Month: April 2015

Baseball season once more. Life begins anew.

I heard a story on HPR about a father and son at Wrigley Field. The home of the Chicago Cubs is hallowed ground to baseball fans, the more so, perhaps, because the Cubs haven’t won a World Series in over a century.

The father was showing his son how to keep score on the scorecard in the center of the program. The reporter speculated that the father’s father had done the same years before. That image transported me to Sicks’ Seattle Stadium, where “Aunt” Jane Harris’ alligator purse was a lucky charm for the Rainiers, and my father taught me the symbols of scorekeeping at games in the 1950s. I have never forgotten how.

A baseball stadium evokes good times past, games and players of old, the warm and comforting sense of familiarity. For me, and for other lovers of the game, a baseball stadium is a special place.

A certain kind of church, one with a large pipe organ and stained glass windows (think the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.) is often another such place. So are, invariably, college campuses, whether in the U.S., England or Japan.

At age 18, I sailed on the Semester at Sea, circumnavigating the world. Many days I stood on deck gazing at the horizon, overwhelmed by a sense of smallness and a sense of peace, at oneness with the universe. I was on a ship—the place obviously moved—but that didn’t matter.

I asked Judy about any place that stimulated her senses in some special way. She went to the day and hour that the heat of summer breaks, the first hint of fall chill whispering its way into being. Her sense of special place was many places. The feeling of peace was the same.

Going into a stadium, a church with a great organ and stained glass windows, a college campus, a beach facing the horizon? Count me in on those trips.

My mother and I enjoy a ritual. Whenever I visit her in La Mesa, we find an afternoon for me to drive us to a particular parking lot at Sunset Cliffs, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We park, roll down the windows to catch the breeze and the sounds, and we watch. There’s a lot to watch so we stay quite a while. Then we drive to the other side of Point Loma, get a sandwich and go to the end of Shelter Island to eat our sandwiches and watch ships coming into the harbor, pelicans patrolling, dogs walking their owners, whatever passes.

Our watching time nurtures remembering time, too. Mom has lived most of her 94 years near salt water. She especially remembers time past at the seashore.

We both hold those times at those places as special, too.

A Somerset Maugham short story tells of an Englishman who worked his professional life in Hong Kong. He loved the liveliness of the city, felt comfortable in its foreign-ness which was tempered by its British-ness. On one level, he would have been content to live out his years there.

But, there was a nagging feeling that he needed to return to England to retire. More and more, he reconciled himself to going home, and soon enough, going home was the most attractive alternative.

So, he went. Over time, his life in England lost the allure he had imagined it to have whilst he was in Hong Kong. The dreariness of the weather depressed him. He reminisced about the liveliness and foreignness of Hong King. Inducements for him to stay in England disappeared, despite his high expectations about going home to England.

He resolved to return to Hong Kong. On his way, he stopped in Vietnam. First this attraction and then that one kept him from completing his return to Hong Kong. If anyone asked when he would be leaving for Hong Kong, he would reply “soon.”

He died in Vietnam because he feared being disappointed by Hong Kong in the way England had disappointed him. Rather like, you can’t fail if you don’t try.

Special places that satisfy the senses are wonderful. And, there is always the risk that, one day, you will return to that place and not feel what you have always felt before.

A friend once quipped “expectations are resentments under construction.” Perhaps we would do well to savor the moments when our places satisfy our senses, be pleasantly surprised each time that they do, knowing that, one day, the magic might not appear.

Even at Wrigley Field.

April 30, 2015

The frenetic energy of the players in Rent pauses as some of the singers ponder dignity and whether anyone will care when they are dead and gone.

In similar fashion, the artist J.M.W. Turner, in the movie, Mr. Turner, laments that his ultimately fatal heart ailment will condemn him to obscurity.

I’m not sure when I began scanning the obituaries on a more regular basis. The old joke suggests that I do so to be sure I’m not listed. Sometimes I read the longer ones entirely, those that chronicle lives that included particular achievement or accomplishment.

The death of Charles Schulz years ago made me feel a part of me had died. I did not know him, but I read Peanuts every day. From the time of Schulz’s death on, I could only read repeats, unless someone took up the pen and ink and carried on. The creator was gone. So was part of my daily life. I felt like some micron of me was dead.

Silly, of course. Countless others who have contributed in some way to my life have died since. I don’t mourn every passing as I did Schulz’s. But some. I am made up of lots of microns. I can survive many more deaths like this.

I have survived more immediate deaths: my grandparents, my father, my uncles, colleagues, children of colleagues, dear friends. Recently, the love of my sister’s life died, before age 70, younger than the statistical norm for male deaths in the U.S. Ill, and in a rehab center, he died wearing a snazzy shirt, sooner than expected though he, and we, knew that his illness would claim him sooner rather than later.

Was the snazzy shirt—a colorful Hawaiian shirt—his claim to dignity? Like the heroine in Cabaret would choose “when I go, I’m going like Chelsea,” did he choose to dress up for his going? Did he know the when of his dying and determine to cross over looking smart and feeling proud?

People care that he has died. He’s avoided that apprehension of the Rent players. There’s talk of some lasting memorial of his life, a form of immortality. As long as we who knew him live, he enjoys one form of immortality. We’re talking about something that would outlast us. I have wished before that every soul leaving this earth would be remembered by more than a footprint on the shifting sands of time.

I can’t do anything about the who-will-care part for those I don’t know. I think anyone who dies without someone caring is the utmost tragedy of death.

I have also wondered about dignity and death. A movement for assisted suicide is called Death with Dignity, asserting for the dying the right to determine how and when to end their lives. The usual image of the nearly-departed is one of pain muted by palliatives, being bed-ridden serviced by tubes, monitored by technology.

It must be a chore for a person to find and assert dignity in that tableau. I hope people do.

Dying a hero’s death on the battlefield has always commanded high status among the ways one can die. Nathan Hale bravely proclaimed “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” just before being hanged by the British. Millions of us have benefitted in the course of U.S. history from the willingness of men and women to “give their last full measure, “ as Lincoln proclaimed.

We owe such as these. We honor them. We memorialize them. In our honoring, we dignify. We can hope that, if they were conscious in their last moments, they thought about something more than their torn bodies and oozing lifeblood.

The “Renters” faced AIDS. Their literary ancestors in La Boheme confronted tuberculosis. The physical nature of those deaths is not pretty, either. Their anxiety about dignity might be shared by many of us who, were we able to choose, would opt for the way the Gambler in Kenny Rogers’ song, cashed in his chips; asleep. You can’t fall dead if you are already prone. No fear. No pain. You simply don’t wake up. Did the Gambler die with dignity?

Truth is, dignity is a state of mind. No one can rob anyone else of his or her dignity. I do not know when, how, or where I will die. I hope I do so proclaiming “I’ve had a good run.”

Maybe I will have the chance to put on a snazzy shirt—a Hawaiian one.

Daniel E. White

April 15, 2015

A while back, an Adult Development PhD encouraged the audience to think of their memories like the fortune-telling 8-ball we played with as kids.

“The answers are all in there,” she said. “It just takes longer for them to reach the window.”

Most of her audience were in their late 40s. Our speed-to-the-window would have been measured in nano-seconds (which we did not know about at the time). Her message was less relevant to me then.

Nowadays, that ball is a reassuring image. My window could be cleaned, though, to clear the fuzz.

I recalled the 8-ball recently when reading a story about German researchers who concluded that one reason many older people can be slower to recall facts or learn new information is that their brains are so stuffed with accumulated knowledge, not because of supposed inevitable cognitive decline.

“The brains of older people do not get weak,” Michael Ramsicar of Tubingen University said to the UK’s The Independent. “On the contrary, they simply know more.”

Ramsicar went on to observe that computers with less information stored in memory often retrieve requested data more quickly while machines packed with information are slower.

I worried at this point in the report. Computer chip-makers compete over speed of retrieval. Fine, two computers of the same make and model may have different retrieval speeds according to the volume stored. But, inevitably, there will be newer, faster models.

I calmed myself with the thought that capacity in the older computers—and me—does not disappear. The speed is just slower. Or so the researchers assert.

One study cited by the Germans noted research tests that involved trying to remember pairs of unrelated words. They concluded that older people often achieve a higher performance because they have a “better understanding of language” and are, as a result, “naturally resistant to nonsensical pairings.”

I hope the researchers are in their 30s or 40s so that they cannot be accused of age bias.

People of a certain age, do you realize what this means? We know stuff, lots of it. We naturally resist nonsensical pairings, because we understand language better. Our tip-of-the-tongue moments are mere manifestations of brains bursting with information.

Take that, you young whippersnappers who think you know everything. Your incessant “text-speak” will lead to difficulty down the road resisting nonsensical pairings! Or not. You might just become older, like us, with all of the attendant advantages of age.

Senior moments as battle ribbons. The world turned upside down, just like you had to do with the 8-ball to get an answer. If we only knew that it was true.

We seniors fret about memory. We joke about premature senility, nervous because we have friends and acquaintances who are senile for real. Maybe we subconsciously worry about our prospects in terms of the dreaded Big A—Alzheimer’s.

We scrub the bad stuff from memory as much as possible and use shared memories in conversations with old friends to recapture treasured feelings. At the same time, we try to avoid living so much in the past that we lose the present. Or bore the young people.

Not being able to find the car keys is a momentary nuisance. Inability to experience again the joy of a given moment in the past is a treasure none of us wants to lose.

Cognitive scientists understand so much more about the human brain than before. What they are learning has stimulated the development of products and activities designed to maintain and increase memory. That’s good. I have friends who have bought the most widely advertised commercial plan available, and swear by its effectiveness.

One author cited research that touted regularly learning new things as the best way to insure active memory remaining alive and accessible. In a nutshell, this neurological exercise program stimulates the development of neurons and revitalized synapses and brain connections. Use it or lose it. One of the suggested activities was to learn a new language, “like Italian.” If that prompts a return to Florence, sign me up.

The Germans might be right. If so, imagine if someone could invent a memory-scrubber that ditched what you didn’t need or want, maintaining brain capacity levels. Better yet, a memory stick, to store the possibly useful but not necessarily first-rate recollections.

If they are incorrect, maybe brain scientists will find how to save the memories we subliminally fear losing.

In the meantime, I’ll keep the 8-ball oiled and clean the window. Capiche?