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One of my favorite Charles Schulz cartoons involves the little boy Linus, who’s always sucking his thumb and carrying around his security blanket dragging on the floor, in the first frame demanding that Charlie Brown read him a bedtime story, which Charlie Brown does not want to do notwithstanding Linus’ insistence.
“Read me!” “Read me!” “Read me,” demands the bedtime resistant Linus, whose persistent and annoying cries finally breaks down the resolve of Charlie Brown, who grabs any old book off a shelf, opens the cover, and begins to read.
“A man was born. Then he dies. The end!!” Charlie says, slamming the book emphatically closed.
“He sounds very interesting,” says Linus. “I wish I’d met him.”
And so we begin.

… though we weren’t ready for this, we have been readied by it … no matter how we are weighed down, we must always pave a way forward.” Amanda Gorman.

I am in a very challenging place/part of my oh so finite life journey. Profoundly alone at 81 I have done it to myself, dedicatedly and skillfully, with great care and persistence: living in Covidland, reducing my anti-depression meds, being abandoned cruelly by Joy, being genuinely bereaved by the loss of Kara, feeling ashamed, empty, fearful, depressed, being old, weak, in pain, less powerful, less. I can hardly get outta bed and no one knows it but me. I feel unattractive and unloved. I can barely bear these truths. 

I justify this self-preoccupied writing as “practicing” writing, like practicing law – the same as practicing piano. No one need hear, just you and the piano. Just you and the keys, the notes, the sound and the silent spaces. Here we are awaiting words, ideas, images, pages. I’d like to be engaged in something deeper and more interesting than my own life, but it doesn’t come to me. I have been rejected by more than most: my best friends Steven, Craig, Isaac, Lyn Rosoff, Lyle, my brother, Larry. I am enraged at Joy … as well as understanding her rejection of me. I can forgive her and myself but choose not to. It is lonely. I miss human company/intimacy. I also miss the time and space the woman/partner occupied, what I had and felt w her, whoever she was.

I am trying to survive my life journey feeling as if I was one of those stone age men often found frozen millennia after their deaths dressed in animal skins with minimal tools (no matches) out alone in the mountains, a relentless environment encasing me. I’ve made plans to be away for 2 months in California, to be nearer my children and grandchildren, to travel as best I still can … alone. I have things to do to get ready! It is very expensive given my fixed income and limited resources, but it is also something I want to give myself… and if not now, when? I am immensely aware of my finiteness, my mortality, my ordinariness, my worker bee-ness, my fear. I keep coming back to the issue of my relationship with myself.

I’m not sure I ever looked at my relationship with myself in this way. I also never was 80+ and all that accompanies that for me. I judge myself negatively and critically. It is very unkind. It is my father and mother yelling at me, telling me I am not behaving as a man should when I’m 4 years old. To what extend do I actually like myself or accept myself? I see myself as an everyman and I forgive my ordinariness, non-success, and nonaccomplishment. I’m ordinary. Okay. I’m also quite extraordinary, just like every other transitory snowflake is unique. And I seem to mostly comfortably accept my limits, much in the same way as I mostly comfortably find defeat too easy to accept.

I note that behaviors consistent with biological age arise almost automatically. Behaviors becoming to us at a given age arise as our bodies and objective age/statuses evolve.  I continue to imagine there is something called the future, something called here-and-now, and something called consequences, all a bit of a challenge to me, an acknowledged confused person living in great chaos, flailing about trying to find any stroke that will keep me afloat. And being public about my distress? Why not? I am the realization of a series of potentialities made manifest, some even the result of choices/decisions someone thought of as “I” made based on “options” I felt existed.

I didn’t choose to be 14 years old, for example, but it happened. I was graduated from public school in the Bronx. I entered into high school where I didn’t try and my grades confirmed that. Years later as a college freshman I registered for a Latin class which I failed. The professor who obviously saw I actually attended class every session but still failed wrote next to my grade “You cannot intuit Latin.” It said much about how I survived high school, i.e., just by going to class. No studying. No homework. Dressed a certain way. Had my hair cut a certain way. Played on the school soccer team. Was interested in girls, breasts, kissing, friends, sports, popularity, Israel, Cuba, Indians, Black people, cars. I became me almost automatically. I had fights. I went to dances, roller skating rinks, beaches. I was voted class vice president, I wrote poems. This was my first – on assignment as a freshman from the evil English schoolmaster, Dr. Manheim, who described my effort as “terse” and worth a “B” – see …

And now I am 80 – and I move as if 80 – a perfect enactment of 80. I even look the part which embraces me more than I embrace it. I am soooo much weaker, less attractive, less respected. Just less. I am also completely aware that nature abhors a vacuum and I have time on my hands. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. Or even what I want to do next.  Often when I see what I want next I am able to manifest it, but in my current circumstances I am adrift without the wind or direction, perhaps with no sail no oars, no compass. I am puzzled by my own experience. Why is this happening to me? Why do I think it is happening to me rather than that I am making it happen?

“You are a sculptor and you cannot move your arms. The marble stares the way desire waits.” From Suspending Disbelief While Brown, Part II by Hossannah Asuncion.