Some passing thoughts of a May-baby

"Never apologize, never explain."  I heard somebody say that once and took it on as not a half-bad maxim for going through life.  For a while.  Eventually I decided it was not the best rule to live by and there were times when flexibility made a lot more sense than following rigid principles. Nuanced thinking beats ideological commitment.  

I turn 86 in a few weeks. That means I am now closer to 90 years of age than I am to the already-really-old age of 80, and I find that a seriously sobering thought. And I am aware that the corrolary to "never apologize, never explain" also needs to go: that is, "live life without regrets."  Much as I would like to think I played my cards to the best of my ability as I faced one challenge after another, as I look back now I find myself overwhelmed by the realization that if I could live life over again I would do a whole lot of things differently.

Right off the top, if I had known I was going to live twenty-four years of my life in Japan, I would have studied Japanese far more seriously right from the start.  I would have practiced my Czerny finger exercises on the piano, I would have learned to play soccer and spent a whole lot more time getting physical exercise.

I had a friend - her name was Gretchen - who said to me once, when I asked her if she had any regrets in life, "No.  There's nothing I would do over again because I like who I am today and if I had lived life differently I wouldn't be that person."  Then she added, "Of course, I would have spent less time doing some of those things."

I woke up with an ear-worm this morning of a song from the Weimar Republic days.  Don't know why it should show up out of nowhere; it just did.  It's one of my favorite pieces of music.  It begins, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  [English lyrics; Seven language version]  and is a pitch for enjoying things while you can, while they still are there to enjoy.  It has the wonderful line in it, "...denn jeder Frühling hat nur einen Mai (because every springtime has only one month of May)."

One of the best things I ever did was to take my junior year of college in Germany.  I went to Munich, one of the world's best cities, I'm convinced, and got, at the age of twenty, my first taste of the big city, the theaters, the opera and concert halls, museums, all manner of types of people, endless intellectual challenges. At the university I got to take a course in the history of the Third Reich taught by Germans who had lived through it and could give perspective I could not have gotten in my own country.  One thing that has stuck with me was that it gave me a lens through which to understand the dangers of MAGA authoritarianism.  It helped me see our manipulator-in-chief, Donald Trump, as an "out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the fire" solution to the failure of American capitalism and its toxic Ayn Rand-like worship of individual rights at the expense of communal welfare.

Americans, I am convinced, routinely fail to prioritize equity. We have built a national cultural structure in which some of us have been able to become super rich while so many others of us get left behind. We (a critical mass of us) have persuaded ourselves that working collectively for the common welfare is socialist - and we have made that a bad word.  Isn't wealth the sign of God's favor?  Aren't rich people smarter than poor people?  Trump and his opportunistic enablers are the outcome of this folly.

I know that even hinting at a comparison between Trump and Hitler is a good way to make a fool of yourself - Hitler's Germany lacked the institutional strength that America is beginning to show at long last. But the parallels - the scapegoating, trolling, ghosting, blatant lying - are there and they are sobering to consider even in their paler versions.

*     *     *

On Christmas Eve I fell getting out of the car in front of my house and broke my hip.  More precisely, I broke the femur in my left leg. I have mentioned elsewhere that they sent an ambulance (and two fire engines, of course) to haul me off to the hospital where on Christmas Day they put a rod through the marrow in the bone from hip to knee, setting me off on the journey of learning to walk again.  And the challenge of learning how not to burn my supremely dutiful husband out from exhaustion.  He's already totally transformed the house by putting in a chair lift and grab bars everywhere and he hounds me to follow the exercise plan the physical therapists have set out for me. There's a bit of friction there.  He, unlike me, still lives in the future and wants me to repair sooner rather than later. I'm content to go into rest mode and let the body take the time it needs. I am now working on getting up and down the stairs (strong leg up first going up, weak leg down first going down) and am already getting quite efficient at frying eggs and making toast without assistance.  It only took me a week to figure out that I could avoid spilling the tea if I brought the cup, the milk and the teapot to the table separately instead of carrying the full cup on the tray on the walker across the kitchen.

To return to that song, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  for a minute...  It has an illustrious history.  Originally from the 1931 German film Der Kongreß tanzt  - Congress Dances - the song became wildly popular and was translated into many languages.  It  was outlawed by the Nazis and became a form of resistance to the Third Reich.  I love the fact that I was born in May - the merry merry month of May, April showers bring May flowers and all that. And all the folks - I'm thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh, the "master of mindfulness" and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.  All sorts of people have stressed the wisdom of seizing the present moment.  Every springtime has only one month of May!  Don't blow it.  Enjoy it to the fullest.

My leg still pains me; it will be some time before that pain is no more.  Donald Trump's enablers pain me; it will be some time before the pain is no more. But the month of May is almost here, and that's cause for rejoicing.

Both/and - not either/or.  I spoke earlier of living by nuanced flexibility rather than by rigid principles. Flooded as I am these days with memories of the past and sadness over loved ones who have passed on before me, I am working pretty much full time trying to both live every present moment to the fullest and at the same time allowing myself to surrender to the nostalgia of treasured memories.

So this is what it's like to be old!?  Not all that bad.

I'm with Leo these days

I've been thinking about Jesus.  People argue over whether it was Aristotle or St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, who said, "Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man."  I'm now more than seven decades removed from my first Sunday School class, and my ears still perk up when the conversation turns to religion.  For some reason I had a brain-fart this morning that made me ask myself, "Did the Gare St. Lazare, Paris' oldest train station, get its name from the same Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead?" It didn't take much digging to learn that Lazarus and Jesus were best buds, and Jesus used Lazarus' digs as a place for him and his twelve disciples to hang out.  (Or maybe Mary and Martha, Lazarus' sisters, were the attraction.) At least one website makes the case the Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead as a way of proving he was the son of God. 

Lazarus

The website provides us with a picture of the dude (on the right), and maybe it's Lazarus' good looks we should be investigating.  

If it were not for all that virgin birthing, raising your friends after death, and walking-on-water shit, I could get my head around identifying as a Christian. My grandmother gifted me as a kid with one of those Bibles that had all the words attributed to Christ himself printed in red, so I became aware early on that if you stuck to the red and ignored the parts where you bash the brains of the kids of your enemies on the rocks, you'll get a pretty cool image of this guy Jesus.  No way I'm going to sell all that I have and hand the cash over to the homeless, but I think his heart is at least pointing in the right direction.

It's not hard to separate the real Christians from those faking it. Big on the agenda of America's Christian Nationalists is making sure the many thousands of folk who are in the U.S. illegally get deported, whether to Mexico or to their countries they were fleeing for fear of persecution.  Which raises the question, did red-letter Christ's "Love Thy Neighbor" pitch deliberately leave out the adjective "American" or did those failing to protect asylum seekers from real risk simply turn their backs and say "Not my problem!?"

Since I'm not a card-carrying Christian, I have no theological obligation to stand by America's asylum seekers.  But I don't get my moral code from the Bible.  I find the Bible morally depraved in large part (It's not just those kids' brains, there's the fact that God is said to have seen the Amalekites as enemies for all time of the Israelis, and thus worthy of being wiped out (1 Samuel 15:2–3, NKJ) to the last toddler.  I prefer a secular code that begins and ends with an injunction against violence and deceit (I know, I know, the devil is in the details).

My beef with Christians began with my awareness that so much that is wrong with American society, the racism and centuries of anti-semitism, the Calvinistic failure to recognize how much their values open the door to greed and self-righteousness, and probably most of all, the homophobia so strong it led author and scholar,  Eric E. Rofes, to title his book on gay suicide, I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves.

I gave up church-bashing, some years ago now when I learned to stop lumping together a group that shares a set of beliefs that are harmful from a similar group whose beliefs are benign, and to put my efforts into seeking common ground. It was my friendship with Jews whose "religion" was less about theocracy than about simply "being Jewish" that led me to understand my upbringing imprinted on me a cultural Christianity that won't let go was no different. Brahms' German Requiem and the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral resonate in my bones and I care not one wit whether the artists whose legacy I share with millions over the years were motivated by a firm belief only adults should be baptised or a simple understanding that they possessed a talent for making beautiful things; we share common ground.

I was taught that prayer only counted when your were talking from the heart with God and in total sincerity - which meant that all the canned prayers were suspect and done so that you could get to be seen to be praying - going through the motions.  That led to the conviction that Catholic (and any other rote) prayer was insincere and to be avoided as not real prayer.  Somewhere along the line, though, I got hooked by the beauty of the Elizabethan English in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer.  I mean really.  What's not to love about the public confession that goes:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.

I mean "no health in us" is a bit over the top, for sure, but the rest of it is a pretty good turn of phrase, don't you think?

On the Catholic front, I had a thing for Pope John XXIII and will treasure forever the opportunity I had to watch him celebrate mass at St. Peter's in Rome on Easter Sunday up close (just to the left of the main altar). I had a thing for the Argentine pope, Jorge Bergoglio, despite his arguably conservative leanings, because I saw him as a warm-hearted grandfather.  And these days I'm quite taken with Leo, the American pope currently on the throne of St. Peter.  He and I speak a similar form of American English, so he's easy to listen to, especially when he takes on Donald Trump for his hostility toward immigrants - which is, I guess, another way of saying I see him as an authentic, not-fake, Christian.  

One nice thing about growing old.  I've lived long enough already to recognize that just because it has taken years to find common ground, it doesn't mean it isn't there...

Old Dogs

 The other day I came across a YouTube video which appeared to have been made by George Will.  I found the message inspiring and immediately forwarded the link to friends.

No sooner did that link make the rounds when the smell of a rat reached the nose of my friend Bill, who for the nth time pointed out to me that I had been suckered.  I'd like to say that I've learned my lesson, but the sheer number of times I've been taken in by these faux reports indicates that that remains to be seen.  Meanwhile, all I can do is hope my friends have a greater capacity for checking for veracity than I do and a greater inclination to do so.  To my chagrin, I have to conclude that my e-mail messages should carry the warning: DO NOT TAKE THIS POST SERIOUSLY UNTIL YOU HAVE VERIFIED THIS INFORMATION.  With that, of course, I need to accept responsibility to be less quick at the draw when it comes to passing on "information."

In my naiveté, I wondered aloud to Bill why anyone would want to milk the progressive left like that. Why make the effort to provide hope and encouragement for your opponents?  Bill wrote back immediately that it must be that YouTube financially rewards those who get the most viewers, and they know that we on the side of resistance to the trump phenomenon are easy pickins.

Which raises a number of questions. I'm a huge fan of YouTube, I've watched hundreds of hours of entertainment videos, piano concertos and the like, and can't imagine life without this great source of information and enrichment coming into my life. I've sung YouTube's praises any number of times. Now it appears even monkeys fall from trees, even YouTube is part of the great American willingness to sell out for big bucks.

That's all I want to say here. Tread softly.  Never mind the big stick; just tread cautiously.  Tomorrow may be another day, hopefully a better one (here you'll pardon me if I talk to myself for a minute).

But keep the lights on.

And this old dog will work harder at learning new tricks.