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.

The unanswered question

I've been told that I should have answered the question that ended yesterday's post.

For better or worse, I see it as the question that underlies everything I write. If I answer it, I might have to go on to a tougher question -- Who are you? -- which is your own business.

Life is more than words can express -- but what is that?

It’s almost a century since my Yiddish-speaking mother stepped off the boat at Ellis Island and into English culture. It did not take long for her to become a stickler for proper language usage, and by the time I came along she could serve as my first arbiter of the way things oughta be.

My father may have been the teacher in the family, but she was the one who taught us that there was not a right way and a wrong way to speak, not a right word and a wrong word to use — just a right way and right words, and we had to know them. She loved the way I excelled at spelling, and she did not tolerate grammatical errors. It was a surprise to many that English was not her first language.

Some of my most poignant memories of her late years are of a confused woman groping to express thoughts that did not jump into her consciousness with clarity. She would stop in mid-sentence, click her tongue, and say, “Ah, what’s that word?” And I would wait, sometimes for a thought that eluded her.

The human brain is an amazing instrument, an apparatus, according to the Devil’s Dictionary, with which we think that we think. Robert Frost called it a wonderful organ, which starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. True, both true, but neither insight is very helpful for a neuroscientist.

What the brain does in Act Five is more unpredictable than earlier in life. Like the rest of the body, it begins to erode at the edges and to act (if I may indulge in a strange analogy) as if it had a mind of its own.

Twice in the past few days I have stopped in a conversation because I needed the concepts of introvert and extrovert, and all I was coming up with were the wrong words: optimist and pessimist. This was not a good sign. It has always been important for me to come up with the right word at the right time.

If I were the worrying type, misplacing a couple of words could have been alarming the first time and an invitation for panic the second time. And many older people, when they forget a word or a name or the location of their car keys, think this may be the beginning of the end. I have thought about these things for years, and I know that the beginning of the end comes early in life.

As it is, I was able to go on with the correct words after an uncomfortable pause, but I began to think it might not be a good idea to live for another twenty years if I lose my vocabulary along the way.

In the allegorical medieval play Everyman, the eponymous central character is abandoned by everything and everybody he thought he could depend on, including possessions, good looks, strength, and relatives. In the end, according to the plot, knowledge is the last friend to leave him, and he can take only his good deeds with him.

This all relates to what a person really is. The modern play (and movie) Whose Life is It Anyway? poses the issue in terms of a sculptor who becomes a paraplegic and who wants to die as a result. As a culture, we are far enough from Everyman to know that we are not our goods, our thoughts, our emotions. Yet, at an advanced age, as our knees give out and our words begin to fail, we each still ask the most fundamental of questions: who am I?

What the seasons have come to mean

As I re-hashed my life when I wrote my memoir, I was struck by how many events resembled incidents and situations that had happened years before. They were never the same, of course. I was older the second (even the third) time, and conditions were different; but in looking back, I could recognize many of the same choices, the same alternatives.

This suggested that the journey through life is as complex as listening to a musical fugue. In the fugue, a melody is repeated again and again but altered each time, with a different key or a new rhythm. The multiple variations at times become so complex that it is difficult to recognize the original theme.

For long periods of my life I would wake up in the morning and greet the dawn by saying “Another day — another chance to get it right.” It was as if each day gives a little more experience, so that the older person can face the same issues with more wisdom, more equanimity. In the Ground Hog Day image, we move toward the Buddhist state of Nirvana, a state of release with no more Karma to pay back.

Getting older, a person recognizes the passage of seasons with more wistfulness. Summer is not just time for another vacation, winter more than a time to dust off the snow shovel.

During the years when I lived in Ottawa, I noticed a marked change in the weather at the beginning of September. There was no mistaking the end of summer and the beginning of a long descent into extreme cold. There was a beauty and a sereniity associated with this change, of course: the pesky summer bugs disappeared, and the leaves on hardwood trees transmuted themselves into brilliant reds and oranges and yellows.

The signals may be different here in Kelowna, but they also show up at the beginning of September, even if only briefly. This past Tuesday, low clouds obscured the tops of the mountains that surround the Okanagan Valley. It was the first time I had seen that meteorological feature since last spring. During the winter it is constant, obscuring the valley with an atmospheric cocoon and insulating it against most of the harshness of winter.

There is a broken cloud deck today, with clumps of cumulus, some small ones, narrow, dense and dark, stretching across the sky, but there are also refreshing patches of blue in every direction. It is not yet time for the clouds to close the valley in. But nobody doubts that the heat of summer is mostly gone, and it is more than the absence of tourists that shows it.

In a way that Ralph Waldo Emerson was never able to do, Catherine has taught me to see natural facts as symbols of spiritual facts. If much of nature is cyclical, if the seasons come and go, if events in our lives repeat themselves, then any positives or negatives we perceive can also be shown to be mistaken in time.

The only things you can be sure of, I have heard, are death and taxes. In the many years when I paid no income taxes I managed to sidestep one side of that truism, but I have no illusions about the other side. I do not believe (as William Saroyan did) that an exception would be made in my case, and I am certainly not enough of a solipsist to believe that the world began when I was born and that it will end when I go. Rather, it becomes easier for me to see my own existence as part of an endless cavalcade of life. And I appreciate Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 more strongly than ever.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Missed opportunities

Yesterday we stopped at a farm stand along the highway up in the mountains. Function Junction was run by a loquacious woman as unexpected as the name of her farm. I asked about everything sold at that remote location, including the blueberries that had just disappeared from the shelves, the cherries that were gone for the year, and the raspberries that were just starting to come in.

I would rather buy produce from growers than at a store, especially when they meet my questions about pesticides with such scorn and distaste that I know the fruits are reasonably poison-free. I bought a bag of what the woman called banana potatoes, much smaller than chicken eggs, and some peaches that were as hard as any I could have found at the supermarket.

She said the peaches would last for a few weeks in the refrigerator, and that I could just take them out a couple of days before I wanted to eat them. Which struck me as strange because I have a memory — which doesn’t seem too distant — of eating fresh fruit without having to prepare for the experience two days in advance.

But there you go. If I think I will want to eat fruit in two days, I can get ready today by taking a peach out of the refrigerator. Stretch the snack out over a couple of days.

The BC fruit outlet not far from where we live is a clearinghouse for all fresh produce that comes into Kelowna, with prices often better than in any store and additional discounts for bulk sales. Even there, except for apples and pears, I expect the fruit to be a few days away from ripe when I buy it.

It is always risky to buy fruit in Canada. In Ottawa, I usually avoided buying fruit for much of the year because the kiwis and plums we got in our winter could easily have been shipped from Chile or New Zealand in another geologic epoch. Sometimes I would buy a mango in August hoping it would be ripe before the first snow.

But that was better than in Thunder Bay, where we used to plant tomatoes and bring the plants into the house before they ripened. We would hang them in the basement and pick them as they looked ready, usually the following January. I never saw a ripe tomato outside there.

There are some items that are not part of the fruity cornucopia of the Okanagan — those that come from the tropics mainly, or from year-round warm climates, such as bananas, mangoes, and oranges. When I was young, it was rare to see these out of season because the shipping took too long or was too expensive. We now expect to get them at any time of year, and not having them is a temporary inconvenience. But nobody is surprised that getting fresh fruit from halfway around the world is more of a gamble than getting it locally.

This is poles away from what I was had in mind when I sat down to write a couple of hours ago. I was actually thinking about what happened to me in the Superstore yesterday when I was returning a bag of oranges that had turned out to be all pulp and no juice. In fact, I wrote the headline for this article before I began. Most unusual.

Here’s where the headline begins to make sense.

The counter at Customer Service was full of cell phones, and the person waiting on me asked if I wanted to buy one cheap. It sounded like something you could expect to hear from a shady character who had just opened the back doors of his truck. But it turned out that the store had received a large shipment of 2015 phones that it could not sell or advertise because the models already on display were more up to date.

“We were told to discount them and get rid of them,” the rep explained “They’re all twenty-five dollars now, and we’re going to put up a sign inviting people to get them here. Nothing wrong with them except that they don’t have the same features as the new ones.”

How often does an opportunity like that fall into your lap? There were several models, including the type I got a year ago for $300. Now I could pick up one — or several — for a fraction of that.

My regular readers will not be surprised that I said no. Technology does not fascinate me enough for an offer like that to be attractive. But back in the car Catherine asked me why I hadn’t just taken one or two. I could give them away. Lots of other people would be happy to get a 2015 cell phone.

Well, that was yesterday and this is today. A gift horse stared me in the face — I get a chance to use the word “literally” her — and I didn’t think outside my usual box. I sped by it on the road (not literally), and that kind of opportunity may never come up again.

Life is full of missed opportunities, but they are rarely so obvious.

Watching the mountain burn

I was beginning this post early this morning, but after many changes, including changes to the title, my laptop gobbled up most of the text. Because of that, the reference to the shipwreck in the last paragraph makes no sense. But it makes sense in the context of the document floating out in cyberspace. I am posting this only to remind me to make all my changes in a Word document.

The sky looked unusual just before dawn this morning. I thought it was because of the spotty, dark clouds moving eastward out of the valley, making a patchwork of brightness and darkness as the sun rose. It turned out not to be the case, however, as the world off to the north became more visible. It then became clear that the strangeness in the scene came from smoke rising from a forest fire that had grown overnight on the mountain directly in my line of sight across Okanagan Lake.

An hour after sunrise, the smoke is rising to about twice the height of the mountain and widening to a plume that merges with the broken cloud deck. Looking toward the sky, it is not possible to tell where that happens.

There’s a terrible beauty about the Bear Creek fire — beauty because the patterns of smoke evoke my aesthetic sensibility, terrible because people’s lives have been disrupted and nobody can tell if some of those lives, in the campground, in the houses, will be changed forever. What makes the scene especially frightening is that the single thin spire of smoke I saw at first has spread out to obscure my view of the mountain altogether.

Now even the thought of a tornado or of a shipwreck could make me swallow my gum, though I avoid that reaction by not chewing gum. But any reaction in the face of nature is inadequate, a humbling reminder of our place in the vast cosmos.

The transience of memory

My sister wrote me earlier this week for some information about a troupe of Jewish singers that used to give concerts around southeastern Michigan and northwestern Ohio almost a century ago. The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan wanted to know more from her about a photo that used to hang in our home, which includes both of our parents. Growing up, we children didn’t hear much about their experience as choristers beyond the romantic detail that Mom and Dad once stayed off the bus long enough in Toledo to get married in a very private ceremony.

The studious Bodzins and the working-class Taitelbaums did not approve of whatever it was that their children were doing together (presumably, except for singing), and the couple did not announce their marriage for months. I never found out why they let the families in on the secret when they did, or how. In fact, we never even knew exactly when they got married either, because they gave a fake date to their parents. But the sparks set off by that experience lingered for years. The two families did not share more than a handful of celebrations in all the years we lived near them in Detroit.

This was the second occasion I had recently to relive some events of the distant past. My youngest (now my only) brother, Henry, came to Kelowna for a few days, and we occasionally touched on matters that, if nothing else, showed how two people growing up together could be left with two very different sets of memories.

I have been aware of this for a long time. Memories are less a matter of what happened than of what remains in the mind. And as we all have different experiences, the things that impress us about any given event will also be different.

In response to one of my occasional writings about the uniqueness and idiosyncracy of individual memory, Henry would occasionally ask me if I remembered something from our youth and I would often say no. I was never ashamed not to have retained everything that happened to me when I was young — very few people do, and I do not envy them. Besides, I could always mention something I remembered that Henry had long ago forgotten.

On this visit, Henry mentioned that when we were young — the word means something different to each of us because i am almost nine years older than he is — our mother reduced her washing load by limiting the number of towels we could use. So we dried ourselves with a washcloth instead and used a towel only to finish the job. When he said he still does that, Catherine perked up because I do the same thing. We have shared that quirky habit for years without knowing it, and, in my case, even without remembering why the practice had started in the first place.

Some life stories are interesting to people who did not live them but many are not, and how Henry and I have dealt with washcloths for more than fifty years will strike most readers as a trivial illustration of nothing. But it clearly shows how inconsequential are many of our memories.

I have often thought about another example. I was named after my father’s mother’s father. Except for his name I know nothing about the man — where he lived, what he did, how he provided for his family — yet this information was essential for his family a century ago.

We all want to leave something of value behind us when we go, but most people leave nothing but a name. The money, the reputation, the direct consequences of a life, are all swallowed up in time, sometimes fairly quickly.

I’ve been writing this piece on and off for almost a week now, and I’ll conclude with two quotations from literature. The first is Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Finally, as Kurt Vonnegut reminds us, so it goes.

Priorities

As a father of three, I used to tell childless couples that no experience is as life-changing as bringing a baby into your life. I had been born into a stable family, moved in and out of schools for a quarter of a century; I had succeeded and failed, both as a student and as a teacher; I had left my native country, been forced out of my chosen profession, and lived in cities and on farms; I had lived alone and with a family I had helped create, then left it to rebuild my sense of who I was. Yet I felt that the most decisive change in all of that was when I became responsible for another human being.

All people must constantly re-evaluate what they are doing. Is it important or not? Does it matter? Can I be doing something more meaningful and rich at this stage of life, even in this moment?

Setting priorities has become trickier. Freed from paid work, a person in my privileged position can (within limits often imposed from outside) choose how to spend each day, even whether to get out of bed in the morning. It becomes much easier to see how actions are the result of conscious choices.

Priorities are the result of playing off what has to be done against what a person wants to do. I am always aware of the necessary tasks in life. Unless I want to see the house fall apart, I do the cooking, the shopping, and the cleaning; I get Catherine to her appointments and spend quality time with her.

Of course, there are times when something that has to be done – going shopping with Catherine, for example – keeps me from doing what I want to do. Being in that situation usually makes me change my priorities temporarily.

Then there are the distractions of the Internet. I have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and one newspaper feed, from the Washington Post. Just looking at the headlines from these three sources could take me more than an hour every day. Reading the most significant articles behind the headlines could eat up another hour or two.

Writers are skillful procrastinators and masters of rationalization. It can sometimes feel like a hollow claim when I say I to want to read meaningful literature and to write. I can find all kinds of reasons to do something else. And spending time on line can be an excuse not to read or write.

Just today I learned that Nike is no longer making golf equipment. I was also encouraged to test my knowledge of European geography, and to watch a video of an elephant swimming in India. All these things diverted me into a new world of curiosity and transported me beyond the normal limits of procrastination and rationalization.

Without looking for it, I also ran across news from the entertainment industry, highlights of the lives and exploits of people whose names I did not recognize, from sports or television programs. I receive posts of these items over and over again, so much so that I can barely see more meaningful news of the day. They remind me of Thoreau saying “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

This morning, the Post offered me more than twenty fresh, mainly time-sensitive articles. Besides the normal diet of politics (more than half the articles), they included a look at new weapons being developed by Russia, an examination of confession videos in China, a warning about imminent flooding of cities on the east coast of the United States, and a local Washington story about the reduction of late-night public transit service. Consider how much time would be required to read even two of these articles.

At my age, saving time is an ongoing priority. Some things are worth the time, but others increasingly are not. No more than anybody else can I always be involved in my top priority item. And I must constantly choose how much time I will give to trivia and ephemera. There are times when I have treated the issue like the Gordian knot and just cut the cord completely by going off line. I’m old enough that the option always seems reasonable.

Who I used to be and what I've become

For most of my life I was a morning person. In some circles, revealing that about myself could be almost a confession, or at the least apologetic, as if it were something to be ashamed of. We all know people who are hardly alive before they have coffee in the morning, and who are proud of it. But I was in the habit of jumping out of bed and getting started on whatever needed doing. When I was a teenager, with friends who would have started their day at noon if it had been possible, I would dress as soon after dawn as I could, even in the summer, and ride my bicycle on deserted streets or play catch with myself, tossing a tennis ball against a wall or the concrete steps in front of the house. Breakfast was an inconvenient intrusion in the day.

I started that paragraph just after six this morning. My first thought, when I woke up a few minutes ago, was about how I can no longer spring into action when my consciousness returns in the morning. It’s a private fact about myself. When I run into people during the day, I have no idea whether they are fighting a diurnal slump or if they are at their daily best. But I do know that mornings are no longer the welcoming time of day they used to be for me. I have finally learned, first-hand, that spirit-is-willing-flesh-is-weak stuff I’ve always heard about.

I’ve reached a point in life where waking up, whether it’s from a nap in the afternoon or from a long, deep sleep in the morning, means re-orienting myself, making an effort to become fully aware of what day is it and what room am I in. I have to plant myself firmly in time and space before I allow my foot to touch the ground.

It reminds me of a story – I think I read it in a book by Elie Wiesel – about a man walking toward a distant town who lies down to sleep when it gets too dark to see the road. The last thing he does before he goes to sleep is to point his shoes in the direction he was going. Before he wakes, somebody tries on the shoes by the side of the road but finds that they do not fit. So he puts them back down, but he points them in the opposite direction. Our man wakes up, puts his shoes on, and starts on his journey again. Before long he sees a town just like his. Everything in it is familiar. He knows the streets, the buildings, the people. Eventually he gets to a house that looks just like his. The woman of the house and the children are so glad to see him that he decides to stay and to forget about the trip he was going to take. He never resumes his trip, and he lives a whole new life in the other town. His wife wonders what ever happened to him.

When you live without commitments that push you into a daily routine, it is not hard to think of yourself like that wanderer. You have to push yourself to remember whether to turn right or left when you hit the road again.

I grew up in a world of religious rituals. Everything was set out and known. I knew that I had to wash my hands before touching my eyes after I woke up, and I was instructed on which shoe to lace up first. The basic book of Jewish law, which lays out directions for every step of the day, is named The Set Table. Following those rituals makes much of life predictable and understandable. A whole community engaged in those rituals gains a built-in sense of trust and cohesiveness.

The down side of moving away from the commitments of ritual, of course is that it can lead to isolation and suspicion.

For hundreds of years in European Jewry it was traditional to ask strangers to show that they wore the ritual fringes on their clothing. That would prove that they were part of the in-crowd. It would also show that strangers were not really strangers, that the fixed community shared something fundamental with them and that they could be trusted.

These rituals have virtually faded from my life. Knowing who I am and where I am going nowadays takes a special effort, and it starts with my first conscious thought in the morning. That conscious thought used to be an instant given; now it has to be jigged into place.

But I console myself with the fact that the spirit is still willing. I know many people who have already lost that piece of the puzzle.

Dying for beauty every day

I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room -

He questioned softly "Why I failed?"
"For beauty," I replied -
"And I - for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren, are," He said -

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night -
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss reached our lips -
And covered up - our names -

--Emily Dickinson

When I used to teach this poem, the students would often ask "Why died for truth or beauty? Why failed?" I told them they had a whole lifetime to find answers to those questions. And life does reveal answers. Like today, when I tried to live for truth and found myself living for beauty instead.

I have tried to balance truth and beauty in my aesthetic, both in reading and in writing. I am blown away by great writing, in poetry or prose, and I admire a well-constructed essay. As John Keats pointed out, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Much of my effort outside the house here in Kelowna has been to work with the local arts council in whatever way I could, helping to promote concerts (even of music I don't particularly appreciate) and just talking to people about the arts community. I make no pretensions about beauty in my own writing -- on the continuum, I am most often closer to living for truth.

Notice, I said living, not dying.

But there are aspects of life here that remind me of other dimensions of the subject. I went into the BC Fruits outlet today to get apples and oranges, and I came away with cherries and apricots and plums and local chocolate with sour cherries as well. The fabled Okanagan heat has finally appeared, and I had left Catherine sitting in the car because it takes an extra effort to manipulate the knee scooter out of the trunk and get it back.The fruit depot maintains a constant temperature all year, something like Carlsbad Caverns or other underground caves, so I was in no hurry to leave the building. When I came back to the car, Catherine made a passing remark about how she had been without her cell phone or her Kindle or her glasses, but she let me know how grateful she had been just sitting there, impressed by the beauty of Knox mountain a couple of blocks away and billowy clouds dominating the sky.

I don't know if we will ever get used to the beauty of this area. It seems endless, the dry heat, the big sky, the changing cloud formations over mountains in all directions.

As they say, it is to die for.

They say family is everything

I grew up in a large extended family. My father had nine brothers and sisters, and when the whole bunch got together – usually only at Hanukkah – there were almost fifty people in the room. My grandparents’ children formed a family club in the late 1940s, and they have met with some regularity every since. Meetings were monthly at first, when everybody knew each other, but the schedule has become lax in recent years.

My parents’ generation is gone, and mine is thinning out. Many of the children of my brothers and sister have left Detroit, as have the majority of my thirty-nine cousins. Their families are scattered, mainly around the United States and Israel. I would be hard pressed to identify the names of the remaining Detroiters, the people who attend family club meetings these days.

It was years ago when I first realized that some of the children of my cousins were so different from me that they might as well have come from a different family, or even dropped from a different planet. They had stayed in North Carolina or Louisiana after going to school there, and the families they had spawned would never know anything about the family that I knew when I was young.

Everything I’ve said so far relates to my father’s family. Our little group did not maintain the same ties with my mother’s family, and I have rarely communicated with more than a few of my cousins on that side. My mother had three brothers and one sister, and in a pinch I would be able to track down the children of only one of them.

The five of us who grew up in my parents’ house were close to each other until my mother died, just over ten years ago. None of us consciously did anything to change our relationships then, but there was an immediate change from that moment on. There were few occasions to bring us all together again. Our children all knew their cousins, but they saw each other only on rare occasions.

In Catherine’s family, the mother’s side dominated. The family I met when they got together for holidays was an assimilated bunch of French-Canadians, none of whom spoke any other French than a joual of the streets. Catherine and her brother were the only ones from her generation who actually spoke the language.

Simone Cunningham, Catherine’s mother, gave all the family parties and was the animating spirit that held them together. After Simone died, it seemed almost as if the cohesive element in the family had been the holiday turkeys and the wine. Catherine was left to do all the work to clean out and close up the house; the cousins showed up only when asked, and then only to see how much of the estate they could lick from the bones. We have seen few of them since, though many of them continue to live in or near Ottawa.

People in the family we are born into are a part of our identity as long as we and they remain alive. But, in tandem, if we are lucky, we also cling to people who share something with us, such as likes and dislikes, or values. They are our de facto family as long as that sharing matters to us.

From the start, with only a few of her close relatives nearby, Catherine and I wanted to be each other’s family. But we realized that if we were going to have anything like the family we had known as children, we would have to do something special with our friends. So we invited people to our house for special occasions, such as Valentine’s Day. On Christmas Eve, we lit the house with candles and asked our non-Christian friends to join us. We all found comfort and joy in each other at a time when much of the world around us had another reason to celebrate.

We tried to create a family atmosphere for all of our friends, many of whom had no family in Ottawa, and some of whom never spoke about their blood relatives at all. Some were continents away from anybody close, and others had been abandoned or betrayed by the people who should have been closest to them. We wanted to create an atmosphere of warmth and love for all of us together.

When Catherine and I went on the road to ask people about love two years ago, a number of interviewees were passionate about the central place of family in their lives. More than one person told us that family is everything. They insisted that life is empty without loving people around you.

It upset many people in Ottawa that our move to Kelowna would mean the end of our bringing people together. For us, too, this was one of the biggest negatives when we weighed pros and cons. We could only hope to be able to bring a new group of people together in our new home.

As it turns out, in the few short months we have been in Kelowna, we have met a significant number of wonderful and interesting people, who have given us their time, attention, and consideration. It’s a family in the making.

For Catherine’s recent birthday, she invited some of those new friends to a party at a downtown restaurant. About a dozen came, along with one cousin who lives nearby.

There was an ironic twist to the evening. For the last couple of years of his life, Catherine’s father lost all awareness of her birthday. She was more than disappointed when she always went out of her way to celebrate his birthday and he could not even acknowledge the day when her turn came. This year she decided to pay for her birthday party with some of the money he gave her before he died early in 2015. So, in effect, Jack Cunningham paid for the evening.

It was the old family unwittingly celebrating the new one.

Life in fruit country

So keep repeating it's the berries
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries
So live and laugh at it all.

– from “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,”
by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson

Sometime in the early eighties, when my children were still children and I was still in a position to show them the world, we drove to a mountain pass near the border between Alberta and British Columbia. Despite our altitude, we were sweltering in the summer heat. Parked in front of us was a semi-trailer with its back doors open, displaying what looked like an endless supply of fruit. For the next two days we enjoyed a large basket of peaches from a mythical neverland called the Okanagan.

When farmers’ markets were open In Ottawa in the summer, I sought out fresh Niagara fruit, plums and peaches and apricots and cherries that had been trucked overnight from Beamsville or Jordan. One of the dreams that tantalized me for years was to move to Niagara, to a region where I would not have to buy unripe fruit in the supermarket and to try — often without success — to guess when it was ready to eat.

The reality of living in Kelowna makes my earlier dreams pale. Because it is a bureaucratic nightmare to convert agricultural land into residential, the city has to expand around orchards and vineyards. As a result, new housing developments and industrial parks pop up beyond agricultural areas, and the city map becomes a checkerboard of land use, with built-up areas interspersed with orchards and vineyards. In the spring, driving almost anywhere in town, it is impossible not to pass acres of trees laden with a variety of fruit blossoms.

We have friends who live near the top of a hill, with acres of grape vines spread out below them. They claim to have bought the property just because they like grapes. Most of the crop is taken off by a vintner, but they can gorge themselves on grapes all season. They trade some of the fruit with people on the next property, who grow peaches and cherries.

At the beginning of July, fruit is plentiful and readily available in stores and at nearby farms. Half a dozen varieties of cherries began showing up in mid-June, then apricots. Peaches come soon, then pears and plums, and finally apples. And I haven’t even considered the strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. A fruit lover like me hardly knows where to start.

A woman's work is never done

Catherine is fond of saying that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We are all familiar with the drill, working out the same strategy, beating our head against the same wall, pushing the same slippery ball up the same hill and thinking that things will be different this time.

For me, the matter is more fundamental. I have always found it insane simply to do the same thing, regardless of the outcome.

There have been times when new-age teachers or groups have encouraged me to move forward and to grow by repeating a mantra until something happened. The practice was supposed to lead to the empty mind that would allow enlightenment to flow in.

I briefly joined some Buddhists, for example, who thought chanting would lead to an infinite array of results. One afternoon, a member of the group called me as I was trying to unplug a kitchen drain. Chanting, he assured me, would unclog the drain.

And, of course, Judaism, the ancient religion of my youth, prescribes the same prayers three times a day (except on days when there are four). I found that while this practice sometimes led me to think I was addressing God, the prayers were more often as mind-emptying as the mantras I later chanted with the Buddhists. After a very few years of saying the same prayers, it becomes hard to focus on the words. I came to perform the practice automatically, habitually, more often out of obligation than because of a search or craving for divinity.

In the course of my life I have come to seek variety, even the kind of mental variety that results from letting my thoughts stray and following my imagination into unexpected corners. That may be why I never fully sympathized with Catherine when she would talk about the sameness of daily life in our previous apartment. She even talked about getting tired of the same old breath-taking sunsets, the same old million-dollar view down the Ottawa River. She felt more of a compulsion to get out than I did. I thought it was a luxury, and often even an extravagance. She felt trapped in the same old apartment, whereas I was excited by the same old chance to write.

Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I am not writing a screed or a complaint. I only want to follow up on my previous two posts and to describe how life can change in unexpected ways. Catherine is a treasure. It is my privilege to be able to help her get through life in any way I can, and it is never a burden. One thing the past few months have taught me is that you have to live the life in front of you because the life you planned is sometimes not available.

So: Catherine’s current condition has changed our routine in ways I never could have imagined. As her mobility has become more of a challenge, I have had to help her do many of the things she used to do by herself, or simply to do them alone. My main jobs around the house used to be to vacuum the carpets, to plan the meals, to hunt down the food and other items to keep the house supplied, and to cook dinner. Now, in addition, I sort and take care of the laundry, do the dishes, and feed and clean up after the cats. (I should add paying attention to the cats generally, because I would not do it on my own and I consider it a chore.)

On top of that, because Catherine has spent weeks unable to put weight on her right foot, I have been helping with a number of minor chores, many of which I would never have thought about. These are as pedestrian as making her breakfast every day, a particularly unique task that involves assembling a concoction of several ingredients (cereal, fruit, nuts, spices, grains). As I do not drink coffee, I have also had to learn how to operate the coffee maker.

I have had to puzzle out the intricacies of her side of the closet and her clothing drawers, which used to seem all a jumble to me. After a few weeks of practice, I now know where to put all the laundry without asking.

In short, this experience has permitted me to become familiar with every corner of the apartment we have occupied since the end of November.

As a diabetic, Catherine has for years had to do many more things out of necessity than I have. That may be the reason she talks more about breaking out of routine than I do. We both spurn same-old, same-old, but in different ways.

Our new routine has affected me in interesting and unexpected ways. I have built up a renewed dislike for routine, felt the monotony of the daily grind in ways I never felt it before. As I face each morning, I consciously think about how the day might present new opportunities as well as the repeated obligations.

In other words, I am learning how to be creative in my use of time. Far from resenting my new home tasks, I now resent the time I used to spend on line, the time that used to slip away as I read articles and posts I could not remember even an hour later, the on-screen appeals to watch some useless video because I had no more new mail – as if I would not know how to turn around in my chair and face life in the other direction.

I am learning that it is insane to come back to my computer day after day and to expect enlightenment from some outside source. The real lessons are right in front of me, even before I press the on-switch.

Der mentsh trakht un Gott lakht – take 2

One of the main things that took Catherine and me to the interior of British Columbia was the harshness of eastern winters. I endured eastern Ontario for more than forty years, and she lived in Ottawa for almost all of her life. Because of reduced vision, Catherine could often not see ice in front of where she was walking, and the dip off a sidewalk could easily surprise her at a street corner. We thought it would be great for her to be able to walk alone safely in the winter. And we were both looking forward to the prospect of walking through the winter without having to bundle ourselves in several layers of protection.

This past winter was a dream, even though Kelowna is still in Canada and it made sense for the temperature to stay below freezing for a few days in December and January. But we never missed the heavy coats we had left in Ottawa and we could already stop wearing boots in January. The heavy cloud cover that obscures the mountaintops above the Okanagan Valley – an inversion that may help keep cold out but which results in unmitigated greyness for more than two months – broke up enough from time to time in early February to allow sunlight through, and it was all uphill from then on.

But there was one major fly in the ointment. The little toe on Catherine’s right foot was a concern almost from the day she got here at the end of November. She went to Emergency before she had been here a week. Later, a vascular surgeon put her on a series of antibiotics for what appeared to be a stubborn infection. That effort at treatment could have continued for months. The doctor eventually offered her an alternative – amputation – which she chose. The drugs were tearing up her digestive system, and she was certainly building up immunity to antibiotics that she might need later. On top of that, there was no guarantee that the treatment would ever allow the toe to recover.

This story could go on for several paragraphs more, but my point is not to tell the story. It is to record my reaction to what happened. Besides, the physical part of it is Catherine’s story, not mine. So fast forward from the amputation in early March to late June, when an orthopedic surgeon finally told us the problem had nothing to do with infection. All the antibiotics were treating an infection that never existed. What was happening was that the bones in her right foot had collapsed. The condition is called Charcot foot.

In her third hospital stay, Catherine was fitted with what used to be called a walking cast, but the term was either ironic or altogether inappropriate in this case because she was cautioned not to put any pressure on the foot (that is, not to walk) for at least another three months.

So here's the math. She got here in late November. Three months from now puts us at late September. Now do the philosophy. We came here to be able to walk in the winter, but we only considered was the weather, not whether our bodies would hold together for long enough to support us. And it is our own physical condition that is now tripping us up. Lesson: it is hard to live anywhere but in the present beause we cannot see the factors that will control the future.

The future is never what we anticipate. When we try to picture some event that has not yet happened, the reality that materializes is never what we imagined.

When we moved west we expected certain parts of our life to change, both as a couple and individually. but we never could have imagined the eventual consequences of the events that have transpired in the past six months. I will get into some of the major consequences in my next post.

Reflections on love

[I am still working on the sequel to my previous post, but this one jumped the queue.]

I have heard about love all my life without having a sense of how it was supposed to work. My oldest memories contain that word only twice. Once, as a stubborn young teen-ager, I was pulled aside by my mother and reprimanded for an act of rebellion with the words “Why do you feel you have to do that? We will give you whatever you need. You know we love you, don’t you?” Actually, I did not know, because that concept did not usually come into my parents’ vocabulary. And it remained recondite until I started to puzzle it out in later years.

The second instance was even more surprising. At a family meal, our father told us to pay attention for a minute. The five of us waited for his proclamation, which must have come after he was scolded (possibly by our mother) for making love too mysteriously abstract in our house. “Now listen,” he began, “because I’m going to tell you this only once, and don’t expect to hear it again. I love you.”

And with that he changed the subject and life continued as it always had.

I did not appreciate my father’s love for me until more than twenty years after he died, when I was writing a memoir about my early years. I often stopped to calculate how old he must have been when I was a punk of a certain age, and more than once I stopped in amazement at how he had responded to me – at how I would have reacted to my own children when I was the same age as he had been.

It would have helped if my early education had taught me something more about love than its place in the lexicon. But it did not. Now I realize how impossible it would be for me to acknowledge all the sacrifices my parents made for me, all the plans they set aside to accommodate me, all the instincts they followed to give me a more positive sense of self than I have seen in most of the people I have ever met.

I have recently lost one of the great loves in my life, a school friend from more than sixty years ago, who was offended by something I never intended two years ago, a man who has rebuffed every effort I have made to bring him back. I recognize that he remains hurt, and I grieve his pain every day.

Love is an attitude of caring. It requires forgiveness and understanding. It encompasses what you can give, not what you can get. And that causes the grief when somebody leaves or dies. Love does not disappear. It hangs on. The loss of a true friend makes the mind spin with no place to rest. Annie Dillard describes this situation beautifully in Holy the Firm:

The pain within the millstones’ pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other . . . is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones’ sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit here. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother, when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

Der mentsh trakht un Gott lakht

It has always amused me that people could dismiss the complaints of others with the platitude that we all have to live with our choices.

It is sobering to realize that every choice we make, every action we take, however trivial, might have serious consequences, which move forward in an endless wave, affecting people through eternity. La Rochefoucauld said, “There is scarcely a single man sufficiently aware to know all the evil he does.” I believe we don’t know all the good we do, either. A few years ago I gave a frantic man a quarter for a parking meter. As he ran off, he yelled over his shoulder that I had saved his life. I will never know what effect I had on his family, his career. We can never even know how the lives of the strangers we pass on the street might be changed by the casual smile or scowl on our face. So how can we make wise decisions if we face some alternatives with only a superficial awareness of the consequences?

We are all familiar with the that’s-good-that’s-bad story. I was once stunned not to be hired as communications director in the Calgary office of the company I worked for. But the office closed six months later and the people who had interviewed me were back in Ottawa looking for new jobs. The eventual date of my dismissal from that company was one month after my sixtieth birthday. That meant I could not collect a lump sum payout but had to be content with what I thought was a paltry company pension. I resented having my choices limited; there was a fortune waiting for me in the stock market. But if I had invested the money on my own, market conditions would have cut my savings in half within three years. Not only did that not happen, but the company soon returned a significant portion of the money I had contributed to the pension fund over the years because it had accumulated excess funds. And my pension continues.

We can plan forever, but we must respond to reality, rolling with the punches and learning from the good as well as from the bad. The lessons can be profound.

Every choice we make limits our ability to do some other things. Every door might open on a new world of opportunity, or it might show us another door. Or it might take us out of the game altogether. As humans, we have only the most rudimentary sense of cause and effect. Even when we think we understand the consequences of our actions, we sometimes act in darkness, and often in a fog. It is almost impossible to escape the haze of shortsightedness that stands between us and our choices.

Sometimes it helps us cope with life to say we have lived by our principles, to believe that our actions have been guided by the best evidence, to assert our faith that everything will be all right in the end. In the broadest sense, we may find deep comfort in these beliefs. But when we hit the deepest ruts and the biggest bumps along the road, they are only words. It is no comfort to realize that our choices brought us to the present circumstances.

All of which leads me to my next post, which deals with some of the realities Catherine and I have had to face since we moved west six months ago.

Reading and writing

For years now, I’ve considered reading to be an aspect of writing, as connected to my ability to write as inhaling is related to exhaling. Just as I cannot breathe out before I breathe in, I cannot write unless there is some reading to back it up. This is true even though I believe in my own self-sufficiency. I could not have become effective as a writer if I had not read voraciously.

Though writing has always been my greatest pleasure, I have occasionally been able to gain as much pleasure from reading as from creating my own texts. I knew that feeling as long ago as the age of ten or eleven, when I first skimmed Thoreau’s Walden in my father’s library. I began to recognize the magic in the words as far more than just a recognition of new ideas and descriptions. It was replaced by the conviction that I was reaching across the years and the miles to touch another human being who was had been waiting to talk to me.

That feeling has never left me. Ever since, I have viewed reading and writing as a dialogue. I have filled the margins of books with comments I wished I could have addressed to the writer – a running commentary from the sometimes ignorant, sometimes merely uninitiated me, an effort to relate words on the page to my own inchoate experiences and feelings and opinions.

From the time I was very young, everybody who knew me also knew that I thought of myself as a writer. Yet, at first, I did not have a strong sense of what that implied. Only later did I run across the well-known but overly simplistic definition of a writer as somebody who writes – presumably in contrast to everybody else, who does not.

The problem with that definition is that it leaves reading out of the equation. Very early in the game, a niece asked me what it would take to become a writer. I told her to surround herself with models, to read the best writing she could, so that she could learn the difference instinctively. Once she had read widely, I said, she would know what writing was all about.

I myself was getting more ambiguous advice. After an undergraduate essay of mine was published in a university newsletter, I took it to the head of the creative writing program and asked him how I might become an even better writer. He gave my essay a quick look – too quick, I thought, to give it a fair reading – then, in a tone I have come to identify with shills and con-men, he said “This essay is a good reason why you should become an English major.” But if there was a reason, it remained a mystery to me. He didn’t say that my essay showed promise or that it was too vague or that I was so far from having talent that I could only come to understand the nature of real writing if I studied in his program. In any case, he offered no apparent encouragement, and I focused on philosophy.

But I discovered that written words could do far more than nudge me into a quiet conversation with dead authors when I was blindsided by the stories of DH Lawrence for the first time. I was overwhelmed by their unique explosive power – amazed that literary works could move me even before I had thought about them. They motivated me to move away from the study of philosophy and persuaded me to explore what it was about words on a page that could instantly fire up my insides and change me forever.

Another aesthetic thrill awaited me as a graduate student in the novels of William Faulkner. Coming to them without any appreciation for the importance of structure in literature, I was struck by the architectonics of literature – years before I knew the word.

For writers there is also a flipside to reading because an encounter with great talent can be as discouraging as it is stimulating. The last time I returned to the stories of Flannery O’Connor, I was so impressed by the style, the plots, the characters – in short, by everything that makes them memorable – that I stopped writing for months, deterred by the impossibility of matching anything I had read.

This illustrates the potential danger that lurks in great literature for writers who are serious about their craft. Reading poses a risk for the ego of a writer and threatens the fragile sense of value that must be maintained by anybody who sends a message out into the world. What keeps me going is the realization that the words I have shaped appear as never before in the history of the world, and that whoever reads my messages has never seen them expressed in the same way before.

Besides, as anybody who loves reading will appreciate, I simply love writing.

Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent

When I rejoined my friends at the table the other night, I was blindsided by the question, “So what do you think about God?” It is a question that many people find important but which I have always been reluctant to speculate about because there is no way to determine whether I am ever closer to the truth or farther from it – or whether the question makes any sense at all.

It is a fundamental belief of mine that what I think, how I speculate about the nature of the cosmos, makes no difference to reality. This is partly as a result of spending much of my life in the presence of people who think their opinion makes all the difference in the world because it affects everything they do.

Some people could not believe we would uproot our life and move west because that is simply not done by people our age. We understand whey many people let their opinions calcify until their way of life is fixed. But one aspect of growing older that has never appealed to us is the way so many seem to change only in the direction of becoming caricatures of what they were when they were younger.

When somebody goes beyond the hundredth birthday, reporters gather around to learn the secret. It often turns out to be drinking an ounce of corn mash every day or avoiding men who yell. If I am ever asked the question (even before I turn one hundred), I would say that I stay young by keeping a childlike curiosity about the world, by refusing to accept any answer as the final answer, and, as Emily Dickinson put it, by dwelling in possibility.

I was raised to believe that truth was there for the plucking, that our major duty as human beings is to find repose by accepting the ancient traditions – that is, to find God by following the path laid out by our ancestors. But as I got older and explored more traditions than the one I had first learned, I realized that the same lesson would have been drummed into me if I had been born to a Hindu family in India, or if my parents had been Confucians.

I used to believe in Truth, with a capital T, and I spent years hoping it would become clear to me. What I discovered was that truth has a small t.

The quotation at the top of this essay, by André Gide, is one of my favorites. I am actually fearful of settling on a truth that would keep me from expanding, growing, discovering. It would alter the basic me beyond recognition. It would send me back to square one, where I began, when my parents and teachers could define the world and my duties with unshakable certainty.

Experience has taught me not to be afraid of the ambiguity and mystery of existence. I believe it is more fruitful to explore the world than to settle on a single way of looking at it. I am heartened that nobody ever lived my life before I got here and that nobody has come up with a coherent theory of reality that I can continue to accept without question.

So what do I think of God? I do not worry about whether God exists. I just try to live a life that will allow God, if there is such a thing, to believe in me.

But this is not the final answer, of course. If I ever stumbled on a final answer, I would doubt it.

Individual freedom and the need for connection

There is something exhilarating about moving to a city where nobody knows you. The anonymity can be intoxicating. People look through you without expectations beyond the simple social demands not to be stepped on or cheated. I realized this for the first time almost forty years ago, when I took a job in a major American city and observed the faces as I walked around the busy downtown at lunchtime. Some people were noticeably fearful and others were threatening, but most faces were blank, hiding unknown thoughts, revisiting the past or anticipating the future. But none of them were focused on me. I was not a part of their experience, even when I jostled against them in the subway. I was truly alone, perhaps for the first time in my life. And I felt more inner comfort in isolation than I had ever known before.

As a writer, I am never alone. I may work in a room by myself, but my words always go out to an audience, and when there is none in sight I fabricate one, even if it is just another side of myself. I project active thoughts over to my listening self as if to somebody else, as if the writer and the editor in me were separate people. And at bottom I am always writing for a listener. I have read out loud to my absent mother for many years, and continued to use her as a sounding board even after she died. My younger brother was the imagined listener whenever I thought about organized sports, and when he died my interest in sports dried up as well. My older brother was the target for every unconventional thought I had. I would call him to share odd facts, or to look at a web site I had found that seemed to make music visible. My thoughts about religion would not have advanced as they did if I had not been corresponding with a friend in Israel. Now, without him, they are moribund.

In theory, I understand the need for community, I understand why people want to constantly relate to others. At the odd periods of my life when I have been employed, I have found meeting people to be the most pleasant part of the job -- far better than being paid. Today, in a new city, I am working as a volunteer at the food bank. The job keeps me in touch with men and women with various handicaps, physical or social. Most have been injured by their collision with the vicissitudes of life. I have met men just released from jail, women who have smoked and sat in the sun so much they have shriveled their skin far more than nature would have done in their thirty years.

Something in me simply wants the connection, wants to nourish the hope that somebody somewhere on the road will be worth knowing as a friend. Reinforcing that, I harbor a perversely moral side that wants to help the world even if I cannot cure it. But that is in theory only. In practice, I have never known anybody who was more self-contained than I am. My years in isolation were the most significant and rewarding I have ever known. I am my own best friend.

Changing life when people think it's too late

There are only a few significant ways my wife and I can change our lives. I am in my late seventies and she is surviving her sixties. But we believe there is nothing to stop us from trying. So late last year we sold everything in Ottawa and moved west to a place where we knew nobody.

Our most ambitious goal was to get out of the house. I mean to live in a way that would take us out every day. We used to have a picturesque three-bedroom apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of a building, with a clear westward view miles up the Ottawa River. It was impressive to everybody who visited, but we spent lots of time there and I often heard the complaint that we should be out meeting people and doing new things. We came to the Okanagan to break our sedentary habits and become more active.

We brought work west with us, a promise to finish a commissioned play for which we have already received part payment. I sank hours of time researching the material in Ottawa, and she, the playwright, has been making slow headway on the script.

The years since I last posted anything on this site have been years of soul-searching for me, years of wondering what to do with the verbal talents I have been sending out into the void for most of my life. I have always wanted to be a writer, and I have used that ambition to learn a lot about the world (notably about myself) but relatively few people ever benefited from the things I have learned. While that was maddeningly frustrating at first, it eventually gave way to resignation when I decided that I myself was a good enough audience. I even stopped writing letters.

That's certainly a change -- not one I would have preferred, but one that has taken me down different paths than I ever would have devised on my own.

Further details, as I am fond of saying, at eleven.