Memorial Day Melancholy

Memorial Day brings a certain kind of sadness beyond its meaning.  The day itself should be dedicated to the men and women who died for this country but aside from some dutiful parades has become a day of commercialization.  The Memorial Day sale ads for cars, mattresses, whatever, are overflowing your mail box (snail and Internet), in the newspapers, TV, wherever you turn.

The “holiday” also is a reminder of the most precious commodity, one we take for granted when young; time.  Memorial Days of the past, memories of different neighborhoods in which we lived, and thoughts of aging now flood my senses.  I wrote a piece about those feeling which I later turned into a short story, with Memorial Day at its conclusion.  Some of the details are real and others are imagined.  It was intended as a memory induced impressionistic piece and it can be read here.

  

I’m reminded of this once again, not only by the marking of still another Memorial Day, but my continuing walks through our Florida neighborhood and golf course.  I walk early in the morning, out on the golf course before the golfers, frequently as the sun is rising.  Although man-made there is a quiet beauty and solitariness about being there, observing the plentiful wildlife, birds ranging from Mallard and Muscovy ducks, Florida grackles, and White Egrets.  The Muscovy ducks are dangerous when they fly low to the ground.  Better watch out as their aerodynamics do not allow for much avoidance when in flight.  I’ve almost been hit in the head at times so when I hear their unmistakable flapping, I duck (no pun intended!).

After walking the golf course, I usually take a turn in the neighborhood.  Early in the morning I see some of the same people and so we sometimes talk.  I’ve been doing this now for nearly 18 years. Although day to day changes are imperceptible, over so many years they are huge.  Houses have been torn down and rebuilt; people have come and have gone.  One of the common themes, though, is the process of aging.  Although I would like to think that I’m an outsider looking in at the process, I’m in lock step with everyone else.

I used to see a man walking the streets, very briskly, at a pace which was mine 15 years ago, but he was older than me.  We always smiled as we passed one another, but we were out there for exercise and it seemed that there was no time to talk.  One day his house was for sale and he was no longer walking the road.  Another neighbor said he was moving into an assisted living facility, that he had had some issues.  After the sale of the house it was gutted and a young family moved in.  And that was not the only one during these many years, and for the same reason. 

A few days ago I saw this sad sign in front of a neighbor’s house at the very end of our road: Goodbye; Friends & Neighbors.  We have Enjoyed Being Here These Past 43 Years -- The De Santis Family.  I really didn’t know them, other than to say hello when the husband collected his newspaper in the morning, but they were one of the “original” people on the road, building their home 43 years ago.  I’ve always admired their house as it reminded me of my northeastern roots and looking at it you would not know you are in Florida. Word has it that they are now going into a “graduated” independent, to assisted, to critical care facility.

Aging comes with several price tags, the increasing healthcare requirements, sudden emergency care, and, the worst consequence, to me, the loss of independence.

On this Memorial Day, there are these memories and thoughts, but there is also the increased awareness that our own turn comes now with gathering alacrity, every day lived to be appreciated, to be productive, but another day closer until we hang our own sign,” goodbye friends and neighbors.” 

And Memorial Day should be a more fully realized day to honor those who heeded the call of Democracy and paid the ultimate price.  I will not buy a car or a mattress this weekend.  It is a time to think of them.

Another Summer, Another Year

This is a continuation of the prior entry, written a couple of weeks and 1,250 miles ago, the flip side of the same old 33 we’ve played on the record player before.  But oh that drive up I95!  I figure that over the years I’ve driven that road some 35 times one way.  At one time we did it over one night, but as we’ve aged have chosen a more “leisurely” two night drive, although this means schlepping bags into a hotel, not once, but twice.  We try to time our drive so we’re passing by Washington at about 8.00 AM on Sunday morning, just about the most benign time to traverse that heavily travelled corridor.  In fact, this time we didn’t take the I495 bypass but went straight through Washington, to the Washington-Baltimore Parkway, and was able to enjoy the sights of Washington we don’t normally see from I495.

We listen to “books on tape” for most of the long, tedious drive and we were particularly pleased with our first choice, The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant.  Just about a perfect book to pass the time, 85 year old Addie Baum’s recollection of coming of age in early 20^th century Boston, as told to her granddaughter.  This was very competently read by Linda Lavin who balanced an immigrant Jewish accent with that of a new Bostonian.  Highly recommended as something to listen to (not sure I would want to read it though).

First stop, as usual, was Savannah, an easy six hour drive from our house, where we meet up with our friends Suzanne and George, a tradition going back many years.  Remarkable, warm people – I had recently written about them in this entry.

After enjoying a leisurely dinner with them, catching up on recent events, particularly health issues, and an early to bed, we were up first thing in the morning to get the next leg out of the way, a 7 plus hour drive to Fredericksburg.  But that morning – in spite of having run the car six hours the day before -- we were greeted by the dreaded “click-click” of a dead battery, and this at 6 AM on July 4.  Obviously the battery was no longer accepting a charge from the alternator so we immediately called AAA, but they could only give us a charge, which would not solve the problem.  They could not replace the battery as the Mercedes ML 350’s is under the passenger’s seat!  Mercedes to the rescue, their customer service dispatched a very proficient young man from a nearby garage within 20 minutes, who had the correct battery and replaced it in another 30, and we were on our way, about an hour “behind schedule.” 

One never knows what to expect as one approaches the Fredericksburg area.  I’ve seen traffic there as horrendous as Washington’s.  Luckily, most people were probably already at their destination on the 4^th so we arrived at our hotel with enough time to unwind and prepare for dinner. I revere the historical significance of the 4^th but without the fireworks, one of the reasons we travel over the holiday.

We’ve stayed at many of the Hampton Inns up and down I95 including this one in South Fredericksburg and remembered there was only one restaurant within easy walking distance (hate getting back into the car after all those jaw clinching hours on the road).  That restaurant is “Hooters,” a most unlikely place to find a couple of septuagenarians.  Well, on the way walking there, this only two weeks after Ann had arthroscopic surgery for a torn meniscus on her left knee, she slipped on some wet grass, her left leg completely folding underneath her.  Nearby people saw her slip and a young Good Samaritan came running over to help me lift her up. We thought she compromised her operated knee, but, instead she pulled thigh muscles above and behind the knee, so not only did we old folks arrive at Hooters, but stumbled in, Ann asking for ice to put on her thigh.  Talk about attracting attention to yourself.

They were accommodating, bringing bags of ice for Ann to use, and one thing we’ll say about Hooters other than the obvious, they have some tasty grilled food if you’re into that kind of thing.  I had a burger and Ann a rack of ribs.  She ordered a glass of wine and they carded her; obviously their policy to card everyone and that way they stay out of trouble, period.  You must be kidding we thought, but probably a good policy so assuredly no one under age can “look” old enough to imbibe. However, Ann’s pocketbook was in the hotel and as I don’t drink, I ordered the wine for her, she ordered my Coke, so when they carded me, I gave the very attractive young waitress who was now sitting at our table in her official Hooters outfit, my laminated university student ID card which I carry around as a joke (still in pristine condition, better than me!).  She said, what’s this?  I said it’s my official picture ID.  She said who is this?  I asked how old she was.  She said 19 and I replied that was exactly my age in the picture.  Rather than drag her head about the philosophical implications, tempus fugit, etc., I unceremoniously pulled out my license.

We arrived at the boat on Sunday afternoon and after our son, Jonathan, and his girl friend, Anna, helped us unpack, they served US dinner (for a change).  Nice to see them, one of the reasons we still do this, and we went to bed exhausted and in some chaos.

Ann’s knee and thigh needed rest and ice the next day so I was off alone to Stew Leonard’s, my favorite supermarket of all time, ideal for shoppers such as myself as it is configured as an orderly maze so you have to pass by everything.  I loaded up with groceries to get us started and began to get back into the swing of things at our boat club, first having our traditional welcome back dinner with our friends, Ray and Sue.

Wednesday nights is a family barbeque night here but it rained and as Ann was still somewhat immobile, I ended up “getting volunteered” to be a “runner” for the event, now held indoors, having to take orders and fill them in the club kitchen where other volunteers were laboring away grilling and prepping side orders. This event is a continuing testimony to the man who organized it years ago, Frank, and although he has now been partially disabled by a stroke, still overseas it to this day, with the able assistance of his wife, Barbara, and his sons. That following weekend was an antique car show in the parking lot and Ann was finally up and about for this, so here she is with a 1915 Chrysler.  There were also cars of my teenage dream years, T-Birds and Corvettes. 

So, our summer has begun here.

For me, living on the boat is increasingly complicated as at home I have my computer on most of the time and can stroll over to it and do what I need to do, managing our finances and particularly writing when I want to.  Here on the boat, the Wi-Fi no longer is “reachable” from where we are docked, so I’m dependent mostly on my iPhone’s cell connection and when I want to write anything lengthy, such as this for my blog, I have to set up my laptop and I’m dependent on the cellular “personal hotspot” to get connected.  This makes transferring photos more data intensive, expensive, slow, what can I say?  So if I post less, and some photos are compromised, that’s the reason.

Nonetheless, this is offset by more time to work on the boat (finished getting a few coats of sealer on the teak cover boards earlier in the week – they can be seen in one of the photos towards the end of this entry) and to read.  I’ve been alternating between William Trevor’s latest collection of short stories (Selected Stories) and the late Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great; How Religion Poisons Everything. 

Putting aside the Hitchens’ work for the time being -- which I’ll write about probably in my next entry -- one William Trevor short story each night is enough for the time being to satisfy my literary thirst.  The man simply never ceases to amaze me with his stories, the reader frequently thinking he is going with one part of the story, only to find the real story is about something else.  He deals with subtle aspects of relationships and his character descriptions are like photographs.  I’ve never read anyone like him.  It’s hard to read more than one story at a time as there is so much to think about.

Part of my routine – one borrowed from home – is my early morning walk.  I’ve written before about the nearby Shorefront Park, my walking grounds here.  It is an old waterfront community in Norwalk, sleepily nestled on the west shore of the Norwalk River.  When I first started walking the area years ago, mostly older homes from the 40’s and 50’s were the norm.  Over the years some of those older homes, particularly right on the river were torn down with new, much more expensive ones being built.  One problem with the area which was exposed during hurricane Sandy is it is low lying.  Many of the homes were inundated by the storm, becoming uninhabitable.  Some were repaired and raised off their foundations, insurance companies bearing all or part of the expense, while others were torn down and more mansion type homes being erected but at higher elevations.  This process is still going on, years after the storm.  So it is a place of change and I get to see it kaleidoscopically.

 

One thing that hasn’t changed when I walk it early in the morning is the sights and sounds of nature, so different here than in Florida.  The evening crickets are still evident in the grass, their murmur quieting by the early morning.  The aroma of pines permeates the air and the mornings can be cool, even in the summer.  A walk here is refreshing and nostalgic for me, remembering our decades in the area.  It is imprinted in my DNA by now. Then there is the view of the Norwalk Harbor, at the “turn around” point of my walk, a place where I always stop and take in the beauty of the scene. 

Still another reason to return.

The question as we age though, is how much longer?  The drive itself takes its toll.  Maybe fly up for only a month, leaving more time on the boat for our son (who has already stepped in maintaining it beautifully)?  Perhaps that will be something to consider next year.  It’s hard, maybe impossible, to just walk away from this area and our past.  Alternatively, let life dictate the outcome?

An event a couple of days ago -- at about 11.00 PM – will illustrate why boating and aging do not exactly mix.  We were already in bed as a strong cold front moved through. The boat began to bang against the port piling in a gusty NE wind. Our bow line had obviously stretched in the wind.  What to do?  Reluctantly, I decided I’d have to get out there to set up another bow line to keep the boat off the piling, as well as going down to the bilge to access another fender and setting it up against the piling.  I also thought it would be prudent to set up a redundant spring line to keep the swim platform off the dock.

I donned my jeans over my pajamas and stuck a flashlight in my back pocket.  I don’t relish walking up the gunnels to the bow, even under the best conditions and thought I should alert Ann that I’d be off the boat doing this work in the dark and under those conditions.  She had just fallen into a deep sleep – amazing given all the banging, and I didn’t have the heart to wake her up at that point.  So I rehearsed every movement in my mind and where things could go wrong and then went about my business.  Hey, what was the worst that could happen – finding a floating body at the mouth of the river in the morning? (Shouldn’t joke like that as when we were at another marina someone on our dock arrived late at night, obviously slipped trying to get on his boat, and his body was found the next morning floating between the finger of the dock and his boat.)

As the morning-after-the-front-passage photographs attest, everything went fine, but for the balance of the night the wind was unrelenting and I felt as if we were underway, the water slapping against the hull and the rubbing of the fender against the piling (better than banging though).  Ann continued to sleep right through!   This used to be “fun” when we were younger, even at an anchorage where it is exponentially more dangerous than the same conditions at a dock. With the passage of time, though, it becomes more difficult to manage, to tolerate even— and it’s certainly no fun.  So, still another factor to consider for the future.

 

How “Terribly Strange” To Be 70

The always erudite investment manager, Bill Gross, has turned the Big Seven Zero.  As he now observes in his recent missive, A Sense of an Ending, “a 70-year-old reads the obituaries with a self-awareness as opposed to an item of interest.”  He conflates his own end of life angst with the end of a market propped up by unsustainable central bank machinations.  He also cites Julian Barnes’ novel, The Sense of an Ending, which similarly caught my attention, perhaps because Bill and I are about the same age, although I reached the magic 70 mark a couple of years ago, sharing the occasion with my family on a cruise.

Barnes should be the spokesperson for our generation with his non-fiction work Nothing to be Frightened Of required reading.  I’ve already quoted one of the brilliant passages from that book in a previous entry, but it bears repeating: “It is not just pit-gazing that is hard work, but life-grazing.  It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us.  This is what growing up means.  And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation.”

I’ve now had a couple of years to “look back” at the consequences of turning 70.  While philosophically I agree with Barnes, it is the avoidance of despair during the remaining years which is the challenge.  It’s probably why us herd of the retired “keep busy.”  But as much as we try not to think about it, for many of us turning 70 is like throwing on a light switch (or maybe, more aptly, turning it off).  Suddenly, the body rebels at being kept going beyond its normal shelf expiration date.  More parts wear out and medical technology is more than happy to figure out a way to keep us going.  As a friend of ours puts it, “I have body parts on order.”

Unquestionably the worst part of the whole process is watching friends battle unspeakable illnesses or going through invasive surgery to keep the body going, with the attendant weeks or even months of rehabilitation.  As we all joke, it’s better than the alternative. Hey, we're on the right side of the grass!  But with increasing frequency we hear about another friend, a relative, or a high school / college alumnus who has succumbed to the inevitable.

As readers of this blog know, one of the activities I’ve steeped myself in since retiring (and therefore, “keeping busy”) is playing the piano, mostly The Great American Songbook pieces.  I recently came across -- buried in my sheet music – some of the music of Paul Simon written in the 1960s.  During those days, that was the type of music I played, but have long abandoned.  So I found myself playing some again, particularly Old Friends which opens with two beautiful Major 7^th chords, A-major-7 (“Old”) and then E-Major-7 (“friends”).

I’m a "serial piano player" and once I attach myself to a song, I play it over and over again, trying different adaptations.  My mind wanders sometimes and, in the case of this song, remembering my thoughts of the lyrics when I used to play it nearly 50 years ago. Today they have a significance quite different than when I was younger, particularly the phrase from the B section of the song, “Can you imagine us/Years from today/Sharing a park bench quietly?/How terribly strange/To be seventy/Old Friends “

The true meaning of lyrics when I played the song back in the 1960s seemed foreign, unthinkable.  My being 70 at the time seemed to be in a one-to-one relationship with eternity.  Eternity has arrived.

So, Bill, welcome to the club!

Fifty Years in a Flash

Personal Space

Once upon a time people were considerate of others’ personal space. I’m old enough to remember those days.  Perhaps today’s “it’s all about me” mind-set is partially the result of the very technology I’m using to write and post this and especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Population growth and prosperity are equally responsible, everyone “fighting” for space.

And by personal space I mean the right to enjoy life without the in-your-face encroachment of someone else’s lifestyle. I love Sondheim’s music, but don’t think I should “broadcast” that love affair at ungodly decibels in public places.  How many times have you been at a stop light and a car pulls up in the other lane with its stereo blasting a base so loud it vibrates your car?  It’s even worse at the beach as it is prolonged. You’ve already planted yourself under an umbrella, only to be accosted for the rest of your stay unless you move.  Or even while you are trying to enjoy a quiet dinner at home, hearing a neighbor’s woofer banging out what now passes as “music.”

I’ll put this under my audio effrontery section: robocalls. The one I love is the automated, breathless but recorded message, that happily announces that I’ve been chosen (one of the select few : - ) to be eligible to have my debt consolidated, please hold on for a representative.  A few times I’ve actually held, trying to get the name of the company.  Call recognition doesn’t work for those calls and if it did, reporting it to Do Not Call seems to do nothing. They simply rotate their phone number (or use Skype). Political and charity calls are exempted from Do Not Call and during political season it’s a free for all invasion of your telephone line and your private time.

Probably one of the main reasons we rarely go to the movies now are the bombastic, extra-loud trailers that you are forced to sit through.  One also has to contend with people checking cell phones, texting during the film, those phones glowing in the dark or ringing their owners’ favorite melodies.   Or, the people nearby talking “huh, what did he say?”

While one’s audio senses are being increasingly assaulted, so are one’s olfactory rights.  Yes, there are much more stringent laws governing smoking, but few apply to outdoors.  A particular bête noire are cigars which seem to defy the laws of being “upwind” of that particular kind of smoke.  Cigars simply stink 360 degrees.  Stay at home and smoke that stogie, or go to a cigar bar.

Air travel has taken the loss of personal space to still another level.  After being required to partially disrobe with your fellow passengers, you board an aircraft only to find you are sitting behind someone who immediately reclines his/her seat – to its fullest extent -- for a lengthy flight, leaving you with the rear of the seat in your face and the tray table in your gut.  We’re told that common sense etiquette should prevail.  Ha, in this day and age.  Recently a number of flights had to be diverted because of unruly passengers duking it out over this issue, one person even carrying a “knee defender” device which prevented any reclining of the seat in front.

A friend of mine was seated behind a lady with very long hair and as he tried to eat what now passes as a meal on an aircraft, she decided to recline her seat, but did not want to rest her head on her precious hair so she flipped all of her hair up and over her headrest and directly into his dinner!  Welcome to 21^st century air travel!

Then, the coup de grâce:  Are we ready for the implications of what Amazon, Google and even Domino's Pizza are testing? -- drones to deliver “goods.”  With GPS technology they could be spaced only feet apart, why not?  There goes our entitlement to viewing a serene sunset, a conga line of drones going by, delivering the essentials of life such as pizzas, dog food, and might as well throw in cigars and boom boxes as well!   We of the “me” mentality must have what we want immediately when we want it! 

Probably I will not be around to witness the ultimate battle of the drones.  And no doubt, as I age I am more sensitive to all these issues, feeling increasingly powerless to do anything about individual incidents. And down here in Florida, people pack pistols, so you might get shot by asking someone to refrain from some of the things I’ve mentioned.  There is no Department of Common Decency and Consideration to complain to and even if there was, let’s face it, nothing would be done.