Starbucks & Tupperware

We're happy to welcome back Sehr Wenig to these pages. We're hoping she will return often with insights learned as she regains her health. 

I'm heading home for a lengthy holiday visit with my grown children, my granddaughter and my parents. It will be the last trip home before a major eight-hour surgery in January to combat the Big C. After waiting through a long, long Starbucks line at LAX early this morning, I quietly picked up the tab for the young woman behind me in line. As soon as she understood what was happening, the young woman began demurring. “Oh, no. I’m fine. I can pay for my own.”

When she finally understood that I wanted nothing other than to say Merry Christmas, she accepted her Grande Earl Grey tea but remained visibly uncomfortable. A moment later, she brightened just as visibly and said, “I was going over there to get water. Can I bring you one?”

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The workplace team I lead held our annual holiday gathering/white elephant gift exchange a few days ago. At the end, as everyone was beginning to tidy up, someone said, "Oh, wait. There's one more gift," and handed me a lovely gift box. Which turned out to be an empty foil pan.

Other people began pulling wrapped gifts from under their chairs and handing them to me. More people streamed into the room, each carrying a gift. Each gift box or bag held an empty food container, many decorated with words like, "Made with cancer-fighting nutrients...and Love," or "Chemo-fighting fuel."

By the second gift, I realized what they were doing and sobbed through unwrapping the rest—which took nearly 20 minutes.

My team, other people from our company, and a slew of former employees have organized themselves to provide meals for the entire time of my convalescence. They have investigated my Pinterest food boards, talked to my daughter, and discussed what foods I enjoy when we go out or order in. They made a group Google doc and calendar.

I could not stop crying. It was one of the sweetest, most humbling things I've ever experienced. The kindness and thoughtfulness and genuine effort overwhelmed me. My first coherent thoughts afterward were about how I could repay their kindness.

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“I was going over there to get water. Can I bring you one?”

The young woman will never know it, but she gave me something far more valuable than a bottle of water. She revealed that my practice for the coming months will need to be a little different than hers—that I'll need to accept kindness without need to "make things even."

The time for paying it forward will come. For now, my task is to accept with gratitude.

It’s not an easy task, but the important ones never are.

The Donald Takes Another Dump

You'd be mad, too, if your hair dye kept bleeding down
and staining your face orange. 

The scariest thing about Donald Trump isn't his right-wing ideology, or his xenophobic principles, nor even the fact that he's a liar.  The scariest thing about Donald Trump is the obvious fact that a: he is stupid, and b: a notable segment of America is rallying around a stupid man as their hero.

Trump's stupidity is self-evident, even if you do nothing more than listen to his speeches and interviews. His misuse of language and grammar, his imprecision of word choice, his butchery of idioms, is the stuff of a poorly read seventh grader. He said the other day, repeatedly, that closing our borders to Muslims could be "quick." What he was he was trying to say was, not that a closure could be enacted quickly, but that the duration of the closure might be "short-lived"  or "temporary."

Another quote from an interview on MSNB a few days ago;  "We have to get a hand around a very serious problem. And it's getting worse. And you will have more World Trade Centers and you will have more, bigger than the World Trade Center if we don't toughen up, smarten up, and use our heads." The man talks like a 12-year old trying to bluff his way when the civics teacher calls on him after he was just caught napping.

Here is a recent statement he read aloud, speaking of himself in the third-person:  "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on." He's now repeating this absurd idea once every hour or so in the days since.

Trump's ignorance of current events is obvious, of course, but he's also stupid on simple common sense levels. In practical terms, how would it even be possible to do what Trump proposes? Nowhere on any passport is there any identification of religious affiliation. And it's not like people carry religious identity cards that can be screened at airport security. There is no way, really, to distinguish between a visitor from Turkey or Ethiopia who is Christian from one who is Muslim. Any person of even average intelligence could have deduced the dumbness of the idea just by thinking for a few minutes. (What is unspoken, of course, is the real message: Trump and his fearful white mob would really like to close America to brown people. Period. Brown people scare this bunch. )

And Trump genuinely does not understand the danger he poses here: by posing this as a religious war between all Muslims and the rest of the world, he is doing exactly what ISIS wants—making Muslims feel alienated from the rest of the world. Here's a fact: ISIS would love to see Donald J. as president. I wonder if the crowds in South Carolina have considered that.

Can you imagine this delivering the State of the Union address?

Mind you, it's not a given that a dumb president can't be an effective leader, or that a smart president will automatically be successful.  Ronald Reagan was no genius, but some would acknowledge him as a good leader. And he seems to have at least been smart enough to pick advisors who handled things capably while he took lengthy naps each afternoon. George W. was obviously dim and he also picked horrendous advisors, but he was not as dangerously stupid as Trump. And a couple of very smart presidents—Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama—were disappointing as presidential leaders. In fact, of notably smart presidents in the last 50 years who were also successful leaders, the list might stop at Bill Clinton.

But no candidate I can remember in recent times combined Trump's ignorant stupidity with an equal measure of out-of-control ego. George W knew in his heart-of-hearts that he wasn't the sharpest blade in the political cutlery drawer. Donald J. Trump, on the other hand, is too dumb to understand that he's dumb. Any man who continually brags about his wealth is actually worthless, and the one who repeatedly proclaims his brilliance is anything but. We all see it, but Donald does not.

This latest foolishness has some people saying that Trumps candidacy has jumped the shark, that Ted Cruz' recent advances in the Iowa polls are the beginning of the end for Trump's comedy of errors. (Cruz has his own baggage, the insanity of which is unfortunately being hidden by the even greater outrageousness of Trump). But don't write the Donald off just yet. His minions are just too numerous and too rabid to ignore. There is something almost predestined in the absurdity of what is unfolding here, a political fate that Americans have earned as result of their worship at the church of celebrity.

Hillary Clinton must be rubbing her hands with glee. Without Trump in the race, there are at least three GOP candidates who could likely win.  But with Trump in the race, either as the GOP candidate or as a Ross Perot-style independent,  Hillary wins in a landslide. We hope.

A deranged bird saved my life

Welcome back our talented guest geezer Sehr Wenig, the only female geezer to have graced these pages. Sehr writes today on a sobering subject that sooner or later touches the lives of most Geezers and their loved ones. Please wish Sehr well as she begins her medical journey. I, for one, am placing my bet on her. 

A deranged bird saved my life.

So did the dashing on a stucco wall on the building next door.

And my friendship with a Geezer I’ve considered my brother for more than a decade.

Some credit must be given to the fine and compassionate doctors and nurses and technicians caring for me now, but without that bird and that stucco and that brother, it may have been too late for their miracles.

Mine is not the kind of lump women are typically warned about, but a gradual thickening, a change in the density of the right margins of my right breast. The weirdness made itself apparent in early August, but I convinced myself it was merely my imagination run amok.

Daily inspections whispered a truth I wasn’t ready to hear – loud enough to make me check every day but quiet enough I could pretend not to hear.

I took to wearing a bra 24 hours a day, leaving one on the edge of the tub while showering so I could cover the developing dimple beneath my nipple before I faced the mirror to brush my teeth each morning.

And then a bird began beating itself to death against my bedroom windows.

Day after day, before the sun rose, that bird flew into the windows above my bed – over and over and over. I asked friends and colleagues how to stop its slow suicide, but no one knew how to help. One morning I moved to the second bedroom to escape the relentless thwacking, but the bird moved with me -- the one and only time it flew into any window other than the one above my bed.

About 10 days into the bird’s mysterious assault upon itself, I glanced out the window above my shower, contemplating the bird and its neurotic mission. There, shaped into the dashing of the stucco on the next building, stood the letters, WTF.

How could a contractor ignore such an obvious sign, I wondered as I slipped on my bra and turned to the mirror to brush my teeth.

Some weeks later, the bra was no longer enough to silence the thwacking of my own head against the ever-more transparent truth.

I called my brother to confess my fears. Exactly as expected, he urged me to go to the doctor. Exactly as expected, I edged closer to taking action. Leaving myself in fearful limbo was one thing; stranding him there with me was something quite different.

As the bird beat itself against the window the very next morning, I called my doctor. While the receptionist set up an appointment within the hour, the bird departed.

That first appointment set off a firestorm of tests and visits during which very kind professionals poked and prodded and scanned my breast from every angle. Ten days later, a biopsy confirmed my deepest fears, and we began making a treatment plan. I have every reason to believe that plan will be successful.

The bird has not returned.

WTF remains.

Good News....and Bad News

Just when I had fully relaxed into the fact the middle age is drawing to close and old age is about to begin,  a complication arose.

At the dentist's office I ran into an extended survey in a waiting room magazine that tells me that based on lifestyle and general health and outlook questions, I'm effectively not quite 55 years old instead of nearly 60, as my driver's license believes.  

I truly don't know what to do.

This computation is based on an elaborate, multi-page survey. Wanting to know the complete dirty truth, I was fully, brutally honest in answering.  I was forthright  about my weight (which is fine if I was 6 ft. 3" tall; unfortunately I'm 5 ft 8"), and about the fact that my cholesterol and blood pressure are on the high side. I was ruthlessly honest about the red meat I eat too often, and about the fact that I have a nasty sweet tooth. I 'fessed up to my occasional insomnia, my allergies, the arthritis beginning to make my toes and ankles ache.

I was brutally honest about every last thing they asked.

But it appears I have enough healthy habits to more than compensate for these vices. I checked off the smallest option for number of alcoholic drinks per day above zero (on average, about one or two glasses of good Scotch per week). It appears, now, that a little bit of imbibing is considered better for you than none at all.  I spend 15 or so days a month in the YMCA pool or exercise room, and walk perhaps an additional 10 or 15 miles a week. The daily regimen includes 45 minutes of meditation, which the surveyors apparently like very much. Early to bed early to rise seems to be a plus. My work stress has taken a large turn downward—that alone probably reduced my age by a year or so. The last loved one lost to disease was now more than a year ago, not front and center in my outlook on life.  And my fondness for a good cheeseburger is apparently neutralized by the nuts, grains, and vegetables I happily eat.

Now, although it's not a terrible thing to actually be younger than I am, it does leave me with a dilemma. I was very much looking forward to the many senior citizen discounts I  become eligible for when I turn 60 years old next month.  I don't lie easily, and if I say I am 60 when in reality I'm effectively only 55,  I'm sure to get busted. I can imagine now the teller at the movie theater who, when I ask for a senior ticket, frowns and asks to see the result of my US News & World Report age survey. 

I must be careful not to regress any further, as might happen if I lose some weight. That was a goal of mine as I enter semi-retirement, but now I'm not so sure. I'd rather not have to send back my AARP membership card. Maybe if I drink a lot more Scotch, it will balance out a weight loss. 

The Human Wound

I recently came upon this small bit of writing from several years ago ago while cleaning out some digital file folders. Most bits of writing one discovers during such housekeeping is utterly disposable and you're well advised to snuff out all the 1's and 0's that form them, lest somebody come upon them and recognize that most of your writing is clumsy indeed.  But this one I decided to save for a little longer, at least until the next digital purging. I don't recall what prompted the writing of this. Sometimes words come from places you can't quite identify. 

I’ve come to believe that the quality that distinguishes humans from other living creatures is not "intelligence," but rather the fact that we are the one creature who is consciously aware of a woundedness, a sore spot, a mortal tenderness that is the source of both all our pain and ultimately our joy. Other living creatures, though subject to the same natural pains and laws of physics, remain blessedly unaware of the nature of the mortal wound, and hence do not suffer or rejoice in quite the same way as do conscious humans. The dawning awareness of this woundedness, this tender spot, is represented culturally and spiritually by many images: the fall from grace, expulsion from Eden, entrapment in samsara: all are mythological symbols of the sting that ensues when a conscious mind recognizes its essential mortality, its woundedness. 

How we respond to our wound governs the quality of our lives, in the end. It determines if we remain trapped in dreariness, or find at-one-ment of some kind.  The traditional path of a life is to attempt to cover up our mortality, to hide it from others and even ourselves. In anger and fear, we try to plate over our mortal wound with thick layers of costuming and personality and neurosis, trying to keep others from seeing it and trying to forget about it ourselves. 

We go to war to protect our wound. Our civilizations are largely structured around the effort to hide the wound. Our technologies evolve, in part, as efforts to defeat the wound. We dress in fancy clothes and dwell in palaces to distract ourselves away from the wound. Though all these are common strategies, they don't make for a very pleasant way to live.  It is a happy occasion to wake up from this condition and see the reality.

Fortunately, the wound is inherent in us, and cannot be avoided forever, even if we wanted to.  Clear seeing will eventually show you the truth of this. Knowing the woundedness, accepting the wound and working with it is a sign of our evolution, our consciousness. To hide from the pain, on the other hand, is to live a life of non-truth. And to do this may even be to live an evil life, for virtually all evil acts are strategies to hide from pain or to push it onto others that we might pretend that it doesn't belong to us. 

We are lucky that we can’t hide forever from the truth, and a genuine glimpse of our own mortal wound is what offers us the opportunity to change, to awaken. To awaken and feel the wound after a long period of hiding is something to celebrate. Some day, you may well come to realize that the moments of greatest trauma were also your moments of greatest awakening.

Sometimes through luck, sometimes with help, you may find that there is another way to respond to the knowledge of our wound. We do not have to hide, we do not need to defend. We can acknowledge the wound, accept it, live gladly with it even. We can tenderly care for our own wound, and treat the tender spots in others with equal compassion and empathy. We can respond to it with good nature, with irony and humor and understanding. Sometimes this is the path of the artists who live to articulate the experience of our human woundedness; the mystics who lived and died with compassion for the wounded; the saints who care for the universal wound. And there's a bit of this trait found in every good soul you’ve known. They are aware of the wound and are caring for it in themselves and others. 

Perhaps you have known people who live this way routinely, or maybe you've begun to  discover it for yourself: It is when we are confronted with the indisputable and unavoidable truth of our woundedness that a conscious, free life begins.

The happiest people I’ve ever known are those most aware of the tender wound in themselves and others. They ache for other people, and with them.

Considering Enjoyment

As semi-retirement draws closer, I've settled on an intended routine that will have me working "for pay" from about 7:00 am to 1:00 pm, with my afternoons free to pursue other things. Almost invariably when I mention this plan to colleagues, friends, neighbors, they respond by wanting to know what I'm going to do with that time. By which they want to know what my goal is, what I plan to accomplish with that free time.

"Ah, so you'll have time to write a novel or two."

"So you could volunteer time with the schools or Red Cross."

"I imagine you might want to go back to photography as a serious hobby."

"You can get serious about a monetized blog or web site."

"Remodel your bathroom/refinish your floors/rebuild your deck/pour new steps for the front entry."

"If grandkids come soon, you can be their day care provider."

Now, it's possible I will do some or even all of those things; all of them are on the list of things I might like to to do. But when these questions come up or suggestions are offered, I remain non-committal, nodding vaguely and saying I haven't decided yet. Because I'd secretly like to give an answer that would strike people as a little unusual, even disappointing.

"I'd like to practice enjoyment."

Enjoyment is a somewhat alien concept in American culture. We are champions of accomplishment, of material acquisition, of achieving tangible goals. On some level we are even champions of hedonistic pleasure, which is kind of the shadow side of the drive to accomplishment. In this country, we tend to pursue pleasure with the same exhausting frenzy as we pursue a workplace promotion. Americans can sometimes even be identified as champions of "fun," which in our culture seems to be defined as a kind of heart-pounding frenzy.

But hedonistic pleasure and fun, as we know it are not the same as enjoyment, I think.

The etymology of the word is hazy and a little imprecise:

Enjoyment: the act of experiencing joy
Enjoy: the experience of joy
Joy: the emotion of delight or happiness by experiencing something good or satisfying.

All of this seems to derive originally from the Greek gaio, which means "to rejoice," so finding a definition is a cyclical exercise the solution for which remains a little elusive.  But in any case the quality of enjoyment seems a bit different that what we normally call fun or pleasure. It's a quieter quality, a bit more contemplative, perhaps.

And simple enjoyment is something we're not all that familiar with, in general—not in American society. Other cultures seem better at it. During a recent trip to Italy, I saw a lot of enjoyment all around me, though admittedly much less accomplishment (Italians are notoriously inefficient). Europeans in general seem to be better at enjoyment; the entire month of August seems to be when everybody goes on holiday and practices pure enjoyment. In China, you can pretty much give up on meeting any kind of manufacturing deadline during the entire month around the New Year celebration—everybody is enjoying themselves. And it's also in China where it's pretty much standard practice for people to leave the work force at age 55 or so,  and for them to then seek simple enjoyment. They become family elders, mentor grandchildren,  go to the public parks to practice Tai Chi or play games with their friends. Who knew those commies could be so wise?

It's interesting to realize that enjoyment can be present even in the absence of pleasure or even fun. The enemy of enjoyment is resistance of any kind, and lack of resistance is quite conducive to enjoyment. You can enjoy almost anything simply by relaxing fully into whatever experience is present. A traffic jam can be enjoyed if you settle into listening to music or thinking sly thoughts about pretty girls. Suffering from the flu, you can either fight against the experience, or you can enjoy it in a kind of perverse way by curling up in a blanket in front of the fireplace, with a cup of hot soup while watching favorite old movies.

So enjoyment seems to me partly about abandoning the pushing and pulling that typically dominates life, relinquishing the effort to turn current circumstances into something different. Enjoyment, as distinct from pleasure-seeking, seems to be based more on satisfaction in, and with, the status quo.

I don't know that I'll be able to pull this off readily. I'm the product of a Lutheran midwestern

upbringing in which the dinner hour was hugely rushed in order to get back outside to do farming/yardwork/snowshoveling. My father was a guy who after each lawn-mowing turned the machine upside down and scrubbed it clean of green stains using a stiff brush. Pure life enjoyment doesn't come naturally to me.

But the next time somebody asks what I'm going to do with my free time in semi-retirement?

"I'm going to practice enjoyment."

With enough practice, I might even get good at it.

Overheard: October 23, 2015

In an office building in downtown Minneapolis on the way up to my optometrist's office, there are two young men from some country in far southeastern Europe or far western Eurasia riding upward with me on a very slow-moving elevator. The inflection of their voices remind me a little of the old Steve Martin/Dan Akroyd "Wild & Crazy Guys" bit, though they are speaking in their native tongue, not English. They are in their mid to late 20s, and my hunch is that they hail from someplace like Moldova or Bulgaria, or maybe even someplace on the other side of the Black Sea. I cannot place the language, but is is definitely not Russian or Polish—it's more unusual than that. They talk to one another quietly in deference to my presence, but with great restrained animation. I cannot understand any of the words—except for a notable phrase that pops up out of the middle of nowhere.

"Ce crezi că am făcut aseară? Am băut vodcă și pastile gobbled. E ceea ce fac mereu. Și băiatul, nu am plăti prețul. Ar fi trebuit să urmat sfatul: "JUST SAY NO ."Това е, когато разбрах, че току-що мойш си грозна сестра."

"Ha ha ha ha ah.  Ha ha ha ha ha."  Both young men laugh heartily, but with attempts to stifle it out of consideration to another elevator passenger not in on the joke.

Then the second one responds. "Невероятно. Това е, което аз осъзнах прекалено-I е трябвало да заяви JUST SAY NO. Когато погледнах надолу и осъзнах, майка вашият ме минет Без да си протези."

More peals of muffled laughter, while they looked sideways at me with some sheepishness.

Americans need to be very careful. Thirty years after the fact, this ridiculous "just say no" catch-phrase from Nancy Reagan's ill-advised and vicious war on drugs is still circulating around in the conversation of young Eurasian men. I feel a little morose to see that this, of all things, is a piece of American culture that has persisted in the larger world. I hope against all odds that I don't now hear "thousand points of light" come out of their mouths.

And then I recall some of the recent sound bites from Donald Trump, and I begin to feel quite ill over what might infect the world in the near future.