Gratefulness gently triumphs over sorrow

Gratefulness, that I got to see my old friend before she went, grateful that something pressed me to make sure I kept our long overdue appointment days before she kept her last one. Grateful for a lovely, lesiurely meeting, it turned from 11:04 pm to 1:00 a.m. in the wink of an eye and I was bundling into my filthy parka and she was remarking that I looked like an explorer.   Grateful that she seems to have gone peacefully in her chair.

Grateful to have known her, and loved her, and to have been loved by her for so many  decades.   Grateful for the light she shed, and the love of her mysterious calling that she wore so lightly, and by her great example, taught me to wear lightly.  

Grateful that she laughed and agreed when I asked her if she’d mind if I began to hold myself out as her protégé.  She treated it as an absurd request I was playing for laughs.  I was, she had a great laugh, but I was also dead serious.  The woman was a major role model.

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When You Have Little Time

When you have little time, are up against the loudly ticking clock, counting down– that’s the moment to slow down a little.  Breathe for a moment, gather what’s left of yourself.   Do not be distracted by the chaos that may be swirling around you, there is not time for distraction. Apply yourself to the task in what time remains, give yourself your best shot at doing the thing well.      

Death is the score keeper, waiting grim and confident at the end of every life.  Do not worry about Death, which comes when it wants to.   Life is the matter at hand, and living it as well as you can.   The timer is always counting down, but it doesn’t stop us, most of the time.   “I will always be here for you,” the loving parent reassures the child, as children must sometimes be reassured.   Not true?   A matter of opinion.

“Why such morbid thoughts, my friend?”  asks nobody in particular.  

“I lost a dear friend yesterday, and I was philosophical when her daughter called to tell me, and grateful that I’d seen her less than a week ago.  I hadn’t seen her for a while, and she was almost 93, and I was planning to see her regularly going forward.  That plan has changed, I will not see her again.   I was philosophical yesterday, grateful I’d seen her, grateful that her death seems to have been painless, after a long, wonderful life, but now the pain of that finality is breaking through.”  

As, it seems, the pain of finality always does, in the end.

Words are Tipsy Messengers Sometimes

Bandy legged, unable to pull themselves together, slightly mad, or stupid, or in a stupor, or just lazy. Capable of inspiring great passion, unleashing a flood of tears, a rushing river of life-restoring laughter, sometimes they just kick their skinny legs, eyes glassy, and don’t want to have anything to do with each other.

Like when you learn the good looking young CEO of the small company that hired your animation workshop died suddenly of a cancer she’d kept to herself.   Or the old friend you visited the other night, who looked so well and chatted so relaxedly with you long into the night, gone.

After I zipped up my dirty jacket, years worn but trusty against the cold, she said “you look like an explorer.”  I said “I am an explorer,” and she smiled.   We loved each other and told each other so.  I marveled that it was such a quick subway ride back from her home, even at 1:30 a.m.  Then she was gone, sitting in her chair by the computer, but no longer there.

Just One Question for the President

There are very rich, cynical people who, because speech has now been equated with money by the Supreme Court, can speak ten or a hundred million times more articulately than the average struggling mutt.    It is now common knowledge that the extremely privileged have unfettered access to lawmakers, who, dependent on their wealthy benefactors’ generous campaign support, will move mountains to privilege the advantages of the already privileged at the expense of everyone else.  

There are two brothers, the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke”) who are only recently becoming well-known for their tireless, well-funded and influential speech against sustainable environmental policy, universal health care, collective bargaining, a living wage and many other things an unbiased person might consider basic rights of citizenship in a wealthy democracy.   The Koch brothers combined “worth” of about 100 billion dollars, puts them close to the richest twosome in the world today.  As anyone who has been following the news recently knows, it will never be enough to be among the richest people in the world today without making every effort to become richer still.

 

The Koch brothers stand to double their money when Obama quietly signs off on the other half of the Keystone pipeline (he’s already opened the southern half).  This pipeline will pump oil sludge, tar sand, the dirtiest form of nonrenewable fossil fuel, from Koch-owned lands in Canada to refineries and shipping points in the American south.   It will enable the profitable extraction of a very dirty and unsustainable fuel source that climate scientists (but, in fairness to science-deniers, only about 99% of them) say will put immense amounts of additional carbon into the biosphere.   It will accelerate climate change at a time when we need to slow it down, for the survival of life on the planet.  The extraction leaves behind a ravaged strip mined landscape and the toxic consequences are frighteningly far reaching; on the other hand, the Koch Brothers stand to make as much as $100,000,000,000 when the president quietly signs off.

 

My question is a purely rhetorical one that I will never have access to actually ask:  do you work directly for the Koch Brothers, my man?

 

I mean no disrespect to our president.    I love a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a sense of humor.  I’m just frustrated because he speaks so well and people want so badly to believe pronouncements that let them cling to the ghost of idealism rather than accept the evidence of even more eloquent and entirely consistent actions.  It’s depressing to judge this good man on the damning evidence of what he actually does, rather than on the strength of the uplifting things he has the talent to say.

 

And so it is with Obamacare, written by a lobbyist for the health insurance industry who has since gone back to work for that industry.   There are corrupt scumbags on both sides of the aisle, and in the aisle, and sliding slimily through the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, everything oiled by the money, er… speech, of the legally created persons known as Corporations, entities whose only consideration, like the Koch Brothers, is maximizing profits.  If the corporation was actually a person it would be a psychopath.  And so it goes.

 

I received no invoice this month from Obamacare — which does not allow me to keep any of the doctors I’ve seen for years–  so I called on February 20th to find out how to pay.  Can’t do it on-line or by phone, it emerges, so the nice woman at the insurance company emailed me an electronic copy of their invoice, prepared 2/14 and not received by most consumers yet, with this maddening sub-punchline:

 

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Our records show that you have not paid your premium for this month.   This premium is now overdue.  This bill includes your overdue premium in addition to the premium you owe for next month.  If we do not receive both of these premium payments by the due date set out on this bill, your coverage will be suspended.  Any charges for services (claims) will not be paid.

 

 So the consumer, not billed until the last week in February, deemed late and threatened with cancellation unless the “overdue” (payable by 2/28 at 5 pm. after all) premium and the preemptive March premium payments (payable by 3/31 at 5pm) are both mailed and received by the due date.

Punchline: there is no New York State agency, known to the operators and supervisors of the New York State of Health Marketplace, that monitors or oversees the business practices of the corporations that do business in that so-called marketplace.  

 

Nor is the hundred million dollar website easily navigable, or even updated, there is no on-line support to be accessed, nor any way to email anything to anyone at the Marketplace.   You can theoretically initiate a web chat, but that feature is not currently working.  The FAQ section, last updated in December 2013,  has nothing about complaints, grievances, appeals or getting help, outside of calling their overwhelmed help line.  

 

On the plus side, waiting times to speak to operators have gone down impressively, from over an hour to about ten minutes.  The operators are helpful, and overwhelmed and their hands are tied.  The consumers, well, can you spell SCAMMED, good citizens?  LOL!   Have a very nice day!

Sentimentality and Friendship

Sentimentality often gets a bad rap, and thinking about it for a moment it’s not hard to see why.  The word is used disparagingly, indicating a mawkish attachment to things like the fallen out of use “mawkish”.  Sentimentality is usually thought of as wistful nostalgia for things that are no more and can usually never be again.  The sound of a ringing telephone in an old black and white movie, a sound a majority of people alive now have never heard, may raise a sentimental feeling in those of us old enough to remember this familiar old tone.   It used to mean someone (we were never sure who) was calling.  Now, it means little, except as a sentimental trigger to a smaller and smaller group of people.  

And to those who are too young to feel sentimental about the former sound of phone calls, any number of puzzles present themselves, in the odd event they notice and recognize the expressions on old people’s faces when the old tone is sounded.  Why would anyone want to go back to an era before we could know who was calling before deciding whether to pick up the phone?  To an era where we couldn’t choose the way our phone calls would announce themselves, customize the ringtones (which seldom involve a ring) to indicate certain callers.   Why would anyone be sentimental about an antiquated, boring and completely outmoded ringtone?

In extreme cases, which are not at all uncommon, sentimental attachment to things, places or people can be crippling.   Life is change, and change is often very scary, always carrying a whiff, for those with the nose for it, of the final change from life to not life.  Clinging to the familiar is easier by far than embracing the unknowable, and this clinging can take many forms.   The smart women, and men, who make the foolish choice to remain with a complete and enduring asshole who sometimes displays an endearing or redeeming trait.  I’m surprised to see how much of my own inability to move my life most productively forward is hampered by fear of change, of the sometimes irrational desire to preserve things (or at least a paralyzing reluctance to tackle winnowing), such as the perhaps 10,000 drawings that are woven into the shifting wall-to-wall mat of mostly papers covering virtually every surface in my neglected apartment.

I’m thinking of sentimentality at the moment in connection to friendship.   Some friendships are saved out of almost purely sentimental motives.  Not to say that such friendships may not also have valuable aspects, it just causes me to wonder about them.   In moments of solitary self-pity (as opposed to convivial group celebrations of self-pity) things that are basically good are viewed in a purely negative light.   What are we to make of old friends who insist we behave as we always behaved, whatever hard-won changes we may have made in the intervening years or decades?   What about friends who insist on their right to insist on their rights, no matter what the consequences of such insistence are?  Or friends who always serve themselves first, taking a slightly larger portion and making semi-humorous observations about their unflatteringly doglike behavior instead of being more mindful, less selfish?

I wonder, thinking back, about old friends I’m no longer in touch with, people it seemed I might become friends with and never did, new friends I was intrigued by, before they disappeared.  Deep friendship is rare, true enough.  Social friendships are valuable too, for one thing they take us out of our own thoughts for a while and place us in another space where brooding is not much of an option.

And I think sentimentally about a time when I did not see everyone I know or can imagine as some kind of slave, many of them in an almost constant low-grade fury.   This fury may be anger, self-hatred, terror, envy, unslakable thirst for vengeance, denial, an all-consuming sense of inferiority and competition, or what have you.  We humans swim in a sea of it, particularly in our competitive materialistic culture where the war of each against all constantly rages, or however Thomas Hobbes put it.  

Hard sometimes not to be sentimental about my formerly more humane view of the world, when this bracing fact of distracted, fleeting, compulsive life was not so much in evidence.  Look at our nonchalance toward things like torture, mass poverty, mass infant and child death, famine, genocide, out of control greed and destruction for the obscene profit of a very few, our powerlessness and the ways we console ourselves that we are still good people.  

Try not to be sentimental about a time when you may have seen this miraculous world more innocently, and mainly as a world of unlimited potential for miracles.  It is still that, however hard it may sometimes be to see it that way.

Somewhat Ironic Careers

We’ll leave my law license out of this one, I found a scrap of paper just now that had these words on it:

Human Relations Unit Sensitivity trainings led by my sensitive, brilliant father — always on guard against attack.

There were riots between ethnic groups in the NYC public high schools in the 1960s.  Jets and Sharks, they’d square off and rumble, with violent consequences.  A bloody nose or knife wound seems quaint by today’s standards, but my father’s mod squad would be called in and they’d find the leaders of these gangs and take them off to a weekend retreat.  Role playing, a chance to hear each other, guided trainings done by a multi-racial, multi-ethnic team of idealistic former teachers.

“We were pretty successful at stopping the violence at one high school after another with the kids we worked with.  The school would be peaceful for a year or two, until the kids we’d worked with graduated and their little brothers and sisters started killing each other,” my father told us, about the time he left that job for another equally stressful one.

Then, at dinner, the master of human relations and sensitivity training would go to work, reflexively doing what he could not help doing better than almost anyone else in the world. The insensitivity sessions the poor devil ran over dinner were legendary and unforgettable.

Last Thought to My Son

I am sure you noted this, but after  I was done writing that piece yesterday I realized it myself.   

I believed that people can’t change.  I also couldn’t give my children most of what kids need as they grow up.  It was just a handicap I had, something I had no control over.  When I was dying, seeing you so mild, I pretended to believe in change for your sake, to belatedly give you some little piece of what you might need.  I pretended.

It just hit me, being able to pretend for someone else’s sake … a big change.