The joker

When President Kennedy was killed, the press had a field day with Lee Harvey Oswald, calling him an assassin and a murderer, until his mother pointed out that nobody could say for certain that he had done anything, and that he could be called all those names only if found guilty in a court of law. When she threatened to sue for defamation, the press pulled back and began to call him the accused assassin.

That was one of the early salvos in what has become a barrage of political correctness, and it has reached even into legal situations that are far less ambiguous than the event in Dallas in 1963. Today, when a lunatic goes into a movie theater and goes on a shooting rampage, hitting seventy people and killing a dozen, then is caught with a batch of other weapons in his hand and even more in his car, and is prepared to continue the onslaught, the papers go no further than to refer to him as the Colorado shooting suspect.

Because of the presumption of innocence in our system, nobody will say that this individual is the killer, Only the most bold press reports say that "police say he shot in the direction of the audience." There is a general fear that if somebody tells the truth about this incident before the facts are evaluated by a jury, the whole case could be thrown out because of pre-trial prejudice. We are protecting the constitutional rights of the accused and the right of the public to deal with him in a sanctioned way.

Mark Twain devotes two chapters in Roughing It (48 and 50) to this subject, ridiculing the usefulness of the jury system when the facts in a case are widely known.

Alfred the Great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive. For how could he imagine that we simpletons would go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his candle-clock after we had invented chronometers? In his day news could not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest, intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try—but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains.

Will James Holmes be the only person in this whole mess who can express himself? Will the press ever get away from shilly-shallying and equivocation, when everybody in the world knows what happened even if the facts are never spoken openly?

We all know the facts: This joker is a murderer many times over, an unfathomable lunatic. Keeping the truth muffled will help none of the people he killed and will do nothing to protect us.

Missing parts

Yesterday I woke up convinced that I had already done everything I ever would do in my life. Why these extra days, I wondered. This must be something like what my father felt ten years younger, when he thought he would die at sixty-five and then treated the final five years of his life as a bonus. I don't even have grandchildren to make the endgame more of an adventure and a discovery. I felt like a sleepwalking wanderer who wakes up halfway across the Sahara thinking Enough walking already, and hearing a voice saying If you don't like the sunshine get into the shade. There are no trees in sight, no bistros, no friends for conversation. True pointless exile.

It has felt more like a mountain climate than the flat north in this part of the late spring, with clear skies at morning, puffy clouds showing up later and building up until thunderstorms can be heard every afternoon, sometimes here, with winds and sheets of rain taking everybody by surprise even though they appeared in the weather forecast long before the skies got dark. The other night it happened so suddenly just after dark that I had been taking leisurely pictures of the yellow sunset, the glowing pink edges on the high clouds, the angels' rays coming over the horizon after the sun's last rays disappeared as I walked back to the car, and the first plashes of rain started as soon as I started to drive away. By the time I got home the air had cooled enough to make me wonder what season I was travelling through. Exile again, but this time instead of from something called home it was from a time of year.

Last night the thunder started long after dark, oddly before I noticed any lightning. And even after the rumbling became sharp cymbal crashes there were not many breaks of light. I was sitting inside, and my first warning of a change in the weather was the sound of water attacking the cars parked on the lot downstairs. I went outside to look, and I felt the floating mist reflecting off every surface around me as I stood far back on the balcony. The frequent rumblings still came alone, without light, even when they got louder. I remembered a distant storm I once saw in Kansas, heat lightning without sound, and thought this must be the missing part.

I am normally self-contained, not caring much about a life without friends, family, colleagues. I have thought that was the only reasonable response to life ever since I saw my father dying in 1979 and realized that one of the things we must do in life is get comfortable with the thought of going out alone, carrying only our memories and our beliefs, deluded or not. He was sure of what waited for him on the other side, and I was not. Even now, more than thirty years later, just as I am prepared to live with my memories and not to care whether they correspond to anything that actually happened, I am willing to embrace my beliefs and not to care whether they say anything about the present or the future. This is what I consider being self-contained. I have not met many people who share that stance in life. It is an antidote to exile. Normally it entails an acceptance of isolation and an unbridgeable gulf between me and anybody else, a permanent distance from everything outside me, regardless of how I try to fill it with love, compassion, concern.

The evening I took pictures of the sunset I was with Henry's son Paul. It's one of my self-imposed volunteer tasks, spending a few hours with this Down Syndrome man, now forty years old. Henry used to tell me he worried about making conditions right for Paul after he was gone. Now Cynthia has to worry alone, and conditions can never be right. He will have a hip replaced in August, and she is desperate to have others care for him for at least two weeks after that. Her long-range plan is to tear their house down to make room for a bigger one for them plus Helen and her husband. I admire them all for wanting to be together, trying to make life easier for Paul. When I take him away for the evening, he complains about his lot, about being at the mercy of people trying to control him or to keep the truth from him. Even six months after the fact, he still gets upset at the hospital staff for not telling him his father was dying. You talked to him, he says to me, did he tell you he was so close to dying? But I've read Moby-Dick; I don't have to be told how close we all are to dying. And no, he didn't tell me.

I have seen a few friends die recently, and none of them told me anything, and I still haven't learned to read the signs. This morning I dreamed that somebody opened the door (which door? I don't know; it wasn't the room I was sleeping in), reached inside, shut the lights, and was standing there in the room with me. Scared me until I got my wits back, but then I was too agitated to get back to sleep. Three o'clock and I didn't need that kind of thing. So I thought I might as well face the day.

Now I have been writing for more than an hour and I can see the sky outside, the first sign of light this close to the longest day of the year. I have always cherished the first light on summer mornings. At various times in my life I would ride my bike through deserted streets or play catch with myself or just read and listen to the radio. It's a time to be alone, to feel as if the world is mine alone. The adventure and discovery of the game without anybody else in it.

And this silly blog insists on placing me on the west coast. Especially odd now, when it's almost time to wake up, not time to go to bed.

Finally old enough to realize

I used to laugh when I heard about the aging population -- I mean the statisticians calling our attention to the fact that the average age of the population has been rising over the past few years. The way they word it, you could have thought there used to be a time when people were actually getting younger.

I never thought about getting old, as opposed to older, until after I turned 70 and my body began rebelling against itself. What used to be the occasional pain was found to be arthritis, and my doctor was afraid I might be suffering from osteoporosis. I also had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, and naps became a necessity when they had always been a luxury. My appetite for food changed, so that the joy I used to get from certain foods, such as chocolate, no longer seemed to be available.

And friends have left the scene, relatives have weakened. There is no longer an older generation. In crowds, I am often the oldest person in the room.

As you age, life teaches you to feel a kinship with more people, more creatures. We all share something mysterious called life, and you can come to appreciate something when you look into the eyes of a horse or a cat, something that was not there when you were younger. In one sense you are the key to the universe, and on another level you are the same as the worms that crawl out of the ground when it rains.

My father-in-law, now in his late eighties, has been getting more confused over the past couple of years. At first, we could see his anger at being dismissed by the medical profession. His life was just as valuable as ever, just as valuable as the next person's, and why weren't they taking him seriously any more? He was just as witty, garrulous, alert as ever, and we didn't understand how anybody could miss that.

But now he can't keep numbers straight, sometimes can't think of some basic words in the middle of a sentence, tells the same stories over and over again but can't recall some of the most important people or events in his life. He is still capable of walking around, though he needs extra time to go places, but is mind is fading faster than his body. He still sometimes gets angry at what people think, but he might later think the same thing he was angry about yesterday.

The hardest lesson to accept in life is the inevitability of change. Today is not the same as where we started, and tomorrow will not be the same as today. Yesterday was easy to accept because it was familiar, but now less and less makes the same kind of sense.

Change is good, you hear, because it's the stuff of life. Without it there is no life. But it's hard watching the world you grew up with fading, deteriorating, changing beyond recognition, moving inevitably toward decay and existence only in memory -- if you can keep that.

When my mother was dying, a friend told me she had gone to the wall with both her parents. In one, the body fell apart and the mind was sharp to the end. In the other, the mind collapsed first and it then worked for years to drag the body down with it. Both ways suck, she assured me.

Many people whistle a tune suggesting that we can never die, that we are eternal soul, that life is a gift, that attitude is everything, that we are passing through this vale of tears on our way to a better place. But they are whistling in the dark. Has anybody ever avoided pain along the road?

We welcome any emotional links we can forge, even if they are bound to result in pain when they end. And they all do end, for one person or another. Mark Twain once congratulated a friend on his engagement but told him he was exposing himself to life's sharpest pains as well as the most exquisite joys. The great emotional dilemma that hangs over my head is whether it would be better to outlive my wife or to avoid the pain of seeing her go. Both ways suck.

Yesterday my son's bike was hit from behind by a car and he was knocked down in traffic. He was not seriously injured, but the car drove over the bike (a well equipped apparatus with many high-end gizmos) and destroyed a month-old laptop computer, which was loaded with software and pictures and files, a machine he was using to produce radio-quality programs. Then the driver kept going.

When I found out about what he had been through, I felt as if I had been personally assaulted. I know he feels the loss of his stuff, but I have spent hours aware of the fragility of his own life, how close we are all, always, to losing each other.

Age not only gives you losses but the awareness of the possibility of other losses. What we have is ours for a minute, then no more. Change and pain and loss. The potential and the actual. And sometimes there are little joys that have to be grasped, appreciated, cherished.

How my dreams show that I am really lost

It began in an idyllic, hilly landscape, not far from a small town I did not know. When some of the people were going to town, I asked them to get me a map, but they laughed and said the place was too small, there were no maps. Toward evening, some of the people were gathering to walk to the shul in town to hear a talk by some famous rabbi, they said, a man I had never heard of. I wanted to go with them just to see where the shul was. Besides, nobody had asked me to walk with them, and I felt isolated from them even though I seemed to be sharing whatever they were doing. I decided to go with them because if I stayed I would have been the only person left there. We walked down the hill, turning on one or two streets, picking up more people along the way, until the whole world seemed to be going in that direction. I did not recognize any of the landmarks, and I knew I would have a hard time finding my way without them. When I caught up with some people I could only think of inane questions to ask, like when it would be over, how much farther we had to walk, how many people would be there. But it was getting chilly and I told somebody I had to go back to get my jacket. I asked if I had enough time before the talk, but the person next to me said nothing, just kept trudging on in the same direction. I turned around and walked back up the hill. I noticed some children I had not seen before, playing on doorsteps, and a few people walking in the oppposite direction, including some old ladies who might have been going to the shul. I could see some traffic above me and then I saw some steps, a kind of shortcut I had heard about, leading up to the main street. But once I climbed them and looked at the street signs, nothing was familiar. I thought we had walked only a few minutes down the hill altogether, turned only a couple of times, to get as far as we got, but I did not recognize anything in front of me or behind me. I thought about small towns I had been in, places where everything was just off the main street, and I walked one or two block, but even the traffic was gone and there was nobody to ask for directions. The street signs suggested nothing to me. At one intersection there was a street going up still another hill, and I wondered if I should go up there. Then I felt pain in the big finger on my right hand. It got more and more intense, and I noticed the nail was beginning to turn blue. Where in this strange town could I find a doctor to take care of it, I wondered. Just before I woke up, I was still trying to negotiate unfamiliar streets near the top of the hill, looking for anything that might be familiar so that I could find my way back to where I had started.