Hmmmmm

I'm 71 years old today. My God! This aging isn't anything like I thought it would be. I was trying to explain to my daughter today--or was it yesterday or the day before?--about why the little dizzy spells I've been having over the past 3 weeks are not that troublesome. People in the pink of their life, mid-40s, like her, can't relate to the miscellaneous pains, aches, bone creaks, mysterious discomforts, bowel irregularities, toothaches, and on and on that afflict the denizens of my age bracket. I was telling her you just get used to these various moments of hurt and go on because almost all of the time they don't mean anything serious. Just your body reminding you that "Hey, I've been on a job a frigging long time, and you should recognize the fact. So--and this it where it pokes you--"here I am!"

Fact of the matter is, you change, but you don't change. In countless ways I'm just the same person I was when I was in my 20s. Somehow I don't think we should count the teen years (mine were pretty miserable, btw, till I got off to college, and then they were just mindless). Exactly the same. But not exactly the same at all, because years of the experience of life change you. If you're lucky, you learn something, but even if you're not, you learn something. Problem is, the lessons are most of the time ambiguous. That's why when you're older you're much more likely to say "hmmmm...." when confronting a situation. While when you're younger, the "hmmmmm" likely comes after the hasty decision.

Facing Up

I read in the Washington Post that we're on the brink of having technology that will be able to predict how long we're likely to live. It does this with facial recognition software and, one supposes, the black magic that is behind all these technological wonders. Article says that if your parents were people who didn't age in a hurry, you're not likely to either. Nobody believes how old I am now (except those who know), but I suppose that has something to do with my looking about 10 when I was 16, 16 when I was 26, etc. At this stage of the game, it's about the only blessing of aging that I can think of. Looking younger than you are, that is. And now through the magic of technology we (and all the insurance companies) will have a basis for projecting our future years. What a country!

What Is This?

I'm talking about this new attitude I seem to have developed as I approach age 70. All of a sudden I just don't seem to care too much about all the things that used to rattle my cage. For example, I'm on the verge of quitting to watch the PBS News Hour every night every night. Why? Because it doesn't seem that important to me anymore. Plus, I've got disgusted with the way they are doing the news. Everything is a contest. In the political realm they have signed on to the silly notion that one idea is as good as another and that "balanced" coverage requires that idiocy be given equal time. The program, which I have never missed, doesn't engage me like it used to. In fact, it's just pissing me off now more than it is enlightening me. Is this a sign of terminal decrepitude, not to really care much anymore about all the foo-rah-rah going on. Seems like I've heard it all before.

Hell, I can always read the news if I choose. Fact of the matter is, I'd rather be reading. Television is largely a waste of time, except for baseball games, LSU football (which I'm almost ashamed to admit I am still a devotee of), Masterpiece, and a few other quality shows.

I guess I'm just getting tired of the same old shit, and hearing the same old shit promises and "solutions" from politicians, the same old shit coming out of Hollywood--I mean, how many good movies have you seen lately? The same ole religious shit that makes no sense and doesn't begin to grasp the gospel. Doesn't it seem that they're getting worse, or is that just me? I'm finding advertising, screaming capitalism, commercials – all just totally futile, and maddening. I'm sick to death of lies. Lies everywhere, but mostly from the mouths of so-called leaders. The real leaders, the ones who can see what the actual problems of the world are and want to address them realistically, humanely (instead of with smoke and mirrors or blah-blah-blah or more-for-me-less-for-you-is-the-answer), it seems to me are just ignored. I search in vain for some sort of moral, upright example of courage in leadership anywhere. Don't see it, except from people who cannot change much of anything. It's discouraging, brothers and sisters.

Maybe I've come to realize, after years of saying so, that things really are not going to change. Maybe what's left of my hope is draining away. I say this, but I don't know if I really believe it – that hope is draining away. It just feels that way sometimes, which is why I need to be around my kids and grandkids whose future stretches out before them and who can give an aging, cynical, but earnest historian and aspiring Christian an alternate viewpoint.

In the meantime, I'm just keep on working on my history stuff which certainly holds my attention and keeps me busy. Doing my poems, listening to my music. Loving my dear wife and chugging along. I'm resolved to read. Read more. I just started a new book on Gettysburg which is already got me quite engaged. I also intend to be a little bit more faithful about checking in here. We'll see how that works.

Or maybe, just maybe, all this is temporary and I'll be snapping out of it tomorrow or the next day. This is what used to be known as blue funk . . . now it's known as check your anti-depressant.

On the Road Again Soon

We're getting ready to hit the road again . . . to Tampa to see our boys, and then again in September we'll be in Colorado where I'll preside at the wedding of my niece Lindsey. Seems like we just got back from Oregon, although it's been a week. Of course, I'm anxious and excited to see my sons--how I wish they were closer--but I must be getting old. When Susan and I got back last Monday, we each slept over 12 hours that night. This is really unusual for me. These trips just seem to take more out of us. Aging ain't to blame for everything, but it's playing a larger role, I fear.

Speaking of which my friend Cecil had a bout with kidney stones last week. He passed it pretty quickly but told me it was excruciating. I know. My son Stu has had a couple of bouts with them, and testifies to their ferocious pain. Bless him, the guy needs to have this physical stuff leave him alone. There's time enough for that . . .

A Tale of Luther

I think I might've mentioned that my daughter went off to Morocco with her husband about 10 days ago. Anyway, she did. And they came back on Thursday night. It was a hell of a trip to the airport and a hell of a wait when I got there – but that's another whole story. Suffice it to say that they were unable to pick up their luggage for about 30 minutes because some luggage handler had an accident, and we had a hold-up while an ambulance negotiated three lanes of vehicles parked there to pick up passengers. Waiting around and wasting time was the last thing I want to do at this point. Here's why.

A little background: when I lived in Germany, 20 years ago now, it was not at all unusual to see guys carrying what is properly described as a male handbag. Very handy and useful devices. I bought my first one when I was still living in Europe, and it immediately became just plain essential. I always say, "I keep my life in there." Almost literally. Credit cards, insurance cards, pocket knife, membership cards, business cards, writing implement, notepad, money clip, etc. But since I knew I was coming back to Oklahoma, a state well-known for its broad mindedness, I made the decision before I even left that I would never talk about my "male handbag" or (even worse) "male purse." So then and there my handbag was named "Luther," and he would always be referred to by anyone who knew about him--family and close friends--as "Luther." Which is really a great name for a purse when you think about it, kindest, suggesting "leather" and "Protestant" which fairly well describes somebody male who would carry a purse in Oklahoma. (And we're not talking about Protestant in the religious sense here, obviously.)

This is not Luther, but kinda like, so you can get the idea.  For one thing, Luther is leather, and another, he's bigger with a carrying strap.

 Plainly, the historian in me is taking over with all of this background. Long story short: I'm helping my granddaughter get her stuff packed up into the car on my way to the airport to pick up Tanya and Mitch--I'm going to drop her at her house on the way--and I put Luther on top of the automobile while I'm fiddling with stuff for the trunk and backseat. And I drive off with Luther still on the top of the car. I did not discover that he was gone until I got to the airport and went to get my reading glasses out so I could discern the words and symbols on my iPhone. Panic pretty well describes what ensued when I couldn't find him. Naturally, I freaked out – and then had to wait for all of the airport delay until I could get home and retrace my route on what I was sure was going to be a fruitless search for Luther. I was not a happy camper.

I will shorten what could certainly be a much longer story by my adding details about how my heart sunk with the futility of of this, and how Susan prayed and prayed (I have to admit I did too, but I can guarantee not as hard.). Lo and behold, I find Luther laying in the middle of the street right past Highway 9, which is where I would've accelerated since it was out of the neighborhood. He was none the worse for wear. It appears the car rolled over it because one handle for a zipper – I guess that's a handle, what you call those things? – was gone; one side had a couple of small nicks; the leather strap has disappeared (I'm not sure I wouldn't be able find it in the same place or in the vicinity even right now.); and some contents inside were destroyed: three ballpoint pens none of them expensive, and my reading glasses, of course, but not the glasses case. Everything else survived: money clip, credit cards and cash intact; pocketknife; and all the other stuff. No harm done. Amazing!

Susan says it was prayer, and I'm cannot argue with that. All I can say is that there was a purse of some sort laying right in the middle of a public, well-traveled street for about an hour and a half and nobody touched it. You had better believe that I have implemented corrective action on Luther's departure from home procedures to go with his already rigorous departure-from-other-places procedures.

Aches and Pains

So I get ready to go back to room to read last night after the Ranger game– which they won 3 to 1 over the Royals – and the toe on my left foot is just killing me. And I know what this is: it's a flareup of my gout, for which I take a pill every day so I don't get flareup of my gout. I keep thinking about all those famous kings and queens hundreds of years ago to use to get this and often for long periods of time, and I always thought well, that's really too bad. But I'll tell you, I've got a lot more sympathy for them now. It hurts. We are waiting right now to get a prescription refilled for some pills that I used to have to take when one of these attacks came.

And I've got these various aches and pains in my back, ribs, sometimes upper left of my chest. They just come and go as they please. I'm just resigned to it. All of this crap comes with the territory of a deteriorating bodily constitution. As I approach what has to be jocularly referred to as "the Golden years," I become ever more aware of how important your health, and especially as we know now, your gene pool, has to do with all this. Susan keeps telling me I'm real lucky because I've got "good genes". But I don't give a hoot about my genes or whatever pool they came out of when my toe is throbbing.

Our granddaughter Libby has been staying with us while her parents are enjoying the 20th anniversary trip to Morocco, of all places. And I'm sure she's got have all kinds of tales to tell them about living with a couple of old people for two weeks. It has sure been a delight having her, especially because we get to know her better and vice versa. I assume, perhaps without a good reason, that that is a fairly even trade.

Some Thoughts about Church

This year (of our Lord, as they used to say) 2013, I'm going to cross the Rubicon of being 70 years old. In my mind, and that's the only one that really matters, it's a demarcation between aging or late middle age, and old or, less starkly, elderly. If you never could quite think of yourself as old, I submit that once you're into your 70s, you can stop fooling yourself about being anything other than elderly. All of this has been a matter of some considerable amazement to me, for we all can remember when we were young and thought about ourselves in the distant future at say, age 65 or 70, the notion seemed completely preposterous.

Even more preposterous are projections we make when we're younger about anything that's going to be true of our life when we get old. For example, except for my 5-6 year period as a near-atheist, I was a church-going Catholic. At age 45, I was ordained as a permanent deacon in the church and for the next 25 years faithfully performed my ministerial duties. And before ordination, I got involved in several different kinds of ministry. I was what could be honestly described as a "religious" person. The point of all this is, if anyone would have told me then or even ten years ago that at the age of 69 I would be out of the Catholic church (and of course out of ministry as a deacon) and not only that, but a member in good standing in a Protestant congregation . . . why what a truly absurd notion. Catholicism was supposed to be a life-long thing. But of course, what do you know about life when you're in your twenties?

Fact is, what you know about life at the stage I am now is only incrementally more. What you don't know is massive by comparison. And that's kinda the bedrock assumption of the little church community I belong to now, a United Church of Christ congregation that embraces a vision of Christianity that comports in just about every respect with my own. For years I silently reflected on the absurdity of my official standing as a member of the Catholic clergy, not because I didn't believe in service. Indeed, service was the only thing that made sense about it. The doctrines and dogmas certainly didn't. It became increasingly evident to me that if I were put in a position of saying yea or nay to a host of Catholic  theological propositions--redemption by Christ's blood, virgin birth, eucharist, Trinity, not to mention the easy ones like papal infallibility, exclusion of homosexuals, etc.--I would be saying either "nay" or "hey, let's talk about this" to just about all of them. I'm the last kind of person to let any proposition go unexamined. And the fact is, just about every theological notion I was taught to believe simply didn't stand up to examination.

Which I might have been able to abide--after all, I had found these propositions problematical for years--but I could not abide the overbearing authoritarianism of the institution and in the light of the massive still unfolding (after years of doing so) sexual scandals, the sheer depth of the hierarchy's hypocrisy and cruelty to children. The massive decades long cover-up of rampant pedophilia among the clergy. I heard a story on NPR the other day about the viciousness of the Irish nuns to the young girls they imprisoned in so-called "Magdalene laundries." Is there no end to these revelations of how un-Christian the Catholic church was and still is? 

It became just impossible for me to stay. So I left, and burned the bridges. I'm now with a group of people now who follow Jesus but who don't have dogma, who accept anybody who comes to our church no matter who or what they are, who believe in peace and social justice, who believe that God is still speaking to humankind, and who embrace a progressive vision of Christianity that we pray eventually will take root in the churches that look to Jesus as the model of how a human being should live his life. I'm not looking back, and I'm old enough now to confess that the future is out there in all its mystery. I don't have clue what it holds.

Are You Ready for This? The Stones at Fifty Years

Rock 'n Roll will never die--but it will get damned ancient-looking.

From every indication I've seen, the Stones just blew them away in London a couple of nights ago. I think they have one more show there and then three in the New York City area. Here is one of the many stories. Looks like they had a great lineup of songs, including one new one. And just in case you're in a mood to remember the greatest of the Stone's albums over fifty years, this list from Rolling Stone should get you started. And are you ready for this? You can listen each one of these fantastic albums via Spotify from right on the list page. Check out some of the early bluesy stuff. Man, these guys can kick it.

One more thing . . . are you ready for this? The average age of the Rolling Stones is higher than that of the US Supreme Court by a about a year and a half. You can look it up.

And if you're tempted to just O.D. on the Stones, Rolling Stone (the magazine) has a massive retrospective of what must be every story they ever did on the band for fifty years. You can find that right here.

Can't quit without just a little taste. This song is one you never hear played, but it's one of my most favorites. It's called "100 Years Ago" from the album "Goat's Head Soup," a great, but underrated album. That's Mick Taylor on the fabulous guitar work, a guy who never got enough credit in the band. He was superb.

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Where We're All Going

Tonight Susan and I went to a wake service for an old and dear friend named Carl Amend. He died in his sleep of a massive stroke a few days ago. Carl and I go back a long way here in Oklahoma. We first met him and his wife Sharan during our Marriage Encounter phase, an experience that led both Carl and I into the diaconate for the Church. We were in the same formation class. We spent a lot of time together. We were in the same tutor group, spent 10 days during the summers for three years at intensive training. It was not long after ordination, about 6 months to a year, as I recall, that Carl had to move because of his job, off to St Louis, New Jersey, and then the somewhere in Texas. I think it might've been Austin. He moved back to Oklahoma City just a few years ago, and one of the last "official" duties as I did as a deacon was to bless his house, his new house.

Carl and I were always simpatico. We thought a lot alike in the spiritual realm, and he was a guy you could always count on. I could always count on Carl to be there if I needed him. He had a big rollicking laugh, and he loved to drink beer, two traits that are going to endear me to just about anybody. But he was generous, funny, unassuming, loyal, and dedicated to his family. It's ironic, I think, that here I am retired from the permanent diaconate and active ministry after 25 years, while Carl after he left Oklahoma City right after ordination never again practiced active ministry. I'm not sure why. We talked about it, but it was never really clear to me. Sharan told me this morning that she wants to talk to me about the diaconate, about Carl's choices. I'm looking forward to the conversation. (By the way, I don't miss the deacon ministry very much, but during these "family" times – funerals, baptisms, marriages – I feel the loss of my ministry most acutely.)

But in the meantime I mourn another of my friends who's gone. In addition to only other woeful results of getting older among the worst is this one: friends die. To me, it's one of the worst aspects of what is admittedly pretty bad deal. I loved Carl. I will miss him.

The Joys of Aging (Chapter 526)

About four or five days ago, I forget which (surprise!) I was walking Prozac the Boston terrier, and I just tripped over an uneven place in the walk. I came down on both my knees, and since I had the dog leash in my left hand, there was little to break my fall. Long story short, I ended up with two horrific brush burns on my knees. Both are now completely scabbed over, but the right knee is still really sore. And of course there's the constant temptation to be picking at those formidable scabs. (I was wondering with somebody the other day whether wanting to pick at scabs on your person is a universal human trait. I concluded it is.) Actually this was the second time I fell walking the dog. Same reason: raised crack in sidewalk. The first time I landed mostly on my hands. Didn't feel good either, but the knees are worse. Nothing is going to convince me this would have happened if I had been 35 years old.

Here's a chapter from Susan's Getting Older collection. I don't think she would mind my sharing this with you. Today she had Red Hats luncheon. It was downtown OKC at the Art Museum Cafe. First of all, she was supposed to meet the group at somebody's house at 11:30 a.m. At which time she was still dressing and about 12 miles away from where she was supposed to be. So she had to drive up to the city herself. Long story short: she couldn't find the luncheon. All the streets in downtown Oklahoma City are torn up, so there's that. So the GPS directions were no good. She asked two people for directions and still didn't find the place. I have nothing but sympathy for her . . . and she's four years younger.

My Dad used to say when he was going through this period. Nothing works like it used to. I think I'm beginning to understand.

Birthdays

I'm again musing about the passage of time. Today is the birthday of my youngest child . . . he's 31 years old. Which, I say, is great for him. Right now he's heavily engaged in intellectual pursuit: earning his law degree. He's working hard, and from all indications, enjoying his life.

As is to be expected. The thirties and forties are the best decades, at least from my present perspective. Which doesn't make the other decades of our lives any less good. They are good or bad solely on the basis of our own highly subjective criteria.

But it really doesn't make any difference what we think, time's march is inexorable. When I was 31, I was also heavily engaged in intellectual pursuits. I was a father, husband, and graduate student at LSU. It was the year I got my master's degree. My dear wife was still in her twenties then, and my daughter Tanya was only six. I almost said "little daughter" till I remembered that just the other day she was over with her own daughter, who is nine. That was a long time ago. Time passes, and we pass with it.

The passage of time: it's a phrase that contains the whole of life, the whole of history, the whole of the future within it. Birthdays are but tiny little pricks of light in deep darkness, buoys in a vast, silent ocean.

Used to Be

I'm thinking today about yesterday. It's something aging people do since they've got so much more time behind them than in front of them. And for me, a professional historian, thinking about yesterday is habitual. It's a mode of thought that's most comfortable for me. I tend to think in aggregates, the big picture, the big things: nations, empires, broad historical currents, 50-year, 100-year blocks. There are probably historians personally constituted differently than I who don't do this. I can attest that this mode of thought often causes me to miss what's perfectly obvious to other people. Which is to say I am sometimes not exactly what you could call present-minded. My forgetfulness for the immediate is legendary, and it's only worsened with the passage of time.

There seem to be so many "used to be's" floating around my life. The most obvious is the "I used to be able to remember things." But there's a whole raft of others. Take heed, you young people. This is what awaits you.

I used to:

• Be able to taste and smell better than I do now
• Be able to drink fairly respectable amounts of alcohol. No more. No desire to either. (and of course I realize how malleable this "amount" would be, but you know what I mean)
• Be able to play a much stronger game of chess
• Be able go whole weeks without being bothered by a single pain in my body
• Be able to count on regular functioning in the GI tract
• Be able to go merrily along without having a bunch of my friends and friends of friends dealing with some more or less dangerous illness
• Be able to get by with a lot fewer daily urinations
• Be able to remember bands, book titles and their authors, movies and who was in them, etc.
• Be able to spell better, not to mention remember everything in my vocabulary immediately
• Be able to . . . 

Well, you see how corporeal all these things are. There's no getting around the fact that your body reminds you the most often of the land you now inhabit. And the people you bring your ailing body to? These doctors? Hell, a lot of them look like teenagers to me.

I don't think this is a lament. Well, maybe just a little. But mostly it's just rumination. Body and mind are telling us things . . . and most of the time not too subtly.

Well, Now We Know

As my friend Bob puts it, now that I've reached "advanced middle age," i.e., that would be pressing almost 7 decades on this planet, I can't remember shit. There's a wide, real wide, variety of health issues that people have at this stage of life, but there's one complaint that's universal. The older you get, the less you can remember. What's clear is stuff that happened years and years ago. What happened yesterday . . . well, not so much. This piece I ran across offers an explanation.

According to Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, the reason things get tougher to remember as we get older is because the pathways leading to the hippocampus degrade over the years. Since the hippocampus is where memories are stored, it makes sense that with age our brains just find it more and more difficult to process information we receive into things we remember. 

In essence, it's not that our brains are "filling up" with information; it's just that our brains get less effective at writing and storing that information as we get older. It's the reason, according to Yassa, why we're so nostalgic as we get older: it's just easier to look back on memories our brains have already stored than to create new ones that are just as vivid. At the same time, Yassa's research doesn't suggest how we can fix the process; only that the research could be useful in treating Alzheimer's in the future.

Aging

Imagine it on a very slight incline in cool weather

The aging process. It's like a good-sized glob of honey at the top of a very slight incline. It will ever so slowly make its way downhill, and in the process cover up fixed points on the incline. The honey is the years of your life progressing every so slowly to the bottom. The incline is the slope of your life with all  those thousands of fixed points on it. These points are the things you know, the things you learned and learned so well they just became part of your mental environment. The stuff of everyday life. All that stuff you never had to remember before because it was just there.

To the title of this little squib: aging is something we're all doing. At the stage I'm at, I've got a fairly good idea of the process since I've been involved in it for a good collection of years at this point. And I have to say  I'm amazed at the stuff I have to struggle to remember or that I have to look up these days. Hell, let's start with vocabulary . . . sometimes I find myself mid-sentence with the word that's supposed to come up in the next phrase, and all of a sudden the word is not there. It's just gone. Like you never learned it all. I play this game in my mind all the time: "Come on, Tom, you know this. Think. Think. Think." Most of the time this process doesn't turn up what I'm groping for.

I cannot remember book titles and authors. Or the names of songs and bands that I've been listening to for 30-40 years. Or movie titles, actors, actresses. Or where I read something just a few days ago--even if I remember the something, vaguely. Between my dear wife and me, we probably remember about 80 percent of the stuff we have to. Even calendars don't necessarily help me remember appointments. The best calendar I have is Susan. She's more aware of stuff I have to do and go to than vice versa.

Forget about the special care I take to put something, whatever it is, in a special place because of my determination not to forget where I've put that something so I can find it again. That's almost a guarantee that it will be lost until it turns up by accident, sometimes months later. At some point when you may have even forgotten that you didn't want to forget where you put the damn thing or maybe even why it was important in the first place.

But you know what? Honey is sweet nonetheless even when it's spilled.

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And Now the Nopes

Continuing from yesterday with the same source, here's a list of predictions of science fiction writers for 2010 that did not come to pass. Just as an aside, you could probably list 100 things here. These guys are wrong more than they're right.

• Flying cars--possible technically, but not socially
• A Moon base (supposed to have this before the turn of the century or a couple of years later. The new target date for such a base is now 2069. I'll be 126 years old then, so I don't think I'll be around to see it.)
• Anti-ageing pills (I'm not sure I would want to take them, if they existed. Little teeny repair robots courtesy of nanotechnology may be coming, but would you trust them messing around in your aorta?)
• Trips to Jupiter (a long way off, at best)
• Nuclear holocaust (This is the one I'm most happy about seeing on the list. The possibility of a general exchange of these weapons between the forces of light (USA) and the forces of darkness (USSR) is no longer with us, but now we have to be concerned about little gaggles of madmen [and women] terrorists who are itching to get hold of a nuke. And then use it.)
• Virtual reality (We're a long way from Neuromancer.)
• AI robot butlers and self-driving cars (Would be nice, don't you think?)
• Computer overlords (no apparent danger of this for a long, long time. Humans will probably make the planet uninhabitable before something like this comes to pass. But maybe if not, the world will be perfectly habitable for them.)
• Commercial supersonic air travel (My God! Can you imagine the airport and security hassles that this would cause? Actually we had this at one time--the Concorde. But the return of such elegant, hyper expensive birds is to say the least, not likely soon.)
• Cheap, clean, unlimited energy (" Nikola Tesla’s dream of free and unlimited electricity seems even more impossible today than when he first proposed it in the early 20th century. Many of the wars on this small blue marble we call home are in large or small part over energy resources. Global climate change is intrinsically linked to the ways in which we produce energy. Whether it’s gas for your car or electricity for your house, we all spend a lot of money on energy. A limitless, non-polluting, inexpensive (or even free) energy source could completely transform humanity, taking us out of the energy dark age we live in now, and leading to a true peace on Earth and good will between all mankind. That’s my wintertime wish for the future. Do you have one?")

Yeah, I have one. World peace. If we did not spend such staggering amounts of money devising ways to kill fellow human beings, resources would be ample to hurry a lot of these unfulfilled predictions into reality.

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