of wheat." I've always thought the boy must have been visited by a prophetic voice, a deep call echoing out from a mountaintop, choosing to speak through him. Why else would someone normally fixated on Sandy Koufax say something biblical like that? He was probably preparing for his Bar Mitzvah and had heard about Joseph, the Dreamer...how he predicted the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine. Still, it was an unexpected turn of phrase for a boy whose previous experience of famine had been limited to finding the cupboard bare of mallomars.

In my experience, a sure sign of a prophetic visitation is the uncanny sensation that the words coming out of your mouth must have been said by someone else first. That's how I felt when I recently heard myself say, "Mortality is the mother of compassion." It seemed that I had known this all along but had somehow forgotten it. I ran to the computer to see if that was really mine or if I had inadvertently lifted it from Emerson or Thomas Merton by way of Frank Zappa. I did not find it. Where did it come from? I knew I could not have developed that idea out of whole cloth. It was as if it were in the public domain, available to anyone who found it rummaging in the back of the coat closet. I knew it was true because it didn't surprise me. Like all wisdom teachings, it winked conspiratorially at me as if to say, "We both know this is an old joke. Feel free to use it." But I have to say that receiving a complete sentence that sounds like you would expect to read it on a scrap of white paper after gorging yourself on shrimp lo mein, that was something. It got my attention.

But what did it mean? What did I mean when that sentence flew like a bird of paradise unannounced out of my mouth and into the world? Both the word mortality and the word compassion tickle the soul. You don't hear either of these words the way you hear the words pillow or toothpaste. Just drop mortality like a stone into the lake of association and it will ripple out to remind you of your mother, of Virginia who died recently of covid-19, of yourself some day when the tremors in your hands decide to migrate to other parts of your body. Then, toss compassion into the mix and you will think back on your time working as a Hospice chaplain, to your encounter with dying and the way it changed you, working so hard to stretch yourself to meet Daniel and Regina and all the others on their way out. But that isn't it. It's something else.

It's the discovery of the universal truth of mortality, not the specific losses I've known. It has something to do with impermanence, the lifespan of a rainbow or a firefly. The miracle of a rainbow fades while I'm looking at it. A firefly lights up in the night sky in early summer for a fraction of a second, then vanishes. If I go out to the back of the house after dark where the peonies luxuriate during the heat of the day, I see June bugs leaping for joy. I witness their dancing and chattering. But fireflies and peonies and mothers don't live forever. They die and are transformed into new life deep in the earth. At Hospice, I had this gift for engaging with that transformation, for envisioning eternity.  It was sometimes comforting to the patients. I believed absolutely and still do that death is not the end and I was sometimes able to pass that along to the dying. But I was not yet filled with compassion for our impermanence. All of us, those deemed essential and those who go unnoticed. The universal, undeniable fact of it. Mortality had not yet mothered compassion in me. It had not yet nursed me in the pathos of our common fate. It has taken the pandemic to deliver the milk of the human condition to my doorstep, reminding me of what I have always known but had long forgotten.


Please share your thoughts regarding this post and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com

Jigsaw

Jigsaw puzzles have been selling like hotcakes. I'm tempted by the hotcakes, but I'd probably be better off doing a jigsaw, pandemic weight gain being what it is. I gave a one thousand piece puzzle to my son for his last birthday. This was BCV, before coronavirus, but it has since come in handy as he, like the rest of us, is looking for something soothing to occupy his mind. Jigsaws have the odor of convalescence. My father and I used to do them on a bridge table when I was fifteen home sick with hepatitis, my skin jaundiced and peeling. Daddy was a stamp collector, so he had the necessary eyesight and patience for detail. Me, I was never all that keen on looking for the straight-edged blue of the border pieces with puffy clouds that you could string together to create the sky over Paris. Now, reconstructing the broken world on a table seems all too appropriate. When the puzzle is complete, I can see the horse-chestnut trees along the Champs-Elysee. I can reassemble the fragments into one satisfying whole. In what other world does everything fit together so perfectly?

Each of us is a part of the puzzle. The little rounded male of us inserts itself into the gaping female of the adjoining piece. Now the picture is somewhat more complete. This is what I'm learning from the pandemic. Each person brings an essential quality, a color, a shape to the complex weave of the corona carpet. Without the person furiously baking pecan pies, the picture would not be complete. Without the person swimming in disinfectant, the picture would not be complete. And without the person sitting in perfect stillness, the picture would not be complete. We are all essential workers laboring in spirit together, crafting our own offerings out of vigilance and lovingkindness. As Pope Francis has written, "rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit."

This morning, I was thinking in particular about my friend Virginia, a precious piece of the puzzle. I haven't seen her since she moved to an assisted living facility in New Jersey about eighteen months ago. In 1998, when I first met Virginia, an irreverent Irish Catholic spiritual director, I was lost in the wilderness. She seduced me with her street-wise, almost belligerent style, inviting me into an encounter with the sacred that was as honest and direct as she was. Virginia and I began looking for God together, turning over rocks and searching high in the branches of flowering trees. We dug down into family stories, meeting every few weeks for more than fifteen years to talk about the inner life. I was born into a secular Jewish household and initially found the subject unfamiliar and embarrassing. We did not do God where I come from. But Virginia was matter-of-fact. God was an old friend she wanted to introduce me to, to make a shidduch, an arranged marriage. She was not at all like a proselytizing zealot. More like someone extending an invitation to the best party in town. I couldn't get enough of her.

Months ago Virginia, now 88, stopped picking up the phone in her room. I would connect to the nurse's station and they would wheel her out to take the call. I knew that was no longer possible in the time of corona, but I hoped they had a phone they could bring in to her this morning. The nurse said no, I needed to call the family for information. I said, I wasn't really looking for information. I just wanted to say hello and tell my dear friend that I love her. Again she turned me down and added ominously that Virginia wasn't there. Virginia, her daughter later explained, had tested positive for covid-19. She is in the ER, all alone, blind and bewildered. There is nothing anyone can do.

The puzzle feels incomplete without Virginia's audacity and grit, her capacity for making common cause with a person like me. So different, so unlikely. She marched out of Easthampton, Mass., a mill town studded with churches for the Irish, churches for the French, and embraced me, a Jew from New York. She said I was a natural. We shared an understanding that was outside of history.

Once years ago, I brought her to a Jewish Renewal shabbat service in Manhattan attended by 800 people. Afterwards, inspired by the sight of all the davveners swaying in their talitot, the men and women sitting together, she went up to Reb Zalman of blessed memory and said in a voice right out of Fenway "you made one Irish Catholic girl very happy." And Zalman said in his cozy shtetl-inflected diction, "sometimes it heppens."


Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com