Near-Birthday & Anniversary

In ten days I’ll be 81, not a prime number thanks to nine. This means if you placed nine candles in a row and then another nine perpendicular to those and made a square and filled it in and then lit them all you would have 81 before the house burned down.

I prefer to think that I’m thirty-one years into my fifties. At a certain point in life we do not get any older except in our eyes, ears, skin and bones. I’m sure all my friends would agree. I’m so fortunate to have friends older than me. It has kept me young, at least in my delusional state.

Bette Davis who famously declared that old age is not for sissies, proved it by dying at eight-one. Boris Karloff also checked out at this age. He had a career scaring the hell out of people long enough. He was first cast as Frankenstein nosing out Bela Lugosi for the part when the producer started laughing at Lugosi’s make-up. Karloff was fitted with eleven pound shoes to give him the monster walk. No wonder he didn’t make it to eight-two. Lugosi had to settle for Dracula. Between Boris and Bela I probably lost a few years.

It serves no purpose to compare one’s life with another’s but one can’t help themselves imagine what Schubert or Mozart would have accomplished having been allotted this life span. Suffice it to say that I have lived the years of John Lennon plus Geoge Gershwin with two years left over.

I’m told I’ve been living all this time on the cusp of Pisces and Aries. No wonder my back is giving out balancing the fish and the ram, half in water half finding my feet. It’s been an amphibious life. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

At one time Peggy was twelve years older than I but over the years she continues to lose a year every birthday. Four days after March 21 we will celebrate our first thirty years together, our brief encounter.  In 1984 I made the leap to a safe unknown, from nothing to everything. I heard her reciting the Emancipation Proclamation on the back forty. Actually if I were in bondage it was of my own making.  But Peggy reminded me of my vestigial wings.

Every day is the anniversary of yesterday. Traveling together this far is reason enough for celebration. Another thirty years would make medical history. I don’t wish to be greedy. I’ll take one decade at a time.

Of Two Minds

I wish I could weigh in on the Ukrainian conflict with conviction but I feel both sides have legitimate concerns. The country is a land-mass sprawling westerly into Europe and easterly into mother Russia. Up until WW I the Austro-Hungary Empire took a slice and Russia the rest. Pity these land-locked countries ever pulled by divided loyalties.

Yet Switzerland has found a way to accommodate four language-driven sectors. More recently on Europe's western flank a somewhat similar unresolved conflict exists in Belgium. About 60% of the population with ties to the the Netherlands is Flemish while the linguistic group to the south are the French-speaking Walloons. The split continues but it has not erupted into armed camps. In fact, Brussels is, ironically, home of the European Union. 

Russia, itself, has ever felt the pull of European culture but resisted the Enlightenment and was slow to enter the Industrial Age. The dissolution of the USSR found chunks of the empire dropping away and asserting their ethnic identities. Ukraine is a sovereign state but its security and economic ties to Moscow have been a given. Having endured uninvited armies from Napoleon to Hitler the Russians are understandably insecure, some would say paranoid, about the Importance of buffer states.

Through an American and European lens Ukraine is under siege. Their former head of state is a corrupt Kremlin puppet responsible for the death of protesters and leading the country to financial ruin while he led a life of obscene privilege. We must rush to the rescue of these 46 million people. But wait!!

The terms laid down by the European Union would have ended Ukraine’s 16 billion dollars per year export trade with Russia. This condition was a deal-breaker for Yanukovych and a needless provocation aimed at Putin. It triggered the regime change and the Russian response. Ukraine would be the second largest country in Europe in area.  By joining the E.U. they would have to pass an estimated 350 changes in their trade laws.

The last thing we need now is a revival of the Cold War. One can hear the squawk of the hawks. John McCain never met a skirmish he didn’t love. As the Iraq and Afghanistan follies wind down a chorus of Neo-Cons are salivating over new prospects of a Pentagon build-up. Whether Ukraine turns to the West or back to the East we must accept that it is not in our national interest to intercede in any way other than through diplomacy. I’m hopeful Obama ignores their battle cries and forges an alternative path. There is in the American strain a messianic urge to make over the world in our image. One size does not fit all.

Blame it all on the cartographers; too many countries squabbling over who belongs to whom. Someday, but not soon, borders will shrivel and blow away. Maps will be of one green ink with land shaped only by blue oceans and inland waterways. 

Play Ball

Baseball spring training is now upon us. I can hear the crack of the bat, balls thumping into gloves and staccato shouts of the fielders. Chuck easy, baby. Heads up.

Sport pages are filled with enough freak injuries to run an HMO out of business.  The act of pitching and batting must call upon a long dormant musculature still hibernating. Or possibly the muscles are over-developed to the extent they have no stretch in them.

It was never my problem. I return now to those glory days which get better every time I revisit them. There I was warming the bench in the late innings with the score tied. The manager had been saving me for this pivotal moment. There was no point in squandering my talent.

He called my number. I sauntered out of the dugout, picked up three bats as if toothpicks in my massive arms, threw away two of them and I dusted the rosin bag in my hands for a better grip. The crowd noise was building as I crossed home plate into the batter’s box. There would be no effort to summon the gods that may be. I knew they were busy and they knew I didn’t need them. No Greek gods could ever get around on a rising fast ball.

It was just that crafty southpaw on the mound and me. I knocked the dirt that wasn’t there out of my spikes.  I rubbed the back chalk line away and dug in. The first pitch was a brush-back as I expected followed by a low-outside slider but I wasn’t chasing. It was now a hitter’s count. He came back with a fastball in my zone but took something off and I was out in front hitting a screaming line-drive foul. He got away with one.

I stepped out of the box to give him something to think about. I unhinged the Velcro on my batting glove and tighten it just to stretch the moment. The next pitch missed the corner. I could see he wanted that one and was out of his rhythm. He came back with a fat hanging curveball he wanted back as soon as he threw it. I launched it into orbit like a celestial body. It jumped out of the stadium and may still be out there.

There is a certain resonance when wood meets ball in the full fat of the bat. Sixty-five years later I can still feel it. For that single moment the game seemed easy. In fact it got harder. It would never happen again but once is enough. There are moments in life we are meant to experience only once. I was part of a continuum started when an ancestor from pre-history picked up a tree branch and struck an errant rock headed his way.

This memory is so vivid because it never happened. The stadium was a schoolyard, the crowd noise was the ovation in my head and the bat was a plump broomstick sawed off at the curb. But I can still taste that confluence, swear-to-god.

What's It All About, Alfie?

I gave it a rest, took a step back to get a better vantage point. It didn’t help.  I know this much.  Writing is therapeutic. I suffer without the illusion of putting the world in order.

We saw a one-man performance of three Samuel Beckett works. Barry McGovern was superb; words poured out of him at the speed of our mind’s gibberish, stinging and tickling, at once. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Nobody I know captures the absurdity of existence as well as Beckett. Mortality hangs overhead yet we go on with a torrent of  words let loose as if from a broken spigot, hunting, grasping for some measure of meaning or control of it all, as though….

If I were the last one standing to greet the visiting aliens they might wonder why they went to all that trouble.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how anything works in this clutter of things. Not this computer I’m typing on or the bulb in my lamp or the TV, telephone, car, even how my clothes came to be. The only technology I might explain is an ice cube tray……but then again I don’t know what makes a refrigerator refrigerate.

It gets worse. We don’t know what we’re doing here except to multiply the species and enjoy our allotted time. Maybe register our wonderment and leave our mark.

So I witness the passing parade as if some clues might appear to my inner Sherlock in this era of connectivity. Two T.V. shows, House of Cards and Downton Abbey, have found their audience and I find myself looking for a common denominator. In a word it is, Control. One mirrors the slime of Washington D.C. ratcheted up a notch perhaps…or maybe not. The other transports us to those years when the last gasp can be heard of the British manor house, with its order and civility in which everyone knew his place.

Machiavellian ambition, however treacherous, seemed easier to take with a British accent. Peggy enjoyed Ian Richardson’s nefarious climb up the ladder but has trouble watching it Americanized in the hands of Kevin Spacey. Like it or not we find ourselves identifying with Francis Urquardt, now Underwood, in his calculated rise to the top of the heap. Adrift as we are in this sea of flotsam I suspect we can’t resist clinging on to anyone who pulls the puppet strings. He navigates deftly through the maze. Never mind his deceit, disregard for human life or indifference to values. He is the ultimate pragmatist. Obama, he's not. He leverages like LBJ, charms like FDR, plots like Dick Cheney. Politics is chess and he’s four moves ahead on the board. If he has sinned (and he has) and dies (as he must) trying to grab the reins, he has died for us, the congregation of the lost. A sacrificial offering who gave us a few dozen hours of a fabled climb up the beanstalk.

As opposed to this downtown alley we can always escape into Downton Abbey where the rituals and traditions, however anachronistic, are rigidly maintained. After all, one can’t expect the lord of the manor to put on his own pajamas. The place reeks of order and we love this tidy world. Of course melodrama is made of sterner stuff and there is no shortage of scandal and misdeeds to put to rights. The nobility of upstairs is matched by the hierarchy of downstairs. The butlers know when to become invisible. The titled class observes what is bred in the bone except for minor transgressions which can be remedied. The operative word is still, Control. We can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff.

Beckett’s characters are closer to the authentic self. But who wants to think about that? Better to live through our small screen plotters and players of a bygone time with a few hours of imagined control over this fractured and mysterious life.     

Old Heroes New

Back in the day I had my heroes. There was the Man of Steel who leaped tall buildings and then returned to his bespectacled life. Then there was Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Florence Chadwick who swam the Channel both ways. I also idolized Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax.

All of them acted as singular individuals taking matters into their own hands and pushing the margins of what was thought possible.  They embodied the American Dream. Heroes and heroines must have an adversary. Athletes have the record book. The Suffragettes and minorities have the weight of social mores. Superman had gravity, itself.

With some sophistication and a broader view of the human psyche came the anti-hero. We took our heroes down from the pedestal for closer inspection and maybe recognized ourselves….on a good day. Over the years the anti-hero became more and more blemished. Redemption was hard-edged, hard-earned or hardly worth the time.

All of which leads me to our latest version in the virtuoso performance by Matthew McConoughey in, Dallas Buyer’s Club. Here we have a poster-boy for the guy you wouldn't want your sister to marry...a red-neck, womanizer, misogynist, homophobic Aids victim whom we are asked to cheer because he single-handedly defies the Food & Drug Administration and by extension, the government, Big Pharma  and Science itself.

I have no use for pharmaceutical companies but in our system they are the arm of research, manufacture and marketing. I do not condone their abusive practices or exorbitant profits. However this film takes down evidence-based science and a vital federal agency along with it.  

In its place we are asked to support renegade science based on anecdote and driven by loopholes and a good-old American entrepreneurial device for personal gain. This script could have been written by Ted Cruz from the Libertarian handbook.

First we are told that the FDA is the villain for withholding AZT from the market. Then the drug is deemed to be toxic when it is released. In fact it was made available quicker than other drug in history because of the AIDS epidemic in the late 80s. And why was it delayed at all? Because clinical trials first had to be made to evaluate benefits against risks. And why were their deaths associated with it in the early days? Because the optimum dosage had yet to be established. In fact AZT has become part of the cocktail successfully treating millions of AIDS victims for the past twenty years.

Vigilante justice is a running theme in Hollywood. The sheriff in High Noon became the Clint Eastwood revenge-seeker. We love our protagonist to break out of the herd, bring down the authorities and make his own rules. Now the cowboy has put on a white coat and become a doctor scheming to circumvent rational medicine. And he even get his woman in the last reel.

What’s next, stem-cell research? Climate change? Evolution?

Love Is the Answer

Even if you forgot the question. Not for cynics who avoid the word and sentiment, those who can’t get past the commercialism of the day, who scoff at flowers, candy and Hallmark cards. Get over it. It’s far too easy.

Phooey on them. Why not celebrate, embrace those in your life….life itself? Today is a reminder to express the most important feeling we can offer. Better yet to live the love daily, beyond the words which have been degraded by overuse. As Shakespeare almost said, The quality of loving is twice blessed….to him that gives and to him that receives.

Maybe it all starts with forgiving yourself..........for the blurt that came out of your mouth you want back or the words you didn't say but should have or the library book you lost but then found looking for your lost keys or the cup you chipped and the sock that  got away in the last laundry.  

Love is a large word. It can be Putin believing in his manhood enough to keep his shirt on. It might be Ruhani trusting Israel and Netanyahu returning the trust to Ruhani. Maybe even the Repugnants finding a smidge of humanity in their hearts or John Boehner loving himself enough to stay away from the tanning parlor.  The U.S. Olympic team loving their sport more than the medals. It might be forgiveness for that guy who got in front of you at the check stand or even the Donald Trumps of the world who are to be pitied for the hatred that poisons their mind and impoverishes their souls.

So this evening Peggy and I go out to a candle-lit table, toast our good fortune, family and friends and exchange poems. To be met, heard and seen, fully received. I know of nothing worth doing more than this.

And not once did I mention, Valentine’s Day.

Shalom Slalom and Lots of Lutz

Imagine whizzing down your favorite icy freeway at 80 mph with speed bumps and mandatory lane changes. Don’t try it without a note from your mother. You must have bravado, strength, agility and a touch of self-destructiveness. I shall never understand the impulse to stare down death to feel alive, or more alive than the rest of us mere mortals. So it goes with giant slaloms and moguls.

Is it Mt. Olympus they are racing down after consorting with the gods? Maybe they pass Sisyphus on his way up. It looks life and death to me but not to Norwegians or Alpine skiers who probably regard the steepest slope as little more than a hill of beans.

As for the Lutz it involves reaching back, vaulting and rotating but on the outside rather than inside of the skate. A trained eye is alert to a mere flip which cheats by turning on the inside of the skate. This has become known as the Flutz. I now know more than I did twelve seconds ago.

Being a world-class Klutz I can’t imagine a Lutz. But I honor and respect all the athletes from 80 countries. Every one of them doing things I’ve never tried from skiers to skaters to sledders….even the three-time lugers who give mortality the finger at 96 mph.

The winter Olympics is both a coming together and a coming apart; a gathering of nations with good will and friendship and a fierce exercise in nationalism. Better to compete than blow each other up.

The opening ceremony was both buoyant and flamboyant. (Ras)Putin strutted his stuff with a pageant of Russian history and cultural heritage. We got the white-washed Disneyfied version minus serfs, pogroms, purges, gulags, Stalin or Lenin but that's all right. We couldn’t expect any better from the Texas school board’s redacted version of American history. Putin was hardly recognizable with his shirt on. I almost expected him to jump out of the stands bare-chested and wrestle a Siberian tiger. In fact earlier in the week he was photographed cradling a leopard.

Aside from power on display we were treated to references from the Russian pen of Pushkin the playwrights and novelists. It was topped off by ballet dancers choreographed with artistry and technological brilliance.

From where I sit transfixed on the couch watching the human body extend itself twisting, speeding, soaring beyond the imaginable everyone looks like a perfect ten. I don't want to hear about the ice dancer who performed with grace and verve but her twizzle fizzled while I'm still having my razzle dazzled.