Thoughts On A Crummy Afternoon

No one would ever mistake me for a financial genius. A fiduciary primitive? Closer to it. My father taught me stoicism yet little else but a sense of humor. He ran a small tire business so was kind of a blue collar guy, only I never ever remember seeing him with a tool in his hand. As a businessman, he was no Rockefeller. I don't remember plans or dreams just the tediousness of opening the shop every single day. I remember telling him (I was in my teens) that Tommy's father took him to the bank so he could borrow $100. Tommy would then be obligated to pay back the bank over the course of a year. Tommy's father was teaching him money. My father couldn't understand why Tommy's father didn't just give it to him. He could mow the lawn or something to pay it off. Shovel snow. Why not? Dad simply didn't get it. Tommy became an investment banker. I became an artist. If my father had taken me to the bank like Tommy's did, would I have saved myself a ton of trouble and become a banker, too?

Spring, 2023

Mountain weather. Damn. Sucker punched again. After nearly a week of Spring's wonder - buds and blooms and blossoms just beginning, a soft breeze, gentle weather, wedgewood skies - temperatures dropped again and snow threatens. But, the chill won't last, and the snow won't stick, and Spring really is underway. My peach trees made it through the Winter as did the weeping cherry, and the apple trees have buds by the thousands. And, of course, the pear tree - which Jamie and I planted decades ago - is as fertile as ever. Last year a bear got all the lower branches, but anti-bear spray plus my son's dog ought to keep it at bay this season, although we did just see one nosing around some newly planted trees bordering our first meadow, a project of the forestry department, native shrubs to help suck up water as it comes off the mountain. 

So much above ground. So much below. What creatures have yet to surface? What creatures won't ever? Yet, it doesn't feel so busy because few of the birds and none of the bees have shown up. My heart leapt for joy at the first flock of robins in the back yard. Chickadees signalling each other - siree, siree - morning glory seeds - always a trip. And there are the crows, constantly the crows, raucous as screeching brakes. I've seen a pair of geese following the creek up stream, and one pair of wood ducks following it down, but not yet anything else. No eagles. No herons. No woodpeckers. No Kingfishers. And no bees. I read a fellow recently, guy by the name of Mark Nepo, that the flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms, and the bee comes. So much to anticipate: meadows filled with color; air filled with scent; awkward newborns; fresh trout; prancing turkeys, hungry bear, drumming grouse...They're all out there where, if we're lucky and if we happen to be looking in precisely the right direction at the appropriate nanosecond, we might just might get to see one. We might get to see that turkey spread his tail and dance, We might get to see that grouse percuss a stump with her wings. We might get to see that spotted fawn hidden in tall grass, its mother carrying the seeds of future meals on her raggedy winter coat. We might even get to see that bear, but rest assured he will be running in the opposite direction. We will get to see lady bugs and may flies, violets and dandelions, mountain laurel and lilac. Someone will claim to have seen a panther, but I won't believe it. 

Borders

Borders are real. They divide one side from another and define one side from another. Of an instant everything is different - the clothes, the posture, the traffic, the architecture, the air we breathe - it's all so suddenly different and so suddenly irrevocable. It is what it is, and it will stay that way. Your job is not to change it but to negotiate it (to find its landmarks) and by your negotiation perhaps foster a difference.

One thinks of them from country to country, of  course, but it's also state to state, city to city, maybe even town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood. Note James Baldwin's Another Country. You are in one place yet, with a single forward step, you are someplace else, another world, another's world. The street may still be firm beneath your feet and the people bustling, but the air is different and you are breathing it and you may well be some place from which you will not return. It is so different there. And now you are aware of everything you took for granted before your one step: automobiles, street signs, street vendors, store fronts, aromas, pace, expressions...And if there is no going back? Get used to it. You don't rule this world. Strange people fill the air with the cut and color of their clothes, the jabber of their tongues, their fast food pallets, trucks with tacos and tamales and terrapin sauce. Oy.

I have recently crossed a border of no return, the one border that is not porous.  In but not out. I have entered the Land of the Elderly, and it is different here. Just yesterday an older woman at the supermarket (younger than me by twenty years) insisted she carry my grocery bag. People hold doors. I have become, "sir". They move more quickly, speak like the breeze in trees. Their machinery is smarter than I am. Their speed limit is not mine. Drive at your own pace and accept the abuse. Get used to it. You're not going back. I am in the Land of the Elderly. While I may not like being here, the alternative is not acceptable. So, I use a cane, watch where I'm walking, do isometrics at my desk, try not to dribble my food...It's a new world, and I want to be a good citizen.

A good citizen, yes, but there is a certain lawlessness inherent here, right? Really, demanded of us. Thank God. Mostly, we really don't know the rules, so we are always breaking one or another. Or we are adapting, and, like water on rock, bringing change. Or we really do stop sweating the small stuff. We really, truly no longer give a shit. So it ought to be an exciting time as well. We clash with our newly discovered limitations, but we skirt them and do an end around. 

I have a t-shirt with a lean, mean 'n' crusty old fart of a guy leaning against a Harley Hog with the caption, "Don't piss off old people. The older we get the less life in prison is a deterrent."  I'd like to think I am capable of at least a scintilla more mischief before I die. Stay tuned.

The problem is the pain, and, in some cases, the gear one needs to cart around from walkers to oxygen canisters to "paid companions" with diaper bags attached to their wrists like the nuclear codes. However, if we're blessed to be free of that paraphernalia, pain is what's left. How to deal with it?  Yeah. How to deal with it.  Your thoughts?

My Gall Bladder and Neil Diamond

Peanut butter would trigger agita, apples indigestion, bacon 'n' beans fuggedaboudit! My gall bladder leapt at every opportunity to say no trespassing. Time to say goodbye.

1979

June

In June of 1979, Jamie and I crossed the border in a plum colored Fiat Spider from Beverly Hills into Montana heading for home in a place we'd seen only once before - a shack on sixty acres bordered by 2.5 million acres of the Bitterroot-Selway Wilderness - 620 South West Gold Creek Loop - smack in the middle of the Bitterroot Valley, some would say in the middle of nowhere. I'd say in the middle of my best dream. There's so much to tell about this part of our lives, but I'm bound, for now, to keep it to my gall bladder.

I'd just finished writing The Jazz Singer for Neil Diamond and was anxious to gedouda town. The Eagles and Desperado came next. At this point in my career I could do no wrong.When Jamie came on board as my writing partner my stipulation was that we stay in one place and that place be Montana. For better or for worse, J chose Montana, and here we are 45 years later. Just now, let me digress. Something I've always wanted to say in public...

That scene in The Jazz Singer where Neil impersonates a Black singer in a Black night club by playing the scene in blackface? That one? I did not write that! I did not write that! I did not write that! In fact, I refused to write that. Do not blame me!

Now, that's out of my system. Here's the rest of it.

We're doing our Little House On The Prairie routine with gusto, Jamie and I, when it turns out I need to have my gall bladder removed. In the middle of nowhere! Jamie nicknamed the local hospital the Thrifty Six 'cause that's what it looked - one story, perfunctory, efficient. Women from Utah came there to have their tubes tied. My gall bladder was the most exciting thing my surgeon had seen since Viet-nam. 

So, I'm wheeled into the operating room and placed on the table all to the music of, wait a minute, Neil? Neil Diamond? Song Sung Blue here?  In Montana? Sweet Caroline up next? What's going on here? I'd had enough Neil Diamond to last a lifetime. Great guy. Good to work with. But my gall bladder? Here? In an operating room? In a damn near deserted corner of the earth? No way! Not this time. However, turns out that the surgeon loves to operate to Neil's music. It relaxes him. Well, I don't know how relaxed he was because I bear a scar the size of a bayonet wound. 

So they wheel me back to my room where Jamie is, basically, the attendant nurse, and where I croak out, "Call my mother." Back story. My mother was a very difficult woman. Formidable. She did not back down. Nor did she audit herself. Nor could she. She asked me to call her right after the operation, but I patiently explained how she'd have to talk to Jamie because I'd've just had my gut opened, and, if she didn't want to talk to Jamie, then she wouldn't have a clue, would she?

The first time she met Jamie I put her in the front seat, and Jamie got in the back. By the time I was behind the wheel again my mother had said, "Out with the old. In with the new. The only reason Jewish men like gentile girls is because of the sex." To which Jamie replied, "I know that's important to Stephen."

My mother's eyes narrowed to the slits of a panther. Elizabeth Hermanson Foreman had met her match.

So. "Call my mother," I croaked. And, Jamie, reluctantly, does. "Elizabeth," she says when my mother answers the phone, "I'm calling to tell you the two things you've been waiting to hear: the operation was a success, and Stephen's in a lot of pain."

One Would Think

 Sunday, March 26, 2023

One would think, after open heart surgery (a triple by-pass, no less - major league stuff), a broken foot, and spinal surgery, plus the premature loss of a beloved dog and, not to mention, one subdural hematoma, all within little more than a year - add to that equation a guy looking at eighty-three - hangin' in but still - One Would Think - that I'd have some sort of profound take on things. You'd think, right? I mean, isn't the point of anesthesia to bring you close to death then back to life again? Shouldn't I have had some kind of experience? After all, you're lying there in a hospital bed, attached to machines, having survived a situation of some risk, folks in uniform efficiently monitoring your every trickle, relatives and close friends with worried faces...You should have some kind of at the very least a slightly unique take on "Why am I here?" Or more specifically, "Why am I still here?" But, nope. Instead, I came out of the anesthesia riven by the thought that my car needed a brake job. Open heart surgery, and I'm thinking, "My car needs a brake job." After a lifetime of searching and thinking and reading and watching and listening: my car needs a brake job. Forget God. Call Pete (Pete's my mechanic). There's a lesson here. Even here. It tells me that a sense of humor comes in handy, pretty much no matter what. Mass shootings? Tornado destruction? Not much funny about stuff like that but most things? Feh. A sense of humor:  In your emotional tool kit it's like your vice-grips of emotional tools - adjustable to most problems.

So, did I need brakes? Absolutely, but I doubt other worldly vibes brought me that conclusion...which reminds me of my gall bladder operation and Neal Diamond. Huh? Tru'dat. Stay tuned.