Mother is aging, 3

Last weekend I drove down to Big City to visit Mother. (I'm writing this on May 2. I visited her April 25-27.) It's starting to worry me, how much she is aging. (See by comparison this post, or this one, or this one.)

The ostensible purpose of the visit was to go through some of Father's old clothes, to see if I wanted any of his old shirts so that she could clear them out of the closet to make room. Father died almost eleven years ago, but it always took my parents a long time to get around to things. Well, we found something like two dozen shirts which both fit me and more or less matched my taste. (Brother and SIL had been there the day before, and had pulled out only two or three.) So I was able to clear a lot of space out of her closets, and it saved me the trouble of having to buy more shirts. That's not where the problem was.

First story

The first morning I was there, I woke up before she did and wanted to check my email. But my computer couldn't find her network. I looked around and saw that she had a new router. But unlike the old one, it did not have the network's name and password on a sticker. So I waited for her to get up. The after breakfast, I asked her about it.

"It looks like you got a new router."

"Oh yes, I did."

"What's the network ID and password? I want to check my email, and I can't connect."

"Isn't it on the router?"

"No, I checked." (But she went to check anyway, which was fine of course.)

"They never gave it to me."

"That's not possible. They have to have given it to you."

"Well they didn't! You know, Brother and SIL were here when they installed the router. Maybe the man gave it to them."

"What?"

"Oh yes. They handled it completely. They did all the interaction with him. So they must have gotten the password from him."

"But then they would have given it to you."

"Well they didn't! I don't have it, and I never got it."

"That's crazy. You have devices that connect to it. All those devices must have been reprogrammed with the new password."

"You'll have to talk to Brother and SIL."

"OK, but they're not here. I can text them, I guess, but they might be busy."

"Well that's what you have to do."

So I texted Brother. I also poked around on Mother's desktop computer to see if I could find any place the new wifi password had been stored. Mother went to get her handwritten password book, and looked up the name of the service provider. There was no entry, and she showed me that to prove that she had never been given the password. I never heard back from Brother. Finally I paged through the rest of her password booklet. At the very end, under "Wi-Fi," was the new password for her new network. I tried it, and it worked.

So I texted Brother, "Never mind. She found it." But wow. How is it possible that she could have concocted this story that they never gave her the new password? Was it a confabulation? For that matter, is it true that Brother and SIL were the ones interacting with the guy from her Internet service? Or did she make up that part when she needed a way to explain why she "never got" the password?

Outtakes from a Day of Mindfulness

The UU Sangha that I belong to held a Day of Mindfulness today. Days of Mindfulness are a practice in the Plum Village tradition, which is the tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. Basically we got together for about six hours to practice sitting meditation and walking meditation. We also ate lunch together in silence, and we spent some time talking about what we would like to see from our Sangha in the future. Most of the attendees were regular Sangha members, but the event was open to guests as well, and we had two or four.

My point here is not to tell about the Day of Mindfulness per se, nor yet to talk about the aspirations that people expressed for the future. What I want to capture are a couple of the "outtakes"—moments that had nothing to do with anything else, but that I want to remember. And I guess the best way to remember something is to write it down.

The guest who stopped me was a woman
and not a man; but how can I pass up
the chance to use an engraving by
Gustave Doré?

One moment was sweetly serious. I think. A number of us arrived early to help set up. (In fact, because of technical difficulties with the Zoom link, we started late anyway.) Someone asked me to help set out tables in the other room. And as I was on my way, a woman put her hand on my arm to stop me. I don't know if I'll need to give her a name in the future, but maybe I can call her Laura. 

Laura was a guest, not a regular Sangha member, and a friend of Debbie. I didn't recognize her. But she said she recognized me! (Cue "the curse of the Tanatus.") Where had she seen me? She said she thought there was some kind of UU service I had attended many years ago. That's highly unlikely, but I might have been there for a special occasion. I attended Janet's Celebration of Life last year, for example. I volunteered to do dishes one time long ago when the Sangha was responsible for hosting some UU Congregation event. It might have been one of those occasions.

Why did Laura remember me? Or what was it about me that she recognized? That was the sweet part. She said I had a kind face—in fact, a very kind face. (Or "remarkably kind," or something equally extreme.) She said, in fact, that if we were both sitting on a park bench as strangers, my face is kind enough that she would end up spilling all her deep, dark secrets to me. Oh my heavens, really? Part of my mind wondered how many deep, dark secrets an elderly Unitarian lady could really have? But then I remembered that D regularly dressed in a style that was conservative, prim, and matronly. So maybe appearances aren't everything.

Hmm. If appearances aren't everything, then maybe Laura was misled in attributing all that kindness to me on the basis of my face. Oh well. The thought was nice while it lasted. 

The other story is shorter and funnier. During a break, Laura was talking to one of our regular Sangha members, an elderly woman whom I'll call Lynn. (I'm not sure how old Lynn is, but she must be at least a decade older than I am, and I'm in my mid-sixties.) They started talking about cats (because Laura was wearing cute cat socks) and Laura explained that her cat had recently died. She made a joke out of saying that she was still trying to get all the sympathy she could. Lynn started offering sympathy, when Laura went on to clarify that her cat had reached the age of seventeen years old before dying, a very respectable age among cats and one at which death is no surprise.

Right away Lynn shot back, "Seventeen years? I've never had a partner last that long!"

Umm, gosh. Is it just me, or does that count as TMI for other people too?

Oh well. We were all among friends, right?  

      

Dream with Wife

Last night I had a detailed, layered dream, and it took me a while to realize it had been a dream.

It all started at work. I was working at Some Company, as the manager of Some Department, and a young woman came in for a job interview. Wife also worked for the same company, and may have been there to sit in on the interview as well. Anyway, we started normally enough, but after a couple of questions we were interrupted by something else that wasn't a disaster but nonetheless distracted us from the job at hand—very much in the normal way of dreams. But the interruption still involved all the same people. So in the process of the disturbance, I got to see the young woman in action: what kind of a person she was, how she reacted to others, and so on. After this had gone on for a few minutes, I pulled Wife aside and told her that I wanted to hire the young woman. Wife agreed.

Not long thereafter, I woke up from that dream to find myself lying in bed next to Wife. Of course she had been in the dream that just ended, so I began discussing it with her as if that were the most natural thing to do. First, I confirmed that it had been a dream, and that she had been there with me. "Yes." "And we both worked at the same place?" "Yes." Then I asked her, "At that job, did you work for me or did I work for you?" She thought about it for a while as if really trying to remember, before finally saying that she thought I worked for her. (And while I hadn't been able to remember myself, that sounded right to me once she said it.) We talked some more, and agreed that the girl in the dream would have made a fine employee. So I said that if I went back into that dream again, I'd hire her.

Then, reflecting on it all, I said that it seemed like it had been not "just a dream" but some kind of alternate reality or parallel possibility—nothing we could ever reach from here, but somewhere we might have been able to get to if we backed up thirty or forty years, if we had made different decisions and if chance events had gone other than they did. I specifically pointed to two things that would have had to be different: one was her health, which precluded any corporate management role for her; and the other was our respective career arcs, since even when Wife was working (before her health got too bad) there was no way we would ever have ended up at the same company. As I was saying these things, I thought to myself that there was a third factor which would have had to be different, but which I wasn't going to mention aloud: viz., her mental illness, which I took in a broad enough sense that I included with it all the dysfunctional and alienating parts of her personality. Again, I didn't mention that one aloud. But Wife agreed with the two factors that I had spoken of.

A little while after that discussion, I slowly awoke into reality, or perhaps I had better call it this reality here and now. I realized that there was no one else in bed with me, talking. I was lying in my single bed, in my bachelor apartment, all alone. And yet in a way I had the same sense I had had before, in the second (or "outer") dream, with respect to the first (or "inner") dream. In other words, it did feel like there was something true about the possibility. It could never transpire in this reality, not here and not now. It would have required significantly different branching many years ago. But it felt—and still feels, I guess—like the scene where I could lie quietly, rationally discussing with Wife some dream we had both shared and then woken from could have been a possibility along some alternate timeline; and indeed that the scene where Wife and I worked at the same company and I was hiring the young woman in the first dream could have been another. When I woke into this timeline, I did feel awfully alone.

Just as a memo, here's what I did when I woke. It was still dark. I don't know what time it was. First I went into the bathroom to pee. Then I got some paper and a pen—and my glasses, which I now need for anything close up. I avoided looking at a clock, or turning on any artificial light; but I lit a candle, and wrote down as much of the dream as I could remember by candlelight. After that, I blew out the candle and lay back down. In time, I fell back asleep.    

           

How'm I doing?

Every blog goes through cycles. 

There are periods when you find yourself bursting with thoughts. Everything reminds you of something else, and you have to talk about all of it.

And then there are times when you just have nothing to say.

So maybe it's time for me to quote Ed Koch and ask, "How'm I doing?" Not because I need to hear an answer from you—if anybody is out there reading this—but just to put a marker in the ground to let you know how ... in fact ... I am doing. 

Let me look at the blog for a minute. In the last three months—January, February, and March—I have posted five times. The last two times that I show five posts (or fewer) in three months were both in 2018:

• August, 1. September, 3. October, 0
• January, 0. February, 1. March, 4. 

So it has happened before, and I've pulled out of it. Doubtless I'll pull out again, however implausible that might look in the moment.

How AM I doing?

I've been trying to exercise at the beginning of every day. What with other things showing up in my calendar, "every day" seems to mean four or five times a week. After I exercise, I'm wiped out for hours. I take a nap. I sit idly in front of the computer. I can scarcely formulate thoughts. But hey, I exercised.

I'm trying to eat less. Maybe if I exercise and also eat less, I'll lose some weight. It has worked in years past—I know, because I have records. But not now, or at any rate not yet. Maybe I haven't hit the right combination yet. Or maybe there are calories in alcohol, and I should ... you know ... cut down on those calories as well. I do that successfully for a couple days at a time, or even longer. But if I take credit for too much success, then tonight will be an epic failure. 

I'm trying to get more sleep. Not tonight, of course, because I've already spent way too long trying to figure out a trivial formatting issue on this blog. But ... you know ... on other nights.

I have kept up publishing in my professional blog on a weekly basis. Readership goes up and down. One frivolous post a few weeks ago got over 500 pageviews. A piece that I thought might be more useful last week got 30. I have no idea what makes the difference.

I have made zero progress on the book I told you I was writing ... what was that? Five years ago? Six? A long time, in any event.

You know I follow the blog and writings of John Michael Greer. Months ago, some people talked about putting on a convention of Greer's readers this summer, and started a website where individuals could express interest. I expressed interest a month ago and have been trying to contact the principals ever since. Nothing, of course.

I talk to Marie once a week, over Teams. I talk to Debbie once a week, over Zoom. I visit the UU Sangha once a week, in person. That's most of my social interaction right there.

I had lunch today with a guy I used to work with. He was recently laid off when his company closed this office, and he's retirement age. So being out of work doesn't seem to worry him a lot. But he still has his resume out, he is in touch with a bunch of people we both used to work with, and he is trying to line up musical gigs for his band (where he plays bass). He's also actively involved as a trainer for a local organization that helps families who have to deal with mental illness, because his 20-year-old daughter is suffering. Wow, I never knew there WAS such an organization back when I still lived with Wife! It's great to know that my friend is so involved with the community, and with other people. It's great to know that he isn't stuck at home, isolated and socially withdrawn.

I wonder what that must be like?

I try to do a Tarot reading every morning to predict what's going to happen in the day. The idea is that by making predictions and then comparing them with reality, maybe I can get better at it. Well ... sometimes they match and sometimes they don't. I don't know if I'm getting any better. Usually I can predict my day pretty well, but that's because I never do anything unexpected.

The closest thing I have to a daily record of what's going on with me is what I write the next morning when I'm trying to evaluate the cards from the day before. Even then I sometimes miss a few days because I never get around to the reading. I'm pretty sure there are no gems buried in that data that you'd have any interest in hearing about.

What else is there to say? Not a lot, I think. I've just summarized the last several months for you, and it took you only a couple of minutes to read. Efficient, isn't it?

Maybe later I'll think of something else to say.

            

Eighteenth date? "I never heard you say ...."

Editorial note: I am writing this post the night of March 14, 2026. But it belongs somewhere in April or May 2011. I know that because it tells the story of a traffic ticket I got while cavorting with D in Faraway City, and I wrote a check to pay that ticket on May 14, 2011. So the event itself must have happened before that date, but not too long before. Looking at the times I was with D in Faraway City, I deduce that our Eighteenth Date is the most likely choice for when it must have happened. I have not yet decided whether to post this note itself in 2011 when it happened, or fifteen years later in 2026 when I am writing it.

Once upon a time—circumstantial evidence puts it at our Eighteenth Date—D and I met in Faraway City, to talk and drink and fuck like we usually did. Saturday morning we drove downtown because they were having some kind of fair. Also we wanted breakfast. But parking was hard to come by, because plenty of other people were going to the fair as well. Finally, as we diverted up a residential side street, D suddenly pointed and said "There!"

It didn't look to me like much of a spot. It was right next to someone's driveway, and I was afraid that if I parked there I wouldn't leave enough room by the driveway to be safe. I told D I thought I'd be too close, but she insisted: "It will be fine!" Mentally I weighed the risk, and figured we weren't going to be all that long. So I parked there, and we walked back to the restaurant district to find breakfast.

We came back a couple of hours later, and—sure enough!—I had a ticket. Fortunately it didn't cost too much. I had my checkbook with me, so I wrote out the check then and there and sealed it into the envelope, rather than risking that Wife might discover it when I took it home. (But I don't remember if I could find a stamp on short notice, or if I mailed it from home.)

Then, as D and I drove to the airport, she remarked—her voice beaming with gratitude—"Do you know something? That whole time you were dealing with the ticket, I never once heard you say, 'I told you so.' I'm so grateful for that!"

I don't remember if I said anything in reply. Probably I just mumbled and changed the subject. But in later years, this event was part of what made me understand that D herself was every bit as narcissistic as she accused Wife of being; it mattered intensely to D what people thought of her, so the accusation "I told you so" would have been far more lethal to her than it would have been to most other people. (I assume most people would regard it merely as a childish annoyance.)

The other thing I understood years after it was too late was what I should have said in reply. My thought is that, after all, D was using that event to weigh my soul, just as Marie weighed my soul after I lost my wallet to some pickpockets in Athens. But that weighing could, properly, have gone in both directions. What I should have said to D, if only I had had my wits about me, was this:

"You are right. I never said 'I told you so.' Do you know what else I noticed? I noticed that there were words you never spoke, either. The whole time I was dealing with that ticket, you never once said, "Oh Hosea, it was my idea that you should park there. Let me pay the fine!"

L'esprit de l'escalier. 

            

You know not what you say

People really don't think about what they say, do they?

(Wow, this is going to take a lot of background before I can even begin to explain what someone said tonight that hit me so wrong. I guess I better get started.)

The Setting 

You know that I attend a Buddhist Sangha once a week, practicing in the Plum Village Tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh (or "Thầy" for short) and affiliated with a local Unitarian Church. (I have regularly called it "the UU Sangha" and I wrote about it recently here.) Typically we practice sitting meditation, a little walking meditation, and then we read a text or watch a video and discuss it for dharma study. 

For the past several months, we have been reading Thay's book Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966. It's a good book in a number of ways, among them that it shows what Thay was like when he was a young monk, before he had acquired the aura of the World-Famous Great Teacher that surrounded him for much of his life. Tonight's reading finished the next-to-last chapter, and included the following story by Thay.

Last year I went to the British Museum. I was fascinated by the preserved remains of a human body buried five thousand years ago.... Every detail of the man's body had been preserved. I could see strands of hair, his ankles, each intact finger and toe. He had been buried in that position five thousand years ago in the desert. The heat of the sands had dried and preserved his body.... A little girl, about eight years old, stood beside me and asked in a worried voice, "Will that happen to me?"

I trembled and looked at this tender flower of humanity, this vulnerable child without any means to defend herself, and I said, "No, this will never happen to you." Having comforted her, I walked with her into a different room. I lied about something that Chandaka, the Buddha's charioteer, never lied about to Siddhartha.* [If you don't know the story of Siddhartha and his charioteer, you can find it here.] 

The Remark

After we finished our reading, we discussed it. One of our newer members—he joined just a few months ago—is a retired UU minister. I guess for now I'll call him The Reverend. He had already delivered himself of a short speech when we were all checking in, about the bombing of Iran on March 1. He explained that he opposed bombing other countries and that he considered his role now to be one of public opposition and activism.** When we came to discuss the reading, the Reverend immediately referred back to the story of Thay comforting the little girl in the British Museum. Then he said, "I want to take this as the text that I live by, from here going forward." He talked about how Thay spent so much time around small children: helping them, supporting them, comforting them, and encouraging them to see the beauty and the love in the world. And he concluded by quoting the very end of this chapter (a few pages later), where Thay writes:

I want to tell Steve not to worry about a thing. Tomorrow when peace returns to Vietnam, he will be able to visit Phuong Boi. Phuong Boi taught us what this love is, and Phuong Boi will share it with Steve in the language of wildflowers and grasses.... Flowers don't know how to hate. We will return to the circle of life as flowers, grasses, birds, or clouds to bring people the message of eternal love. Like the village children who, even in this time of war, sing:

"We will love others forever and ever, hand holding hand. We will love others forever."***

As the discussion progressed, many people said they found the Reverend's words inspiring. 

Tired

Oh look, it's Friday the thirteenth! Also I see that it is just exactly one month since my last post. Hmm.

I've had a note on my desk to write this for ... gosh, it feels like at least a week. And I was meaning to write it for maybe a week before that. But I just couldn't muster the energy to bother. Something ironic in that.

First the good news: my cough is almost gone. Yes, I said a month ago that it was "getting better," but there was a long, long tail on that curve. I still had plenty of times that it would incapacitate me for minutes ... just not so many of them as before. And slowly, bit by bit, the attacks got fewer. I started attending Sangha in person again, instead of by Zoom, because I didn't need to screen out quite so many coughing fits. And by today (knock wood!)—really, for a few days now—it seems to be almost gone. Once or twice late at night, maybe, but not otherwise.

Other than that, I have been wiped out most of the month.I have kept current on my writing deadlines. (That's one blog post about professional topics under my real name per week, and one short little blurb per week also under my real name.) I have gone out to get groceries when I need them. I have met other obligations when they have come up. But not much else.

All I want to do is sleep. Coffee will postpone the sleep, but it doesn't give me any boost, or the feeling of actual energy in my limbs that makes me want to go do stuff. Only spirits give me that boost (echoes of this post, thirteen years ago!) but of course I can't spend the whole day drinking. So I get up in the morning, browse the Internet, have breakfast, take a nap, browse the Internet some more, maybe answer a couple of emails, have dinner with wine, browse the Internet with a nightcap or three, and go to bed. And my body feels sluggish except when I am asleep, like I have to drag it through the motions. No wonder I'd rather be asleep! That's the only time that I'm not fighting my body just to move it through space.

Is this what "wanting to die" feels like? I don't perceive myself to be especially sad, but just getting through the day seems to take more effort than I feel like expending. 

Is this depression? (I wrote about that here. My plan of taking some of my old SSRI's didn't last very long, though.)  

Here's another ironic bit: I wrote all the above in the present tense, but it doesn't actually reflect how I feel this morning. For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to get a little more exercise, and maybe to eat a little less often. The last couple of nights, it's turned out that I've had little or nothing to drink. I've started going to bed earlier, with the result that I sometimes sleep 9 or 10 hours at a stretch during the night. And by the most remarkable coincidence, I've started napping less, and I've felt incrementally more energy. Wow, who would ever have thought there could be a connection? (Yes, that's sarcasm.) On the other hand, I do take notice that I couldn't even muster the energy to write about this state while in the middle of it. I hope I can maintain a little momentum in the current direction.