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Note: liked this one a lot. TBDHSR liked it too. I hope you do as well. Spo
If I were step into The Way-back Machine and go back in time to visit myself as a ten year old he would be bewildered and horrified at who I am at sixty. Not that who and what am I now is ‘bad’ (it is not) but who I turned out to be isn’t anything my ten year old self imagined. As a boy I thought Life (mine) would go linear like a train on an open track and at ten I knew every stop, every junction along the way until it rolled triumphantly into the station having stayed on track and on time.
When I think back on all the rough times of my life, the times when I felt the most upset and anxious, those times were when my train got diverted to a different track or even derailed. This was not how it was supposed to go. Another metaphor is I felt like an actor given a script to memorize who knew their lines, but upon going on stage The Director and the other actors started doing impromptu and I was to follow along, ‘off book’.
I wouldn’t upset my ten year old self with disclosures of ‘guess what you are going do and become” * Rather I would tell him Life isn’t linear but goes off course – at least the course you think or want it to be. This series of sudden changes and tangents is Life – and this isn’t bad really. It can be adventuresome if you are open and curious about what The Fates do to you.
When tangents happen they are almost always viewed as bad, something not wanted nor expected. One reason is because we tend to react negatively to surprises and life changing events. Another reason is life changing events generally ARE bad – at least in the present and into the immediate future. If only we could see what this in the big picture!
I used to name my derailments as ‘my personal Armageddons” listing them as I, II, III and so on. I think I got to MPA VI when I connected the dots they were hardly end of the world events; they were just ends of the linear timeline I was on. After the necessary time to feel the sting and the pain and to mourn the loss, I say to myself ‘I don’t know yet if this is good or bad in the big picture. MPA I-VI were temporary or blessings in hindsight – possibly because I used them to build a new train line or to write a new play from the shreds of the last act.
Thanks to experience I will be as ready as I can be for the next derailment. I’ve had more tangents than you have teeth; I recognize one when it happens to me. “Ready” doesn’t mean I won’t feel bad about them; ready means I won’t have those it’s-the-end-of-the-world emotions.
Now in my sixties I imagine my 70yo old self stepping out of The Way-back Machine to congratulate me for being better balanced for the pending problems and yes I am doing well at seventy it’s just not how you imagine it will be but you already knew that didn’t you.
*One mean exception: ‘Guess what kid! When you grow up you are going to love tomatoes! “
When I was a lad I grew up on a cul-de-sac shaped like a needle with a large ‘eye’. Back then the street, which was called Fair Court, was lined with elm trees. From my perspective they were tall as sequoias and made a gothic roof of leaves shading the street, giving it a slight cut-off-from-the world feel. The next street over, to the south, was its sister street Ford Court. It too was lined with trees of elm and oak. On Hallowe’en both streets took on an enchanted forest-like ambience which thrilled me to no end. On Hallowe’en I would first make the rounds of the homes on Fair Court where everybody knew me and then it was off to Ford Court where I knew only The Barches. Ford Court had older and oddly-shaped homes which gave the street a more foreboding look. To get from one street to the other meant cutting through the municipal park at the end of each street’s ‘eye’. It was not lit at night. Can you imagine the scary delight of going through a dark forest-like park on Hallowe’en, not knowing what may be lurking around each elm? “Something is following us!” one of us would shout and we would shriek and run to the sidewalk entrance onto Ford Court, safe from the spirits of Sweeny Park.
At the end of the eye of Ford Court, located among some oak trees, stood a small house with a stone stairway porch step leading up to the front door. With its “A”-shape frame it wasn’t like the others houses. It was a witch’s house, no doubt about it. Jeff Barch told us Fair Court kids nobody every came there and nobody was ever seen leaving the driveway thus confirming our assumptions it was enchanted by a witch. Some of the younger kids casted doubt on this hypothesis as there weren’t any gingerbread children in the front yard but we older and wiser kids knew better. This was a ploy. The painted iron jockey at the end of the driveway with its outstretched arm holding a ring was once was a little child who foolishly wandered onto the property and was transformed into a statue and forced to stand guard as a warning to others to stay away.
The sensible approach to stay away from The Witch House was discarded on All Hallow’s Eve. Who better to trick-or-treat with than a real honest-to-goodness witch? We took precautions though. We would go up the porch steps never alone but two by two while others stood guard at the bottom of the steps ready to holler a warning if there were signs of green hands reaching out from the door or up from the top step. Oh the horror.
The fact that we never saw the witch was a relief and a disappointment. That crafty crone would set outside her door a dummy, dressed as a gypsy (as they were called then) sitting on a lawn chair, holding a wicker basket with a sign attached to it. Her front porch light was green or purple, never white, as the other neighbors had on their porches – more proof of sinister shenanigans. The outfit didn’t vary but the sign did. It always had an ersatz spell, written in large loopy handwriting, along the lines of:
Here’s some sweets
For the needy
Please take one
Don’t be greedy
So far as I remember no one ever violated the rule to take only one treat. What would happen if you dared to take more was something unimaginable. The mannequin would come to life and grab the greedy child, caught red-handed as it were, and drag the misfortunate one into her house for a fiendish feast. Perhaps the villain would run off feeling smug with his or her four or five Three musketeers bars only to suddenly be turned into one of those jockey fellows or worse a black squirrel, which were ubiquitous in the area.
For ambience her A-shaped home with the dark light and dummy could not be beat. However, what The Witch of Ford Court provided wasn’t anything special. It was mostly ‘fun-sized’ Snickers or Dots, or Mounds (ugh); it was a disappointment. You would think a serious sorceress would put out something special and not what the mortal neighbors provided from their conventional homes with their no-stairs porches.
I didn’t bother to keep an eye out in my plastic pumpkin which treat was the witch treat. I figured if I ate hers and turned into a toad everyone would know who did it and storm her house as they do in the black-and-white horror movies and burn her at the stake, which would be one of the flag poles the two courts had in their ‘eye’. Happily this never happened and every Hallowe’en she put out the dummy with her basket of treats.
The elm trees are all gone now, dead from Dutch elm disease, and replaced with small non-shading Japanese maples, making the two courts ordinary and exposed, typical suburban types. All the residents of my youth on Fair Court and Ford Court are either dead or moved away. I haven’t been back to them or the connecting park in decades. I have no need to see Fair Court again, preferring my memories to the actual places. There is a part of me that would like to return to Ford Court though and go up those concrete steps once again to The Witch House and knock on her door. I imagine it slowly opening revealing The Witch who was really the mannequin, dressed in her gypsy attire. “Come in! Come in!” she would say “I’ve been waiting for you all these years! How I’ve longed to see you!” and I would go in – finally – for tea and fun-sized Halloween treats and stay a spell.
Just be on the look out for a new iron lawn jockey or a bewildered-looking black squirrel.
Note: I put my entries into categories. Most fall under the common catalog of “Spo-reflections”. Once in awhile I place one in “Best of Spo-reflections”. The Board of Directors Here at Spo-reflections said I can put this one in the latter. Spo
I’ve been in a state of insomnia for some time; it’s been over a week since I’ve had a good night’s sleep. There are many factors for this, which is often the case. One of the consequences getting up at 4AM regardless. Rather than trying to force myself back to sleep I rise and do things, including this post.
One of my earliest memories involves sleep. It may be my earliest. It’s probably full-up with falsities. I suppose it doesn’t matter; it is a conglomerate of warm and assuring images, none of them ‘wrong’.
Our first house was an apartment in St. Clair Shores MI, which was situated close to the lake of the same name. We could hear the horns of the freighters as they pass each other, usually long and deep single notes as they pass each other port to port. In my bedroom I had a night-light named Mr. Blue. He was a plastic fellow, consisting of a hollow spherical blue torso, the size of a large grapefruit. His head, also made of plastic, was solid white and had a rosy little boy face painted in a perpetual smile. He was crowned with a clown’s cap, also blue, resembling a small cylinder wastepaper basket, slightly off-side to give him a jaunty look. An electrical cord with a single nightlight was inserted up through the base. When lit he illuminated the room in a cheerful blue.
Father was a young attorney in those days and I daresay he worked long hours. In my early bed time I don’t remember him home for dinners. What I do remember is he would come up to see me and say things. I don’t remember what he spoke about. He never was a man to discuss erudite or self-reflective matters. I can see him sitting there bathed in the light of Mr. Blue, speaking to me while we heard the freighters passing in the night. Father is what is now called a ‘boat nerd’ but back then was called a ‘freighter freak’. Freighters and he were one; it almost felt like they were his.
At the heart of insomnia is the sense one is not safe to fall asleep; one has to feel secure to do so. I don’t have that anymore, but back then I did. What could be more assuring for a good night’s sleep as a loving father standing vigilant glowing in masculine blue? Sometimes when I need solace I conjure up this memory, although I see it as a third person, as if I am my present age standing in the entrance to the bedroom, watching Father talking to his toddler about his day or perhaps telling him about the freighters passing by.
While the details of this memory are fuzzy blue, the image of Mr. Blue is not. I would recognize him in an instant. Over the years, the heat of the bulb faded the blue to almost white, and his face slowly disappeared to become a while ball. The white base of plastic became warped that Mr. Blue no longer stood steady. I have no memory of what happened to him, when he was tossed as worn out.
I don’t literally want Mr. Blue anymore, although I recently realized the humidifier I run each night has a blue light option which I always turn on. What I need is a figurative Mr. Blue to watch me sleep.
I often call Father before he goes to bed to wish him good night. Thanks to cams on the internet I can see the freighters going through the Soo Locks and under the Bluewater Bridge at Port Huron. He often asks me ‘What ships are there?” and I describe them to him. I hope this helps him sleep soundly.
The “Daily Stoic” podcast this morning had for its meditation “What have you learned?”. This was in reference to the past year and the pandemic. The point: in every trying situation there is opportunity to learn something, about yourself or the world. One can grow. A bad event without growth is meaningless pain and sorrow. So, what have I learned?
People do not change. This is both a comfort and a sadness. I majored in Microbiology, and I have an appetence for History. I’ve studied every epidemic, pandemic, and plague of history. How we responded to Covid19 was no different than any other time. In a plague, governments first react by denying or downplaying it to protect commerce and their jobs. After the cat’s out of the bag, people go to extremes: they become quite conservative or openly defiant to what needs to be down. Others outside the group/nation are blamed for the bug (usually from the East); religious fervor kicks in and quack remedies arise take precedence over rationale remedies. The plague de jour lightens up and people prematurely drop their guard and the plague surges again. Note: what next happens is the pathogen lingers on/off for awhile and it never completely goes away. What varies is if the event gets into our collective memory or not. It will be curious to see if covid19 is forgotten, like the 1918 flu (which was worse) or becomes mythologized like The Great Mortality of 1348. Given the nation’s state to deny what it doesn’t want to believe, I’m voting for the former: years from now folks will say it wasn’t that bad, it was al a hype etc.
I did the right thing. I did not panic; I did not hoard TP or food. I did defy what the experts and sensible people recommended to do. I did not exploit the situation to my gain at the loss of others. I was resilient with needed changes at work, home, and lifestyle. While I sorely missed the gym, travel, restaurants, etc. I did OK. Now that these are somewhat back to usual, it doesn’t feel like it was any great time lost.
My countrymen are deplorable. The human reactions/behaviors mentioned in the first point are understandable but this time around we (the USA anyway) were so over-the-top and ill mannered in their reactions. I was abhorred and ashamed of the Ignorance and Hate that arose. Mind! That stuff was always there, it merely came out and in great amounts. While I feel I did the right thing, the nation did not – and they were so proud of it too. I do not see this mending anytime soon if ever. I feel I was born in a country of people, and now it has become a kennel of mad dogs.
The saying ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good’ remains true. It is a comfort that while we really bungled the situation, we learned things we would not have learned otherwise. So-called truisms were found to be false. People can work from home – myself included. The covid19 vaccine was made in a novel way that opens up brave new world exciting treatments for other wee beasties that are certain to arise. Papers are already coming forth on the positive and negative effects of isolation on human psychology, these will teach us something about ourselves as a species. I hope we can learn from this.
Stoicism works – again. Thems who prescribe to this philosophy see Life not knee-deep in buttercups and daisies but full up with obstacles, hardships, and problems – none of a divine nature. Regardless, if we endure and do the right thing and persevere, we will get through this somehow. Again.
Gratitude. Technically I didn’t ‘learn this’ but it was heightened during the hard times. I continually reminded myself of the many things for which I am grateful. I had many assets to get me through the past fourteen months. What I am more grateful for was the support and love of others. That includes you, my darlings. You are dears – all well over four feet. I am glad you are there as we trek into the future, into the unknown. We will do the right thing, we will learn, and we will be together.
“His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.” – “The Dead” by James Joyce.
Last weekend while rummaging around the pantry looking for a cookbook with an idiot recipe for white bread I came across a 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook bought in an antique store many years ago. As I opened the creaky dingy tome out fell a folded slightly yellow piece of paper. It spread its wings like that of an exotic butterfly and fluttered to the ground. Written in pencil in a female had was a recipe hand-for refrigerator rolls.
I love this sort of stuff. I felt like a musicologist discovering a long-lost concerto that has not been heard in centuries. It raised a lot of questions for which I will never know the answers. Who was Thelma and why did she bother to write it down? It must have been a keeper for it took time to write out the directions.*
The contents convey some history of a bygone area. The directions calls for yeast cake which I do not know is available anymore. The flour is to be sifted – does one still need to do this? Even the process of making rolls seems quaint and outdated. I can hear Brother #3 saying no one bothers to do that sort of thing anymore as nearby is a bakery where delicious rolls can be bought quick as a quarter note.
‘Seven cups of flour’ and ‘makes 36’ makes me think the recipe is for a group not a family dinner. I imagine Thelma was part of a church women group in Wisconsin downstairs in the kitchen in charge of making food for after service luncheons. Who can tell really.
In my mind I have a little ‘file’ of chance folks I’ve encountered in life. I find them – or perhaps they find me – in letters and recipes tucked into books I have bought. They appear on signposts and on memorial quilts and plaques. They enter my psyche as if needing someone to remember them still. I will think of Thelma whenever I see the cookbook that held her like a grave stone. I plan to make these rolls someday when I can get seven cups of flour and figure out what to do for a yeast cake. I will call them “Thelma’s rolls” and eat them in her memory.
*An aside pleasure was seeing the careful cursive without shortcuts as if she was composing an essay. I hear this sort of thing is no longer taught in schools. What a pity for it is more than mere writing but an artistic expression of ones soul, as individual as a fingerprint.
If you listen to the news you’d think we are a world of nervous wrecks. There are certainly are a lot of worrisome matters but the news seems to say we have no options other than going off the deep end towards the worse-case scenarios. A combination of religion, medical training, psychology, philosophy – and life experiences – has me prepared to expect fear and when it happens act calmly. This doesn’t mean I am without fears. It means I am handling things OK enough – or so I hope.
It saddens me when I hear of hysterics needlessly hoarding toilet paper and ammunition yet defying sound medical advice not go out and use masks. These folks haven’t come to terms with primordial human fears. We all have these; we are ‘wired’ to experience them whenever we are confronted with something unfamiliar or threatening. Let’s look at them.
Fear of death. We have gravitated away from thinking about and preparing for this inevitable truth. This wasn’t always the case. Less than a century ago people died younger and more likely. They often died at home around loved ones where their deaths were witnessed. Our ancestors were scared of death but they weren’t gobsmacked by disease and epidemics. A lot of people nowadays (who should no better) are confronting their mortality for the first time and this isn’t going well.
Solution: Always remember you are going to die and this could happen at any time. “Momento mori” (remember you must die) items were once put up where people saw them on a daily basis. These were not to scare but to remind folks to be prepared for a death and live well in light of such.
Fear of loss of control. I often say to my patients if there was one thing they could do to better their lives it is to give up the need to be in control. There is hardly anything we really have control over. Paradoxically the more we try the less we control. There’s nothing like a pandemic to make one feel out of control.
Solution: discern what you can control (your thoughts and reactions) and what you cannot and don’t need to control and act accordingly.
Fear of running out. When we feel anxious we tend to hoard things. Hoarding spreads faster than contagion: when we see people snatching something up we think we should do so as well. I think the media does a bad job showing frantic shoppers as this only gets more out to do likewise.
Solution: Learn to go without. If you don’t have something other things can suffice. To be without something often only means you don’t have it. Weren’t we all recently trying to make minimalism in our lives?
Fear of others. If I could eliminate one thing from our monkey brains it would be our proclivity to form into groups of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ with the latter seen as something to compete with or better yet destroy. In every plague people blame someone else for it. Western society generally blames The East (bubonic plague to covid19). That awful man in the White House is playing this strong, rotating among the Chinese; WHO, the Democrats, the media – have a missed any? I suppose we should be relieved he hasn’t yet blamed the Jews who usually get the booby prize in the blame game.
Solution: be very conscious of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality. Try not to see others as different. Focus on what needs to be done not whom to blame – I am talking to you Donald.
Fear if being trapped. We don’t like to be in a cage, even a golden one. Americans may have more of this angst than other societies. I sense some of the defiance to governmental orders to stay home/don’t group/wear masks etc. touches a national nerve ‘you are not the boss of me!”
Solution: remember not all traps are bad. Some traps are inevitable or for our own good. Be mindful of these and the language applied. I am not ‘trapped at home’ but ‘safe at home”. Accept the traps that must be for the sake of our welfare.
I am prepared for death. I have learned the wisdom of not being in control. I can live without things. I try not to demonize people as others. I recognize a cage. By being mindful of these matters it may not stop my fear but I keep going and not go succumb to my fears. Or so I hope.
Here at La Casa de Spo we have the ritual every Saturday morning to first go to Einstein Brothers for breakfast and then walk athwart the parking lot to Uncle Albertsons to do our grocery shopping. There is hardly anyone else in the store at the 7AM hour; we can breeze in and out with ease. We always the check-out with Denise the intrepid cashier. Her pleasant chit-chat and weekly updates start the weekend right. As is our wont we we went to both this morning.
Oh the horror.
You all know the situation so I will skip over a diatribe against hysterical hoarders and focus on the Spo-thoughts. Someone and I vowed we would rather go without and go hungry than be part of the lunacy of the times. We shopped to get only the things we actually needed.*
When it comes to my fellow man I feel often like Margaret Mead among the Bantus observing tribal behavior. I was quite curious to see the shelves. You can guess which ones were bereft. More fascinating was to see what foodstuffs and item hadn’t been snarfed up in the frenzy. Here are some curious findings:
All the boxes of macaroni and cheese boxes were gone. Well not all of them. The specialty and ‘organic’ types were untouched and there were plenty of them.
All the pasta was gone yet there were lots of sauce jars available. Don’t people put sauce on their spaghetti? The M&C and the pasta both gone I guess people are no longer doing their low-carb diets.
In the meat department all the beef was cleared yet turkey, chicken, and buffalo was available.
The biggest surprise was to find Kleenex was abundant. What the hell folks – Corona19 is a flu-like disease not a GI matter. I don’t understand the run on paper towels unless people think they are going to use that in lieu of toilet paper. If so the joke is on them as paper towels will clog the loo and plumbers don’t break quarantine laws for love or money.
The snacks shelves were plentiful as was the produce section. Perhaps people were a tad sensible to not waste money on junk food and on perishables.
Someone fetched the milk from the back of the store so I don’t know how is the stock on milk, eggs, and butter. He didn’t say anything like ‘nothing back there’.
The pet section aisle was full up with pet food. Apparently folks aren’t worried about the four foots running out of Kibbles in the pending apocalypse. Maybe when their fridges run out of frozen beefsteaks they plan on eating Fluffy ?
Final observation – and this gets my vote for The Spot-the-Loonie award – is the empty bottled-water section. If I was in a panic and had limited money to spend the last thing I would buy is bottled water. The taps are all working.
We got our few items and stood in the longer than usual line at the check out. We stood behind a cow whose cart was full-up with frozen pizzas and Weight-watcher entrees. Denise was glad to see us. She was wearing thick blue latex gloves I asked how she was doing and to her welfare. She stated she had never seen the likes of this before and she hoped we were doing OK. I replied we were doing fine and here are our two things as we were buying only what we needed. The mentioned cow turned and silently glared at me.
We don’t plan to return to the grocery store until next Saturday. I think we have enough here to eat modestly until then. If President “I’m not responsible for any of this” Trump says we cannot go out we will eat the dog treats along with Harper I suppose. I just remembered the cheese I ordered for the now defunct Palm Springs holiday was rerouted to arrive here on Tuesday so I guess we won’t starve after all.
*Milk and dog treats.
I recently reheard the story of Pandora. For thems unfamiliar with this Greek myth it is a tale ultimately about keeping hope despite sorrow. Zeus is honked off at the mortals for having power and fire and basically just for being generally happy so he designs a guaranteed disaster to wreck havoc. He creates the woman Pandora and gives her for a wedding present a jar * – and tells her under no circumstances never to open it. She’s curious, she opens it, and all the woes of the world fly out. Mankind is forever plagued with war, death and disease, turmoil, and strip malls. However, at the bottom of the jar is one other thing: Hope. Some god (curiously, never named) but Hope in the jar out of pity for mankind so they wouldn’t despair. Despite the woes of the world there is always hope goes the tale.
One of my professors in my residency programme taught us never remove a patient’s hope. Even with the dying provide hope to help make their departure better, less uncomfortable and more meaningful.
I have lots of patients who feel hopeless. Sometimes they present their hopelessness as a sort of challenge like a gauntlet thrown down: “Find some way why I should hope my lot will ne any better”. Sometimes all the hope I can have for them is to somehow alleviate chronic suffering to feel and function a bit better. I am daily tried by this axiom. Presently I have a handful of patients for whom I have nothing more to offer or to give them. They still keep coming to see me despite ,my recommendations to go elsewhere (hoping they will find someone who can think of something). You would think they would take this commonsense and logical advice: why stay when someone one can’t help you. There are many reasons why they stay with me, but one of these is hope: they still hope I can do something. To ‘give up’ and go away succumbs to the awful realization I have no hope for them.
The opposite of feeling happy is not feeling sad nor is it feeling angry. When you feel sad or angry you still give a damn about something. The actual opposite of happiness is hopelessness: the emotional conclusion things will never be better or different.
There has been a rise in the rates of depression and suicides and drug abuse in the world (particularly in the USA) correlated to the sense of hopelessness. The still voice of Hope is more readily shouted down these days by the legion of woes emanating from the jar of Pandora. The challenge is to discriminate what looks hopeless but isn’t so from the things that are unfixable. Finding Hope in every situation is becoming harder to do for me.
*If you are like me you grew up hearing this tale as Pandora’s box, not a jar. It turns out the Greek word for jar got misinterpreted as box. The up to date versions of this myth are reusing the word jar. Also in the original myth Pandora is not an innocent done in by her human curiosity. She was purposely designed by the gods as something malevolent to do Zeus’ biding.
In order to get through life without going mad or losing our marbles we have to delude ourselves from some harsh realities. One of the hardest truths to accept is the realization the majority of us are unimportant and nothing special.* I am one of those people.
I like to believe I am overall a good person who continually works on getting through life with probity and good will without too much ‘Shadow’ mucking up my intents. I am good at what I do and what I do benefits others. My work has meaning. I have a loving family and relationships. Other than my copious carbon footprint I will leave this earth with the quiet satisfaction I beheld a marvelous story and the world was not worse for my being here.
But that’s it. I haven’t done anything noteworthy to get me into the annals of history. When I go I will be remembered for a little while by thems who knew me until they too die off and I am forgotten. If some of my siblings’ decedents happen to be into genealogy I may be remembered as a dead-end side branch in the family tree. I will join the billions of people who have gone to their graves unknown and forgotten.
Most folks don’t think this way; they go through life without conscious cosmic thoughts of whether or not they will endure somehow. A tiny minority of us want to ‘live on’; they try hard to become memorable in any way then can. Often they are depressed knowing their chances of success is very low. A few – very few – get into the history books to be one of those remembered.
This realization doesn’t evoke depression or grief in me but a sort of relief I will not be going down the path towards greatness. I am OK with my lot. At 56 years old I am not looking towards the future in desperation to ‘do something’ like writing a great novel or rising through politics or becoming a legend in my field.
In the musical “Pippen” the hero Pippin dreams of a great life. “Don’t you see I want my life to be something more than long?” he sings in the opening song. He longs for greatness. He tries politics and war and hedonism – and fails in all. By the end of the musical he has fallen for a widow with a child pointing him towards domestic living and daily drudgery. The master of ceremonies suggests he commit suicide in a brilliant ending rather than succumb to the mundane. Pippen chooses the latter. The master strips him, the woman and child, and finally the stage to nothing. He walks off and tells Pippen to live trapped in ‘that’. The widow asks Pippen if he feels trapped. Pippen replies yes he does, but he feels good – and that’s not bad for an ending of a musical. With smile and a bit of flair, the three of them bow, and the curtain drops and the play is done.
I feel likewise. 🙂
*I think the other hard truth is the world is not just. The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it while the bad people often get away with their actions without consequences. There is no gods or karma to remedy this.
Someone and I recently had experiences of mono no aware viz. the passing of Time and the ephemeral element of such. Last weekend he had dinner with a friend of ours whom we haven’t seen or heard from in many years perhaps decades. Someone reported it was a nice but sort of sad for our friend had clearly aged; he was not as ‘sharp’ as was. They talked of times together (circa late 90s/early 00s) at places no longer open with friends no longer in touch.
While traveling to Michigan last weekend I wanted to eat at Olga’s, a Greek restaurant I regularly visited in my college days back in the early 80s. Olga was a vivacious young woman then who was just opening her first store. Last Saturdays’ food was the same but the place didn’t have the ambience of my college days. There was a sense of fading to the place; it lacked ‘vitality’. When I went to wash my hands I noticed on the cork bulletin board was a memorial: Olga had died only a few months ago. She was in her 90s.
We would all like to push the pause button in order to stop Time. People and places for which we have warm memories – we want them to stay just as they are. Of course this does not happen. In time people age and disappear and places change or close – they certainly don’t stay the same as when we were there.
One of my favorite poems “The Lost Hotels of Paris” by Jack Gilbert starts with the lines:
The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while.
I wrote this entry while witnessing the terrible news of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral. What a loss; what a sorrow. It raised in me the question not why it burned down but why this hasn’t happened sooner given centuries of candles and tribulations it has endured.
Later in the poem are these lines:
It is right to mourn the small hotels of Paris that used to be when we used to be. My mansard looking down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night. Venice is no more. The best Greek Islands
have drowned in acceleration.
The irony of these lines is Notre Dame has gone the way of the small hotels: another victim of Time.
It’s sad to see things go. This phenomenon will worsen as I age. A younger man does not think this way. He is making memories rather. He is visiting the small hotels of Paris or their equivalent.
But it’s the having not the keeping that is the treasure.
This is my favorite line of the poem. We may not be able to halt Time or keep things but we have the experiences.
My intuition tells me it is only a matter of time until Olga’s place closes and this too becomes a memory. I take solace these are good memories. I merely have to close my eyes and I am back in college with the future before me, eating gyros and laughing with Olga.
The Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back is indeed a bargain. I am glad to have had many equivalents of the small hotels of Paris.
Spo-Reflections 