A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT

I NEVER THOUGHT MUCH ABOUT BIRTHDAYS UNTIL one morning I woke up as an octogenarian. If you are granted to live into your 80s, trust me, it will get your attention.

There are several reasons that this happens. First and foremost it's the number itself. 82 is a lot. I think everybody wishes to live long if it can be long and healthy. I've known people whose quality of life was so miserable that they wished for or welcomed the end.

The second thing that gets your attention in your 80s is physical change. It's unavoidable. Oh, you will try, but to no avail. It's bigger than you are. You slow down. You loose strength and stamina. The aches and pains seem to grow in intensity and often signal real problems that encourage a more intimate relationship with your primary physician. You begin to get those looks that say, "Well, what did you expect?"

Then there is social attrition. Friends die or move away. Spouses leave you or you leave them. It doesn't matter when in life these things happen. It is a devastating event at any time but it can be deadly when you are old. Unless, of course, she was a real bitch or he was a perfect bastard, then the event can bring on a season of true euphoria.

Today has been a great day. Sunny and cold. We had a fine chunk of beef on the grill with a bottle of good wine by the fire. There were presents. How lucky can one man be? Family in Florida speak of 82˚ and I count 82 years behind me and number is climbing as we speak.

Birthdays? Bring them on! It has been said many times before and I say it again: so far go good.

Thank each of you for your well wishes and greetings. You are the best. I wish for a warm hug from each of you.

Love Jerry H

DEALING WITH A DREARY SUNDAY

I knew immediately something was wrong the moment I woke up this morning.  First it was Sunday.  I have no particular problem with the day itself - it's just that I have so much old baggage full of Sunday issues dragging along behind.  Secondly, it was a cool dreary damp beginning that did not improve with time.  Thirdly and likely most importantly, I have not rested soundly lately for some reason and that alone has the potential to impair one's gait, to cloud one's focus, to cause one to doubt.

Suddenly I knew - I had a serious case of ennui.  I spent most of the morning letting this cloud engulf me as I probed around for another cup of coffee and finally realizing that a proven remedy for this condition is a sandwich made of an English muffin, a patty of Jimmy Dean sausage (hot) and a wad of scrambled egg with a liberal dose of Tabasco Chipotle sauce mixed in.  

It was a temporary fix, so to speak, as the sense of boredom again descended over the day.  I began to reason out the situation like this:  Do something - anything - just get busy.  I have so many things to do that it would take the rest of the day to list them.  That sounded way too boring to do.  Problem is, I didn't want to do anything.  Ennui is like that.  It's self sustaining, or defeating if that makes more sense.  Like a self fulfilling prophecy.  "Oh, that's probably not going to work out."  Sure enough it didn't.  

I had a partner years ago when we were therapists together who used to say that when sad, or depressed, or bored or whatever you want to call it, just go with it for a while and you'll see it evaporate right before your eyes.  Don't resist it for the more you do, the more it hangs in and grows in intensity.  This is a technique that has worked for me over the years but it requires one magic element that only you or I can provide: the desire to move on in the sunlight.  Ah, I just knew this was going to come up.

I am really not having that much of a problem with ennui, or whatever.  I have managed to blot out two thirds of the day dealing with this condition and before you know it - after a session on the treadmill, a little stretching and a hot soaky, it will be cocktail time and the Devil can just get in line and wait her turn.  See, I feel better already.

It just occurred to me that a trick I have used all my life to combat the ever present presence of self pity, boredom or sadness is to snack.  Since May of this year I have not snacked at all.  I mean it.  OK, maybe one or two times but I have limited my eating to two meals a day, period.  Nothing in between.  With a little effort this system has aided me in loosing a bunch of ugly fat.  I ain't going back to dealing with negative feelings with food.  Drink?  Perhaps, but not whole cans of salted nuts.

Getting back to today, I was looking in my freezer for some frozen green peppers for CA who is making turkey chowder for the evening meal and there was half a frozen pistachio muffin laying there in a plastic baggie.  I have no idea how long it had lain there, but I immediately began to feel the load of the day lift off my shoulders.   I probably should have just let the idea of the muffin do it's healing work but instead I re-heated some of the morning's darkroast and heated the remnants of the muffin and ate it.  

I could just feel my pancreas firing off insulin I did not need but I now have hope and can see the sunshine in my soul once more.  Ennui, my old friend, I know you are there.  Give it a rest for a while.  Perhaps I'll see you on the next dreary Sunday morning - OK?

THAT TIME AGAIN

I suppose that there are numbers - which of course do not lie - that would prove that daylight saving time is singlehandedly saving the planet from destruction. But I doubt it.

It's that time of year when time is the timeliest of subjects and daylight is in short supply. And if we were burning handmade candles for our light we would be shifting our schedules to conform to available light to minimize the burning of the labor intensive wick.

While in Paris in 1784, Benjamin Franklin, proposed some kind of adjustment to the available sunlight rather than adhering to the actual clock time which placed one end or the other of each day in darkness, which, as I have stated, required the consumption of expensive tapers.

While most of us nowadays forgo the use of open flame for light, the same principle holds that we try to conserve the use of expensive energy.

Just between you and me, I dislike the time changes we go through twice a year. It is, however, hard to argue with the saving of 10,000 barrels of oil through the use of the time shift as was reported during the oil embargo in the 70s.

Sifting the work day into the daylight portion of the day became an issue during war time to conserve energy. In the 40s it was called Eastern War Time, Central War Time and Western War Time. As a young teenager then, I remember vividly how everything was defined by the war. Everything.

What I remember about all this as a boy is a bus ride home from a music lesson downtown Baton Rouge at 5 PM in total darkness. I didn't even wear a watch then. I couldn't have cared less, as I recall. I always seemed to arrive at my appointed destination on time. Is there a lesson there?

Anyway, we are now on what I call real time. The time that is set by celestial pulleys and chains, set in motion by the hand of God, or Goddess, I am sure. And we'll muddle through with that until darkness falls in the middle of the afternoon next month. If I were not such a dignified old man, I'd scream!

I still have to set the clock in my car, on my stove and microwave and coffee maker. Oh the clock at my bedside as well. Better get on with it before it gets dark.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

IT'S THE LEAST ONE CAN DO and I don't do it that well. I have given up on ever being a card sender on the birthdays of my friends. It just wasn't a part of my culture, except in elementary school where it was emphasized. But like most things at that age, I didn't get it that it was being emphasized for my benefit and learning.

I grew up thinking that whatever I wanted to do at the moment was the most important thing in life. Picking out a card and filling it out for someone else's birthday never made the cut. It should have but it didn't.

My partner in life, CA, on the other hand, spends as much money on birthday cards as she does on food. Her entire family places a high priority on sending cards for everything. She can not imagine not doing it.

I go through periods of thinking that even at this late date I can learn a new trick and send out cards on time for everything. Alas, It doesn't "take", as it were.

Along comes the computer age and I plug into it with a fearlessness that astonishes even myself. I have a calendar on every device I own. There are three that matter: my desktop computer, my laptop and my phone. If I change a date or enter an appointment or birthday on one of them it instantly appears on the other two, as if by magic. You'll forgive me, but I remember when electricity was discovered. All this really does seem magical to me.

Yet, with all this assistance at my fingertips, I still am not the best at remembering. Now there is FaceBook and it's pathological insistence on reminding us of every breath anyone takes, and I have to say it helps me remember, but you must be here every day for it to work well, and I am not.

And if you are wondering - I do love getting your greetings on my birthday. I have always been amazed that anyone ever thought of me. I had this low self esteem thing, you see. I managed to compensate for that with an overwhelming bad temper and an impressive sense of being right about everything. I have overcome the former while seeing nothing wrong with the later.

But back to the card sending thing: I have this reminder pop-up that appears on all my devices that reminds me of birthdays. Yes - even that doesn't work for me all the time. But today it did. An old Istrouma High School buddy of mine is 81 today and I sent him an email with "happy birthday" in red capitol letters. He replied immediately, thanking me and telling me that he and six classmates of ours are meeting this morning for breakfast, and that he was going to tell them of my note. Now how cool is that? And how I wish I could be there.

One would think that I'd learn from this how important it is to be consistent in the simple act of remembering important dates. Well, I have never been consistent about anything. My eye doctor asked me once if I put my glaucoma drops in every day without fail. I laughed and said, "Sam, I don't do anything without fail!". And there you have it.

Happy birthday everyone. I hope you have cake and perhaps a glass of wine to lighten your heart.

Love - Jerry

THE WOODS

I am fortunate in that I live 1 1/2 miles from the gate to Bradbury Mountain State Park. Because of my age - just about everything these days is because of my age - I can get in free. I take advantage of this benefit as often as possible.

On this particular day I am getting my kit ready in the parking lot and I notice a quartet that about to begin their hike and notice that it consist of what seems to be a 14 year old boy, an infant in a big wheeled stroller and what I assume to be a mother and grandmother, both of whom are rather wide in the beam.

I decide that rather than overtaking them - they are surely going to be slow - I'd take a shortcut through the playing field and get out on the trail ahead of them. When I got to the head-off point they were a hundred yards beyond. These overweight women pushing a baby carriage are walking much faster than I am. Soon they are out of sight. I am quickly re-evaluating my physical condition.

However, I carry on toward my destination which is the perimeter, or boundary trail - the longest and most difficult of the walks available on the mountain. Surely these portly women will not be attempting to push a pram over those trails which can be a challenge for healthy hikers alone. Guess what? That's where they were. When I got to the junction for the perimeter trail there they were trying to decide what to do, as the terrain had begun to be challenging.

In my most genuinely supportive tone I suggest that they not attempt what would likely be impossible and to do another trail which would be possible for them and more enjoyable. They seemed to be pleased to have this information and proceeded to take my advise. I probably saved their day. However, no matter how wide their bottoms were, they were out there out pacing me, who, in my inflated ego state, felt I could and even should out pace them and their baby buggy. When will I ever learn? I can just hear Freddie Mercury's refrain: "Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go round".

Living as close as I do, I am able to report on winter, spring, summer and fall. Don't worry - I will not do that here. I do remember once when CA and I clung to each other to get over a particular passage of icy trail to get to the summit. I believe it was March. What were we thinking? During visits long ago, I actually ran the trails that I now carefully negotiate with a supporting staff. Just coming to grips with reality, folks.

Bradbury Mountain is a pocket park in the classic sense. The park is tiny as parks go but it can handle scores of people without having them bump into each other. I have gone out there when the parking lot was full and not seen a soul on the trails. Weekends in good weather excepted.

In the day, this was a farm. Stone walls are all over this mountain. Such things were not constructed in the woods. they were there to make clear the fields that were cultivated or grazed. Now, people like me walk along these trails thinking wilderness and the shades of generations past, who cleared the land and piled up these stone walls, laugh up their etherial sleeves at our hubris. Once it was wilderness, but that was long long ago.

Ultimately, I arrived at the summit and found that I was surprisingly alone. I enjoyed the view and had a swig from my bottle while a couple walked up from the opposite direction. The young woman had on a pair of pink and yellow sneaks, fresh from the box, it seemed, and loudly noticeable. They seemed almost electrified. I made some comment about the pink and yellow sneaks and she looked at me with that blank stare, which suggested to me that she did not have English as even a secondary language. Ah, Québécois perhaps? The shoes should have told me that much. She never uttered a sound. So I lifted a foot and tapped it indicating that that was the subject of my comment and she more or less smiled and went on her way with her companion. So much for my lame attempt at international sociality.

I always say that I am out there to get the exercise, but what happens is that I end up experiencing the "magic" that is there for anyone who walks in the woods. There's always the chance that I will discover something new or forgotten about being in nature. About being alive. About myself. Some days out there are more effective than others. Today was one of the good days.

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

Nothing, in my experience, comes close to equaling hearing loss for removing one from the mainstream. No matter how much money you spend on hearing aids, hearing loss, in most cases, is progressive. The electronic hardware can only amplify the frequencies you can hear. The more frequencies you loose the less effective hearing aids become no matter how expensive they are, or what your audiologist tells you.

I began wearing hearing aids fifteen years ago and for a few years felt that with the moderate loss I was experiencing I was still able to participate at a high level in an active social experience, which included listening to music with genuine appreciation. As time moved on, my disability became more profound and I had to move from tiny units completely within the ear canal to more powerful over the ear units with all kinds of amplification and multiple channels for amplifying selected bands of frequencies.

It was at that time that I noticed a distinct change in the level and quality of my understanding. Although I was hearing the sounds I was not hearing the subtile sibilant and explosive frequencies - like the S's and K's - which are essential for understanding words, specially if they have a common "vowel" sound, such as corn, horn, born, torn and so on. Attempts to amplify just the frequencies I needed seemed to help at first but then as my disability increased it did not matter how much specific amplification was applied, I simply was not hearing certain frequencies. Those frequencies had just dropped out of my aural repertoire.

Not long after that realization, I discovered that music no longer sounded like my memory demanded. I spent years involved in choral music and listening to all kinds of music. I also appreciated much of the popular genre from the 60's and 70's. Recently we had a roof replaced and the man doing the work had his radio blasting out what sounded to me like a metal garbage can being dragged beneath a car. Then I heard a familiar beat and realized it was John Fogerty doing his signature Proud Mary, to which I had danced and listened for hours a few years ago. The parts of the audio spectrum that are required to identify music, much less to appreciate it, were gone. It was one of the saddest moments in my life.

In a more practical sense, this has resulted in my being literally on the edge of life. Marginalized. I suppose a certain amount of marginalization goes along with being an octogenarian. Old people are not, as a rule movers and shakers, or even chosen to be on someone's softball team. However, not being able to actively participate in a conversation including more than three people because of the practical inability to understand what is being said is distressing. It gets tiresome saying, "What did you say? Will you say that again slowly and articulate clearly, please?", every other sentence. What happens is that I spend the evening simply not knowing what was being said. I find it impossible not to feel just a tad left out. You think I am feeling a bit sorry for myself? Goddamn right I am. But not that paralyzing locked down self pitying thing. I do not intend to drop out. I might become choosy in my social exercises but I'll be there.

Why should I care? Here's why. Conversation to me is one of the most exciting features of being a human being. I thrive on it. It is still possible on a one to one basis and sometimes with a few more but it must be conducted in a quiet setting. And, my partners must not mumble, talk to their armpits or slur their words and phrases.

Unfortunately, elocution, the skill of clear and expressive speech, especially of distinct pronunciation and articulation, is simply not valued anymore. If everyone sounded like Walter Cronkite, there wouldn't be a problem. Well, that may be a slight oversimplification, but you take my point.

I am clear that this is my personal problem, but if I want to be understood, it is my responsibility to speak clearly. I was taught to do that in high school. At some point such training became unimportant in the modern curriculum.

The bottom line is that I want to be included. Everybody does. However, at the rate things are going, I may be lucky just to be able to hear the dinner bell. I really don't want to miss dinner.

Please - Ring it loudly, ring it long.

Dear Pal . . .

Dear Pal

Thanks for your recent note. I really enjoyed reading it - several times, if you can believe that. It's always good to hear from an old friend. I have so few friends who actually write letters anymore. I can tall you that I treasure each one. I will say a special thanks for typing it. As I recall, your handwriting resembled something it would take a board certified Egyptologist to decipher. OK, OK, I know even that would not help my scribble.

I have to thank my first wife - you remember her. She was in the class ahead of us. She was a champion typist. She gave me a lesson of sorts and after some years of trying and then the advent of the computer I finally am more comfortable at the keyboard than with pen and ink. I never thought I'd be saying that.

It's funny how when I think of you, I seem to easily slip into that old comfortable memory mode - not that squishy nostalgia mind lock thing, but, well we do go back a long way - do we not?

It's probably something like a self-fulling prophesy, I suppose. The older I get the more I value someone's friendship who remembers the same things that I do.

I just thought: I am sure you remember when it was in vogue to say something like, "Do you remember what you were doing when you got the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?" Now, try this on: do you remember when it was that you became aware that you had not heard that for the past 20 years? Hell, it might have been longer than that for me.

Anyway, you mentioned Mary Jane. Yes I remember her well. I kind of had eyes for her in High School, but never made a move. I think I was afraid of rejection. Always been an issue with me. I later found out that she said "yes" more than a little, and I probably knew that at some level and that was the real root of my fears. HA!

I am so sorry to hear that she died. I remember in High School I always thought she had one of the finest rear ends around. Her cheerleading skills were worth the price of a game ticket. I think she married that big All State guard - what was his name? I know he died some years ago. Heart attack at work. Did she remarry? I don't have any information about that. No reason I should, I suppose.

Except for you, Tyrus and sometimes J-Boy, I never hear any news from down there. Moving away early on kind of severs the connections.

I'm glad to hear that you and Rosalie are still playing golf. I'd like to think I could still do that but my shoulders would not survive three holes, I'm afraid. I love to watch the game. I had a half set of clubs about 40 years ago and a friend borrowed them for another lefty to use and I never saw them again. Probably a blessing considering what it costs to play these days.

If I remember rightly, you actually live on a golf course? That must be nice. But I don't know how I'd like that unless there were other benefits. Like a saloon near by. Maybe a pool and a work out room.

We do some hiking and now and then still get into our kayaks. But my treadmill and bicycle keep my legs moving year around. I'm afraid to stop. We have some good trails near here and get out on them as much as possible. The roads have no shoulders so that is rather dangerous with those Red Neck pick-up cowboys flying through these hills. I guess that's a bit unfair. I have more red-neck blood in my veins than any other kind.

So, as you can see, I am rambling along here and probably need to stop and put this in the mailbox. Thanks again for the letter, and we do hope to see you later this summer. Be well, and keep in touch.

As Ever - - -

Your pal Jerry