After FUNeral musings

The rabbi conducting yesterday’s funeral had actually met the recently deceased several times over the years, my friend’s father who passed away Sunday at 89 from a late diagnosed cancer.  The deceased had been a strong, vigorous man with a handshake like a vise, I was amazed to learn he’d been close to ninety.  His nephew ended his funeral remarks by calling him a mighty oak and there is nothing lacking in that description of him.

It occurred to me, listening to the moving stories of his youngest daughter and two of his grandsons, that stories told at funerals by people who love you present your best qualities while the rest, to reverse paraphrase the Bard, is oft interred with your bones, as Aaron’s were in the Jewish policeman’s funeral plot in some Queens cemetery.

I am muddling this, because in a hurry to pack up and get back to my cracked and depressing hovel which I have once again vowed to tidy and have patched up.  There is too much to tidy and too much work to patch and paint and re-tile all the things that need to be fixed once the clutter is removed.  A powerful metaphor for my life of action-stalling deliberation that went through my mind after the grandsons spoke lovingly of how their energetic grandfather never wasted a moment of his life.  After retiring from a long and vigorous work life as a police lieutenant and later insurance inspector, he was either strengthening his already strong body or keeping his mind sharp with a new book.  Or walking with or playing with his grandchildren.

The rabbi spoke of the dead man’s uprightness and nobility.  It would not occur to this man of integrity that there could ever be a good reason to depart from what is true, and right, and decent.   His name, Aaron, said the rabbi, was the name of the Jew who had created the priestly class and a fitting name, for the deceased was a true aristocrat.  I thought then of the analogous speech at my own funeral, the final rites of a man who has spent too much time brooding and too little time  pitting himself directly against life.

“He embraced his arbitrarily given name, The Prophet Elijah, with humility and an absurd sense of purpose.  He accepted without apparent complaint the difficult, essential, unpaid task of returning the hearts of children to their parents and the hearts of parents to their children.   Only this reconciliation could prepare humanity for the coming of the Messiah.  Undeterred by the impossibility of the assignment, knowing that the Messiah is not of this world, as subject to wishful imagining as any concept ever dreamed up by people facing the worst and an idea more objectively dubious than all other such human imaginings, even if more laudable than most, he persisted.   Our Elijah was not dissuaded by any of these things, even though he received no reassurance from God, as his biblical namesake had, and thus had no expectation of being taken alive up to heaven as a very, very old man because God loved him so much.”   A pause to look around at the assembled in their suits and nice dresses, letting the immensity of this sink in.  

It is a depressive move to think of your own funeral at, or immediately after, a funeral for somebody else, I think.  I wonder idly now how many others were measuring their own lives against the life of this mighty oak in his flag draped coffin to the rabbi’s right.

Many who give these funeral orations have never met the deceased.  This man did, and gave a few personal reminiscences that were meaningful and moving.  I thought the bit about the name was a little forced, perhaps, especially when he added that the last name, written in Hebrew, formed the root of the word sustainer, nourisher, giver of life, and that he was, indeed, an aristocratic nurturer who sustained us all by his example.   It set my thoughts back to my father’s story about the funeral of our neighbor, Sonny Friedman.

“The rabbi said that he was called ‘Sunny’ because of his cheerful disposition, that he lit up the room when he walked in,” my father told me in his sardonic manner after Sonny’s funeral.   I wish I was artist enough to convey my father’s wry, disgusted expression as he recounted that clinked attempt at a warm, personal touch.  Sonny was a nice neighbor, but withdrawn, a bit dour, perhaps, and I don’t remember that his understated, slightly forced smile lit up any rooms.

Our view of a person, from life to death, is clearly dictated by our perspective, and you know how dictators are.  My sense of this man I’d met a few times was much different from the portraits those who knew him well, and loved him best, painted.  These paintings were striking, majestic, highlighting what was best in him, colored with bold, poetic strokes.  

My sister had seen our father paint such masterpieces at funerals, I had too.  He could make the person live again for a moment among the gathered as he led them through laughs and tears.  “The D.U. could do that for someone he hated,” my sister contends to this day.  “It was just a gift,” she says.

In the audience, in a suit that bound me here and there, to remind me it was not my regular, comfortable clothes, I compared my own life, with its generous swathes of wasted time, to the deceased’s energetic striving, even in the weeks before his painful death, his unflagging strength and discipline, the full exploitation of his engine’s potential, run full-throttle, every day.  

In my seat on the wooden bench, squirming in my suit, I felt the opposite of that.  A trailblazer with tired eyes and quivering rubber legs, resting up apprehensively for the big day as winter prepared to bluster in.

 

 

Protagonism

Twenty-five or thirty years ago a friend of mine coined this term, as far as I know, to indicate the tendency, in our celebrity culture, to present oneself as a protagonist.  In the years since, everyone vaguely inclined to it has become a star.  Some of these stars shine over a city of two or three, some over an entirely empty yard, but while they write or perform they indulge in the dream that someone, somewhere, gives a rat’s ass about what they think or feel.

“Protagonism!” my old friend snorted, to indicate that the long-ago soundtrack I’d improvised and recorded on magnetic tape was mere showing off, did nothing to enhance the audience’s appreciation of the movie, instead merely pointed a constant finger at its author.  

“Nobody cares, nobody cares,” the world-weary dispatcher at Prometheus Courier Service used to say many times a day, especially when people tried to share their concerns with him.  He drank himself to death alone in a rented walk-up in Chelsea, and indeed, nobody cared.  Not to say he wasn’t a very nice guy and a lot of fun to shoot the shit with.  

People photograph their lunch and post it online.  OK.  Same with opinions, which, like cloacae [1], every one of us former reptiles and our bird cousins possess.  Unlike these primitives, we can post them as fast as we think them up.

I wonder about this desire to make oneself known to others, in the form of writings, photos, videos and music posted on the weird electronic spider web most of the world is connected to.    Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who knew a good deal about it, called this desire to make oneself known to others the oldest human longing.  

But thinking about it now, I wonder:  who can possibly care that a stranger’s father, when he was a baby, was whipped in the face, setting in motion a long chain of regrettable events that weighed on his children and his children’s children?  Or about his speculation on the terrible life of the insane mother that caused her to whip her infant in the face, before she left forever the town that would be wiped off the map twenty years later, the blood of everyone she knew in childhood plowed into the mud.  

I suppose one might as well wonder why people read poems, or enjoy psycho-biographies, or watch violent movies where terrible events are portrayed vividly, or smile at idiotically idealized comedies, or love head-banging music.  The things created by human souls as they hurtle between infancy and death.  Could be I’m just thinking too much, having nothing better to do.  You wanna see what I had for lunch?   I’m almost done digesting it.

 

[1]   In birds, the cloaca is the terminal chamber of the gastrointestinal and urogenital systems, opening at the vent. Excretory systems with analogous purpose in certain invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as “cloacae”.

Birds also reproduce with this organ; this is known as a cloacal kiss.  

 

 

Lovey Cries for all of Us

Another one of the things I used to write.  Lovey, a ten pound poodle, had a short, tragic life, fighting with my mother, often bullying my mother.  My nephew, a boy of few words, said as we were leaving the apartment “that dog’s a tyrant.”  

It was not, strictly speaking, the dog’s fault.  My mother in the last years of her slow death from cancer was in no condition to give a puppy the care and patient guidance it needed and they both suffered for it.  Lovey died at five, a month before my mother, and it was a tragic blow, like losing an affectionate, troubled teenager.

 

Lovey cries for all of us

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 4:31:57 AM

My father told me the last night of his life that he’d never seen love or affection exchanged in his home. He said “I have no idea how it’s even done.” I did not have my hand on his as he spoke to me that night, with all the tenderness he could muster. He was not the cuddly or even affectionate kind.

When he was feeling maudlin, after a particularly stupid and bloody battle with his children over the dinner of steak he provided every evening, he would look at me with hurt in his eyes and say “you should read ‘I Never Sang for My Father”. He’d tell me to read this play with all the bitterness he could manage and I’d snort.

I had the play on the bottom shelf in my room in my parents’ house, it rested halfway on the floor, covered in dust. I never so much as cracked the cover of the old paperback.  I have no idea what the play is about, except for the sense my father, someone who never sang for his father, gave me of it.

I saw my father cry twice in life.  Once was during a seder, when he was talking about God pouring out His wrath against every tyrant who persecuted His People, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Inquisition to Chmelnitski to the Nazis.  His tears were bitter as the Dead Sea, pouring out of his surprisingly light hazel colored eyes, and I’m sure my sister recalls that moment as clearly as I do.

The other time was during a visit in Israel.  I’d gone there for a year after High School and my parents came to visit the new kibbutz where I was living and working.  It was a historic occasion, the kibbutz was about to celebrate its first Passover, and so my parents and my sister came to visit.

My father swept the dining hall and helped lay the table cloths and set the hundreds of places for the seder, my mother worked in the kitchen, my sister probably did too.  I was out in the field picking the crops.  I spent most of the long seder in a friend’s room, listening to Jimi’s beautiful Axis: Bold As Love for the first time, then the second, then the third.

I got a day off for my parents’ visit.  We drove in a rented car to a stretch of the beautiful Aravah desert, an oasis.  It may have been Ein Gedi, I can’t think of where else it could have been.  It could have been the walk down to the Dead Sea, now that I think of it, judging from a picture I have from that day.  It is a picture of us standing on the rocky shore of some dark water at low tide.  My father, with big, black sideburns, my sister, thin with a big new bust in a yellow tank top, and me, skinny as a whippet, with a scraggly beard and veins roping down my arms.

My mother and my sister were walking ahead on the dusty trail.  My father motioned for me to hang back by the car a minute, then we began walking slowly.  The color of the land was like wheat, but there was no wheat.  It was dry, parched, biblical terrain that did not look kindly on strangers.

My father was trying to talk to me but I was seventeen, lean, tanned, and impossible to engage.  I’d hardened my heart to him, as he’d required me to do, and appealing to me was like appealing to a thug, a stone-faced adversary who gives no quarter.  I had the demeanor of someone who’d rather smash your face than listen to your side of the story.

Taking this in, what he knew in that moment was largely his own handiwork, he suddenly began to cry.  It lasted only a moment, long enough for him to beg me not to become like him, to let my mother hug and kiss me, to be humane to my mother.

“I’d have to hold his head, but your father would let me kiss him,” my mother told me after my father died.

I was on the plane tonight, the cranky old woman next to me had gotten on standby.  She was in the middle seat, spilling over to my seat, she’d firmly taken the entire armrest and part of the area where my shoulder and arm should rightfully have been.  I didn’t muscle her.  I’d already let another old woman ahead of me on the walkway to the plane.

“It doesn’t matter,” she told me with a lovely smile and an accent from the old country that told me she’d seen much more terrible lines than this one.  She truly didn’t care if I went first or she did, but she took my small gift, to make me feel better.  She was very gracious about it.

I’m sitting on the plane and it occurs to me that my mother finally said the words “I’m dying.”  Words easy enough to say when you are depressed, or angry, or manipulating somebody.  But to say it when you are dying takes a lot of work, and when she said it the other day, angrily and to manipulate me, she meant it and understood it.  Said the awful thing aloud for the first time.

A few hours later I was sitting at the computer keyboard and she rested her face on the back of my forearm as I typed.  Gently, it didn’t disturb my typing. And with infinite tenderness.

Sitting next to the fat old lady who crowded me on the plane it came to me.  Her relentless touch and the heat of her meaty arm reminded me.  I hadn’t hugged my mother much, perhaps two or three times while I was there.  I’d probably hugged my nephew as much, or my niece, and these were hugs like hipsters give each other in greeting.  Stylized, barely touching, they take a few seconds to execute and are done for the look and the gesture rather than for the feel.

I leaned into the car and kissed her goodbye on her cheek as she kissed me on mine, the way I kiss Ida whenever I see her.  Her dog cried like a human being, beside herself to see me leaving.  My mother for her part did not cry, neither did I.

The dog sat up on her lap, staring at me, stretching toward me, inconsolable, crying, imploring me not to leave.  The dog wept without shame or restraint, like a creature acutely conscious of love, affection and companionship and crying because it was losing someone it loved.

I Used to Write Things like this

Looking for an account of a long unhappy friendship I’d written at some point, germane at the moment due to the passing of that former good friend’s mother, I’ve been picking through the haystack of unsorted needles with little hope of finding that story.  Going through the files for the now extinct blahg I once maintained, I stumbled on this one, poetic in its way, written four years ago when I was in the first stage of optimism about this new plan I had for my life.

Lost Souls

Sunday, September 19, 2010, 12:30:58 AM

Sat around a long table last night eating delicious food with a dozen people I love, each one full of great qualities, each one, in some part of themselves, a lost soul.   We bang around in this world lost a good deal of the time and there is no shame in it.  I am just thinking about it now, the dark night before Ralph’s unveiling, in the aftermath of the Days of Awe.

My sister took my mother to see “Up in the Air” a black comedy that touched a raw a nerve in this downed economy.  My mother, even though a George Clooney fan, didn’t enjoy it very much.  “Everybody in that movie was so damaged,” my mother told my sister as they left the cinema.  Abby was impressed by the insightful comment; indeed, every character in that movie is damaged in their hearts, in their minds, in their souls.  They dream the dreams of damaged people.

It was my mother’s follow-up comments that rendered my sister speechless on the drive home.  

“Do you think the filmmaker was trying to say that everyone is damaged?”  my mother asked.  Abby wondered if this was an ah-ha moment, the possible opening of an important discussion.  She ventured the opinion that everyone probably is damaged to some extent.

“I’m not damaged,” my mother said forcefully, a few months before cancer took her ravaged body and struggling soul from this life, and my sister was at a loss for anything to say to that.

Ralph’s tombstone will have a cheesecloth gauze removed from it tomorrow, after some prayers are chanted and a few words said about him.  Ralph was the father of my good friend Rob, who was my best friend in the world, and we spent many an evening over at his house, my family and I.  Ralph was quick with a droll remark, glass of booze in his hand, suave as Dean Martin but at the same time as downtrodden and dominated as the Jewish husband in any Jewish husband joke.  

The last time I saw him he looked wonderful, he was pushing 90 and could have passed for 75, dapper as always, smiling, his thick hair brushed back and shining.  He had no idea who I was, but could see by his wife’s friendliness toward me that I must be an old friend.  We went into a quiet room and sat and talked, his wife and I, then he turned to me with that old Ralph mischief in his eyes, and melancholy too, and crooned “the party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.”  A year or so later he was being eulogized, another mystery who had walked among us.

As all the ones we walk among must of necessity be.  There are reasons for every action, ridiculous as it may seem, given so many of the actions reasoned to.  If too unreasonable to be called reasons, there are at least rationales for every belief, behavior, hope and grudge.  We don’t act without them and we can’t do anything incredibly cruel or stupid without believing we have good reasons, or at least strong rationales, for doing what we do.  Sometimes we feel lost, wondering who is actually pulling these strings, this spider web I am hanging in life by, like a dangling participle?

Music that could and should be made, but silence.  Love that should be expressed freely, and shared, and used to give strength, used in a hundred bizarre undermining ways that advance nothing but puzzlement and hurt.  Beauty, sorrow, beautiful sorrow, sorrowful beauty, permutations of every moving thing often moving off in directions that sustain nobody.

It is no wonder that so many souls are lost, lost on the way to Death we do our best not to think of as coming for us, though it most certainly is.  We are a busy society, a competitive, commercial one, time is money and money runs faster than time, so we must be faster still.  And this chasing is hard work, leaving us tired, distracted, it is not always easy to concentrate.  

The research says we can only really focus on one thing at a time.  We generally have several things clamoring for our attention and feel obliged to multitask, which makes us less attentive to the things we attend to.  We have to take risks to advance, they are scary and so we are often tense when we jump.  A tense jump means trouble.

No connections, you want connections?  I could give you connections, but it would cost you.  I would require something of you to make these connections for you.  I am weary, and will be sleeping presently, to be up in seven hours to stand with Ralph’s widow, and his children, and a few friends still alive.  I will now be taking off my slippers, putting up my pipe, neatly hanging my velvety robe, laying myself between thick, creamy covers.  I’ll be snoring.  

I am tired, my dear, of speaking to the black, purring night.  The night is many things I love, but it is not big on conversation, which I do also love. And lost souls or no, I see the light of engagement on everyone’s face when they are correctly asked an intelligent question, or given feedback that leads them toward the light, or laughter, or a good, long cry.  I wonder about the short-circuit, why most people are too lost in worse things to be present more than momentarily when the moon is blue and a certain music reminds them– damn, I used to love music.

Courtesy Call

“Hi,” said the voice, mangling the pronunciation of my invented name.  “Did I pronounce that right?”

I reassured her that she’d been close and then, at her request, pronounced the invented pronunciation she’d  been so far from.  She then pronounced it perfectly and told me she was calling from the medical center where I’m having my colonoscopy tomorrow.

“This is a courtesy call,” she told me and then informed me I would have to make a $100 co-pay before the procedure.

“OK,” I said, “thank you for the courtesy.”  She peeped a little laugh-like peep.  As to my questions about the procedure itself, I would have to call the doctor directly.  “So you are calling from billing,” I said.  

“Yes,” she told me pleasantly and we wished each other a good day.

Funny

We learn that Napoleon was funny, quick-witted and, one presumes, deadpan.   A biographer of his recounts Napoleon’s drollness when a maniac ran up to Napoleon and Josephine outside the opera and declared to Napoleon that he was in love with Josephine.  “Odd choice of a confidant, sir,” Napoleon said to the maniac. 

“There are over FIFTY Napoleonic jokes recounted in my book,” said the biographer indignantly to the man he was debating, a man who held that Napoleon was a humorless, tyrannical, bungling, petty dickhead who, given the chance to truly spread the values of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, made things much darker rather than lighter, particularly to the humorless, autocratic, militaristic east.

“Over 50 jokes scattered over the 900 pages of your book,” shot back the man who would stop at nothing to debunk the notion that Napoleon was a cool guy, a great man, and funny.  “Pretty slow going, eh?”  Turns out he’s got a Napoleon biography in the works too, was flogging it a bit by the end of the debate– hinting coyly, in hopes of boosting sales, that he actually thought Napoleon was a cool guy and, possibly, even droll.

I have no idea if he was a cool guy, or droll, or if one should expect more jokes in a 900 page biography of a famous conqueror and ruler.  It’s not like it’s the biography of Jerry Seinfeld, after all.  Still, it got me thinking cheerlessly about humor, about the mysterious force that makes people say and do things that make people laugh.

If you ask me, or even if you don’t, I will admit to being a bit mystified that I am not more depressed at the moment.  If we get on to the subject, and I don’t dodge it for once but describe plainly the present circumstances I find myself in, you will find yourself flinching.  I’ve seen people literally start biting themselves in the back, like dogs attacking fleas, when I am done recounting the probably impossible challenges I’m up against at the moment.   People begin clutching at the most ridiculous ideas to try to help me.  Perhaps I could do the animation workshop with severely retarded adults who are also blind and deaf?  There’d probably be a grant for that somewhere, no?

“Hmmm,” I’ll say, pretending to consider the merits of the idea, “You know, I never thought of that.   Of course, they’d have a bit of trouble making a soundtrack, wouldn’t they, if they’re deaf?   And I suppose they’d need some help with the visual part, being blind.  But I’ll have to mull it over.  Thanks!”  And my thank you will ring a bit emptily in the uncomfortable silence before we can shift the conversation to more pleasant topics.

Still, before taking my leave of these friends, at more of a loss than I am to understand why I am not yet totally paralyzed by depression, I will usually have remarked, riffed, opined, and/or dead-panned in some semi-humorous way.  People need to laugh and the dark humor of dark humorists will suffice in a pinch, especially in a pinch.  

An old friend, literally almost 98 years old, passed away recently.  Sekhnet cried and I patted her then said “but let’s be honest about it, she’s a fucking quitter.  She said she was going for 100, but she just didn’t have the guts.”  Tears still falling she laughed, the sick twist, because there’s nothing like a little laugh to ease pain.

There are over FORTY other, equally hilarious, jokes in the 3,000 page memoir I am working on now.  You’ll want to be alert for them when you read the book.  Of course, bear in mind they don’t come across as well in print as they do when deadpanned spontaneously in the circumstances that spawned them.

“You should do stand-up!” a friend declares, wiping his eyes after my farcical account of my long and terminal unemployment, my foolish ideals and abject lack of practicality.  A good idea, stand-up, perhaps, if I’d started 40 years ago, had an incredibly thick hide and was as determined pursuing it as I am now, intermittently, pursuing this other long shot.  I could also have been a hell of a professor of something, if I’d started a few decades back.  Coulda, woulda, shoulda, you know the drill.

On the other hand, I know a self-made millionaire, one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met, who lives in a mansion of one hundred rooms, a beautiful place he had built for himself and the wife who savagely attacks him daily. And, like in the old Yiddish curse, the devil chases him from room to room. Helps me keep things in perspective, thank my luck that I live alone in only three cluttered rooms where the devil has a much less fun course to chase me through and often tires of the tedious game.

LOL!

A word of encouragement (13 minute drill)

The only thing you can control, most of the time, is your reaction to the stresses you are under.  

“Mmm…,” she said, “that sounds reasonable.  But what if you put yourself, by poor planning or sheer impracticality and wishful thinking,  directly into the jaws of the situation that’s causing you the stress you’re under?”

Even more self-control is required then.  That anyone could say, with the assured wisdom of hindsight, that your plan– or lack of a plan, would have inevitably put you between these stressful jaws eventually, nostrils filled with the deadly breath of the beast intent on devouring you and your spirit — is not the issue.

“What is the issue?” 

I think of Michael Holden, a new kid with blond hair who was in my class in fourth grade.   The desks that week were arranged in a horseshoe and Holden and I sat, with about half the class, with our backs against the windows.   Which now that I think about it, put us dangerously in the path of strafing Communist planes, which, during the Cold War, we sometimes did drills to avoid the bullets of, should they come screaming in.

We were reviewing a math homework assignment and the teacher was going around the horseshoe in order, calling on a kid to read the answer to the class.  We would all check our work and then pass the page in for the teacher to make notations on and hand back to us the following day.   It was pretty asinine, as many things were back then, but easy enough, and all in a day’s work.  

The assignment was to teach us about making reasonable mathematical estimates.   We were asked to estimate the answer, then work out the math problem and give both the estimate  and the actual answer.  The first kid said “the estimate is ten, the actual answer is 12.5”.  The second kid used the same formulation, as did the third and every other kid.  

I counted around the horse shoe and counted the questions to see which one I’d be called on to give the answer to.  I worked out the estimate and the answer, it took a moment.  Meantime, I kept filling in the estimates and answers my classmates were kindly providing, cleverly getting one or two wrong and dutifully marking an X next to those, along with the correct answer.

Holden, I saw, was struggling somehow, either didn’t count right or didn’t get the assignment, or… I don’t know.  But when the teacher called on him he had a blank loose leaf page in front of him, which he stared at thoughtfully.   

“The estimate,” he said, and began to cough.  “The estimate is,” and he was convulsed in what the Russians used to call a paroxysm of coughing.  He struggled to get the word ‘estimate’ out again, as his cough became more and more like a dog’s bark.  He was fair-skinned and his face quickly turned pink, then red, then crimson, almost purple.

“Michael,” the teacher called in concern, “go get a drink of water!”  And he dutifully nodded, still coughing, got up and walked to the back of the room where he drank at length from the water fountain at the end of the long sink.  Another kid gave the estimate he hadn’t provided, and the actual answer.  The teacher never got back to Holden.  

And there’s the buzzer.

A Walk in the Dying Light (#2)

A cool fall day, sunny, the leaves just starting to change color on the trees in Queens.   I took a long walk toward evening, since I avoid the direct rays of the midday sun, what with my nose’s history of cancer and all.  The end of the long loop took me past a suburban house, on Tudor Road, where usually I see as many as a dozen feral cats lounging, clearly being fed and cared for there.  A couple of small dogs lived behind the fence, and they were pretty calm little dogs, by the looks of it.  The cats always seemed very comfortable there, a tiny one slept in a little hollow in the strip of grass by the sidewalk, others were arrayed on the sloping lawn.  This evening I passed as the light was dying away into a chilly fall evening.  I was struck by the lack of animals.

It was light enough to notice that the car parked in the driveway was encrusted in grime.  It was a small, squarish car and it would have been hard to see through the windows of it from the inside.  I noticed that the passenger side front tire, the only one visible to me as I approached, was flat.  There was no kitten curled in that depressed spot in the grass by the sidewalk, nor any other cats that I could see.  There were several black plastic plates with the remains of some wet cat food smeared in them.  There were several dirty plastic bins on the sidewalk, packed haphazardly, lids askew, their contents seemingly random.  In one, on its side, was an almost colorless orange cat, lying on a red towel.  

I paused to look at the cat.  The cat raised its dirty head listlessly and looked at me with slight suspicion.   It’s cat disdain was clear to see, as was the missing eye on the side of the face that had been resting on the towel.   There were no other cats to be seen.   This one glared at me for a moment, until I moved on, then presumably continued its nap in the dying light of one of the first chilly days of the fall.  

Life for feral cats is short and brutal and the winters are certainly no fun for them.  Few, from the evidence of short lives of the kittens and adult feral cats around Sekhnet’s, survive more than a winter or two.  The world weariness of this cat was striking.  I could have been looking at a veteran of ten consecutive deployments in a hostile and senseless war zone.   I walked on, thinking of how savagely hard so many lives are.  It appeared that the eccentric old protector of these feral cats on Tudor Road had probably moved on, by the looks of it.  Every thing that lives moves on.

 

 

Remembering A Remarkable Soul

The first two lines of a greatly appreciated personal email today, from a man whose mother died a few nights ago:

My Mom and your buddy passed away peacefully in her sleep Wednesday am. She got this, her final wish,  a royal death.

She would have been 98 in a matter of weeks, and it was only recently that I heard her voice tiredness for the first time.  

I knew her for more than 40 years, making her around my age now when I met her, a small coincidence that just occurred to me.   If I could live the rest of my years as well as she did those 40 that remained to her, I would be very blessed.  

The only memory of her that is not pure sunshine is recalling how demanding a mother she sometimes seemed to be.  All mothers cause some vexation to their children, as, sadly, we all do to our mothers.  Though I could see what could be vexing about her as a parent, I was privileged to never experience it personally.  As her oldest son noted, over the years we became buddies.

“I want to be Sophie when I grow up,” Sekhnet said often.  If talking to Sophie she’d say “I want to be you when I grown up!” and Sophie would laugh the easy, distinctive laugh she practiced often.  What Sekhnet meant was Sophie’s joy for life, her sense of adventure, her ready embrace of the good side of whatever else the thing might be.   Her robustness and optimism, the way she drew people to her by these qualities.

She became friendly with my parents in 1999 when they met for the first time.  My parents came up from Florida for my law school graduation in the spring.  The graduation was in Newark, New Jersey.  Sophie emailed my parents, inviting them to stay with her and her husband in their nearby home.  The email was typical of Sophie — charming, well-written, mischievous.

She laid out the many advantages of staying in her home and stressed what a pleasure it was for her and her husband to be able to offer this hospitality, and how small an effort.  “If you say no, we’ll say you’re being stubborn,” she ended, closing the deal.  The two couples became friends at once.

Her husband died, and, not long afterwards, my father was hospitalized suddenly with only days to live.  Sophie was then close to ninety and had stopped driving on the dangerous Florida speedways, but she wanted to say goodbye.  She took local streets, a trip that took several times as long as going by the turnpike, and a journey much longer than any she’d driven in years.  I will always remember her face as she sat by my father’s bed a few hours before he died.  It was like the sun.  She beamed a smile on him as he feebly gestured and made such small talk as he could.  She showered him with love and a huge smile in a room where everyone else was frowning and fretting. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.   She stayed a short time, hugged and kissed us all, and made her way back the way she’d come, while there was plenty of sunlight to navigate by.

A few years later she and my mother booked an apartment in a residential building in the West Village that was rented out as a cut-rate B & B.  Sophie and my mother were going to share a place for a week and then my mother would move to a studio apartment for the second week of her last visit to New York.   I brought them to the apartment and when they opened the door my mother looked around and let out a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said to Sophie, looking around at walls that needed painting, almost no furniture, a mattress on the floor in the living room “what a dump!”.  My mother turned her expressive face to Sophie– the expression was of someone about to throw up.  This cracked Sophie up.

“Oh, Evelyn!” she laughed “it’s an adventure!”  She immediately offered my mother the better of the bedrooms and they had a very nice little adventure together in that perfectly adequate semi-shabby apartment on West 15th Street.

Walking with them during that visit illustrated another contrast between my mother, a glass half-empty gal, and Sophie, for whom the glass was always, at the very least, half-full.  My mother walked with a cane at that point and would walk quickly until she had to stop, breathless and feeling she was about to die.  “I can’t breathe!” she’d say with some degree of panic, “I can’t breathe, I have a sharp pain…” she’d point to her heart and double over slightly as she struggled to catch her breath.   I’d talk soothingly to her as she caught her breath and then she’d be fine, dash off on her next sprint. Sekhnet and I switched walking partners after she and Sophie caught up to us.

Sophie walked slowly and deliberately at 92.  She would take your arm and cause you to walk at her pace.  She would converse, and observe, and laugh, never running short of breath, walking at a slower than average NYC pace. She made the whole process of being old and wanting to see and do everything seem effortless.

One trouble with living long and having old friends is that eventually they all die.  Sophie kept up with the children and grandchildren of old friends and continued to make new friends everywhere she went.  She was an inspiration, my life was enriched by knowing her, watching her remarkable example.  I hope very much that Sekhnet gets her wish and grows up to be her.