He parked on 9th, which was called 100th
W. outside the Bowl, and waited on the sidewalk before the cemetery's primary entrance. A ghostly gray, cool morning--onshore flow again--with the possibility of afternoon sun. He was wearing his New Balance shoes, black jeans, and a gray hoodie
zipped up to his jugular. Fists jammed into hoodie pockets, he gazed out at the cemetery, a sunken, mostly open six-acre rectangle bounded by tall evergreens on the west and south which shielded it from a Westgate strip mall and a housing development,
by lightly-trafficked 15th on the north, and by busy 9th/100th on the east. A narrow blacktop service road ran east-west, another north-south. Except for an elevated Columbarium plaza with waterfall erected in its northeast corner in 2006, the
cemetery, founded in 1891, remained true to its modest origins. Its sward, green but not lush, littered here and there with wind-blown fir and pine cones, was kept unevenly trim with tractor-mower and weed-whacker. Somewhere in there lay the bones
and scraps of burial suits and dresses of his grandfather and grandmother and mother and father.
The old man was the last surviving member on both his mother's and his father's sides. His mother's parents, her brothers and sisters and their offspring,
who all lived in Seattle and with whom he had lost contact by the time he reached middle age, were gone. His Edmonds grandfather had died of prostate cancer in 1965. He had fought the illness, not knowing what it was because he would not consult
a doctor, by praying and reading Science and Health. His grandmother, trapped between faith and fear, finally begged, when his grandfather could not get out of bed on his own, to let her take him to the emergency room of the newly-constructed
Stevens' hospital, just south of the new high school on 76th. He was terminal. They put him in a double room and hooked him up to oxygen and an IV. The old man and his father and Diane visited the next day. They found little to say.
They mentioned that the Seattle Rainiers were off to a good start. His grandfather was taciturn, resentful, could not look them in their eyes, ashamed that he had failed his faith, had let Satan in by succumbing to the illusion of ill health.
After a few minutes, they left awkwardly. At 4:00 a.m. the old man received a call from his mother. Once visiting hours were over and the nurse had made her bedtime check, his grandfather had pulled the IV from his arm and the oxygen from his nose
and willed himself to die. His grandmother went to live with his parents. At family gatherings on holidays and birthdays everyone sat in painful silence as she repeated stories about her childhood and her life with Bertrand, her autonomic system
humming along without "her." When her dementia became too much for them to cope with, they put her in a home in Lynnwood, where she soon died of congestive heart failure. His mother, who had suffered for years with ulcerative colitis, atrial fibrillation,
migraine headaches, and osteoarthritis (three surgeries on her knuckles retarding the clubbing of her hands just enough to enable her to continue, agonizingly, to punch the keys on the cash register at Safeway), died at 55 in 1975. In March she had become
apathetic, had no appetite. She began calling in sick, saying that she'd go back to work the next day but never doing so. In pajamas and robe, with a crooked index finger she'd dial her call from the wall phone in the kitchen, then retreat to lie
on the couch all day. She said she had the flu. The old man and Diane came every few days to the old two-story house on Wharf Street in north Edmonds, which had a glimpse of the Sound between cedars and the large waterfront split-level owned by
a state legislator, and talk about what they were doing--cultivating their garden at their house on Grandview, playing in couples' golf tournaments, planning a summer trip to Europe. She brightened at their visits, smiled at what they had to say. She
herself said little more than that she felt as if her body was encased in cement. She wasn't vomiting or coughing, she was just inert, too tired even to smoke her Pall Malls. The old man would coax her to take a few bites of Jello or ice cream
by spoon-feeding her. She so welcomed his attention, his touch on her shoulder. His father could not get her to eat more than a bite of toast or poached egg, although she would drink the coffee he brought to her from the percolator that was always
plugged in. One day she banged her shin on the coffee table and her skin shredded and peeled away from the flesh. His father took her to the ER at Stevens where a doctor examined her and promptly admitted her to a double room. X-rays revealed that
she had advanced lung cancer. The pain came on within days. They put her in a private room and gave her morphine shots. The old man and his father visited her every night for a week. On what turned out to be the last night, they came
in to find his mother and a friend from work hugging each other, her friend appending consolatory pats. The tears in their eyes released a flood from the old man's as well, bringing a tiny, grateful smile to his mother's lips. When the friend left,
his mother called "Shot" to a nurse who had popped her head in, then resumed her forlorn mien. As the morphine took effect, his mother fell asleep, breathed very deeply, exhaled, then lay without inhaling for half a minute. The old man did not
know what a death rattle was. Could this have been one? At last she took another deep breath, exhaled, and lay seemingly breathless again. The old man's father looked at him and said, quietly, "Did you think she was gone?" "I did."
They remained in the room for half an hour. "I suppose we might as well go home," his father said. "Yeah." "She'll be unconscious for hours. They'll call us if...." "Yeah." "Why didn't you stay?" Diane said when he got home.
"She must be near the end." "She could hang on for quite a while, and I've got school tomorrow." At 3:00 a.m. his father called. "Wayne, Mom's gone," he said, and then sobbed gutturally. The old man had never heard such sounds coming from
him. "Dad, do you want me to come over?" "No, there's nothing you can do. I'll be all right." "Why don't you go over there?" Diane said. "He needs you. You need each other. You can take bereavement leave tomorrow."
She got out of bed and embraced him. He hadn't known how much he wanted to be held. He did not go over that night, but he did take bereavement leave the next day and met his father at Beck's Funeral Home to make the arrangements. More than
100 people crowded the mortuary chapel--coworkers and spouses, Music and Art Club friends and spouses, Sewing Circle friends and spouses, Edmonds merchants and spouses. A Presbyterian minister that Diane knew gave a restrained eulogy, outlining his mother's
life, she who believed in an undefined God and wanted everyone to go to church though she herself never did, and speaking of rewards to come. Although his father could play the piano for an audience, he was unable to speak to one. The old man,
however, had spent parts of the three days before the funeral preparing an elegy which he recited at the grave, the mourners hunched in heavy coats against a cold wind, after the minister's final brief prayer and before Steve Beck said "This concludes the
service, folks."
My mother lived in throbs of pain
Her tissues taut, her joints aflame
Yet that did not her love deter
And she gave us more than we gave her.
Now, earth, into your lap we place
This tough, tired lady
for your embrace
And make of you a last request:
Pillow her in eternal rest.
His father had died of pneumonia at 82. After the old man's mother's death, his father continued to live in the ramshackle house on Wharf Street for another
10 years. For a few months he actually seemed brighter, more alert, engaged. When the old man would telephone, he would often get, if not no answer, a busy signal. His father continued to teach piano to a few students at Mills Music in Bothell
and to play the odd dance gig, but increasingly clubs were dispensing with live bands in favor of cheaper DJs and recorded music. Most sold off their pianos; his father was forced to buy a portable keyboard and lug it along to the few jobs that he did
manage to contract. In time he seemed to lose confidence in himself. He began to let things go. He made only token efforts to keep his bathroom and kitchen sink clean and to sweep the kitchen floor, ignoring the powdery dander accumulating
on furniture and sills and the film from the two packs of Winstons he smoked daily that was gradually opaquing the windows. Once a year the old man Pledged and Windexed for him. Dropping by occasionally for a cup of coffee, the old man would renail
a loose plank he noticed on the deck or get up on a ladder to change a dead light bulb in an overhead fixture. When he found himself taking on the chores of weeding around the shrubbery and mowing the lawn, the old man began urging his father to sell
the house to an interested developer who wanted to demolish it and rebuild it. The thought troubled his father--to erase his house was to erase him--but eventually he came round to conceding the advantages of leaving the drafty, creaky place and moving
back to the Bowl. He bought a one-bedroom condo unit with a wide view in an older building on Alder on the hill above Old Milltown. Diane helped him pack. The old man rented a U-Haul and did most of the lifting and carrying. His
father worked less and less. He mostly stayed in the apartment, studying the activity on Puget Sound through binoculars, watching sports on TV, and reading the Seattle newspapers, The Reader's Digest and, although he seldom bought anything,
Consumer Reports. Diane invited him to dinner every two weeks. His father would regularly bring mail-ordered Omaha steaks for Diane to broil and she would always have prepared his favorite, angel food cake with chocolate frosting, for
dessert. After dinner the two men would watch a televised game together while Diane made phone calls or went for a walk. Other nights his father drove to the new China Palace at 5th and Walnut, to Clare's Pantry at 3rd and Main, to Portofino's
on Olympic View Drive, or to Jimbo's on 196th in Lynnwood and dined alone. To give them an activity in which they could spend time together, the old man offered to begin bowling with him in a Tuesday night league at Robin Hood Lanes in Westgate. His
father had been a bowler for years, but the old man had only bowled a few games as a lark with friends or with Diane. Immediately the competition excited him. The first few nights he used a house ball and, doing what came naturally, threw it with
a back-up spin. The rare strikes that he got were misfires pulled left that happened to back into the Brooklyn pocket. His father had his own ball and threw a skidding hook from an upright five-step hopping approach, braking suddenly to a stop
on a stiff left leg, not sliding into it, and landing the ball on the alley with a thunk. He averaged in the 150s. The old man read The ABCs of Bowling, borrowed from the library, and observed closely the various bowling styles
on display in the league matches, amazed at the skill and power of the surprising number of bowlers who averaged 200 or more. He bought a ball at the alley pro shop, had it drilled to fit his hand and weighted to hook. He decided on a simple four-step
approach, staying low with knees bent, starting one board left of center and throwing his ball over the second arrow to get it to break into the one-three pocket. Tempo was crucial for him. If he didn't rush to the line, if he started his arm swing
as he took his first step, if he kept his arm relaxed and released the ball smoothly at the end of the swing, if he kept his eye on the arrow, if he followed through, he could throw a hooking, working ball with fair speed and accuracy. He was thrilled
by the visual and auditory triumph of the powerhouse strike, pins blasting backward with éclat, was tantalized by the agony and ecstasy of the mixer, unexpected strikes, unexpected splits, pins crazily tripping up or flying past one another
on balls that were light in the pocket but driving hard, and galled by the pocket hit that left a solid 10-pin. The result of every shot could basically be explained by the laws of Newtonian physics--speed, spin, angles, and coefficients of friction--but
those laws could not be exploited to his satisfaction on every shot, and always there was the possibility that they would be subverted by quantum uncertainties. In his first year he averaged in the 160s and gradually improved until, in his fourth year,
he peaked at 190. He and his father would acknowledge each other's good shots wordlessly, with a smile, a nod, and a high five. The night in 1990 that their team won its lone league championship, the two of them bought their teammates a round of
beers and nachos in the alley's bar and snack shop. It was the only athletic triumph of his father's life, and he proudly displayed the championship trophy on top of his piano in his condo. In 1999, after they had dined together on Sunday and bowled
together on Tuesday, the old man's father called on a Saturday in February and said, "Wayne, I'm sick. I started coming down with something when I came home from bowling this week." He was coughing, shivering. He lacked the energy even to
dress himself and go out to eat. The old man brought him tomato soup and plain red Jello from the deli at the Westgate QFC, but he was unable to eat them. "Dad, you've got to see a doctor." "At 8:00 o'clock? It's too late. Take
me to Dr. Hope tomorrow." "You need help right now. I'll take you to Stevens." "I don't want to go to the hospital. I want to stay home." "We have to go, Dad." The old man dressed him, uneasy about helping him into his boxer
shorts. In the car the two were silent, listening to the Husky basketball game on the radio. When the ER doctor diagnosed pneumonia and ordered him to stay, his father panicked. "Let me go home, take me home, I want to go home," he
insisted. "Dad, you have to stay. It's the only way you can get better." "I can take medications at home. I promise I will." He kept trying to get out of bed, his gown flying open, but the old man restrained him. Finally,
nurses tied down his arms and inserted an IV and a catheter. The next morning, after glucose and saline and a steady dose of antibiotics, he was better--and even more bitter. He kept wiggling, agitating, trying to loosen his bindings. "Untie me.
Take me home. Let's go. I'll be all right. Let me up. I have to go to the bathroom." "Dad, you're on a catheter." "Amazing stuff, those antibiotics," the pulmonologist, Dr. Alan Barnett, said. But on the day after
that his condition began to worsen rapidly. They put him in the ICU. The old man visited twice a day. His father was morose. The old man told him that, when they did get the pneumonia cleared up, he would have to go into a rehab facility
for several weeks. "Oh, cripes," his father said, "it's not worth it." Those were his last words. Immediately he feigned sleep and invited death to overtake him. Two days later the doctor moved him out of the ICU and into a private
room, where they kept him sedated and waited another three days for him to die. About 30 people--a couple of adult former piano students, some fellow bowlers, some coeval Edmonds old-timers like the Hamiltons and the Andersons, and Zee and Janice,
Monk and his second wife Sandra, Diane and her sister Linda, and a few that the old man did not recognize--attended the funeral at Beck's. The old man employed a minister from a list provided by Beck's, furnished biographical details, and asked him to
present a religious-reference-free curriculum vitae. His father had, at the request of the old man's grandparents, occasionally filled in as substitute organist at the Christian Science Church, and he kept a copy of Science and Health
on the bookshelves that held his Digest collection, but otherwise had evinced no interest in religion. He and his father had not once discussed the subject, a fact about which the old man was exceedingly glad. When the minister finished,
the old man stepped forward to the lectern which sat on a table that also held his father's old portable hi-fi turntable, his metronome, and a plain white LP sleeve. He extracted from the sleeve a 1974 recording of the George Adams trio live at the Lake
City Elks and played "These Foolish Things," a five-minute track on which his father soloed extensively, lyrically and tenderly, as if from deep within, Teddy Wilson-like clean right hand single notes alternating with gentle two-hand chords, his tour de force,
the old man thought, tears welling. When the beauty died, two tears from his left eye having waterfalled onto his glasses as he bent to cradle the tone arm, he warbled for the dead one:
My father was a slim, shy man
Whose feelings you might
think he'd banned
Until his fingers touched piano keys.
Then how eager he was to please
To bob and shudder, shout and moan
And take us with him, no longer alone.
He set the metronome to ticking and invited the mourners to
pass by the open casket.
At the gravesite, following the minister's spare "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," a slight, acne-scarred woman with shoulder-length gray hair approached the old man. "Wayne, I'm Maureen. I was a friend
of your father's in the '70s. We met at the Lake City Elks when he was playing regularly there. Sometimes we'd have a drink together after hours, you know. Then we kind of drifted apart. But I was so glad to hear that recording.
It brought back many wonderful memories. I loved his solos on that old beat up grand they had. I didn't go there to dance, I went to listen to him."
As his stomach dropped, he thanked her for coming. So it had been an affair,
an infusion of passion, a remission from the quotidian, that had given his father a brief new life, even as, for of course she must have known, it stole his mother's from her.
He turned back toward the street and saw a waving, smiling
Sylvia, who had just pulled up in her sea green Prius, its homely aerodynamic forward slant proudly humble.
"Hi," "Hi," they said on the sidewalk, exchanging brief hugs and back pats.
She was wearing black cotton pants,
a black cloth trench coat, and sneakers with oversized soles for stability.
"I thought we'd just wander across the grass in a clockwise direction, note some of the names out of our past, visit our parents' graves, then sit for a few minutes by
the Columbarium," Sylvia said.
"Okay," the old man said. "'Wandering over the beautiful uncut hair and mothers' laps of graves.' Which is not, we must concede, growing among black folks as among white. We were--and are still,
in the Bowl--a very white enclave. Do you think there are any blacks at all buried in this cemetery?"
"I doubt it. Tree-cutting whites kind of took this whole lovely area from the few Native Americans that were here and then your grandparents
and mine arrived and unwittingly (let's give them the benefit of the doubt) erected economic and cultural barriers that discouraged people of color from moving in. At least we recognize our privilege now, and I know that the City Council has formed a
committee to promote diversity, but certainly well into the future we will continue to experience the incredible lightness of being here."
[The myth of the noble savage seems to be essential to many "enlightened" weltanschauungs today.
I would remind you that the sedentary Coast Salish hunter-gatherers who preceded us whites developed an inegalitarian society structured on the basis of hereditary nobility. They were patriarchal, sexist, and bellicose. They were territorial, kept
slaves, hoarded luxuries, and flaunted their wealth in ostentatious potlatches. Monk]
[No society is perfect. In any case, the perception of a few flaws in Native American tribes, who were so wonderfully in tune with their environment, in
no way justifies their brutal treatment and the criminal expropriation of their lands by whites. Charlotte]
"Well, you, maybe. Me, not too likely. I'm sensing time's winged chariot hovering near."
"I'm not your coy mistress,
you know."
"No, no, of course not. These days sex only embarrasses me. I was having trouble even 10 years ago, when Diane was alive. She would KY up expectantly, but an hour after taking Viagra my stomach was cramping, my bowels were
rumbling, and I had achieved only a flaccid sensitivity. Today, if I entered a Seinfeldian contest, I would win, hands up. I'm the condottiero of my condo. Or is that TMI?"
"There's no such thing as TMI. I'm interested
in everything. What I meant is that I'm not shy, I don't play hard to get, and I'm not owned by anyone. But is it just old age bringing time's Uber, or are you referencing your multiple myeloma?"
"Multiple myeloma. If you live
long enough--if something else doesn't kill you first--it's inevitably fatal. So in the offing, prior to my offing, are chemo and radiation, wretched retching, fatigue to the marrow. But at this moment I feel fine. I'm taking massive doses
of calcium and Vitamin D to strengthen my bones against the inevitable crippling onslaught of osteoporosis that the cancer produces. I had an infusion of Zometa last month to kill off some of the surplus of cancer-causing white blood cells that infest
my bone marrow and will have another in a couple of months. I have energy. I have a goal."
"To win gold at the Huntsman Senior Games!"
"Yes! Why don't you come with me?"
"Hah! Except for swimming, I've never cared
a thing for sports."
"You wouldn't have to care about the games. You could just immerse yourself in the beauty of the landscape--the mesas, the buttes, the iron-rich red cliffs, the lava fields, the white rock mountains, the canyons. And,
of course, in the pathos of aging, desperate old men casting themselves as characters in a theater of the absurd."
"For the moment, let's just immerse ourselves in the homely beauty of this landscape."
"Sure."
They stepped off the service
road and onto the uneven grass. Most of the older graves were marked by gray flat cement plates or gray stubby cement headstones with laconic inscriptions: names, dates, relationships ("mother, sister, friend," "brother, son, grandson"), husbands and
wives and sometimes children lying side by side beneath the simplest of home pages. Many of the newer ones were mini-monoliths: three-foot tall sculpted pieces of granite, obsidian, or terra cotta, personalized with inset colored lithographic headshots
of a smiling deceased surrounded by bas-relief etchings (a tennis racquet, a music staff with a treble clef and two measures of quarter notes), fraught with engraved outpourings ("God took her home, it was His will, but in our hearts she will live forever,"
"We miss, remember, and mourn you"), farewell hashtags from the bereaved. Cautiously, paying attention equally to their footing and to the graves, he sometimes grabbing her elbow, she sometimes grabbing his, one stumbling on the uneven two-inch concrete
curbing that outlined some of the graves, the other miscalculating a drop step into one of the many declivities produced by the earth's heaving here and settling there, weaving in and out among the maze of graves randomly while working clockwise generally,
the yard's only visitors at that hour, far from the madding crowd, all quiet except for the faint swish of tires on 100th to the east and the claxon caws of crows in the hemlocks to the west, noting plastic vases of plastic orange-red dahlias and plastic yellow
daisies, here and there a real rosebud decaying, and sporadic plantings of small, fading American flags, stepping over unraked clumps of yellow-brown grass recently sheered and seared by a weed-whacker, walking among millwrights and sawyers and merchants
whose premises they had frequented, and clerks and bus drivers and mechanics and teachers, like Joyce Koerner who in fifth grade had taught them about Hernando De Soto and Ponce de Leon and John Jacob Astor and Jim Bridger and read to them Caddie Woodlawn
stories, and like Teddy Albert, their young charismatic high school choir director with the wavy hair and the bold grin, his prominent bicuspids tangling with his incisors, and secretaries and housewives and helpmeets, past pioneers and the sons and daughters
of pioneers, many of whom had been active in the businesses and service clubs and city administrations that had defined community parameters in the '40s and '50s, past others who had blushed unseen, by the old man and Sylvia at least, mute Miltons perhaps,
nearing the Columbarium they finally came upon, within twenty feet of each other, the graves of George Clarence Adams, Margaret Elizabeth Adams, Edward James Vose, and Violet Gladys Vose.
"Ah, George and Maggie," Sylvia said. "I always liked
them. But your dad was really shy."
"Yes, he was. And that was okay with me. We had a good relationship because we both kept our distance. He tried jobs like selling cars and giving piano lessons to supplement his income as a
musician, but he was not very successful because it was so hard for him to marshal his rhetorical resources. He would wait for days in the showroom at Hopper Chevrolet for that special customer who had already made up his mind to buy. He could
successfully teach piano only to students who were self-motivated to practice. My mother finally got so exasperated that she took a job checking groceries at Safeway. She always wanted us to be richer and to have a better house and to be noticed
in the community. But to me his diffidence was a welcome quality. We could talk freely about sports and jazz, and neither one of us ever wanted to get personal or spiritual or metaphysical. I felt he was always proud of me, but he never pushed
me into anything, even music. Three different times I started in on piano lessons with him but I never lasted more than two weeks because I would neglect practice to go out and play ball with Gary and Monk and the guys."
"And your mother was always
so social and active. Kind of like my mother in that way. Going to Sewing Circle every week, Music and Art every month, serving as Cub Scout den mothers, arranging birthday parties for us kids and Halloween and Christmas parties for the adults.
Sometimes, if things got too quiet for her, my mom would lift the phone off the hook on the wall, give the operator a number to put through, tell one of her friends or sisters or cousins that she'd be dropping by, put both me and my brother on the front bench
seat of our round-backed '48 Ford so she could extend a protective arm in case she had to stop short, and away we'd go, the mothers chit-chatting and drinking coffee for a couple of hours, the kids left to figure out a way to play together."
"And your
dad?"
"Kind of in between your dad and Maggie and Vi. He drove bus for the STS for years, of course, and that was a good role for him. I rode with him sometimes in the summer--kind of an early take-your-daughter-to-work thing, I guess.
He had a little patter with the riders, he could tease and joke a bit while he steered with his left hand and clicked change from the coin changer on his belt with his right or reached up and ripped off a transfer from a pad clipped to the dashboard. He
said he always enjoyed the little interchanges. I could tell that he liked the power of calling out place names authoritatively--"Lago Vista, Wallingford"-- and that he felt he was performing a valuable service in getting people to their destinations.
But at home he was pretty quiet and it was my mom who ran things."
"Mine too. My dad was the titular head of the house. He kept the books, paid the bills. He loved cars, and although my mother thought it unnecessary, he bought a new
used one--strategically avoiding the heavy first-year depreciation, you know--every four years. A '50 Ford in '51, a '54 Studebaker in '55, a '58 Chevy in '59. He sold that one to himself, when he worked at Hopper's--one of his rare commissions!
But my mom was the family's engine. She organized the fishing, the bowling, the picnics, the trips to the Husky games. She was the one out looking at real estate--vacant lots, spec houses, recent listings for sale or rent. She was the reason
we moved eight times before I got out of college and went to live on my own. She was the one who declared when I was in grade school that I was going to go to college--which no one on either side of my family had ever done--and made my dad buy a $250
savings bond to finance my freshman year. And she was the one who decided to cash in that bond when I was in high school and apply the money toward a down payment on a new house with a peek-a-boo view on Hummingbird Hill!"
"Does that explain why
you commuted to U-Dub and I lived on campus? You had to live at home and work part-time to finance your own education, whereas my parents had just enough money to get me into a dorm?"
"Exactly. Fortunately, in 1957 we could get into the
U with just a 2.0 g.p.a., and tuition was only $60 a quarter. After graduating from high school, I sold my '49 Ford convertible for $500 and downscaled to a $200 '48 Chevy coupe, worked summers on the school district grounds crew, and during the school
year boxed groceries part-time at Safeway. I got by."
"I had it a little easier. I didn't have to work during the school year, but I chipped in $400 a year to my parents for my education. Summers I took a lot of baby-sitting jobs and
worked weekends clerking out at the fruit stand on Highway 99 near Lake Ballinger."
"So let me ask you, were our families typical, and if they were, were we actually living in a matriarchy wink-winking at the Biblical and cultural myth that father Ozzie
knew best while Harriet provided the true wisdom and grit and glue for her family? Were women sexploiting their husbands, offering them a missionary position (at least I can't imagine my mother exploring any other alternatives) twice a week to gain control
of the family?"
"Not at all! Don't give me that 'hand that rocks the cradle' business. Don't give me that Our Town nonsense about women voting indirectly by influencing their husbands before the 19th Amendment came along.
Any 'control' that women exerted in the '40s and '50s devolved to them circumstantially. Women assumed the responsibilities of child-rearing and insuring domestic integrity and coherence because men either abdicated them or delegated them. Women
had no real authority. They might have appeared to be leaning in, to be empowering themselves, to be surreptitiously assertive without asserting, to feel an inner potency and worth, but they were only doing what their husbands in effect commanded them
to do. They had little real authority at home--they were paper-tiger mothers--and none at all in the outside world. They were oppressed by a social construct whose administrators were men--who, incidentally, in a different way, were oppressed by
that construct, too. Men were not allowed to be tender, nurturing, expressive, emotional."
"They suffered from toxic masculinity?"
"Yes."
"And who was responsible for the construction of that construct?"
"Men themselves!
From the testosterone-dominant prehistoric caveman times, cartoon apeman types brandishing a club in one hand and dragging a nubile female in an off-the-shoulder animal skin outfit by her long ratty tresses in the other, from the original male-dictated division
of labor--men the hunter-warriors, women the child-bearers, home-fire-tenders, and berry gatherers--to the days of big-cheese farmers in the dell 'taking' wives ('hi-ho, the derry-o,' we all pat the bone), to captains of industry and finance, Dayly life with
father, Clarence laying down the laws of efficiency to Lavinia, and everything cheaper by the dozen, don't you know, down to George and Edward wearing the pants, Margaret and Violet the housedresses."
[Reader, I understand your vexation but hope that
by now you've willingly suspended your disbelief and become tolerant of the many lengthy polished pronouncements that come so trippingly off the tongues of Wayne's characters in various colloquies. Les lecteurtrices moyen sensible
must remember that this is a closet novel whose reality is virtual, at best. As Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby in perhaps the greatest of all sitcoms, the BBC's Yes, Prime Minister, says of his habit of putting his idiosyncratic stamp
upon (i.e., falsifying) the minutes of Cabinet meetings, the minutes should say what, upon deliberate reflection later, the Prime Minister would have liked them to say, so Wayne would have us accept as spontaneous the crafted Algonquian eloquence
of his characters. In real-life conversation, I well recall from our high school days, Wayne himself is quite the hemmer and hawer. Solveig]
"But haven't we made progress? Aren't things getting better for women? They can openly
love, live with, and marry other women. They have equal opportunities in the military--there are even some female generals. They are becoming scientists, engineers, surgeons, CEOs. We've had Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, Indira
Ghandi, Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi, Theresa May. We almost had Hillary Clinton. Women are becoming empowered."
"Wrong! The exceptions prove the rule--and that rule is still made by men. 'Empowerment' is a buzz word that
comes too glibly off the tongues of both men--even some Republican men!--and women. The implication is that women are responsible for their own oppression, that there is something wrong with them, that they need to improve themselves, that they need
to stop apologizing, be assertive, submit a compelling resume, negotiate a raise, fight for respectability. Any version of feminism based on a feel-good self-help philosophy misses the point and does more harm than good. "
"The point being?"
"That they are not to blame for their lack of power and relevance, the system is. Social constructs are based on warped, unfair assumptions about authority. Women remain drastically underrepresented anywhere that genuine power resides, especially
in business and politics. Hillary had no chance in 2016. The election was rigged--not by any specific person or group, any chicanery or skullduggery, not by the Russians or the FBI, but by a systemic oppression of the mind. Hillary was a
good candidate--experienced, tough, compassionate, dogged--but she was done in by a world view that dates from the caveman--or Adam and Eve, take your choice--that men were meant to rule."
"She did win the popular vote."
"But not the electoral
vote, and the electoral system was constructed by a male-created, male-dominated federalist society fearful of true democracy."
"And she did have some flaws. She was duplicitous, evasive. She danced around issues like Benghazi and
her private email server."
"Trump's flaws were infinitely greater. But he's a man; he gets to write off his debts."
"And there was racism--the revenge vote against Obama. And xenophobia, tribalism, nationalism, a changing economy
roiling the working class, Clinton fatigue, frustration with politics as usual, desire for change, a fresh face."
"All explained by adherence to the male power structure."
"Sylvia, such single-mindedness!"
"If by that you mean such determination
to cut through obfuscatory clap-trap to get at the truth, I agree."
"And such vehemence!"
"If by that you mean such self-respect, then I agree. I'm standing up for Maggie and Vi, who were not allowed to be free."
"They couldn't have
been happy in their traces? They couldn't have heard and responded to the call of the domestic?"
"Right! And American slaves were happy on their plantations, and prisoners are happy behind their bars."
[Amen, sister! Charlotte]
The old man groaned. "Sylvia, can we go over to the Columbarium and sit on the steps now? My sacroiliac is seizing up. I can walk for an hour, I can play softball for three hours, but I can't stand still for more than five minutes without
fidgeting in sciatic pain. I'm impressed with the way you maintain a poised, balanced stance."
"As you may have noticed, I have a solid base. I've got some heft all the way down. I'm grounded. Your legs are too skinny to support
your slumping, top-heavy torso."
They walked to the stairs beside the fountain, the old man gaining brief relief by leaning his right hip against a railing, and contemplated the sleek 10-foot tall sweeping marble-topped rectangular structure of granite-faced
niches, some engraved and occupied, some not. They studied a color-coded board demarking sections and prices, which ranged from $1,950 to $4,950, the most expensive ones centrally located at eyelevel, the cheapest ones relegated to the wings at floor
level.
"It's a nice idea," Sylvia said, "even though it reeks of classism. Saves space and encourages cremation, which is better for the environment than burial. That's where I'm going. I bought in on my last visit to town a couple of years
ago. I've found my last niche. My spot is right there." She pointed chest-high, just left of center. "Have you decided how you want to be disposed of?"
His sacro bit him again. "I'm definitely going to be cremated.
Now, do I want some kind of monument, some temporarily permanent record that I was here? So long lives this, and this gives life to me? Or do I want to be scattered in anonymity, like Diane?"
"I think there's something to be said for leaving
a visual reminder of your existence--for the sake of others, if not yourself. Haven't you enjoyed strolling through these archives today, remembering, rethinking, refining perspectives? Even if we stipulate that a marker won't mean anything to
you--that neither your body nor your soul any longer exists and neither will ever cohere again--couldn't it be meaningful to your younger acquaintances and to some of your former students who might pass through and be prompted to reflect upon their personal
histories, or something you said or did, some example you set? Or, failing that, at least be another useful memento mori? Wouldn't it be, in a way, rude to leave no trace of yourself, to vanish like a Snapchat?"
She smiled
and directed him to turn and sit on a debris-free step beside the clattering fountain. He roamed his eyes over the stiller town, smiled to think of rude forefathers out there as well, tried to visualize a woman giving birth astride a grave or a grieving
visitor lustfully honoring the Sabbath in that theater.
"Sylvia, did your parents die happy?"
"Well, my dad died suddenly of a heart attack at 65, but I'm sure that, as a Christian and a male, he found life to be meaningful and enjoyable.
My mom died at 85 in the Edmonds Landing assisted living facility on Dayton. By then her memory was pretty much gone--so let's say she had the happiness of an infant whose physical needs are taken care of by others. But in her prime, even though
she was oppressed in a way that she was either unable to see or unwilling to call out, her religion would have made it impossible to convince her that she was not happy. And, in spite of my objections to male domination, I get that."
"My parents--and
grandfather, too--decidedly did not die happy; they were happy to die. No raging against the dying of the light for them; they most kindly stopped for death."
"And for that you...what? Pity them? Resent them? Disdain
them?"
"Disdain? No, never, I have too much love for them, too much pity and compassion, no, wait a minute, pity implies condescension , who am I to offer it like alms, compassion is empathy, rapport, so too much pity, yes, but not in a good way,
I'm not entitled to it, and, hauntingly, not enough compassion, I should be a bigger person, and yes, you put your finger on it, a little bit of resentment, a haughtiness, why didn't they fight harder, unwarranted because I have not yet experienced the physical
and emotional pain, the readiness for death, that they did."
She nodded. "Yes. I wouldn't be too hard on them. The end does not necessarily unjustify the means. The denouement of the last act, even if tragic or tawdry or tepid,
does not render meaningless the experienced richness of the complications and ambiguities of Acts I through IV. Or, to put it in your sports terms, you can enjoy the vicissitudes of a game, all its ups and downs, your own good plays and errors, even
though you ultimately lose it. Being is its own excuse for being."
"Or possibly the only excuse for being?"
Sylvia looked away from him. Were they done?
"Sylvia, it's almost noon. Should we go have lunch
somewhere?"
"I suppose so. I am hungry."
"One of the waterfront restaurants? Arnie's? Anthony's? Fresh halibut, fresh salmon, fresh tuna? Or Spud, down by the tracks? Takeout fish and chips?"
"How
about Chanterelle?"
"Sure. An unpretentious but eclectic menu. In the century-old Western storefront building. Meet you there, then. Maybe we'll get lucky and find spots in the city parking lot behind the restaurant."
The old man followed Sylvia as she passed QFC, turned right on 104, and merged into heavy traffic. Some of the cars took the swooping bend sinister toward the ferry dock when the road Yed to provide two descents into town, but they went straight ahead,
passing tall firs and hemlocks and coasting down 5th, the Bowl and the dark Sea and Whidbey opening before them like an invitation. They slowed when they reached the old man's condo, traffic backing up as drivers and their passengers deliberated over
restaurants and darted their eyes in search of parking spots. Sylvia shrugged and waved and took the last remaining space when they pulled into the small city lot off 4th, and the old man smiled, turned left down the alley to Dayton, went to 3rd
and then almost to the City Park before he found an opening that he could nose into, enabling him to avoid the embarrassing fits and starts, tries and retries, of an octogenarian parallel parker. He locked the Santa Fe and jogged back to Chanterelle,
breathing easily. Sylvia waved to him from a dark corner table in the back as he came through the Main Street entrance.
"At least you got lucky," he said. "Every restaurant in town is busy at lunchtime these days. That's okay
with me, though. I think I need these kinds of noisy places. The clutter and clatter of life. The hurly-burly. Here you get a mix of tourists and locals, a lot of them seniors our junior looking for moderate prices. Remember
when there were just three diners in town?"
"Sure. Brownie's on 4th, Bud's Cafe and Tuson's Grill on Main."
"My family used to splurge once in a while and eat at Brownie's or Bud's. I would order a hamburger steak, well done, and
French fries. My parents would get chicken-fried steaks with mashed potatoes and gravy. They'd have coffee, I'd have milk. None of the entrees cost more than 95 cents. We never went to Tuson's because it was too pricey."
"My
family did go there now and then. Dad and Mel Tuson were good friends. Sometimes he'd walk over there in the afternoon for coffee and he and Mel would roll the dice to see who paid."
"I'm curious," the old man said after he had activated
the flashlight on his phone to help him decode the faint, blurry menu script and they had ordered from a not-quite middle-aged pony-tailed brunette waitperson wearing a black tee shirt and black slacks, the brie and pear quesadilla (about 400 calories, he
guessed, though not many of them protein) and a diet Coke for him, the Montrachet chicken salad with goat cheese and a vodka martini for her. "You say you meditate. You gaze inward. I remember seeing you on Sundays at Hughes Memorial sitting
with your parents in pews up front while I sat with Gary and Monk and the Maple Street guys in the back, and I know you were awed by Billy Graham at the Seattle Crusade in 1951. May I ask? Do you still believe in Jesus as your personal savior?"
She patted her hair with her left hand, gently traced one of its twisting Mobius strips. " My views have been tempered by the eastern religions over the years. I believe in some Christic experience suffused with Buddhist and Taoist elements.
I believe there's a universal draw to inclusion. There is a spiritual force outside us to which something inside us is compelled to respond."
"Ah, Sylvia, that inclusive 'us.' I don't think I've ever felt that compulsion."
"Wayne,
that's awfully hard to believe. I think you're in denial. But my own personal Jesus, you were asking? I think we all personalize our spiritual quest, whether we call it Christ, Lord, Teacher, Love, Mystic Law, The Tao, or the Ineffable.
We call out at moments, we ask protection, we wish blessing and love. We feel a pull. We crave completion. Atonement."
"So we're filled with longing and then fulfilled by belonging? Atonement has always scared me, Sylvia."
"What, the quiet knowing of oneness that is our true nature? Getting out of our own distracting, egotistic way?
"What I fear is that apart from my own distracting egotistic way there is no me. My distractions define me. They are my ballast.
I have to cling to them. If I let go, I disappear. I agree with the Buddhists that existence is suffering, but I cannot accept that the objective of life is to end suffering and that the way to end suffering is to cease clinging. To cease
clinging is to cease. The Buddhists posit that cycles of reincarnation eventually lead to nirvana, a state beyond desire, beyond suffering, a timeless realm where the concept of a distinct existence disappears, where no one is anyone and anyone
is no one. That does not work for me. I don't want to lose my identity in something larger than myself."
"Are you sure? I think we all seek refuge in authentic atonement."
He was having trouble hearing--the high ceiling,
the hard surfaces of the tables and the suspended metal light fixtures, the clinking of plates being gathered by the bus persons, the full house of chattering, gesticulating patrons. He raised his voice to encourage Sylvia to do the same.
"Most,
maybe, but the authentic me seeks refuge not in atonement but in independence. I am not blessed with a 'be' attitude. The mind of the authentic me doesn't want to be quiet. It wants to use today and yesterday to prepare for
tomorrow. It wants to churn, to multitask, to run a bunch of apps simultaneously. Rewind, fast forward. Rewind, fast forward. Keep those synapses snapping. The authentic me defines itself by its inevitable failures when it attempts to transcend
limiting expectations. The authentic me is always short-shrifting the instant, is never fully in the moment. The authentic me is always saving the jam for tomorrow's bread. I can remember the past, I can imagine the future, but I can't grasp
now because it's already gone. I find that whenever I try to cherish the moment I am conscious that I am losing that moment while simultaneously failing to use that moment to prepare myself physically or mentally or emotionally or financially
for the next one. To be in the moment is essentially to be longing for it, trying but failing to cling to it, in despair at its transitory nature."
"But every moment," Sylvia said, her volume rising in sympathy with his, "has an infinite
number of half-lives in which we can dwell. Now is all there is. As Wittgenstein said, eternal life belongs to those who live in the now. You make time run not by acting frantically but by slowing down. You sink into the moment; you
sync your heartbeat to the rhythm of now. There is no better preparation for the next moment than to be fully in this one. Wayne, if you are longing, desperately trying to cling, you are not in the moment. You may think you are, but you are
not. You are confusing living in the moment with living for the moment. You are not your thoughts. The thing is to observe them without either grasping for them or pushing them away. You can only live in
the moment if you are unaware of the moment. You are totally absorbed. Your self-consciousness evaporates. Be becomes finale of seem."
Their drinks arrived. Although the Coke came with a straw, the old man chose not to unwrap
it. They raised glasses in a silent salute.
"Yeah, I've always loved that line, and Sylvia, I do see how what you say can be possible--and wonderful--at times. In a dark theater rapt in a movie and wrapped in surround-sound. Immersed in
the labyrinth of a crossword or cryptic puzzle. Lining one into the gap and racing around the bases--nothing else exists at that moment. And basketball--the fluidity of my favorite game! Pivoting, jumping, gliding, sliding. Mindful
of where you are, of where everyone else is, sensing where and when to move, no distinction between action and thought, thought unmediated by language. Active but at peace. In your body but detached from it. Okay, I'll concede that.
But, although you seem to be detached from your body, it be not detached from you, and it keeps reminding you through muscle fatigue and shortness of breath and jarring collisions that you are indeed an other, apart from all others.
It also reminds you that without its electro-chemical system there is no you. You are an other but also not other than your body. As you age, your autonomic system without your permission begins to take a little time off, its
internal housekeeping becomes less meticulous, you need iron and vitamins, you begin to outsource your production of testosterone or estrogen, your immune system begins to see you as a terrorist, your cancer is forming, your arteries are filling with plaque.
The authentic me is a briefly useful fiction whose tale ends idiotically in a narrative violation as the body disintegrates and the self vaporizes. Lose yourself to find yourself, we are so often told. I cannot agree."
Sylvia raised an eyebrow.
"So, Macbeth, how would you put it: to loose yourself you must bind yourself?"
"Maybe--if I thought a paradox were any kind of a solution! A true paradox is an unsolvable conundrum, like Zeno's Achilles never able to catch a tortoise that's been
given a head start or an omnipotent God making a stone so heavy He's unable to lift it. It is not an ersatz transcendence. If a senior playing softball is like a dog walking on its hind legs, then a paradox may be the last refuge of a scoundrel."
"Wayne, I'm not sure whose words you are alluding to in that odd little modus ponens--Pepys, Ben Franklin?-- oh, it's Dr. Johnson, isn't it?--but clearly you are bent upon looking through every glass starkly. You are not a body of atoms,
you are consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being an organization of atoms merged with the all, of the world, not looking at the world. Your sense that there is a you looking out through your eyes at a world
that is separate from you is indeed a fiction. There is no stable self that is carried on from one moment to the next. Spirituality is the moment-to-moment realization that the conventional sense of self is an illusion, and it is achieved through
meditation. Meditation is simply paying attention. Meditation is living in the moment. The point is that if you truly stay in the here and now you will not experience the fear of losing this moment or of being unprepared for the next.
You will simply be. To quote Rumi, 'You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck.'"
"To me that kind of paradoxical Rumination is just an easy escape. Paradox is where you go when
your dreams bang against adamantine facts and logic."
She leaned forward. "Or is paradox where you go when you divine that appearance is not reality? When you have the insight that a person is not a self-sufficient entity and does not exist
as the controller of the body and the mind? When you quit clinging to dualism? When you realize there is no distinction between phenomena like thoughts and emotions and the mind-awareness which reflects them? When you see immediately into
the reality of things unhampered by heuristics? When you see that nothing exists essentially? That you need only let your ego go? Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. You cannot achieve happiness unless you're not looking for
it. To improve your performance, stop thinking about it. If something is bothering you, move toward it rather than away from it. To make the most of time, lose track of it. Know that you don't know. Don't just do something, sit there.
Keep coming back to the now. To ecstatic equanimity, rational exuberance, detached engagement, relaxed intensity. These paradoxes are reality. To deny them is to live in alienation."
"Alienation, it seems to me, is reality," the
old man said.
She leaned backward. "A self-willed illusion, I'd say."
They paused to sip their drinks. The old man dabbed his napkin at the sweat that had begun to pool on the table from his overly-iced Coke. Sylvia, using only
her pretty teeth, cleaned the toothpick of its olive and chewed it slowly.
"So meditation leads to spirituality and spirituality leads to what? Serenity? Bliss?"
"Yes. Ridding the mind of the distractions of thoughts leads to
atonement."
"And atonement is by definition a state of serenity or bliss?"
"Yes. Existential suffering is entirely the product of your thoughts. Negative feelings like anger, panic, or depression are mere illusions that vanish when
you examine them closely. That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. Awareness is the antidote to suffering. By rewiring your brain through meditation you can become free to return to your right
mind. Free to become one with what is. You can keep bouncing back to bliss."
"And there is no possibility that maybe you have deluded yourself?"
"No. The delusion is the self."
"And emptiness is fulfillment!
Sylvia, I am just too superficial and literal-minded to accept that. I can stop by woods, but I can't fully enter them. My little force does think it queer! To me, emptiness is loss. I'm a clinger, a clutcher, a grasper, trying to resist
the emptying out that accompanies age by keeping current on the one hand and by inviting memories to refresh themselves on the other. My memories and my thoughts are extraneous, illusionary distractions? From what? Perhaps so on those occasions
when I am trying to maintain a rigorous, disciplined train of thought, but what is to be gained by always defaulting to the mindlessness of mindfulness? That's serenity? That's bliss? Or is it dementia? Is it death? Sometimes
for me bliss is just riding the stream of consciousness, seeing where it takes me, even into painful places, playing with language and memory, consciously dreaming, ego intertwined with id, polylinguistically perverse. My thoughts break down barriers
and, briefly, liberate me. That's as close to dolce far niente as I can get."
"But that doesn't last, either, does it? And it's more diversionary than satisfying, isn't it? The human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering
mind is an unhappy mind. The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment cannot be a matter of having fleeting experiences. Real freedom must be coincident with normal waking life. It grows from direct insight into the unconditioned reality that lies
behind all manifest phenomena. When you look closely for 'I,' the feeling of being a separate self will disappear."
Beaming, their waitperson appeared tableside with a plate in either hand. "Here we go! Careful with the quesadilla--that
plate's hot. Ground pepper on the salad? Enjoy! Can I get you anything else? Refill on the Coke? Another martini? "
"Yes."
"Yes."
And she was off.
The old man mopped up more condensation
from his glass. "So I think, therefore 'I' am not? It seems to me that pure consciousness apart from the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching is a spiritual fantasy. The mind is not independent of the brain."
"But consciousness is the light by which the contours of the mind and body are known. Consciousness itself is free. We need to break our identification of the self with thought and allow the continuum of experience, pleasant or unpleasant,
to simply be as it is. Through meditation we seek to recognize that which is common to all states of experience. It isn't a matter of thinking new thoughts. It is easy to think that something like this martini--which, incidentally, is delicious--is
just an appearance in consciousness. It is another matter to recognize it as such prior to the arising of thought."
She emptied her glass.
"And is the martini helping you to expand or alter your consciousness?"
"Of course.
And I'm hoping the next one will open yet another door to reality."
He smiled. "Diane and I used to enjoy wine most every night--something reasonably complex but affordable. And I still do. I'm excited by the sensory thrills
that wine can provide. There's something synesthetic about it. You can have fun pretending for a moment that you are tasting color, smelling feeling. Diane would occasionally have two, but I generally stop at one glass. I cling to Apollonian
clarity, fear Dionysian ecstasy. It's just too scary to feel myself beginning to dissolve and flow."
"Scary? You should try LSD."
"Mmm. This brie-pear thing is soft and good. Sour cream, sweet acid. You have?"
"Yes." She scraped some goat cheese onto her fork, then stabbed through a couple of spinach leaves into a toasted walnut. "I became friendly with a painter whose so-so surrealistic works I was showing, an accountant by day but an adventurer
by night who got me into yoga and tantric sex and then LSD. When you're on acid, your brain is flooded with signals that crisscross between the various regions. It mixes up the sensory modalities, muddling you with the things you see, feel, taste,
hear. In certain areas of the brain activities get ramped up, in others they get suppressed. A portion of what you feel as your self overflows into the outer world, into objects, which begin to live, to have another, deeper, meaning. You
and the pizza you are eating are no longer separate entities. You are the pizza and the world beyond the windowsill. You lose track of which is which. As the ego dissolves, you experience the oneness of all living things. It
is sublime. Time dilates. You feel great. You feel eternity in the moment. You feel atonement. Unless you don't."
"Here we go!" Their waitperson swooped in with fresh drinks, set them down, mopped up the sweat
puddles in front of the old man, carried off the used glasses.
"You had some bad trips?"
"Shattering. Terrifying hallucinations that I thought were real--bugs and snakes coming at me, streets churning and melting. One time I had the
illusion that I could fly. After a few of these I realized that this was self-torture and was not for me. Psychedelics can open up forms of consciousness that lie beyond rational consciousness. They can raise you to new heights of awe and
understanding--or plunge you into the abyss. For me they were just too risky and painful. Meditation is a safer route to waking up from the dream of the self. The painter and I did not stay together, but I have remained committed to meditation."
"It's a key ritual in your 'religion'?"
"Yes. Meditation and prayer."
"Prayer?"
" Not prayers of supplication, not prayers to a god, but the unspoken, ecstatic outpouring of love and joy, a silent speaking in tongues, when I feel
myself to be at one with what is. My personal religion has long been done with any obsession with 'sin,' and 'cross,' and 'suffering.' There is far too much man-made, male-dominant culture masquerading as religion. Un-Christian Christianity.
Un-Muslim Muslimism. Jews who have wandered far from how the chosen are to love. Rules, creeds, orthodoxies are not a cup of water to offer someone thirsty. Saving, being saved, should be the beginning of our conscious relationship with cause
and effect--our growing toward the light. Not amassing wealth and power. Not dominating. Not forcing. Not proselytizing. Not colonizing. And definitely not enslaving."
"I'm with you on the proselytizing, colonizing,
and enslaving, but striving, seeking, winning--these are the very essence of life. Nature's red, in truth and law. Doesn't a basic irritability underlie all living substance? To live, mustn't both animals and plants interact with and
dominate their part of the ecosystem, however small it may be? Mustn't animals eat each other or plants, and some plants eat animals?"
"So your motto is prey, eat, live?"
The old man laughed and raised his dripping glass in salute.
"Yes! Because even the glorious lilies of the field, though they don't spin, are actually toiling madly all day to feed themselves through photosynthesis, and their little roots are competing with alien roots to take in water and other nutrients
as well. Don't viruses like Sars and Mers and H1N1 parachute into our apertures on aerosols and try to set up camp in our cells? Don't the very bacteria in our guts constantly jostle for supremacy? All life forms fight to exist, and all defend
their own territory with things like weapons, or thorns, or hard shells, or poisons, or camouflage. Don't most kinds of reproduction demand some form of domination and submission? Doesn't even the apparently amiable splitting of a cell imply some
violence? Isn't it true that for most living things to survive, some other living thing must die or at the very least be exploited? Mustn't life wrest its existence from its environment?"
"To what end?"
"To a dead end. Because
(a) you'll often fail and (b) even if you succeed you are compelled by a biological imperative to continue striving until you and the essence of you--your memories--die. There's just one damn thing after another. You never achieve a final victory.
And--okay, I see I'm going to have to grant at least one paradox--even though it ends your suffering, dying is the worst failure of all. That's the human condition, which is unacceptable to most of us--a fact that is also part of the human condition.
If we as individuals are mortal, and if our universe and therefore our species is mortal, as the second law of thermodynamics implies, our life does not matter, but we must pretend that it does in order to keep on, although keeping on, Godoting-- in either
quiet desperation or in raucous aspiration-- is pointless."
"Wayne, this is stupid stuff--and I'm not just saying that because you're eating your vittles fast enough and I'm melting into my martini! You, the self-proclaimed inventor
of the HSQ, keep trial-ballooning these nihilistic ideas that verge on horseshit--but, fortunately, the vodka vitiates your passive-aggressiveness for me."
"Martinis do more than Milton can?"
"Sometimes! If life's a bitch and then you die,
never to exist again in any way, shape, or form, would it not have been best for you never to have been conceived?"
"One passive-aggressive quibble before you proceed. There was no 'I' before conception. 'I' wasn't hanging around somewhere
waiting to be conceived and given human form. 'I' did not exist until one of my father's sperm cells, after the big bang of his ejaculation, willy-nilly, who knows why (size, shape, Usain Boltish quick-twitching flagellum, serendipitous position
at the head of the pod when the gun went off?) penetrated what happened to be my mother's egg cell of the month. And 'I' would not have come into existence had any other sperm cell from what turned out to be my father penetrated any other egg cell from
what turned out to be my mother. In the strictest sense, it couldn't have been best for 'me' never to have been conceived, because 'I' wasn't. 'I' wouldn't have been happier if 'I' had not been born. 'I' would not be better off if 'I' had
not been born."
"It's a moot point, Wayne."
"So let's moot it."
She leaned forward again. "No, I mean you might be technically correct but that's of little relevance to my argument."
"Which is?"
"If you truly believe
that existence is meaningless, you should have long ago asked yourself what Camus called the most fundamental of existential questions--'Shall I commit suicide?'--answered in the affirmative, and done yourself in. If you truly believed, like David Benatar,
the anti-natalist avatar, that to bring a child into a world of suffering is immoral, you would not have sought so fervently to conceive with Diane. Your actions belie you. You don't have the guts to be a nihilist or even an Aristotelian who truly
excludes the middle between belief and nihilism. Your seeking, doing, and making imply that, at the very least, even if you are not eternal, and even if you do not achieve transcendence, your life has value in itself. You have a self capable of
having experiences, something that the never-conceived never will."
"Quibble: there are no never-conceived."
"Again, moot."
"But you are favorably contrasting our existence with nothing. There can be no contrast because there is
no middle to exclude. You provide an A, existence, but no non-A."
"The non-A is nothing."
"Yes."
She slouched backward. "Wayne, if you're going to Abbott-and-Costello me, then I'm done."
"No, please, Sylvia, sorry. I
love to hear you talk. My point is that we have no way of knowing whether this existence is meaningful or not because we cannot experience non-existence."
"Regardless, I am confident that nothing, in this context, is something--and that
we do experience existence as rewarding. We relish sensual pleasure, we enjoy emotional relationships with people, we have the satisfaction of exercising our mental and physical powers in all kinds of tasks and projects. In all of these
ways we feel ourselves become a part of the whole."
"But aren't all of these also ways in which we sense ourselves apart from the whole? There is that rush of life's phenomena, the blooming and the buzzing, which I readily admit I still
crave and cling to, but what about our experience of sensual pain, our all-too-often bad relationships with people, and the frequent frustration of discovering that our mental and physical powers are not up to the tasks we put them to? Do these not lead
to alienation from self and world?"
"Not if we see that they are all parts of the whole, a synthesis of A and non-A, a higher middle ground. The meaning of life is to give life meaning."
"Please! Let us put an end to paradox!"
"Sorry, can't be done. We must embrace the fictions of paradox as the answers to the absurdity of life. You're more than a little stunted in your spiritual growth. You remind me of that Stephen Crane creature in the desert, holding his
heart in his hands and eating of it. If asked if it was good, you would reply..."
"'It is bitter--bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart.' True. So true."
"Whereas I believe in altruism.
I believe we should eschew bitterness and savor love with open minds and open hearts. Mindful people are more joyful, more serene, more attuned to a shared humanity. In their caring for others they are rewarded with the release of serotonin and
dopamine in the nucleus acumbens, imbuing them with the wonderful sense that life is worth living. Merging with something greater, being in the presence of enormous beauty and goodness, is heavenly. To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence
within one's daily existence."
"So altruism is actually an expression of selfishness."
"Look who's resorting to paradox again!"
He shrugged. "You're right. Guilty."
"But sorry, not sorry?"
"Yes. Because
I believe that it is for selfish reasons that humans feel love and behave ethically. In the overall scheme of things, we and our genes have a better chance of surviving if we don't colonize, if we don't enslave, if we practice the Judeo-Christian Golden
Rule and the Confucian Silver Rule, treating others with love and respect because we wish to be treated with love and respect, refraining from harming others because we wish not to be harmed. The release of the feel-good hormone oxytocin when we behave
ethically is an evolutionary development. We have, over eons, learned to reward ourselves with it when we do the 'right' thing. We become addicted to it, we behave in ways that give us our fix, and gradually our survival rate improves. We
have developed a compassion gene to further the success of our selfish gene. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature has a bootload of footnotes documenting the decline of violence and mayhem through the ages. Disguised as altruism,
our selfishness rewards us with longer and less painful lives. And with that, as we conclude our day together, you trying to find one more drop in your martini glass, me eating my heart out, I'd like to say that, in spite of the occasional dumpling of
horseshit that each of us has dropped, I have truly enjoyed our lunch. Certainly the Coke's caffeine helped, but for me the analytical sparring spurred my pulse, released a surge of adrenaline, and heightened my awareness of myself as a being apart.
I loved the competition. I'm wired!"
"And certainly the martinis have helped, but for me our talk, our analytical sparring, has paradoxically served as meditation, leading me to feel again the bliss of atonement. I'm all dopamined up, and
for that I thank you."
"The only problem is that in the hours and days to come, my delight will give way to rue, the old esprit de l'escalier--why didn't I say this, why did I say that?--and I will be haunted at odd moments by my failures.
Whereas you, I imagine, if you sense the encroachment of any rueful thoughts at all, will simply peer at them closely and find that they were never there."
"I expect so."
Their waitperson appeared tableside and picked up the old man's plate,
clean except for a couple of fugitive pastry flakes. "How was it? Everything okay? Finished with that salad, ma'am? Coffee? Dessert? Blueberry cobbler today."
The old man and Sylvia looked at each other.
"I think we're fine," the old man said.
"Two checks, please," Sylvia said. "We'll go Dutch. Or is that a slur?"
"It could be. Linguistic usage changes with the times. Originally I think the expression referred unpejoratively
to Dutch doors that divide down the middle, but now it might imply selfishness or cheapness on the part of the Dutch. Best not to use it. I'm sure that Charlotte--and for good reason--would accuse us of being 'tone deaf' if we did.
[Damn
straight! Charlotte]
As kids we All-Stars used to squabble up and down Maple Street, accusing each other of being Indian givers, of welshing on a bet, of gypping somebody or jewing somebody down. Wouldn't do that today.
No way, Joe. And certainly just remove 'niggardly' from your spoken and written vocabularies, because too many people know only what the word sounds like and not what its original meaning is."
Smiling gamely, their waitperson looked at the
old man confusedly.
"Separate checks," he said. "And everything was great. Thank you."
Two days later, he posted on his blog:
Epitaphs for the Digital Age
Wandering through the Edmonds Cemetery recently, lonely as a Wordsworthian cloud and feeling an Ishmaelian November in my soul, I was first startled and then oddly cheered by the changing nature of today's tombstone inscriptions.
Apparently many are now taking the electronic revolution all the way to their graves, as evidenced by the following examples:
As F8 would have it...
From the Cloud to the clods
What app from Hell did I mistakenly download?
Not what
I anticipated when I hit Control-Alt-Delete
I suppose no one wants to join my Group now
I was counting on McAfee to prevent this
Any chance it's just buffering?
Wish I could say I'll be back in a GIF
I should have left a
trail of Cookies
Is it too late to be Saved?
[Talk about whistling past the graveyard, Wayne! Gary]
[Yes! I think this might score a 90 on the HSQ. Carolyn]
[Wayne, how do these mock epitaphs even grow out of our
visit to the cemetery? I think they trivialize our experience as well as the lives of those buried there. Moreover, they are all laments, regrets, ruings, plaintive expressions of your fear of death. They are pseudo-hip. They belie
your thoughts on the lives and deaths of your parents and grandparents. In spite of the many pleasures we experience on earth, few want to go through this life again. In the interest of fairness, here is another take:
No more passwords to
remember
At last I'm spam-free
I'll never be hacked again
I've Escaped
I'm in my Favorite Place.
Res(e)t In Peace! Sylvia]
[Wayne, I do enjoy the topics you bring up for discussion but often doubt your sincerity.
You decry the invoking of paradox as a kind of weaseling, then fall back upon it when you encounter a contradiction you can't resolve. You say that nature is red in truth and law but ignore the benevolent intricate symbiotic interdependence to be found
in nature's ecosystems. You celebrate the rush of life but then conclude that consciousness of it leads to alienation. You quibble over moot or inconsequential points. Cavalier caviling seems to be becoming an emergent feature of your lex life.
Dave]