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.