Hiatus

It's been a few weeks since I posted. I'm doing some more serious writing instead of blogging, and I may be on this kick for a few more weeks. It's been so long since I wrote anything creative that I don't want to stop. Come back every so often to check on me. I promise to return.

The decline of civility in American discourse

I don’t usually feel my age, and that’s partly because of the experiences I have shared with like-minded people, events that gave me a general sense of hope and optimism. One of those great experiences happened during the sixties, when I taught effervescent baby boomers in Madison. The experience showed me how a whole civilization could become more tolerant and inclusive.

How different the smell of revolution is today! The spirit of change we feel three days before a malodorous presidential election gives me a sense of unease. It reminds me of Thoreau’s wondering why we always level downward to our dullest perception, and praise that as common sense. He goes on to say, “The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.”

This weekend I am overcome with a strange sense of powerlessness as I look uneasily across the border. Rather than a contest between two sparring political parties, I see two monolithic factions threatening to bring a cleaver down on the democratic apparatus, each so enraged as to suggest that the candidate of the other party should be in jail.

This has happened in a country I left almost fifty years ago, when the United States still saw itself as the bright city on a hill, shining like a beacon to the world. Three hundred years into the experiment, its form of government could still serve as a model for other countries. But what wafts up from the south now is an inescapable odor of rotting principles, reeking of gunpowder and horse manure.

It is not easy to enjoy these interesting times because they affect the nose too strongly.

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Apology to my faithful reader(s?): Please excuse the olfactory unpleasantness. I could have used more pleasant imagery, but it would have clashed with the subject matter.

The new normal

Almost sixty years ago, my younger brother surprised everybody by showing up in his army uniform at our family home. He was stationed at the Pentagon at the time, and we had not seen him for months. My mother’s father, who happened to be at the house, wondered how Jerry had materialized when he was supposed to be in Washington. I don’t know, he said. When I was in service, it meant service.

Zaidy had been pressed into the service of the Czar more than half a century before that, and he had a hard time understanding how Jerry could take advantage of a couple of days off to hitch-hike halfway across the country and join the family briefly. A stint in the Russian army had not allowed such freedom.

We tend to define as normal whatever we knew when we were young. That may represent even a life that seems exotic to most other people. A Mormon in Utah will find an air of strangeness in the everyday life of a Hasid in Brooklyn, and vice versa, but those environments will not seem at all odd to children growing up there.

On a smaller scale, the life of my immediate family would have seemed off kilter to most of my elementary school classmates, just as the details of their lives intrigued and mystified me. And life in the homes of my cousins was an object of wonder to me.

Yet, I grew up believing that the word normal meant the same thing to me as to most other people. It took years for me to understand that everybody has a different sense of what the word means.

I was so certain that I understood normalcy that for years I would cut articles about strange events from the newspaper and collect them in what I called my lunacy file. The articles could be reports about anything: bank robbers who had asked police officers to help push their getaway car or a woman whose delivery of a baby was the first sign that she was pregnant.

My file eventually became thick. But then the Internet came along, telling the world about the most extraordinary events, coincidences, accidents. Even serious journalism seemed dedicated to attracting attention to itself. To make that happen, every news item had to be as unusual as possible.

There is no point to a lunacy file today. As the biggest news of 2016 has demonstrated, lunacy has become the new normal. Most amazingly, it is no longer normal even to read a newspaper.

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Then there’s this, from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera:

Chico: Hey, wait, wait. What does this say here, this thing here?

Groucho: Oh, that? Oh, that’s the usual clause that’s in every contract. That just says, uh, it says, uh, if any of the parties participating in this contract are shown not to be in their right mind, the entire agreement is automatically nullified.

Chico: Well, I don’t know…

Groucho: It’s all right. That’s, that’s in every contract. That’s, that’s what they call a sanity clause.

Chico: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Santy Claus.

Inefficiency in language

Words can be have deadly effects if they are used in a disciplined way by a trained communicator. Mark Twain famously advised against picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. But it is a rare talent that can make a point without taxing the patience or intelligence of the audience.

****

A friend of mine who worked in a hospice once told me about an elderly woman who was completely silent after she became a resident, just lay still in bed, usually with her eyes shut, though she gave hints of life when friends came to see her. And a steady stream of visitors to her room offered their one-way conversations. They would talk about the family, what they had done since their last visit, the things that interested them. And she would say nothing.

One day a particularly chatty man rambled aimlessly on in a variety of directions, never coming to rest in any of them, moving effortlessly and aimlessly from one topic to another. The woman lying in bed tolerated his visit for a time, but she finally opened her eyes wide, probably for the first time in weeks, and snapped at him: “Do you know why I’m here? Get to the point already!”

****

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin explained why he had always tried to avoid writing documents for review by a public body:

When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome sign-board, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words: John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word hatter tautologous, because followed by the words makes hats, which show he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word makes might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words for ready money were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, John Thompson sells hats. ‘Sells hats?’ says his next friend; 'why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?' It was stricken out, and hats followed it, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So the inscription was reduced ultimately to John Thompson, with the figure of a hat subjoined.”

****

As a writer in government, I was sometimes encouraged to obfuscate as much as possible, to use words to impress rather than to communicate. I turned down some assignments because the client was more interested in filling pages than in conveying any information. And I sweated some others because I was told to add words to the mix, even though there was no more to be said.

Some of the most successful government writers I have known were able to make a career out of piling words on top of each other without advancing a single idea. They were continually able to satisfy bureaucratic demands, such as I once heard from a deputy minister who took me to task for a draft text I had submitted. “Don’t say that,” she warned me. “If we publish that, people will think we’re actually saying something, and we can’t have that.”

Such candor is rare in government; it exposes the reason why so many government documents are more like soporifics than stimulants.

But this is not a new phenomenon. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have described a colleague as being able to “compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” I have tried to find out who he was talking about, and under what circumstances, but I have been unable to locate a context for the quotation, so I think this is just a story told to illustrate how Lincoln felt about words.

It's an approach worth paying attention to.

Life's twists and turns

Act Five is usually a time of resolution and reconciliation. It is the culmination, the consequence of all the earlier choices, a time for reflection. A wrapping up time, in other words. If there are reversals of fortune or of direction, they are insignificant, a blip in the grand scheme of things.

Catherine and I were going to defy this normal pattern and to write our own life script. The trajectory of our own lives would defy any patterns that might ever have existed. We had already defied probability by living together for almost thirty years, thrown sand in the eyes of my relatives who knew “such things” as our marriage could not survive. Now, at an age when most people with the choice are hunkering in for the duration, we were leaving everything familiar and moving to a city where we knew nobody.

We jumped right into the creative life of the city. We got close to people connected with the Kelowna Arts Council, attended concerts and poetry readings whenever we could, sometimes three or four times a week. In our effort to fit in, we were almost playing out another version of Act Two.

This has all contrasted with a backdrop of the Charcot foot that hit Catherine early in our stay here. It has preoccupied us since it was first mis-diagnosed as a toe infection late last year, and it has played an increasingly obtrusive role in our lives ever since.

We got blindsided still further on Monday, when x-rays showed that Catherine’s ankle was fractured. It was an especially painful surprise because within the past few weeks she had moved from having to use a knee scooter to moving forward on two feet with the help of a walker, and finally to unaided walking. This lasted only a few days before she noticed her ankle protruding more than it should.

It wasn’t until a recent visit to Emergency that we heard her foot described as osteoporotic. I hate the word; it reminds me of pock-marked driftwood, drained of life after months of being bleached in the sun. On top of that, my mother had osteoporosis late in life. One night she choked on some food and the Heimlich maneuver was not an option because a vigorous yank on her body could have broken some ribs. We called 911, and firemen came to resolve the problem. Luckily, the food had dislodged itself before they arrived, and they did nothing more in the house than accept a drink of water.

Osteoporosis and Charcot foot are telling us that the future still holds some surprises – but that we should not be surprised when they materialize.

Somewhere in Act Five of a play, the characters left on stage accept the reality that has unfolded. Somebody reflects on the events that have just passed and the dramatic world returns to what is thought of as normal life. But that time has not come for us. We are not at a place to stop and rest and reflect. Our reality is still developing and it is too soon to say “Oh, so that’s the way it’s going to be.”

This is truly a script unlike any other.

A hospital is no place for a sick person

A decade ago, my friend Henry and I used to dream about being where we were not. Actually, in Ottawa, anywhere else seemed attractive to us, especially in winter. One of his most pleasant memories was of visiting a friend who lived in a houseboat off of Vancouver Island. Henry would tell me about the benefits, especially as people aged, of living in a more benign climate: a better chance to exercise outside when the weather was harsh, no snow to shovel, lower electricity costs, less time and energy required just to step outside, and reduced clothing costs, because protection from the cold would be so much simpler.

Since then, Henry has gone on to what some people call a better place, but he is not in a position to enjoy it. And, in a climate that is indisputably more benign, I can now look at Canada’s paradise more closely.

I am usually grateful for everything on the other side of my window: the mountains, the ever-changing and impressive clouds, the generally comfortable temperatures. It has become much easier for me to be grateful for conditions here than it was in Ottawa. Seeing the lives of other people and hearing about the natural disasters that hit other places makes me feel churlish when I have an impulse to complain about any of my own trivial problems.

Yet, as Thomas Carlyle pointed out almost two centuries ago, all progress begins with a headache. There is no improvement until somebody confronts a problem and sets out to find a solution.

Which brings me to the medical system in British Columbia.

Without a local family doctor, both Catherine and I used walk-in clinics when we moved to Kelowna whenever we felt the need. Because her needs proved to be more urgent than mine, she found a doctor before I did; I was finally able to see a doctor just over a week ago.

Months before that, I asked one of the clinic doctors why it was so hard to find a general medical practitioner. He winked through his years of experience and, as if he had rehearsed his answer, said without hesitation, “Because the system is broken.”

Visiting Kelowna General Hospital more times than we can remember, we have had more occasion to deal with the medical system in British Columbia than we ever wanted. Luckily, the hospital is only a few blocks from our home, and the level of care has generally been exemplary. But unluckily, with Catherine’s unusual and unpredictable condition, we have had to cope with administrative delays, oversights, and mistakes.

Catherine was told about Charcot foot early in the year, and her right foot has been in a cast since June 5. After graduating from a wheelchair, she zoomed along on a knee scooter, and then she was able to use a four-wheel walker. But nothing beats walking, or even hobbling, unaided.

She is eager to wear shoes again, though it is likely that one of them will be a boxy therapeutic aid. We have gone for x-rays and visited orthopedic surgeons a number of times, and the people at the high-risk foot clinic referred her to a doctor in the hospital’s rehab clinic, who would be able to tell her when to get fitted for shoes.

The appointment was scheduled for early next week. Then it was postponed by two weeks, and now it has been rescheduled for another week after that. In the meantime, she uses the walker, sometimes abandoning it and clomping along for short distances.

Yesterday, when she learned about the latest delay, she wanted an earlier appointment, so she called the hospital clinic where her most recent surgeon works. She was scheduled to see him at the end of this month. The call was passed around from one person to another until somebody finally located her name, but then they couldn’t find any trace of an appointment.

It reminded me of the times I would sit in a university class while the grass was being cut outside the window and the professor would have to wait for the sound to recede before he could continue, as if the grounds staff were contending for supremacy against the teaching staff. Here the administrative people were pretending that there was no validity to the plans of the medical staff.

People outside Canada sometimes act as if this country has a single medical system. Far from it. Each province does its own funding and runs things in its own way. People pay for the Ontario Health Insurance Plan once a year, when they pay their taxes. In British Columbia, there is a monthly payment plus a deductible for prescriptions. It must be exceeded before the provincial plan pays anything. Far fewer services are covered by the province here than in Ontario, to the extent that I estimate our medical costs between four and five times greater here than they would have been there. On top of that, medical help seems far less accessible here.

In other words, we are paying more for fewer, less timely services. William Butler Yeats could have been thinking of this province when he wrote “That is no country for old men.”

But that was just Carlyle’s headache. We wouldn’t think of going back.

Accept the universe that lies in front of you

This was not much of a summer. There were only a few hints of the vaunted Okanagan heat, and never for more than a day or two at a time. We muted the air conditioner for much of the season, and we shut it off altogether in early August. Now, at the equinox, the heat has retreated to the south. The nights are cool, and a light shirt is no longer enough to protect against the early morning chill.

Heavy clouds occasionally obscure the mountaintops around the valley, though only once have they hung around all day. Still, even those brief reminders of the greyness of winter to come make me grateful for every hour of sunshine. The drab winter months will come soon enough.

We came west to dissolve the drabness and sameness of our Ottawa life. Now that we have completed almost one complete seasonal cycle here, we can see hints of some new habits of life that in themselves could become patterns of drabness and sameness.

Changing location does not change personality. You are what you are, and you take yourself wherever you go. The geographical cure does not solve relationship problems, job problems, or inertia problems. This is not unique to us, and it is certainly not a modern phenomenon. Plato wrote that Socrates was once asked why a certain man was still crabby after coming back from a pleasure trip, and he given a simple explanation: the man had had to travel with himself.

It seems all too human to complain. Some people are lucky enough never to wonder “Why me?” and others are wise enough to outgrow the question, realizing that stuff happens to everybody — including things that from their personal perspective appear to be bad and good. Still, it takes an effort to accept every quirk of the universe with equanimity. This acceptance might take the form of religious surrender, or it could be some other form of psychological self-defense. Herman Melville, for example, buried this reflection deep in the pages of Moby-Dick:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints.

That view gives a reason anyway, even if it paints a harsh picture of human life, as full of “hard things visible and invisible.”

There is another familiar fallacy that some people harbor to distance themselves from a reality that might take courage to face. It begins with the words “If only.” Things could be so much better if only they had more money, more friends, a better job, less snow to shovel in the winter. The implication is that life could be perfect if conditions were just a little more favorable.

If you are going to be happy in paradise, it will not be because you are in paradise but because you are you. And if a new place will make you a different person, it will not be because of the place but because you are determined to change. Happiness is a choice, not the result of circumstances.

All things considered, I have been blessed with one of the best lives of all time, and it is not because of where I am or what I own or who I know. It is simply the result of my general attitude. I believe my life and situation would seem like a beautiful dream to most of the people on this planet — in fact, to most of the people who have ever lived.

And why would I ever want to be somebody else? Our image of other lives is never realistic. Many of the pleasant faces we encounter, either in person or in pictures, mask miserable interiors, anxieties, worries, troubles that nobody would choose to own. When I think of the beauty of music and wonder what it might be like for a professional musician to live inside that beauty, I normally consider only the esthetic pleasure of performance, the applause and acclaim of an audience, never the monotonous hours of rehearsal, the days away from home in strange hotels without the leisure to explore new cities.

If you envy somebody’s life, remember that from some limited perspective your own life could seem better than others as well, and that people might easily envy your life if they saw only the surface.

Our circumstances have been very different from what we pictured at the beginning of this summer. The plans Catherine and I brought to Kelowna have had to be shelved for now, and we have seen how quickly life can change, for better or worse. We have not been able to walk together for months. Friends tell us about their camping adventures, their days swimming or hiking, while we have been camping out in hospital waiting rooms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw discontent as the want of self-reliance. He called it infirmity of will. To cure it, he recommended focusing on the business of life.

So we deal with the life in front of us, grateful for the friends and the mountains and the skies, even for the clouds, and we recognize that circumstances only represent the hand we have been given. Whatever they are, however harsh they seem to be, we still have to play that hand. How we play it will determine whether life becomes a matter of joy or of regret.