My aunt Dolores used to wait near the ice-cream truck on summer days. As the flurry of children dispersed back to play, ice cream in hand, she would scan the periphery. Some children had held back, watching, tempted to the spectacle but without money to spend. She’d wave them in towards the window of the truck and have them point to the picture of what they wanted on the outside of the truck. And then she’d buy each of them an ice-cream. Brilliant. It was a poor neighborhood, we were all poor, and my aunt wasn’t any different. But she invested in humanity this way.

I wish I could track the effect.  It must have been for some of these children like Dolores was buying stock in them early, when the vision of their company was a child and needed someone to believe in its worth.    

This neighborhood was split by the railroad tracks, adjacent to the public housing project where we lived, and was filled with families and children. There were good people here, there were bad people here, and there was a lot of noise. I remember the noise of the train: the soul-rattling blast of the horn, the rumble and blur of tons of dirty metal wheels, and the cyclone rush as we stood as close to it as we dared. Playing ‘chicken’ with a train at full speed drowned out everything. We sometimes put pennies on the railroad track and learned with fascination what can happen to small objects under pressure.

Against this noise, on summer afternoons, the melody of an ice-cream truck would dance into the parking lot like a rainbow ballerina stepping out of a black and white photograph. My aunt Dolores would gather up her change.

This was decades ago. When I think about it now I picture a child, perhaps a little girl in a little dress, lighting up as she realizes that a nice woman was going to buy her ice-cream on a day that her parents couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give her a quarter. And I hope Aunt Dolores remembers, and will always see, that girl’s little finger pointed carefully, and shyly, at the glossy Orange Creamsicle picture on the side of that white, white truck on a bright sunny summer day.

(Democracy Hits An Iceberg)

                Have you heard this thing about frogs?!  The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to, or be aware of, sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

However, it’s not true, because frogs are ‘thermoregulators’; changing environment is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms. Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. Therefore, the frog would move when the water got too warm. (A thermoconforming organism, by contrast, simply adopts the surrounding temperature as its own body temperature, thus avoiding the need for internal thermoregulation.)

                The biology lesson is over, but, let’s not let science be an inconvenient truth.  Let’s suppose the fable were true, and ponder two key questions:  Would the frog even get in the water if it knew that the water would soon come to a boil? And would the frog stay in the water if it learned as it was sitting in the beaker of water that the water was going to come to a boil?   

                In another context, would someone board the Titanic knowing well beforehand that it was scheduled to meet an iceberg?  And, having hit the iceberg, would someone stay onboard as the ship took on water, tilted, and the lights winked out one by one? 

                I used to think I knew the answers to these questions.

In a more contemporary context, would the average person on the street five years ago have said that they would like to someday have as President of the United States a person vulgar in both word and deed? And, having elected such person, and squatting bug-eyed in that ignominious beaker of warming water, would they maintain support for their decision as the water ridiculed and ignored advice from its own senior leaders, embraced our real and potential enemies, criticized and subverted our longtime allies and alliances, all the while standing on 5th Avenue impulsively tweeting ignorance and disregard of science, history, and democracy?

                Democracy has boundaries and needs to be regulated to survive. And here’s my message to a warm frog:  If you voted for him—jump.  And if you still support him—boil.

Definition of Vulgar: 1a : lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste : coarse b : morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate : gross c : ostentatious or excessive in expenditure or display : pretentious 2a : offensive in language : earthy b : lewdly or profanely indecent

Definition of Thermoconforming: 1a : Republican

Hospice Care

“. . . a program designed to provide palliative care and emotional support to the terminally ill in a home or homelike setting so that quality of life is maintained and family members may be active participants in care also : a facility that provides such a program”

            Archaeologists examined a 4,000 year old skeleton of a child in Vietnam and learned that, due to a congenital paralysis condition, he had had little, if any, use of his arms from birth and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so.  Let’s call him Utu.  They concluded that the people around him, who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

            He lived another 10 years or so.  4,000 years ago.  As soon as I read about this, it made its way into my thought rotation and would periodically surface in different genres of interest.  Anthropology:  Is this rare in primitive cultures?  No—research reveals many examples of this kind of care in ancient societies; there are even older cases which show medical conditions just as severe.  Archaeology:  How was the care rendered?  Were artifacts found which suggest how the family group fed him, bathed him, and tended to his bodily functions?  Family:  Who in the family, or family/tribal group, had the compassion in such a brutal environment?  Was it Mom and one or two others?  Or, did the group as a whole feel a collective duty to the unfortunate one? And finally, Language:  as written and spoken language existed in that area of the world then, did the young one talk with the others?  What was said?  

            A friend of mine commented recently that ordinary life is like hospice, as we journey to our last feeble heartbeat.    

            I like this analogy, as it favors a tenet of my general philosophy about life—that everything is on a spectrum.  Through this prism, I can argue that hospice care indeed need not be limited to within a doctor’s declaration that a person is reasonably presumed to have no more than 6 months of life left.  This modern legal/medical insurance/resource-mindful threshold of time unlocks the benefits of hospice attendants, liberal pain management drugs, and the comfort that can come from personal home care from loved ones.  Though it seems practical to not squander an entire family’s resources upon more intensive medical care to extend a person’s life slightly, neither does it seem right to have to be in the position to pit care against resources. 

            And then there are the ‘facilities’.  I was a hospice care volunteer briefly and baked chocolate chip cookies for an 87-year old veteran in a hospice care facility; these cookies were a thing he had joked about previously.  I brought cold milk with it.  He was surprised and delighted, and I talked with him for awhile.  I could see a kind gentleman emerge from behind his clouded eyes, one whose language, intellect, and sense of decorum was of the Cary Grant era.  It was my turn to be delighted.  No doubt, as soon as I left, he was wheeled back in front of the communal TV where I had found him, to stare at the screen in his stained sweater while trying to elevate his swollen feet.  He will be barely visible to the uniformed attendants, his fellow octogenarians, and his memory-deprived wife at the same facility, until everyone needs to be wheeled to dinner or bed.

So, everything is being tried. Home care under limited, final conditions. Facilities.

Advanced medicine and economics shape the various options today but advanced medicine and money were not even players at the table for little Utu- but I’m not sure that this lack was detrimental to his quality of life.

I like to think that he was told stories around the fire at night, that his mom cradled him protectively in the cold, and that he contributed his thoughts, ideas, and perhaps wit to his friends and family. The group might have liked having him as one of their own. Far from being forgotten, he was probably always being thought of, and may even have been considered special in some superstitious way. He must have believed he was getting the best care available-as he was-and that nothing was held back from him due to resource constraints. If the group had food, shelter, clothing, toys—they shared. If a certain plant-derived medicine was thought to help, it was applied.

And he was always at home.

For him to live a full 10 years under such primitive conditions, he must have been incessantly loved. And, he must have felt it every moment of his life.

            Now, that’s hospice care.

“While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.”

     I’ve experienced enough death at this point to be able to color it in a coloring book. 

I’ve always delighted in the way that very young children color things heedless of the conventions of color and I love the way their hands take flight with scribble and run amok within and without the lines. Here are children skating on a pond with green and yellow faces, and there is an elephant, big and black with orange tusks—wearing a hat! The world is a carnival, one can paint it with imagination instead of experience, and within the big Crayola box is a ticket to every ride.

     I’ve had the normal share of real death growing up; once in a very great while a neighbor, an uncle, or grandparent dies and there are the funerals and after-gatherings.  These are colored somberly in dark browns and matte blacks, low voices, and quiet preparations.  Those close to the loss and experiencing deep grief sometimes acted a bit outside of the lines, but their errancy was accepted with deference, and, for sure, with extra visits for coffee and conversation for many days and sometimes weeks afterwards. 

     But, of course, there are also abnormal death experiences.  The autopsy I witnessed in a room with moon-thin light, odd smells, and grotesque vulnerability was the color of a silent scream, and yet we all kept within the lines as medical training expects.  The bodies we found and tracked in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina told tales of slash-red violence and midnight-black suffering and yet we kept quite within the lines, as military training expects. 

     Adults handle it.  We are expected to handle it, and with restraint, and we should and do usually color appropriately and within the lines.  Society and life feel safer, and maybe children grow up better able to handle it in their own futures by this example.     

     But there is one area where all bets are off. 

     The death of a child. 

Anyone can tell you that the death of a child is particularly heart-breaking in all regards and extreme deference is given to those parents who experience it. It is also traumatic to those who must ‘respond’ to it. Among a corps of necessarily stoic first-responders, it is legion that the toughest part of their job deals with the abuse or death of a child and they are understandably greatly affected by it.

    

But I have a sense of this kind of loss.

I lost both of my children to parental alienation, deliberately false allegations, and bias in the family law court systems. As for grief stages: I am usually numb, though whenever I see children of their approximate age, I experience a quickening. I relive moments with my beautiful young children; they leap alive in my mind. Quick movies play, and I experience a hug, a toy, a laugh, and the gentle holding of a little hand. A moment later, it’s gone, and I am again alone. And for the rest of the day, I want to sleep. This has gone on every day for over three years. Life. Death. Life. Death.

I cannot see the lines that I am supposed to be within. And there are no colors for this that I can describe.

                Just after I woke up this morning, I descended my stairs carefully.  I had soft thick socks on, the wooden stairs had a shiny finish, and my fear factor was at a ‘two’.  So, I deliberately planted each step firmly and I did that thing where both feet meet upon the same step before another step is ventured.  This is an old-people thing, of course.  As I later puttered about on the first floor, I dissected the significance of the ‘two’.  It should have been a zero.  Fear seemed like an intruder here—the uninvited kid at the party who is rumored to have a gun. 

I had gotten used to zero. For so long, falling was fun, and was seen through the prism of play versus injury. In the playground, we’d push each other down just to ignite a chase. As teenagers, we’d jump off our 10 foot high porch roof into the grass yard, having to clear a menacing metal fence underneath! We’d build up to that stunt as a rite of passage in the neighborhood. Later, I’d parachute out of airplanes in the military and, despite carrying heavy equipment and even jumping at night, we’d usually land without injury. (Myself excluded—but that’s another story!)

                 I’d had a fall down the aforementioned staircase recently, and ended up in a pile at the bottom of the stairs with my laptop and a few other things strewn about the impact area.  Memory came upon me while I was lying there catching my breath and teared up until she realized I was pretty-much OK.  Nothing broken.  But that scene must have looked like one of those commercials for a ‘life-alert’ device, where the actor who has ‘fallen and can’t get up’ looks to be about 80 years old.  

                There are many manifestations of aging along our lives’ journeys but to be worried about stairs feels like a big category jump; a jump into the last category of aging—that category where people talk wistfully about moving to Arizona or Florida and getting a one-story house with no stairs.  Another big category jump is when discussing surgeries competes with discussing sports teams as general conversation at a gathering.  We all remember that kid in 4th grade who had their tonsils out—so exotic and novel was the idea of surgery and hospitalization back then that we were mesmerized and even jealous of that kid.  All the special treatment they must have been given at home, and were certainly given back at the classroom!  But now I’m afraid to ask how someone is, for fear of opening up the door to the banalities of their various health ‘procedures’. 

                 Well, I guess I’m old.  I’m admitting that.  Whew, that was a big step I just took there.  A-Ha-Ha-Ha. 

I picture it all as a long journey to the top of a hill and then down the backside to the final valley of death. I’m over the top, am somewhere on the backside and, actuarial tables aside, I think my slight fear of stairs can give you an accurate grid coordinate or my location. The exact location of the top of the hill, the peak of one’s life, is different for everyone, highly subjective, and open to interpretation as to whether it’s a physical and/or mental thing. Good arguments can be made for various ages and events up and down the ladder of human experience while life is shiny and strong. We can, however, exclude a timid descent of well-lit ordinary stairs as anywhere near a peak life event.

                So, now that I’m here, what do I have to show for it?

Well, a good lifelong friend and mentor said that perhaps the only thing that survives our deaths, after anybody who remembers us also dies, is our writing. So, since I’ve been writing for many years, I picture the backside of that hill glittered with little pages here and there.

And this piece is now also behind me as I stumble downward through the end-of-life scree.

See it? It’s just over there, at the base of that fallen tree, fluttering gently in the fading light.

The day before my wedding, I went to check the well at the farmhouse where I was staying and where the wedding was to be held the next day.  The farmhouse got all of its water via an electric pump from this well and it was a big and professionally engineered well.  I would check it once in a while in its neat little wooden covered hut, and I always tipped the large wooden disc cover up so I could stare down into the deep cool clear water.  It was late summer, dank and florid with earthy smells.  I could even smell the wet granite stones that lined the well. 

               This time, as I lifted the cover up, I was surprised to see a dead rodent floating on the surface in the center.  I could see that no such creature could get up the granite walls of the well once it had fallen in.  After it died, it had remained floating and apparently slowly decayed on a lake of glass. Various grey and blue hues had spread out widely in concentric circles to cover the entire surface of the water in a sheen of decomposition.  In the middle of the target was a hapless little bag of fur, tufted carelessly, laying quietly atop the water like a tiny dropped jacket.  I couldn’t see whether the fur had yet released the marionette of mouse skeleton to pirouette eerily through the cool water to the stone-cold bottom.

               I pulled what I could out of the water with a big screen dipper used for taking the occasional leaves off the surface. 

               Back at the farmhouse, I thought about it.  Hmmm.  Big wedding tomorrow with people coming from all over.  Guests were staying with us.  Water for cooking, food prep.  Water for showers/bathing and drinking.  Almost immediately I thought about calculating how much bleach I could add to the water to ‘purify’ it.  I knew about this stuff from being an Army Officer and there were calculations one could work to make water potable for ‘field’ situations; bleach, in proper ratio, was the simple little miracle ingredient.  I typically had that type of Army manual around, found it, and decided to do it.  I was a trained and smart little Army Officer and really had no second thoughts other than an abstract interest in the implications of a bad outcome.  Ha.  But I was pretty sure about myself back then and didn’t even devote much time to worrying.  The night before a large home farmhouse wedding and reception with all the fixin’s tends to be a little busy.   

               I measured the volume of the water in the well, calculated, added the bleach in carefully counted ounces, and stirred.  The next day we had the wedding, everything went great, and nobody ever got sick.  I would occasionally tell the dead-mouse-in-the-well story to various of those wedding guests years later and of course everyone was (safely!) aghast.

               Later, I would sometimes wonder about a couple of things here.  How could I have decided so cavalierly upon my ‘water treatment’ scheme versus simply buying lots of bottled gallon water from a supermarket for the day?  Cost wasn’t a concern compared to what we’d already spent on the wedding―I just didn’t think of it.  And, with a sad furtive shudder, I’d also wonder about the last hours of that mouse: the swimming, the dark and cold, the exhaustion, and whether maybe, near the end, the mouse had had a stricken sentient realization.   

               So.  Time went on.   Jobs.  Cars.  Houses.  Kids. Years.

               And then I got divorced. The divorce, and subsequent legal proceedings, have been a struggle. My beautiful children were pulled away from me through a family court legal system that cannot, or will not, recognize bad-faith and malice. I haven’t seen my little children, Autumn and Lincoln, in years. And I’m swimming. And it’s dark and cold down here. I cannot rest.  I’m alone. And I’m very, very tired.

Recently, Memory got an Amazon package in the mail, and, walking through the house with it, casually mentioned that she’d forgotten what she’d ordered. We both laughed sardonically, sensing the implications. Oh. My. God. It’s come to this.

It made me wonder if America was on the verge of a collapse like ancient Rome. But, I think the excesses of ancient Rome lacked the nuance of modern indulgence; Romans certainly had technicolor excesses but bread and circuses were simple brick and mortar events. Today’s quest for fulfillment plays out in a long Kafkaesque play where something is always almost going to happen. (Franz Kafka was a writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the modern individual.)

The best part of doing cocaine is going to get it. (We’re not talking about Memory anymore, I have, ahem, a friend, who has some experience with this.) Amazon allows us to always be on our way to the coke dealer and that journey –knowing that something is ordered, and in the mail– is the fix. This personal fulfillment process –running concurrent with all the steps companies must take from the moment they receive an order until the items land in customers’ hands– gives an extended buzz of anticipation and it’s almost a shame that Amazon is making two-day delivery a standard because, when the product arrives, something dies. What remains is good, and maybe even useful, but not so important that you’d always remember its name at a party.

                I tend an extensive vegetable garden and I can tell you that the harvest is a different animal than watching the vegetables thrive and grow. If I could inject only one of the two into my veins, it would be watching the plants burgeon and stretch out green and lush in the warm brown dirt, soaking up water while reaching hungrily for the sun –and it would not be plopping the basket of picked vegetables on my kitchen counter at the end of the summer.

Maybe getting a package in the mail wasn’t always like this. I traced Amazon’s lineage on one of those ancestry websites back to Sears Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward. These catalogs revolutionized mail-order, and credit, and shopping as if in the big city. This was now done from the distant farm kitchen table miles from nowhere in the great wild West. Shopping equality came to minorities, and the poor, in a boon that hasn’t subsided. And I’ll bet that when they ordered a plow, or new shoes, or a rifle, or a wooden toy, or a gingham dress, –I’ll bet that when that box arrived on the weathered front farm porch –they always knew what was in the box.

How I feel about fake things has been changing. Initially I began to notice that artificial flowers and costume jewelry began to appeal to me genuinely sometimes, and an historic disdain for these fake things was dissipating. Such disdain in me hasn’t been anomalous- it is the usual mental subordination of something fake for something real, especially when it comes to beauty or valuables. For example, picture a wedding ceremony bestrewn with all fake flowers or an engagement ring presented that is knowingly fake.

Flowers. I was in the office of the new Governor of the Emam Sahib District in Afghanistan in 2008 and we were having a substantive conversation about how the Americans were going to help him. He was a very intelligent man, college-educated in the United States, and he also had that unique warm hospitality trait so prevalent in Afghanistan that makes a guest feel comfortable and respected. Over his shoulder I noticed a vase of artificial white roses that popped surprisingly against the drear of this landscape and this mission. I must have commented on them at some point.

We shared a big joke early during that first meeting when I suggested that we Americans build a tall HESCO barrier wall around his whole municipal district. (These are collapsible wire mesh containers with a heavy duty fabric liner, filled with dirt and topped with barbed wire, and are used as a blast wall against explosions or small-arms.) He looked at me thoughtfully and asked “Why?” I was surprised he had asked this and said, of course, “To make everyone who comes here feel safe!” He then -elaborately pretending he had just now understood the purpose- said carefully ” Then, why don’t you just build a pretty little stone wall about waist high?” I laughed immediately and genuinely at the unexpected and profound wisdom of this response and we knew we were going to be good friends. Indeed we were, and we eventually did many great things together to help his District and his people.

At the end of my tour, this Governor presented me with that vase of white roses from his office, probably because he knew I liked them. Sadly, this was one of the few things that didn’t make it back with me, lost in transit somehow, somewhere. I’ve had artificial flowers in the places I’ve lived ever since and I can’t think of a good reason why they aren’t quite beautiful and worthy of as much appreciation as anything beautiful. More importantly, I can’t feel a good reason why they aren’t quite beautiful and I do feel that they are.

Next.

Jewelry. When my Mom died, the girls in the family inherited her jewelry and divided it up and I eventually became aware of a large amount of costume jewelry left over from dividing up the real stuff. My sisters let me have about all of the costume jewelry so that I could give it to my little girl, bit by bit as a game, and also as a real remembrance to her of my mother- her grandmother. Much of the jewelry was of a fun nature as my mother was quite festive and therefore had lots of Holiday-themed costume jewelry among other odd things. Now, this was a real trove of treasure to my little girl, as it was, bedecked with gold, silver, sparkly jewels, feathers, and all manner of bangle. Soon, I also thought the jewelry was as nice as any, and soon after that, I felt it. Just like the flowers. The only depreciation of this costume jewelry will have to come from an internal subordination of this jewelry to real jewelry, and the innocence of my little girl prevents it for her, and a new realization prevents it for me.

A couple of caveats: First, I know that these two initial realizations each came within dramatic context and one might reasonably guess that the circumstances created the realizations. But I don’t think so; I think the circumstances uncovered the realizations that were within me. My appreciation for fake things has bled out from these initial ink-spots of revelation onto the other pages of my day-to-day life and I find myself seeing things at first color without reservation as to how they came to be. Secondly, I’m talking about fake things that are nicely made, that are of some quality, and not something so cheaply made as to detract from what thing it purports to represent. For example, the spectrum of artificial flower quality is very wide; some are visibly fake from a distance and some are breathtakingly real from an inch away. And likewise, though some gumball-machine jewelry lacks a certain charm, I find that most costume jewelry is nicely made, though artificial.

Artificial: 1: humanly contrived (see contrive sense 1b) often on a natural model: man-made

Contrive: . . . 1:b: to form or create in an artistic or ingenious manner

So, in light of these definitions, I should find and replace all the words ‘real’ above and replace them with ‘natural’. We have to also now acknowledge the contradiction in “most costume jewelry is nicely made, though artificial.”

So, if something is artificial it was ‘humanly contrived or formed or created in an artistic or ingenious manner, often on a natural model.’ This was the original meaning at least, but something happened. Beauty and its consort Valuable hitched it’s wagon to Real.

Well, I unhitch that wagon.