Losing the Laugher

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Losing the Laughter

As a child growing up, nothing and no one could make me laugh till my sides split and my face hurt except my sister, Nanette.  I call her sister though we siblings from another mister if you will.  We grew up and into ourselves with each other from the age of eight. As rural kids we had a free and frolicsome life, running through the woods, riding horses for hours on end, playing in the ancient barn that always seemed unsafe and therefore magnetic.  It finally did fall down one Sunday morning when everyone else was at Mass and I was sitting on the porch, proving it truly was a terror in the making but hey, no animals were harmed in the watching of this incident.

Nan and I always had a unique ability to jointly see the absurd in life and were drawn toward people, places, and feelings that engendered a sense of delight.  The laughter followed naturally and grew over the years.

One Sunday supper, we were maybe 17 or 18, we were in the formal dining room assembled en mass, something the father figure tried to require as a family bonding time but there was such a vast gap in ages that getting us all together was difficult at best, and felt really odd and oppressive to the older contingent of us. There were fancy linen tablecloths, formal china settings and Maida, the grandmother doyenne, was in attendance as well.  It is fair to say the she was not a fan of children so having seven of them at table was already a challenge for her.  She was a New Orleanian through and through so Manners were paramount and we were frankly a feral herd at best.

Dinner was through, the oldest of us were planning our escape to go get stoned and head to the movies so fidgeting was flagrant.  Then Mike came in.  At the time, Mike was Nan’s boyfriend and would one day become the father of their amazing daughter, Brooke Corinne. For now, though, he was the scruffy, barely tolerated hippie who was undoubtedly corrupting their eldest child, so the reception was chilly but hey, it was Sunday, prayers had been prayed at Mass and over food so there was a largesse in the air. Mike pulled up a chair while we were finishing coffee and dessert. 

And then it happened.

Mike reached over Nan’s plate and took a sip of her coffee.  Out of her cup. At this point grandmother Maida could not contain herself any longer.  Someone needed to be the sacrificial lamb for the collective sins of the table that she had endured in silence thus far.  She spoke, acridly, and said

“You allow him to drink from the same CUP as you, Nanette???”

And Nan, the oblivious provocateur, replied:

“Well, I KISS him, don’t I?  Same germs.”

At this point, the oldest of us who were not doing spit takes were watching for the explosion from Maida that just had to be imminent.  What exploded was the laughter.  It launched from a place within each of us that had been tensely restraining our behavior for the entire dinner hour and now, thanks to Nan, all bets were off.  The little kids thought we were simply nuts so they starting screaming with kid laughter.  The stern-faced father was trying to maintain discipline, something he attempted to instill on a completely random schedule so one can say it was laughably ineffective at best and really, only added to the hilarity that was racing around the table like a wildfire.  Nan, not thinking she had said anything out of the norm, finally realized that control had been lost; people were falling on the floor holding their sides and screaming.  Even mom finally ceded her normally fun and cheery façade to history and joined in with her own oh-so-special gut laugh.  She would perfect that laugh over the years much to her mother’s dismay.

And so, the level of laughter perfection that Nan and I have shared was cemented for future decades.  It took very little for she and I to dissolve into gales of guffaws that we honestly had no control over.  Disabling fits that seemed almost medically dangerous when we were in them but again, no control.  They would leave us weak and sore and grinning but something else.  

Peacefully Drained.  

The calm that would eventually overtake us was a shared euphoria of delight. We had shed all the teenaged angst and adult worry and whatever else was inhabiting our darker natures; we had killed the worst in us and let the best of us shine…for a while.  It was therapeutic.  It was delight in each other in that only the two of us knew what the laughter was about (frequently nothing!) and that only the two of had had this moment in life, together. As the years went on, we would set out in the car, sometimes stoned (oh all right, often high), with one destination in mind.  

We were out to get lost.

We drove through the rural countryside of our youth staying only on small, two-lane, back roads and making only turns that would take us away from anything familiar.  We would drive for hours yakking and listening to the radio until that magic moment would simultaneously dawn on us. We were lost.  And for some reason that was the key, the impetus, the trigger that turned on the laugh track that we both craved.  We would sit on the side of some unnamed country lane and scream with laughter at our ability to lose ourselves while being lost. Nothing was really funny, but everything was truly hilarious.

Another cleansing of the heart and soul complete.  Peace.  Out.

Years later I was home visiting from California.  Mom was living with Nan and Max in Gettysburg, PA. The big day out with Mom was shopping at the Gettysburg Outlet Mall and movie or lunch.  Olive Garden was the spot.  The three of us got our table and were trading tales and playing catchup. I have never been able to exactly pinpoint what the trigger was, but it happened. Something set us off and Nan and I started to giggle, then gasp, then scream out loud.  Mom, watching us, became infected with whatever insanity had gripped Nan and I, and collapsed with us.  

We tried, really, we did.

We tried at least act normal.  Sugar an iced tea perhaps?  Spilled sugar from the trebling hands only fueled more laughter.  This was not a polite little tintinnabulation of charming voices elevated in modest mirth.  Oh, no.  This was flat out spit your food and howl time.  We were now laughing at each other’s inability to control themselves.  Nan and I were screaming “Don’t LOOK at me!!!”  Mom was spitting “What are we laughing about??” 

That is where it went off the rails.

Diners all around us (oh fine, the entire restaurant) was noticing us.  Noticing may be too demure a term. There were unapologetic glares.  People were corralling their small children and covering their ears and turning them away from the spectacle that was us.

Ok.  Maybe not quite that bad but people were definitely not amused and, the waitress was now hovering around us like a fly on the butter dish and shooting us what can only be described as the “I am about to call a manger” look.

Chastisement is a weapon.

Teachers have used it for millennia. The Look can stop traffic or encase over-abundant behavior.  In our case, the the withering reproachful glare from our waitress had an effect.  It did.  Nan and I having done our time on the floor of many a food service establishment recognized The Look. We knew we were about to be 86’d.  From the Olive Garden.

The utter absurdity of that struck us as, well funny.  So that funny was added into the already funny show in progress and we knew we were going to tell this story forever.  ‘The Day We Got 86’d From the Olive Garden…With Mom’.  And off we went.

I think we just plain wore out funny out because we eventually calmed down, finished up our meal, paid and left.  The leaving was a tad awkward as everyone, I now do mean everyone, stared us out the door and into the car where we once more broke down at the thought of how utterly absurd and perfect that moment had been.

Sharing laughter with Nanette has been a life-long joy for me. I wait for our time together so that we can simply let go and laugh until it hurts.  It is a cleansing ritual that I share with only her.  As Nan let’s go once more, this time of her mortal coil, I must find a way to regain my smile and maybe one day my laughter.  For now…..

I’m Losing My Laughter

President Obama, Please

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President Obama, Please

Set the Tone

A return to “Yes, We Can”

We need nuance, facts, direction, compassionate calm; in short; 

Hope

The President’s remarks to the graduating classes of 2020 over the weekend were striking in their simplicity and powerful in their eloquence.  They were the carefully crafted and considered words of a man, a world leader, a figure who stands so far above the political fray of this moment; our moment of national and global crisis, as to shine brighter than the tarnished remnants of the Fractured Union in which we now barely live.  We exist in a nightmarish netherworld of altered reality populated by bloviated expulsions from a huckster and a fraud who never wanted this job that he currently holds and does not have the intellectual capacity to maneuver within.  The current occupant of this global stage plods and plots his daily course with only the inept and mono-visioned focus of a man held captive by his own demons; demons which now have grown to infect, much like the virus he is being defeated by, the entire world’s hunkering and panicked population. 

We ask ourselves daily, “How much worse can this get?”, “How much more damage can he do in three months?”, or six, or however many months or years he will have at his disposal.  With the legislative checks and balances gutted, neutered, or in many cases euthanized, who will stand up to his schoolyard bully-ism?  

Who will speak truth to faux power?

As a populace, we have been beaten into a stunned silence by the barrage of non-fact and fictionalized “truth” by what can only be described as a despotic demon. This is a caricature that he undoubtedly thinks is a good thing based on his fawning obeisance to other world leaders who operate under the protection of militaristic, propped up, potentates.  We know this.  It is a fact firmly in evidence for years now as proven and witnessed by the sycophantic salaaming with which he believes he is flattering those whom he admires, or needs, or wishes he were more like.

These other world leaders, however strong-armed and backed by strong arms, know him for the fraud he is.  They know him for the weaknesses he displays and are angling with ever more efficient aim, at the heart of our democracy.  Our time in the sun is passing.  Our American Century is already well passed its “use by” date.  We are two decades into a new century and what nation or global cabal will lay claim to this shredded, barely formed, next 100 years? We can only surmise and none of our worst imaginings will be bad enough when we finally have to face to ultimate reality.

The winner will not be us.  Unless.

Unless our most recent past president retakes the reins of civil discourse and once again shows us why he was the best of the brightest.  Why, in the history of our country, we had eight years of scandal-free governance, global accord, and record economic expansion, innovation, and development; all while literally pulling us up out of the fiscal and cultural morass he was left with as he assumed office in 2009.  It is what, historically, Democrats appear to do best.  They problem solve our way into prosperity when the other party has looted our savings accounts of cash, courage, and convictions.

President Obama’s soft, thoughtful, rhetoric to those students of 2020 whose immediate, hard-earned, transitions into the real world were abruptly cancelled spoke more than just graduation oratory. They resonated into a human core that we have had literally excised from our current consciousness.  Numb to even the most blatant abuses through a daily barrage of instant twitterishness, we are reeling in a boat without a rudder; bobbing on seas that grow more stormy, and more disturbed, and more threatening hourly.

Something is going to snap.

The rubber band that has held our democracy together is old, frayed, and brittle.  The virus appeared as if to prove this point.  It could have been a nuclear attack on an ally, or on us.  It could have been a massive cyber-attack on our infrastructure.  It could have been a thousand tiny arrows aimed at a million points of perceived weakness.  Instead, it is a stealthy, one-celled, unseen, virulent agent that is taking us all out.  The world was stopped as efficiently as if someone had pulled the power cord to our lives.  And in reality, all the rest of those horrific end-times scenarios are still quite possible.  They could be heaped on top of the trash pile we are currently wallowing in. If you doubt that, I beg you not to tempt the universe for fate is, indeed, a cruel mistress.

Now.  This moment.  President Obama chose to speak out, critiquing the current president with the slipperiness of an eel and with a fluidity of words that only the highest intelligence can muster.  Heartful yet truthfully blunted, Obama reintroduced us to statesmanship in a ten-minute lecture format.  He must continue and once again take up a mortarboard of leadership that he set aside for loftier goals in his post-presidency.  It is a requirement.  History will judge this moment.

It is true that past presidents, as a rule, hold their tongues on the current administration’s foibles.  But today, the rule of law is abandoned, the courts are now akin to sacrificial altars of paganistic political power grabs, and the congressional oversight is in hiding. Now we need the shock and awe of a thunderbolt, but one sounded with the velvet-smooth cloth hammer of an orator of good cause.

I call on President Obama to once again pick up the overly onerous task of leading us into that unseen future he promised us once more than a decade ago.  Craft a message and deliver it to the Viral Times we are suppressed by.  Give Ted Talks on leadership, speak to organizations and political action committees, and yes, directly to the people of our country and our world, with the clear-eyed vision of a pragmatist, and from the stolid foundation of someone who trusted us through untested times in the recent past.

To hell with the “norms”.  They are dead.  Let us bury them.

Give us back our hope, Mr. President.  Show us how to think again and what to do and we will cheer you on with a resounding,

Yes, We Can…..Again.

Grateful Is Boring

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Grateful is Boring

The world is in many stages of grief, anger, fright, and confusion.  Let’s begin there.  Oh, and we’re all, to varying degrees, in some sort of self or institutional lockdown.  We each come to be in our own private Idaho’s of solitude through no fault of our own but none-the-less each of us must come to our own private reckonings with the hermetic existences we are now enduring.

It happened, for the majority of us, quite suddenly and without any huge, impactful, event.  There were glimmers of a “new” virus out there, somewhere, in some far-off Asian province.  We’ve had these before from other disparate places; Ebola, H1N1, Bird Flu each, if we thought beyond our morning lattes, certainly had the potential to kill multitudes of humans but again, “them”, the amorphous masses that really did not affect us or our daily routines. Much.

And then this virus, this Coronavirus; this CoVid19.

One day I’m picking up our friend at a nearby airport for a visit and the next day, literally the next day, we were suddenly sequestered together for the foreseeable future.  It’s a good thing we were all very old friends who had traveled far and wide together over the decades and knew each other far better than most so it was really like a small family of three, on holiday…of sorts.

Except for the niggling of uncertainly that the daily news was feeding us if we listened.  This then bred the full-blown fear that rapidly followed.  Without warning the world “out there” was an apocalyptic morass of potential infection, suffering, and death.  Really, overnight.  And “out there” was outside our front door!

What this does to our individual psyches is a very personal yet somehow shared experience.  This isolation idiocy grows in each of us and on each of us in very different but related ways.  But mostly it is the constipated pipes of our freedom of movement highway (excuse the metaphor but really, how shitty are things anyway?) that affect the majority of us the most.  No quick trips to the store, no drives to Five Guys for a burger without masks, gloves, trays for the car and counting how many customers are in the store before you enter.  I met our neighbor across the street tipping a single used cup into his garbage bin.  We locked eyes and he said, with no trace of irony in his terse voice, “If I don’t come out to the trash bin at least twice an hour I’ma kill him.”  Him, being his husband 40 feet away in their house.  I got it.

But here’s where it gets rough.  Grateful.

It’s on Facebook a thousand time an hour:

“I’m grateful for the sunny day!”

“I’m grateful my family is healthy!”

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“I’m grateful for my precious cat, Precious!” 

Grateful is boring.

There I’ve said it. Bad me.  I’d feel shame and self-loathing if there was anyone I’d be actually seeing face-to-face in the next whenever to even care!  And besides, all wagers aside, I’ll wager that each and everyone else out there is of the same opinion.  

Grateful is boring.

Our lives are boring. Period.

My life and home have never, and I mean N.E.V.E.R been so respectably clean, organized, and perfectly presentable.  My mother would be thrilled!  But my mother would not be allowed to come into my house to see this miracle of modern living.  She’d be in quarantine as well if she hadn’t died decades before all this shit hit the fan.  And she thought 9/11 was bad!

We did the hard shit first: we moved rocks, built walls, rearranged plants in the garden.  I, alone, trimmed 185 feet of 16’ tall Oleander trees, both sides, and the top, down to 6 feet.  Forty, count them FORTY, huge, green, bins of waste; I’m still feeding them out to the green waste guy who now has added me to his Stalag-like list of offenders for TOO much work getting done which, I know, seems very UN-Stalag-like in its rock-splitting historical context but none-the-less, is my new reality.  It took me two weeks, 8-hours a day, to accomplish this one task.  Oh, and I had just had a quadruple heart ablation the week this all began.  The general consensus was if that didn’t kill me then either the CoVid would or a heart attack would, so what the hell…….get on with it.

And then the basement was cleaned and organized.

This actually was the beginning of the fright portion of the picture.  This had never been accomplished before in living history (I’m assuming for anyone else out there, as well).  I unpacked boxes from three moves and two decades ago.  But there was no place to take the give-aways as our local thrift stores were….you guessed it….closed.  We actually put some really hard-to-dump items like pool railings and air compressors on the curb with “$50 OBO” signs on them hoping they would look attractive enough for someone to steal them.  Someone bought them!  We shake our heads in wonder.

The real issue for me is that “Inspiration”, along with Elvis, has left the building. 

Grateful is boring.

I wish I could fully absorb the depth of the First-World, White-Person, problems we are confronting, I do!  I’m a privileged, white, talented, educated, individual but trust me, this shit is weird.  And it’s weird for well-off and well-under alike.  We really are all in this together.  The pablum platitudes that are pumped out have a certain ring to them that in my bones I feel resonates the same with my core group of over-indulged retirees the same as it does for those inner city Detroit put-upons who are still unable to drink their WATER no less wonder what would happen if and when they contract this plague.  For them, too:

Gratitude is boring. But what a world apart those two realities are. 

As a writer and a photographer, I’m having a pesky “block”; a creative logjam that is preventing me from having the inspiration I need to pick up a pen or a camera and create something that soothes my soul and maybe captivates others.

This is such a shit problem when compared to food lines, ER meltdowns, ventilator goodbyes, and the myriad of other tortuous pathways humans all over the world are traversing.  For them, gratitude is also boring but in a much more life or death sort of scenario. They literally having nothing to be grateful for.  Nothing.  They are bereft, seemingly forgotten, and without even hope which I posit is a prerequisite for gratitude. 

No hope=no gratitude.

So for now, from whatever end of the polar-opposite spectrums we all come to this same, fraught, fearful place we find ourselves in as humans, let us at least try and dig as deeply as we can into the fabric of the lives we are living and at the very least, fight for a glimmer of hope.  Then, clinging as hard as humans can to that, maybe we can get to; 

gratitude.

December 12, 2019

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December 12, 2019

Community

The Second Greatest Showman

Community

For a simple, declarative word, Community is as amorphous as an amoeba; shape shifting with time, place, people, and purpose.  How we define community is a very personal attribution, it provides the outlines for our own world as well as telegraphing information about each of us to the greater world as a whole.  We spend a major portion of our lives moving in and out of various communities at varied times.  Our immediate family is, of course, our first real venture into co-existence with others; we had no choice. As we moved further along in life many of us make concise and sometimes extreme and painful choices about our original community of relatives that helped to inform our early selves.

Things and people and places change.  We grow, hopefully, for the better.

School, sport’s teams, scout groups, church, best friends, old friends, new friends; they have all been community for us, for a time, at a time.

For me, as a young gay man graduating from college on the east coast, I was definitively in search of myself and a community; one I could not define, had not seen, and had no clue as to how to access.  With a grand leap of faith and an airline ticket begrudgingly given to me by my parents for graduation, I landed in San Francisco in 1977.  To be slightly more precise, I landed in a Victorian flat on Castro St., the quintessential, ready-made community for a mid-century gay male.  A party.

While there, I did manage to define myself in many ways, made lots of friends, expanded horizons I did not know I even had.  I became a nascent version of the man I would someday become; one who still, even now, is searching for yet more ways to push myself further while at the same time dig my roots deeper into my community….as I know it now, today.  It is radically different from the community I had forty years ago; it should be if I am doing things correctly.

When the party in San Francisco ended, everybody died.

Yet I lived, on and on and on, and continued to try and recreate a community, any community, that reflected my life up until then and one that promised to hold me up for the life yet to come, however short or long or uncertain.  I lived in many cities after San Francisco starting with Palm Springs. At that time, the mid-1980s, it was not a comfortable fit for me, but it provided me a career, a home, travel, and many of the trappings of community or at least a community I could exist within for a time.  But I knew there was more. Waiting.

The question was; did I have enough time to keep searching?

And so, as Cervantes said: “Until death, it is all life”

So, live on I did, in many places and many communities.  I met the man I would spend the remainder of my life with and together we maneuvered the world thorough many more communities, many more families of friends and then one day, seemingly suddenly but in reality not, we were older!  And what we were to do at that point came forcefully into view; as if by chance but really, by the design I had set in motion, along with the plan he had sojourned along for years before we met. Those paths combined with a need we both now had for something more, something tangible in terms of community.  We really wanted an ease of existence that included friendships as yet unseen and a place that the sun had blessed with time and space and a personal largess of wonders.

Welcome home.  Welcome back. Just welcome…..to Palm Springs.

Cathedral Cove, Home, within Community

It was not even a decision, the house up north sold itself and the home in the desert found us, exactly the way that an entire hoard of friends would magically appear and cement themselves into the form of a new and lasting family.  The ease with which this transition happened was so stunning that it was nearly undetectable; perhaps a sign that “truth will out” to toss a Bit of the Bard in.

Last night, we were at a free holiday gift from our Community God; the movie “The Greatest Showman”

There are no words to emphasize how truly remarkable it is to walk into a local movie palace filled with 300+ members of the larger community and realize that you know about one third of them personally!  It is a grounding of one’s soul; a peace of being that permeates your body and sends intermittent rushes of joy and gratitude coursing through you.  This is one theatre in a place of hundreds of thousands but the community spreads out from there and it does so in large part because of one person:

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Eddie Kreg Anderson, our own Greatest Showman

It is Eddie’s mission to found his own community and to share it, gleefully and with purpose, with the rest of the town, valley, and all who enter herein. And boy does he know how to throw a party to celebrate this community.  Confetti cannons, water cannons, exploding balloons, flaggers on stage; all designed to enhance the interactive movie experience that is “The Greatest Showman”.  Think “Rocky Horror” (he does that one as well) but with more heart and more of his entire soul wrapped up in it like a Xmass package for us all.

Before the movie started, he told us his story, his evolution, his search for himself and for that community that could feed and nourish his person. Moving to Palm Springs he found many elements already in place.  But Eddie wanted to elevate that experience, include more people in the community and throw the doors open to inclusion, uplifting friendships, and a non-judgmental nature that would welcome all and threaten or demean no one.

“The Greatest Showman”

A movie about Freaks and Geeks who find THEIR family in a circus, as so many of us have done throughout the years. The joy and companionship demonstrated in this film actually leap off the screen and energize the audience.  Filled with music and movement that transcends mere earth-bound realities, “Showman” shows us how to BE the community we are looking for.  How to become the people who create their own community that supports itself and each other.  I only heard a happy babbling consensus of joy as we left the theatre.

Eddie Kreg Anderson is OUR Greatest Showman

Tonight, I am over the moon grateful for our community.

 
 

Monkey Mind

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Monkey Mind

Or

Is My Mind Monkeying With me?

Tempus Fugit. During a life, a long, and in many ways, unexpected life, we who have endured now have the distinct oddity of reflection. Or as we age further, the inability to reflect as we would like; to remember the facts and figures and events that have shaped us, molded us, into our specific spot within humanities’ realm.  Lines blur, memories meld, everything becomes fungible, fuzzy, fantasized upon occasion. How are we to sort it? What are we to make of the inconsistencies that seem to spring up daily in our foggy memories of yesterday?  I know.

Let’s Write a Book!

Where to begin?  This has been my dilemma and one of the reasons I took myself out of my life for two months recently to sort out how I was going to write this book.  In researching formats, it is straightforward. Autobiography, biography, memoir.

Simply put, a biography is the life history of an individual, written by someone else. An autobiography is the story of a person’s life, written by that person. And a memoir is a collection of memories written by the person themselves. 

“Collection” will become important

After setting up my atelier in a tiny city in the Tuscan hills, I set out on this self-imposed literary mission.  I was cranking out the story of my life and, because we all come from sources external to our own selves, parents, families, and cultural surroundings, they seemed particularly salient and necessary to my story. Twenty Thousand words later, I found myself up to age three years. Faced with the ignominy of my own existence, I sadly had to admit that I was neither famous nor infamous enough for anybody to ever read what was looking to be a NextGen War and Peace. 

I put aside this growing monster and looked a little deeper into my reasons for feeling compelled to write this at all.  People: friends, acquaintances, have been telling me for years “You need to write a book”.  I had to realizes that they, too, have the same compulsion to tell their own stories so, as a writer, they were egging me on to make themselves feel justified in their own desires. But was it Ego or a Conceit.  I did manage to get a piece penned about exactly that question, but it left an ever greater, growing, void about what I was really after.

I dove it at this point and went in search of how, why, when, and who writes any of these tomes. The most salient bit of sage advice any of my research turned up was this. 

Start In the Middle

This seemed fragile to me as an outline but, at least as far as writing a memoir is concerned, the best approach. Find a point, a marker, a theme from which most of your life, before and after that event, has had its genesis and from which it plays out its third act.  The book then becomes a series of stories, most fact-based, some memory-clouded a bit, but all, before and after the central impetus, relate to that one thing, that happening, that reflected everything before and altered everything after.

Last night, even after I had taken all my evening potions and pills, settled into bed, dragged open my book and, waiting for the quieting fog of sleep to take me to my dreams, I wasn’t even on the off-ramp to sleep.  I honestly could not keep my eyes open and was not really absorbing the last page of the book I was reading, a sure sign it was time for lights out. But, once I closed the book, took off my glasses, and physically rolled over to sleep position, my Monkey Mind took control. 

In the dark behind my eyes, my thoughts felt exactly like a stainless-steel pinball; heavy, lumbering, inexorably trending downwards to the exit slot but, at the same time, being constantly whacked and buffeted upwards again by flippers controlled by unseen hands. Every whack back up awakened my mind to more and more intrusive thoughts.

Should I start to pack now?

Was I rude to so-and-so?

What is first on my work schedule when I return?

What has my life amounted to?

Should I change all my money to Lire now?

I wonder if I could find my teenaged car on-line?

Am I losing my mind?

There was the Middle

Maybe not the exact middle, but far enough along that there was certainly a before and hopefully enough after to make it a good starting point.

As I lay awake tossing through my laundry list of mindless chores I should be doing, I found myself scratching my head, more in manner of self-soothing touch than a real questioning of priorities.  As I raked my fingertips through my hair I discovered, again, a daily occurrence, the set of four significant indentations in my skull. 

And Just Like That

I had an entirely new and horrifying thought with which to occupy an entirely new timetable of worry.  I am starting, finally, to lose my hair.  If I continue on the hereditarily dictated pathway to baldness, my time is coming.  

My middle point story involves The Fall, an event I have written about before, but one which now raises more questions than the initial surgery itself posed.  The prospect of utter baldness, a look that so many men in my community are so comfortable with, both as a necessary evil and as a fashion statement, now shoves itself to the top of my Monkey Mind list of things I have to confront, probably sooner rather than later.

I had brain surgery three years ago. It required the neurosurgeon to drill four, dime sized holes through my skull in order to drain the blood clots that were threatening to permanently disrupt my inner-head.  They left me with a skull that resembles a polo field after a chukker, but before the audience takes to the field to replace the divots plowed up by the horses and the players. 

Instead, the surgeons placed titanium plugs to cover over my exposed brain.  Now in all fairness, before I went into surgery, they told me “We don’t know whether we are going to have to do a complete craniotomy” (removing the top of the skull, excising the blood clots, and then, later on, replacing the skull and stapling it back together) “or just drill some emergency evacuation holes.”

The drill won out and I am left with what I refer to as my manhole covers.  A much simpler, less risky, less time-consuming operation.  Easy access in, easier healing time after.  But the dents in my skull now have taken on a sinister new place in my fever-dreams.

I will not resort to the comb-over, ever. And with my still red hair, a crew cut, or a buzz, really reminds me too much of the look I sported most of my childhood, whether as a convenience for my mother, comfort in the humid summers of my youth, or the remedy for lice infestations that all of us country-raised kids seemed to have with regularity. Peach Fuzz I was called.

None of this is a comfort

What it does signify is the impending need to continually be explaining to total strangers and friends alike why my skull looks a lot like a rutted, washed out, flood damaged roadway.  But that aside, what it triggered in the dark nights of my discontent was a mental exercise of reviewing all the other crap my sleepless mind was considering.

This, in turn, began to morph into a cautious thought tunnel of wondering whether the hit to my head and the subsequent surgery had actually impaired my mental functions.  Were my sleepless mental meanderings just exercises in frustration? Was my growing tendency towards a mild OCD, something I had never, ever, had in my younger life, a result of the trauma? It has seemingly sprung from nowhere lately and while not unwelcome in that I am much more organized than I had been when young, why now? But then, the real issue in the dark of night and the dark recesses of my mind became crystal clear.

Was This Dementia?

I did ask my surgeon afterwards what was in my future.  He was quite reassuring but……I keep going back to my own research, from Medscape.com:

Favorable five-year outcome rates after acute TBI range from 14% to 40%. Several series have shown an increase in favorable outcome in younger patients. Ages younger than 40 years were associated with a mortality of 20%, whereas ages of 40-80 years were associated with a mortality of 65%. May 28, 2024

I was seventy years old at the time of The Fall. In fairness, after the surgery my brain felt like it was on fire!  My thinking was rapid, crosswords were once again my go to stress reliever, reading and comprehension came roaring back.  I really felt like there was no stopping me. In our house we spend almost no time on looking back.  If I felt this good, then mission accomplished and all of this medical mishigas was behind me.

My friends let me believe this for some time.  They were quite encouraging about my progress. Almost immediately, I started a new career, a wholly unexpected development at this point in life, but one that put my brain and my body to good use, and I felt there was no stopping me, I was on top of it all.  Bring it on!  Give me more! Yet, when the subject of The Fall would come up, little snippets of reality started popping up from friends and family.

“Oh, you were really not yourself”

When pressed for more information from their perspective, it became painfully clear I had been quite cognitively impaired for weeks leading up to the surgery and apparently, unbeknownst to me, continued through what I had been perceiving as a brilliant and totally complete recovery.  As always in life, the axiom of 

Not so fast

Is really a good rule of thumb.  Noone wants to tell you, to your face, that you’ve been a bubble off level for quite a while. But an honest search of my mental inventory and my own actions post-surgery revealed to me that I really had been (still am?) significantly affected by the surgical intervention that saved my life.

In conjunction, I will point out that this was mid-Covid and the life-adjacent issues that that blip on life’s radar created were also personality affecting and weighed heavily on some of the decisions I made in this time frame.

We all culled our address books, winnowed out the old, dead, no longer in contact “friends” we have carried for decades. We simplified our lives because that is what we should be doing at this age.  Simplification. Narrowing the focus moving forward.  Keep what works, jettison what, and who, doesn’t. 

I became ruthless in my redline editing. I eliminated two multi-decade friendships that I discovered were no longer serving me well.  They both, individually, exhibited behaviors that I was simply no longer willing to accept.  When approached on their actions I was met with denial, rage, anger, and demands for apologies (on both sides).  The sheer escalation of vitriol was shocking to me.  The finger pointing of fault, at me, was hard not to internalize.

To one of these folks, I wrote a long letter apologizing “if I had offended them” because honestly, I could not see where I had.  A perfect political apology.  I was told “You didn’t apologise enough”.  Really?  That is what they had to counter with?  After some stalkerish behavior ensued, I was really over the drama. Click, delete.  Lesson learned.  I will never issue a politically correct apology again.  

The second friend, who had spent most of lockdown at our house, was really “family” for many decades.  They were intertwined with many of our other friends both locally and elsewhere.  But the behavior towards us, in our own home, became rude, thoughtless, and more than annoying.  They were told, directly, that their actions needed to be explained and apologized for.  There was literally nothing in return.  A silence so deafening that my choice was made, almost for me. Many well-meaning friends urged me to “be the bigger person and apologize”. Based on recent experiences, this was not an option.

These were very painful decisions

They cost me a couple of years of soul-searching, hours of conversation with mutual friends, a lot of self-doubt but in the end, I was in a place where I had to stand in my own truth, acknowledge the years we had all spent together, the times we had had, and fully accept what was fully in the past and what I must do to gather my forces for the future.  My future. And sadly, those specific friends would not be a part of whatever future I had to craft moving forward.

My night terrors, controlled in the dark by my Monkey Mind, would still be there.  What they meant then, what they mean now, is really a moot point. It is a marvel that after the dark nights of my soul, the light of day is a cleansing wash so complete that even last night’s terrors dissipate in the bright light of each new day I am given.

Monkey Mind in the dark. Fears of dementia. Questioning my choices and decisions. It is just life, at this age.  I fall back to Doris Day. “Que sera, sera” What will be, will be. Or maybe even better, make sure that you consume every morsel of the life you are currently living.  It is our collective responsibility not to fret and dwell, but to eat like the banquet is never ending.

“Life’s a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death.”

Auntie Mame