THE DISAPPEARING COFFEE KLATCH BLUES

03. February 2017 · 2 comments · Categories: A Personal Journal · Tags: , , ,

An old friend sent me a link to a Roger Angell piece about growing old (he’s 93) from the New Yorker. I read it slowly and with a Kleenex box at the ready. In a moment of grandiosity my friend suggested that I might have written that, or something like it. There’s no way I could have done that, even though I could say “Amen!” after every line.

The most stabbing part of the essay was when he spoke of outliving so many people. This is a condition that sort of creeps up on you. You discover it when in some midnight hour you decide to find “old Joe” with whom you palled around with in high school and find that he died in Korea or succumbed to the big “C” a few years ago. If only you had known …

Angell lives in an apartment in Manhattan and talks of a large support community leaving cooked chickens at his door and here I am living in the lap of paradise – knowing dozens of people while hardly ever seeing anyone. I cook my own chickens, thank you very much!

It’s mostly my fault – not seeing people as much as I think I should be seeing people. I am not the conversational dynamo I once was. Being essentially deaf sort of puts a damper on conversation and rips the heart out of the desire to be around people in the first place.

I always wonder if anything I say is relevant to the on-going conversation. There have been times when I enter into a conversation only to be greeted by a stunned silence. Not because I have uttered some profound titbit of eternal wisdom but rather the unspoken response is more like, “What the fuck are you talking about!”?

I have a new bionic ear now that promises to deal with this condition and in fact it is working quite well. I feel very fortunate to have this technology available to me. I am more likely now to be able to keep up with conversations. It’s a work in progress – a process with which I am quite familiar.

One of my fantasies is being a part of a group of older guys who have breakfast somewhere every month or so to just be there and talk about stuff we all remember. I have an old friend out west who meets six or seven retired army and air force guys at McDonalds for 50¢ senior coffee. I’d pay more for better coffee, myself. I’d pay a lot more for better ambience. There was a time 50 years ago when I was in the clutches of purpose and calling that there was a small group of ministers who managed to have warm and supportive relationships with each other. We golfed, lunched and hung out. Of course, when I bailed out of the crusade, that was that.

There is today in Baton Rouge a group of my old high school buddies – all retired engineers – who meet monthly. I am in touch with one of the group who tells me that now and then I am mentioned. It’s a strange feeling, but I like it.

I’ve stopped trying to find old friends from long ago. It’s a dead issue – no pun intended. I have lots of live friends, albeit mostly the age of my children. Even so, we don’t see each other enough. What’s enough? It’s what it is.

The take-a-way from all this is this: Be in your life. Don’t think about it – live it.

Now if I can just remember to do that.

TWO OLD GUYS SITTING ON A BENCH

18. December 2016 · Write a comment · Categories: A Personal Journal · Tags: , ,

The following is a quote from a note from an old friend. It’s in response to a statement I made about how it seems that it gets harder and harder to keep up with the work of friendships the older you get.

"I … sometimes feel a gradual growing distance in friendships. My perception is that for 95% of my life this didn’t occur. However perceptions, mine and others, are unexplainable, more mysterious than women.” (I didn’t know anything could be more mysterious than women, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day)

I’ve thought about this a lot and have concluded that there are some real reasons for this “gradual growing distance” that seems to infect those of us who are more or less fortunate enough to live a long time.

To begin with, older people have more going on in their lives that they have to deal with every day.  The inventory of things you can no longer do or do well.  Failing eyesight, hearing, lung power and bowel action, balance, dwindling strength, diminished libido, the expanding list of actual diseases.  These things begin to occupy more and more of one’s thoughts.  At least that’s how it is here.

There is a more subtile element going on here as well.  We men often act as though we think we’re all alone in this struggle to survive in the aging process.  This is its own disease.  A couple of old guys can spend hours together every day and not know what’s going on with each other.  Women can’t do this.  They talk – share – confide – laugh and cry.  It’s personal.   Men have to have some un-personal activity or subject matter to talk about.  Poker, football, golf, fishing.  Nothing wrong with any of that but guys can hang out for days around one or more of these activities and never know one of them is sick or sad or afraid.  This would never happen with women.

I don’t know just where I’m going here except that it seems easier for men to adjust to isolation.  And that’s a self defeating talent.  A kind of default self-maintaining virus infected algorithm.

When I was growing up, there were many overseeing adults in my life. The entire neighborhood was my mother. In order to maintain my sanity – or more to the point, the sense of who I was – I found myself hiding out in my garage attic or my tree top lair or off somewhere on my bicycle. I was expert at escaping.

The outcome of this early “training” was the often repeated desire to become a hermit. To go off and live in a cabin in the woods. Beyond authority. And as I now know, beyond companionship, wi-fi, a good liquor store and probably beyond medical care. I suppose what it boils down to is – beyond reality.

Isolation from time to time is necessary to reset one’s clock to standard time. It increases the value of community and companionship.

So there are two old guys sitting on a bench. Sharing their fears, pains, hopes and even dreams. Laughing, crying and yelling at each other – from time to time reaching out and touching one another … to be reminded of their humanness… .