THIS IS HARD

AS A RULE, I DO NOT LIKE TEAR JERKERS. However, now and then, there comes along one that is funny, expertly casted and tearjerkingly wonderful.

No, I’m not going to tell you what it was. That would spoil the whole thing. It’s not about the piece or movie or story - it’s about the value of tear jerkers.

Value? A value in tearjerking? You got to be kidding. Most of the time I am into stuff like THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE, THE DIRTY DOUZEN, HEARTBREAK HILL - stuff like that. I am usually not into the emotional stuff, just live action for me. Give me HIGH NOON or THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY and I am happy.

But now and then I find myself deeply involved with a story that touches something deep within my heart - why does this bother me? - and I find the odd tear trundling down my face. The truth is GUNS OF NAVARONE is not reality. Something like that may have happened once but it’s not life that can be expected in the real world. A scenario that was dreamed up and actors playing parts that were never real is not something that tugs at one’s heart strings.

What plucks the strings is human intimacy. The warmth of loving another. The uninhibited hope in a youthful face. PLAY IT FOWARD, comes o mind. Perhaps, AS GOOD AS IT GETS. Maybe even AND SO IT GOES, for a more recent example. I still have a tissue to cover that one.

I don’t think I’ll get to sleep unless I can find some reruns of AMERICAN PICKER, or, perhaps some old TWILIGHT ZONE stuff to soothe my mind. Tears don’t work this late in the evening.

OLD PHOTOGRAPHS

You take all those pictures. You file them away, and maybe even put them in album books, but most likely in boxes and drawers. They lie there for decades. Now and then you fumble through them and say things like, “I need to organize these some day”. You haven’t said this? OK, I’ll blink first - I’ve said it numerous times, the last of which was just today.

I can see in my mind’s eye the ones I’ll most want to preserve, print, or duplicate. For sure I should digitize them. That’ll do it. Then I can share them with the entire family, who, of course, have been lined up since four in the morning to get their download, or their hard copy of these family treasures.

Of course, they are treasures to me. Does that make them treasures to my children, who would be the only people on earth I can think of with any vested interest in such matters?

It’s a lot of work. CA says it would make a great winter project. I think making a bi-weekly bowl of chili would do for a winter’s work. Of course, I can do both. I know the chili will happen and probably not too far off either with these cool evenings driving us inside from the porch for cocktails.

In a weak moment not long ago I threatened to just pile them up and light them up. I mean, in a hundred years who will even care? Or, is that even the question?

Don’t worry. I’m not going to burn them. Excuse me - I didn’t mean to infer that you care about my old photos. I’m just ruminating and hoping that I might get past this issue sooner than later.

I can see my favorite picture in my mind. It’s the one a street photographer made of Billie, my first wife, and me on Canal Street in New Orleans in September of 1949. We were on our wedding overnight. To say it was a Honeymoon would be a serious stretch of the imagination. Neither one of us knew a thing about anything, but we looked good. I In my shark skin double breasted suit in light blue and she in a shiny, I think taffeta thing - it made noise - with several petticoats holding it out at an angle. We looked like the teenage runaways that we actually were. It had to be obvious to the entire city. The photographer spied us half a long block away and we paid him a couple of dollars for the print which we didn’t believe would come - but it did. We didn’t have a clue about what lay ahead.

But that’s the thing about old photographs. They are slices of life that reveal more, sometimes, than originally intended.

I’ve been meaning to organize these photographs for decades. I think this is the year. Well, more exactly - the winter. I thinkI can work it in between bowls of chile.

HEAR HEAR - MARGINALIZATION

I AM NOT AWARE OF A TIME IN LIFE WHEN BEING INVOLUNTARILY OPTED OUT IS FUN.

MARGINALIZATION seems to be systemically tied to growing older. First you are retired from whatever you do for work. In general you are no longer part of the production process. This is not altogether a bad thing. Physically and mentally there comes a time for slowing down and shifting gears. Try as we might, we can not stop ourselves from wearing out.

Taking this process (the aging process) one step farther, we begin to bring into the discussion subtile disabilities that crop up along the way. There are the degenerative conditions that affect many aging people but do not prevent participation in the stream of life going on all around them. Such conditions affect people in different ways and to different degrees. Some people sneak through the latter years with little or none of those degenerative encumbrances. These people are fortunate and few.

It is when the sensory systems - mostly sight and sound - are affected that real marginalization occurs. Thankfully, blindness has been recognized as a medical problem since the beginning. The treatment for cataracts, macular degeneration and other vision disabling conditions are central to healthcare contracts.

Hearing loss seems to have been ignored in this age of one breakthrough after another. If you suffer from growing hearing loss as an adult it becomes quite completely your problem to deal with. Why is that? It takes quite a stretch of the imagination to call treating deafness a cosmetic procedure, but there it is. A more fatuous denial rationale can not be found.

Then there is the money angle. The instruments are quite expensive specially the digital type which enable the wearer to navigate complex situations. Nobody wants to pay for them. The VA does pay for hearing aids after a lengthly screening process for some of its members. I understand that is normal for most VA based services.

The obvious truth that there is money in the government to pay for taking care of the needs of older people into the ages is completely ignored. Except for fancy book keeping and emotionally charged wording in the public discourse, it is a testament to the feckless selfishness of the ruling class, the industrial military partnership and their political henchmen that this hasn’t been handled long before now. Need a new killing machine? OK. Spend all you need. When I consider that new stretch destroyer in the ways up at Bath Iron Works and the fancy new all service fighter jet, which is billions into your money and is not even thought to be viable at this point, I get a sick feeling of being willfully bamboozled and marginalized.

It really isn’t a mystery why this is the only advanced nation in the world who does not sponsor universal health, and support for the aging population. Qui Bono, indeed. Who benefits?

Hear Hear!

HEAR HEAR

From time to time I am going to be talking about hearing loss in this space. I considered doing a blog entirely devoted to the subject but decided to approach the issue from the side, so to speak. My thoughts and comments about hearing loss may be collected instead in a separate page on this blog. For now, it will be HEAR HEAR #1 and #2 and so on. That cumbersome notation may also change.

I will make a special effort to avoid self-pity. Sometimes it descends on me like a hangover. I do not enjoy it. It’s non-productive and even destructive. Yet it’s no fun walking around with obscenely expensive hearing aids in my ears that often do not perform up to their advertised standards and without which I am virtually deaf. It leaves me feeling profoundly vulnerable.

WHY TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL? It helps me. If I can put words on my experience it helps me to see ways I might be able to optimize my hearing ability. Also it helps to dissipate my frustration and sadness at being unable to participate fully in life as I have always done. I find myself using my hearing loss as an excuse to avoid encounters where it is assumed that I can hear well. I don’t, for instance, attend live performances anymore. I’d love to attend author readings at the library but there is music that comes across as so much unpleasant noise and writers, in my experience, are some of the most inept public speakers. I simply can not win, so I take the path that’s easiest for me and avoid such things. Being a natural loner, I seem to be able to make the most of this condition, but I don’t like it.

I suspect that many of you experience, from time to time, difficulty hearing in certain environments. It may be that you sense the onset of some hearing loss yourself. Your comments would be welcomed and would appear at the end of each post. How do you deal with such conditions? Have you ever had a hearing test? Do you often find yourself asking, “What did you say?” or something like that? Have you ever pretended to understand, and did not? It is the insidious nature of any disability that it’s always there. In the end, your life is moulded around it like a form fitting coat. It doesn’t necessarily define you, but it becomes a consideration in just about everything you do.

Jerry Henderson      Until next time…

WHAT'S TO TALK ABOUT?

I was leaving Maine Mall the other day and a woman with an infant in her arms was walking toward me and talking on the phone which was held between her shoulder and ear. Hands free - so to speak. She seemed to be doing all of the talking. The child was asleep.

One crowded day on Bradbury Mountain, two young women were were hiking together and both were talking nearly simultaneously, oblivious to the mystic beauty of the surrounding forest. Just to be fair, I did see, on another occasion in very nearly the same place a man talking on a cell phone as he hiked the Boundary Trail. At least he was breathing clean mountain air.

The times I have noticed someone talking on a phone while driving are too many to count. Sometimes I blow my horn at them. But I drift afield. This is not about the telephone. It’s about the constant need to talk. The phone is simply an instrument that extends the possibilities.

I have seen groups of men jogging and talking all at once. I don’t get it. Jogging for me, when I could do it, was a cherished solitary time of meditation - and sweating. Out on Monhegan Island, where trail walking is as near nirvana as you can get in this life, I have seen groups chattering up a storm about some off-island subject that would have been more at home in Maine Mall. Maybe that’s where they would have preferred to be. I found myself wishing they were there.

It could be said that you can constantly talk and appreciate the beauty and mystery all around. You could say that, but for me that’s a bit of a stretch. For me it’s in quietness that you hear wind song in the forest. It’s in quietness that you hear your heart and perhaps find yourself. It’s in quietness that the wonder of life in any situation reveals itself.

I have often said it: I love conversation. It is the gift of humanity - that social engine  whereby we know each other. Yet, a time comes when to talk is like a barrier behind which we hide ourselves from discovery and revelation. Besides, what’s to talk about when all around the creation is seeking your attention with her arms filled with treasures?

WHERE DO WE BEGIN?

One would think, that after hundreds of years of lessons taught and wars fought and children of ours and others as well dying, that the people of the world would see the futility of hate, the laughable arrogance of bigotry and the palpable sense of brother and sisterhood that we all - every last person on this planet - share.

This monster in Charleston is not a sicko who needs understanding. We all understand him. He is a raw criminal who has brought to a keen focus the truth that there are those among us who would slaughter a huge segment of our population simply on the basis of skin color. This is a learned response to the human condition. We are not born to hate. It’s a doctrine pounded into us by mother and father, church, synagogue and mosque. Those centers of culture that we depend upon for our direction, have failed and become complicit in the propagation of the culture of hate.

And we are all complicit in the way we stand by and fail to be a voice for what we know is right. There is no lack of targets for our indignation, but until we see how each of us individually is part of the problem not much will be accomplished. If we wait for politicians to fix this thing we will be sorely disappointed. Religious forces are not going to do it either. In many ways religion is one of the root causes of our present condition.

It’s going to require a revolution of ONE. The ONE of you and the ONE of me. In the end, we might come together, but it can’t depend on that. Even if there is only ONE, then it must begin there.

COULD YOU REPEAT THAT?

It’s distressing, distracting and depressing trying to understand what is being said in groups of more than two at a gathering of more than two that includes food, alcohol and good humor and loud music. The complaint has more to do with my disability than what other people think or do about it. Others can do nothing except make room for it while I experience acute exclusion from the main stream. Entire events happen and I know nothing of what was the core subject of conversation. This results in an attitude of frustration and rejection of normal social activity. Not a healthy condition at all.

I have been doing some research into the problem and have found that much is being done to define the issue of hearing loss, but little done to actually address the issue. Things like cochlear implants, high priced hearing aids and tele-coil installations are beneficial but seem not to migrate into the lives of the every day consumer who needs such interventions, even if they can afford them.

These efforts are huge but comparatively small when put up beside the amounts being spent on other technologies that have little to do with the quality of life for millions of people. Little will happen, perhaps, until the “Boomer” generation wakes up one sunny day to realize that they can no longer hear birdsong. That day isn’t far off.
What is so attractive about noise?

This can be traced directly to the modern phenomenons of earbuds piping loud music directly onto the ear drum, the idea that loud is the same as fun and quiet no longer is associated with a nice place to have a drink or a gentle meal. I won’t even bring TV or the local MultiPlex into the mix as it is too obvious to mention.

Not enough is being done to treat the condition and less is being done to deal with the environmental source of the problem. Until noise is seen as a pathological condition, the issue will persist. Quiet is good, and should be valued above noise of any kind.

I tried to find a cute line to end this with but came up with only this: Hearing is not necessarily understanding and silence is really golden.