(This piece is a flashback to a more innocent time, 1986, when it first appeared, in somewhat different form, in the now long-gone Houston Post Magazine. I repost it in part because of the shock value of the photo – who IS that guy, and where has he gone? (And also, for those of you with sharp eyes, who IS that other guy, with the yellow socks?) At first glance you might think that the piece has no relevance to today. Arugula? Everyone knows arugula now. But even 40 years on, have things really changed so much? Houstonians of a certain (very advanced) age may think you recognize Café Disdain, but any similarities in word or photo to a now long-gone real place is a fiction of fading memories. With the ART CAR PARADE just finished for another year, I will note that 40 years ago, sitting at a sidewalk table at a similar place, I watched the first Art Car Parade drive by. How time flies!)

Picture this: It’s Saturday afternoon. The sun is shining in an immaculate sky. It’s cool, but not too cool. Warm enough, but not too warm. Just the sort of day for a sidewalk café.

Every other yuppie and pseudo-yuppie in the city has also made this perceptive observation. By the time I get to sidewalk café row (located mostly on Montrose Boulevard or Rice Village, or some such similar au courant avenue in the city where you live) the sidewalk is moiling with us like carp in an overstocked pool. We always seem to travel in schools, distinguished only by the subtle differences in our old school ties. But none of us would be gauche enough to wear a tie on Saturday afternoon, of course, so on Saturday afternoon we are impossible to distinguish, one from another.

I survey the sidewalk scene and spy a tiny empty table in front of Café Disdain. I squeeze my way through crammed-together tables, brushing against put-together patrons, all talking of Antonioni (or whoever is the au courant avant-garde film director of the day). I perch on a tiny round chair built for the posteriors of small-for-their-age 10-year-old girls, and prepare my psyche for the incomparable pleasure of a yuppie lunch.

After what must be four or five hours of soaking up sun and psyche preparation, the waiter disdainfully looks my direction. Perhaps the flies swarming around the dishes left on my table by previous occupants have become thick enough at last to attract his attention. Yes, I confess, even yuppie flies have the knack, which I do not, of gaining the attention of waiters at Café Disdain. Could it be that this waiter can tell from way over there that I’m only barely a yuppie, if at all, on the leading edge of the baby boom, maybe even over the edge by some definitions?

Whatever, at last he deigns to come over and I know right away he is the waiter for whom the café was named.

You expect me to wait on you? his look seems to say. There must be some mistake here. Let’s take this up with the manager. (Note: It is not I whose look is saying this.)

“What can I get you, SIR?” he asks, hitting the “SIR,” the way they do when they really intend a reproach involving your mother’s virtue.

Trying to look blasé, I ask for a menu. The waiter, with an awe inspiring motion which embodies the whole universe of disdain in a single gesture, indicates a shadow-shrouded corner down the block. (These days, of course, he’d be pointing to a QR code.) Perplexed, I look in the direction of his gesture and almost make out, in the distance, a tiny blackboard with a few chalky smudges. After a puzzled moment, I understand: the menu (i.e. QR code)!

“Does SIR need a few more moments.” I wouldn’t think of disputing him at this point, but he’s already left anyway. Too bad, I think, that he didn’t take any of the dirty dishes with him. Maybe he will, next time, if there ever is one.

Being in that first wave of baby boomers as I am, my eyes aren’t what they used to be. In order to see the menu I will have to put on my glasses, which is shame enough. But in order to read it, I will have to get up and walk down the block to where it is hung, on the wall, in the shadows. Since there’s only one of me, that means I’ll likely lose my table and all my psyche preparation will have been in vain. But there’s no way around it. God forbid I should ask the waiter to read it to me. So I get up and walk.

It isn’t really so far. After hardly more than half an hour of squeezing back through my fellow lunchers, I get close enough to make out a few of the chalk smudges. Yes, they appear to be words, but …

The first word I make out is “arugula.” (Keep in mind, these were more innocent times.) I struggle and struggle, but I can’t make it into anything else, into anything I know. It can only be “arugula.” “With pumate and raspberry vinaigrette.” “And a garnish of borage blossoms.” I am thunderstruck. My first impulse is to cry.

I grew up in a household with a traditional American larder. The most exotic ingredient in my mother’s kitchen was celery salt. The last time I looked – 20 years or so later – it was still the most exotic ingredient. In fact, it was still the same bottle. I remember a couple of occasions in which garlic entered the house, touted as a taste sensation, but it didn’t catch on. Too bohemian, I suppose.

My mother’s cooking was wholesome and plentiful and tasty. It nourished me and helped me grow, but it did nothing to prepare me for lunch at Café Disdain.

Some of us (and I am thinking here specifically of myself) have always had to ask our waiters to translate menus from the Chinese or the French. This is humiliating to be sure, but this is America so we have a right to expect foreigners to translate for us, right? It’s one of our more endearing qualities (right?).

Now more and more, however, I find that I have to ask for translations from the Yuppie too. But unlike waiters whose native tongue is Chinese or French, which I do not understand, when Yuppie-speaking waiters disparage me to the other help, they shift into disquietingly loud and clear American. “Can you believe this yahoo doesn’t know what pesto is?!” I heard a waiter scoff once. I suspected I knew who he meant.

But back to the menu. Half way down the second column I finally encounter something I know: “Coffee,” it reads. I’m pretty sure that’s it. Even though I know that nothing at Café Disdain can be taken for granted, I feel fairly certain I know what “coffee” means. That’s what I’ll have. Yes, I’d hoped to have a little lunch, but I can always find a bite to eat – maybe not too moldy - in the fridge at home later. Best to minimize the opportunities for humiliation, I figure. Besides, the portions at Café Disdain make “little lunch” the operable words, so I won’t be missing much anyway.

Back at my table the waiter looks surprised at my return. “Oh, I thought you’d left,” he says, and he starts putting back the dishes he’d started clearing away. “But then I should have known you hadn’t since there was no tip on the table.”

As endearingly as I can, I assure him it’s all right to finish clearing away the dishes since they aren’t mine. He looks at me through the drawn eyes of suspicion. Not yours, eh, he seems to be thinking. Well, did you eat anything off of them? If you did, I’ll be charging you anyway.

“What can I get you?” he asks, when he’s finished stacking all the dishes on one side of the table, and the tone in which he says it adds an unspoken, And hurry up about it, I haven’t got all day.

“Coffee,” I say.

“Just coffee?” he asks after a moment of stunned silence.

“Yes,” I say, and after a moment, in which his eyes roll up and his lips curl in that expression for which the café was named, he asks, “Jamaican Blue Mountain, Kenya High Altitude, Java Mocha Prima Rara …?”

He’s stumped me there. I have to take a moment out for processing. Have I wandered into a travel agency instead of an eating establishment by mistake? Jamaica, Kenya, Java. What fun. But no, at travel agencies they don’t leave you sitting for hours at crowded tables covered with dirty dishes. At travel agencies they book you on phantom flights to unfriendly cities so you can spend sleepless nights in flea-bag hotels. So this must be an eating place.

In desperation, I say the first thing which comes to mind: “And light on the arugula, please.”

The waiter scribbles on his pad and rolls his eyes again as he walks away. A few moments later I hear disdainful chortles of disbelief coming from the direction of the service island, and I suspect I know the reason.

Needless to say, I am not a welcome visitor to Café Disdain. No one who fails the Arugula Test is welcome there. I persist in going now and again on sunny Saturdays because it’s such a humbling experience to have a yuppie waiter put you firmly in your place. But thank goodness the hot weather will soon come back and the sidewalk cafes will all go indoors for a few months. There’s only so much humbling even a stalwart pseudo-yuppie like me can stand in a single year. And I’ve just about had my arugula’s worth already.

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We went to the opera yesterday. It may have been, by mutual agreement, our last. We’ve never been opera fans – and this most recent outing did not change that. I know there’s something in it I just don’t get. There has to be: so many are so enthralled, there have to be compelling aspects that elude me. I keep thinking (or perhaps, after yesterday, I should say “I kept thinking”) that eventually I’d meet my opera road to  Damascus moment, and all would suddenly be clear to me. I haven’t; it’s not. Or maybe I have. Clearly, at this age, I will never be an opera fan.

It's not for want of trying. I went to Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on my first grand tour in 1973. I was high up in the rafters, so couldn’t completely appreciate the experience; I’m sure it was better from the boxes. I heard Akhnaten, and an early performance of Nixon in China, both at Houston Grand Opera. We even managed most of a rendition of Dialogues of the Carmelites – affectionately known in our household as Caterwaulings of the Caramelized – at the same august venue. All, perhaps, less than ideal choices for an opera novice.

I do remember a couple of compelling opera encounters. I will never forget Violetta’s (a.k.a. Sheri Greenawald’s) heartbreaking lament that she was “too young to die,” delivered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis sometime in the late ‘70s – and delivered in English, so I actually knew what she was going on about. Why, oh why, do they still sing these operas in foreign tongues? How many productions of Ibsen in Norwegian have you seen, in Houston? The cuts between surtitles and stage are enough to induce vertigo!

And also, I had a brief, fun encounter with Albert Herring once, though, surprisingly, he went by another name offstage. (Hey, Albert, or whatever your other name was, didn’t we have a fun after-opera night?)

Aside from those, and the rousing oom-pah of some triumphal march in Aida, nothing else in my plus column for opera comes to mind. Though I did leap loudly to my feet at a rousing moment in Boris Godunov –  to the chagrin of my seatmate, who had bought the expensive orchestra seats – and to my own embarrassment, since I was leaping straight out of sleep.

Ballet – now that’s a different story. I still vividly remember my electrifying ballet revelation. It was 1967, or maybe 1968; it was St. Louis – Kiel Opera House – but no opera obtruded that evening, as Impresario, Sol Hurok, brought us Stars of the Bolshoi Ballet. They don’t make Impresarios like Hurok anymore; and they don’t make stars like the Bolshoi’s anymore – the stars of that day, anyway.

But the moment that changed my life, the one I’ll never forget, happened as The Dying Swan (a.k.a. Maya Plisetskaya) floated onto the stage to the haunting strains of Saint-Saëns, embodying said swan, choreographed to sublimity, by Fokine. OMG, those arms! There could not possibly have been bones in them. Or, if there were, they were the celestial bones of real swan’s wings, not the gross, clumsy ones of us land-bound humans. (If you’ve never seen her dance it, do your self a favor and watch the YouTube link.)

After that, and again on that first grand tour of mine, in 1973, I saw Nureyev partner Fonteyn – or so I remember it, though I can’t find online proof of such a performance, so perhaps it was really somewhere else, some other time. I saw Baryshnikov leap, shortly after he’d leapt through the Iron Curtain; likewise Makarova, though for her it was pirouettes instead of leaps.

On jaunts to New York through the late ‘70s – more for the gay discos than the ballets, admittedly, but you had to do something before the bars got hot – I saw Balanchine-conjured Festivals at the New York State Theater (as was then) – something old, something new, but all golden (nothing blue) – season after season, year after year. I even bought my signed Edward Gorey New York City Ballet poster on the spot. Those were the days when ballet companies toured the nation (New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Joffrey, and even those Russian troupes, Bolshoi, Kirov, that kept leaving dancers behind), so even us provincials could see them without having to venture far from home.

Why ballet, but never opera, I’ve wondered? Neither was a feature of the West Texas where I grew up in the ‘50s. So one would be as unlikely as the other. Perhaps my early career in dance had some bearing. I had been, after all, a child dance star in a minor universe. I’d even tapped on television as a child of six – for Cowboy Bob (or am I making that name up out of memory muddle?), wearing hat and boots, and chaps and glittering cowboy vest over my little-boy Texas cowboy togs – and turquoise and silver string tie, of course (or, at least, turquoise-like and sort-of silver). An outfit much like this one, but without the horse. Though to be real about it, the horse might have done a better job with the steps than I - and he wore his tap shoes all the time.

Experiences like that stay with you. I was in tap dancer heaven.

For a little while.

I turned academic and my dance career did not develop. But maybe the spirit didn’t die, as had my singer’s soul, when the choir director asked me NOT to sing out, since I insisted on singing off-key. Or maybe it had something to do with a few ballet flings - those legs!, ultimately more enticing, no question, than Albert Herring - those lungs!, which have their place, of course, but run a poor second to legs when the curtain goes down.

But surely there’s something more to it than a contest twixt legs and lungs. That makes me sound so shallow. But whether or not, I’m finding it comforting accepting, after yesterday, that my career as an opera fan – or rather, the worry over it – is at an end. One less thing to worry about in old age. Now I can concentrate on my plies and fouettes. (Those legs!)

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I thought it would last my time – 
…
I knew there’d be false alarms
In the papers 
…
– But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? 
. . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast 
…
Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely;
 …
I just think it will happen, soon.

(Distilled from “Going, Going,” by Philip Larkin)

I remember the first time I went to Washington, DC: 1964, I think it was, but the exact year doesn’t really matter. Except that Lyndon B. Johnson was President, about which, as a Texas boy, I was chauvinistically proud. Never mind that Johnson became President as a result of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in Texas, an awful act about which I was not Texan proud (though I fear I was not adequately horrified, at the time, either.)

I had not been many places by then: a couple of adventures to California (Disneyland!), with a stop in Las Vegas on one; to New Orleans, so my parents could revisit their own brief time there toward the end of WWII; and to Dallas, hardly noteworthy for a Texan, except that, at my insistence, we went to see the then new movie Cleopatra, in a big downtown movie theater – a pinnacle event of my life till then, for which I struggled, in those pre-Ticketmaster days, to secure the required “reserved tickets” weeks ahead. (As it turned out, the audience for the week-day matinee we attended consisted of us and half a dozen others; my father dozed through much of it.)

So going to Washington, DC, was a big event in my life then. First, because we flew: my first flight. My Aunt Bob and Uncle Benny, going there to visit their Army Colonel son, stationed in a Virginia suburb, took me with them, so I’d have the experience. We flew Braniff, from Lubbock with a plane change at Dallas Love Field, landing at the then almost new Washington Dulles airport. I had to wear my only sport coat, with tie, and my best, most uncomfortable shoes; Aunt Bob accessorized with pillbox hat and gloves; Uncle Benny must have worn a suit. We left so early that we ate TWO breakfasts on the way, one on each leg of the flight. I still remember the omelet out of Dallas, which may have been my first.

I also remember the thrill I felt, going to WASHINGTON, the seat of government I heard about every evening on the Huntley-Brinkley news; bastion of American Democracy; most important city in the World, so it seemed to me from all I’d heard. Real metaphorical “city upon a hill,” to quote my own ancestor, Winthrop (though I didn’t know it then); “The eyes of all people upon …” it, and by association, us.

“… wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon vs; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee haue vndertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from vs, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake euill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy seruants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses vpon vs till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing …” Extracted from “A Model of Christian Charity,” 1630, by John Winthrop. (Clearly I get my spelling talents from Great … grandfather, John.)

Going to Washington outshone even seeing Cleopatra!

The first night, cousin Col. Gene drove us through the grand streets of this grand city, past the Washington-Jefferson-Lincoln Monuments; through the streets of the National Mall, with the Smithsonian museums on either side; around the Capital; down Pennsylvania Avenue, and in front of the White House (dark, sadly, as a result of LBJ’s frugal affinity for turning off lights). A splendid first look, for me, at the most legendary symbols of freedom and self-governance, that loomed in my imagination as Olympus, Sinai and that City on a Hill all in one.

And I remember thinking, even then as we toured, with a bit of shock and dismay, “This is just a place.” Grander than the Lubbock I knew from a childhood and adolescence of living there; grander, but not divinely different. “Just a place.” And I realized, with a flood of dismay and anxiety, that everything my myth of Washington embodied – democracy, freedom, security – held together just by luck and the agreement to believe.

I’ve never forgotten that instant of realization. But, even so, “I thought it would last my time …” Now I’m not so sure.

A few decades later I went to Munich, Germany, for the first time. By then I’d studied history in college and read and heard about Munich, almost as much as the Washington of my youth. I knew it to be the place where Hitler had walked the streets and cultivated the great Nazi evil, that had, not long before my birth, caused the deaths of millions and the near destruction of the world. A place which had nurtured almost unimaginable horrors (almost unimaginable), devised by evil, inhumane humans (inhumane?), who must have been monsters of a different order than regular people like me and you.

Munich, of course, had been decimated as part of that Nazi apocalypse, so the actual buildings I saw were faithful recreations, not the ones Hitler had walked among. But the land was the same, and the streets the same, as he had walked – and I walked them too. But I realized again, “This is just a place,” a place where evil grew, and where it could grow again, unless we agree to make sure it can’t. Evil walks the same streets that we walk, drinks at the same bars, eats at the same cafes. All that keeps it at bay is the agreement to call it by name and fight against it together.

After Munich, a trip to Berchtesgaden. And an overnight stay at Eagle's Nest, Hitler's Bavarian Alpine retreat, in the building that had been the barracks for his army guards. I think Rick Steves suggested it. A midnight storm of Wagnerian drama. Barking German Shepherds. Gunshots (I swear, though they must have been only imagined). Little sleep. How could I sleep in the very place where evil had not just walked, but played and planned and slept?!

In the morning, at breakfast, not even the view through crystal air out over glorious mountains could make me forget that, even amidst such beauty, evil can flourish, unless …

I don’t know why these memories have come back to me just now – of fragility and looming evil. “Age simply,” and thoughts meandering? Maybe you can help me figure it out. But for whatever reason, here they are back, after 50, 60 years. And coming with them, those words of Larkin:

“I thought it would last my time –
…
– But what do I feel now? Doubt?
…
I just [fear] it [may] happen, soon.”

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Remember the bad old days of the Pandemic Lockdown, back in 2020? Six years ago not, but of course you do. Who could forget them - though we might want to. Back then, when we couldn’t have anybody to dinner, for fear it might be the last meal for all at table, I - probably like most - retreated into imagination out of desperation. Just to fill the time, and to fill the void left by NOT having those candlelight suppers Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet, s'il vous plaît - remember her? Of course you do. Who could forget her?!) taught us were so essential to civilized life, I set the table for a series of imaginary gatherings of imaginary guests for afternoons and evenings of imaginary frivolities during those anything but frivolous days. If it had been a French play, it might well have been titled The Madman of Mandell Street.

Now that those days have passed, and we can be real people together at our tables again, I thought it might be time for another look back at those settings, put together when imagination and hope seemed to be about all we had to keep us going.

This is sounding a little weighty, which I think the setting themselves were not. And so here they are: Nine Imaginary table settings, and one reality check, in remembrance of a pandemic (mostly, we hope) past.

PS: Some of you may remember these from Facebook way back when, or even Substack once before, but it’s been a while, so maybe you’ll enjoy seeing them again.

Imaginary Setting No 1 - Down Mexico Way

Imaginary Setting No 2 - Blue and White Luncheon

Imaginary Setting No 3 - Pink Magnolia Supper

Imaginary Setting No 4 - Tea With the Queens

Imaginary Setting No 5 - Success Is a Midnight Supper in New York (with Andy Warhol)

Imaginary Setting No 6 - Far East

Imaginary Setting No 7 - Wine Tasting, with Ruth Laird (For those who don’t know, Laird was a mid-century Houston ceramicist with great talent and imagination herself.)

Imaginary Setting No 8 - À la recherche de la France perdue (with Marcel Proust)

Imaginary Setting No 9 - LA MADONNE A LA SPAGHET, a spaghetti supper with Emma Richardson Cherry

Imaginary Setting No 10 – GUESS WHO’S NOT COMING TO DINNER: A reality check for the way it actually was.

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At lunch the other day, my dear husband said, out of the blue (or perhaps more accurately on the life-cycle color wheel, out of the black): “I think we should begin doing some Swedish Death Cleaning.”

!!! Say what?!

Where did THAT come from? Never mind that neither of us is even remotely Swedish. It was enough almost to put me right off my pablum. Lucky for me I already had my antacid tablets at the ready. I always keep those handy now, in case the daily gruel should prove too spicy for my decrepit old stomach to digest.

After a bit of reflection (I will not call it by it’s real name, grim terrified projection), I allowed as how he might, just might, be somewhat right. But to what end, I wondered, and what, just what, did he have in mind for cleaning? Was he talking about polishing the silver and dusting tchotchkes?

“No,” he said, and he began listing things around the house to get rid of – around our house, some of which had made our house our home for going on 50 years. He began naming things with a speed and fluidity that made me think he might have been working on his list for almost that long. 1, 2, 3 … 100.

With a start at about No. 25, I realized that the things he listed – books and bibelots and kitchen tools and vintage clothes (sometimes called “worn out old rags” by the less aesthetically refined) – all had one thing in common: THEY WERE ALL MINE!

Not that everything in the house wasn’t ours after all these decades, but of all the items on his little(?) list, not one had come through the door in his hand; no, rather, all in mine. I’m sure this was purely accidental, that somewhere between items 150 and 200 we’d have spotted something on the list we would both agree in calling his. Unfortunately, long before we got that far, I ran from the dining room screaming, in tears. It was a particularly spicy gruel that day.

Some, including dear husband, have suggested that in my writing, not to mention my solitary brooding and 2 AM nightmares, I fixate on death too much. Is it any wonder, with luncheon conversation like that?!

Rather than “fixating on death,” I prefer to think of it as facing reality. It isn’t IF, but WHEN. I know that. And though most of us can’t put an exact date to it, and most of the time don’t really want to think so, we all know that old guy, DEATH, is coming to (coming after!) us, sometime soon, no matter how young(-ish) and healthy we may try to pretend, to ourselves as well as others, to be. If you have any doubts about that, ask your own great aunt, granddad (or some great or other), who’s now 125. (Doing a little quick math myself – which is getting harder and harder and slower and slower all the time – I see that I, myself, am now closer to that unattainable 125 than to those fondly remembered days of 30! That’s good for two antacid tabs.)

I may be a bit overly sensitive to this Death Cleaning thing, thinking back to a comment my brother made long ago, when I was actually much closer to that 30 mark than I will ever be again: “Mother is cleaning out her closets, getting ready to die.”

In fact she was cleaning out her closets (I’ve written about that elsewhere), but only to make room for more stuff, which did not include a coffin for another 10 years and more. But his comment planted an idea which has left me a bit skittish about closet cleaning ever since. Not a major problem, since, with closets, you can just close the doors and take the tack that if anyone unauthorized opens them, they deserve the vision of cluttered chaos they may find inside.

But in my spirit of facing reality, I do admit that Closet/Death cleaning will sometime be appropriate. Just not NOW.

As though the death cleaning lunch weren’t enough, dear husband lovingly offered to make up for my clear discomfort (and indigestion!) by taking me out to lunch a few days later. I wondered which of our usual spots he’d be taking me to (there are only five); but not wanting to squelch his surprise, I didn’t ask. Wasn’t I surprised when we turned into the parking lot of Old Farts’ Senior Living Warehouse instead of Nidda Thai or El Jardin?!

“Just part of our information gathering,” he reassured me. “We need to plan. Nothing, including our address, will be changing soon.”

Soothing words of reassurance. And yet, somehow, I wasn’t reassured.

Even though the lunch was free, and the “residents” they brought out to chat with us (those few, I was afraid, still mobile enough to bring out) soliloquized about how full and comforting it was, living at Old Farts’ in the midst of other old farts (many of whom, I feared, perhaps could no longer even remember that there had ever been those halcyon days of 30, but never mind), I could hardly rest easy enough to properly enjoy the Lemony Fool they gave us for dessert (maybe not the ideal choice for the event, considering the name), never mind the decaf coffee - could not rest easy from the urge to rush home to be sure the moving vans hadn’t pulled up as soon as we were out of sight. After all, I did go up to my desk one morning, and when I came down to lunch, car No 2 (MY CAR) had driven off to the used car lot while I typed, never to be seen again. It's hard to regain confident serenity after a trauma like that. (To be fair, I had agreed at breakfast it should go sometime; I just didn’t know it would depart by noon.)

Yes, I know it isn’t IF, but WHEN. That was a trick challenge about asking the 125 year olds, in case you haven’t figured it out already. I know there aren’t any of them, never have been, that I won’t be one either. I still pride myself on facing reality, not fixating. I believe I do a good job of it – as long as REALITY stays in the abstract. My calendar is much too full for fixing a date for it. As for dining every day with my Old Fart peers? No thanks, not now. I’ll be overcooking my dried out fish fillets myself, for a while longer.

And as for Death Cleaning?

Oh, no, not yet. I’m leaving every room stuffed full, every corner cluttered. (And believe me they ARE.) Sorry, dear husband. Death’s going to have to run an obstacle course to get to me. And if he makes it (WHEN!), he’ll be wise to bring a dust cloth with him.

(PS: To tell the truth, Old Farts’ (that’s not its real name, by the way) was lovely, and the residents were fun and engaging, and the fish wasn’t dry (not too dry), and I can actually see moving there someday - just not yet. Still NO on the Death Cleaning, however, at least until it’s one of mine and one of his from the very start of the list. And even then, NOT YET!)

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(Note: As I mentioned a while ago, I’m taking a short rejuvenation break from Substack writing after two years. While I’m resting, I’ll be re-posting a “Best of” piece every Wednesday. This is one of them. See you with new writing in mid-October.)

There’s a specter hovering over me and its name is FAT. It dogs me through my waking hours and haunts my dreams. It convicts me of  weakness and self-indulgence; it makes every mouthful a transgression. Because of Fat I know no peace.

In one breath my culture, and my doctor, say, “Eat and be merry for that is the good life,” and in the next they say, “Be thin.” Does anyone else detect a contradiction here?

Even the prospect of company for lonely evenings hardly compensates for the shock of realizing that there may soon be enough of me to make two.

There are days, and this is one, when it seems as though the sole purpose of my existence is to outgrow my pants. At ten this wasn’t so bad. When Aunt Kate (no waif herself)  exclaimed at how short my pants had become since her last visit, I cringed, but deep down I felt a youthful pride. Now, when the Chunky and Chubby Apparel Shop salesman smirks on hearing my waist size, and suggests I try two sizes larger, I simply cringe.

But do I mind assuming the shape of a pear with legs? Do I resent the sleek young things in the Facebook ads? Does Limburger smell?

When my neighbor (no word mincer) asks, “How did you get so fat,” am I taken aback? Does she not know that the English language is rich with euphemisms she could have picked instead: “filled out,”  plumped up” – two ego boosters if I ever heard them? (Will she feel any trepidation when I tell her my words to live by: Never forget and never forgive?)

I try confronting Fat directly to no avail. “Fat,” I say, “why have you chosen me to settle on?” And Fat replies, “Because you’re there,” and chuckles, but its chuckle is sinister, not jolly.

“Fat,” I ask, “when people in the world are starving, why do you stay here” – and I point to various parts of my own person – “where you’re not wanted?” And Fat replies sneeringly, “Let them eat cake.” After a moment’s pause for reflection, Fat’s gaze goes glassy and it elaborates: “Let them eat butter cake with French vanilla ice cream.”

“Fat,” I say, “I’ll promise never again to diet if you agree to stop at current levels in ‘filling out’ my hips and thighs. Otherwise it’s war. It’s Paleo, Keto, Atkins, grapefruit – whatever it takes.” But Fat’s a ruthless bargainer. It knows my Fat Wars rhetoric will crumble against it’s sugar cookie arsenal.

“Diet all you like,” it says, riveting me with a look that might cow even Weight Watchers. “Your hips are mine already; your thighs don’t stand a chance. Remember the cinnamon roll!”

A tear comes to my eye: I do, indeed, remember the cinnamon roll … and the chicken and dumplings, and the apple cake with crème fraîche. I never seem to forget them.

But if reasoning with Fat is impossible, and bargaining difficult at best, what’s left? Ignoring it isn’t an option. Mind you, I’d be perfectly happy to ignore it – or at least pretend I did, despite mirror and conscience – if others would do the same. Thanks neighbor lady and suit salesman for making it clear they won’t. So what course is left to me?

Perhaps acceptance.

“How,” I hear you natural thinnies raging at me over your strawberry jammed croissants, no doubt after a cheese and bacon omelet swimming in butter and a cup of coffee with heavy cream, “can you accept Fat? At least you can go on fighting.”

“How,” I reply, with a defeated shake of my head, which you fellow fatties can probably see in your mind’s eyes as vividly as though you were here, “can I not?” Sometimes as our friends at Overeaters Anonymous tell us, the last desperate gesture and the first necessary step are the same: acceptance.

“Fat,” I say with bravado, hoping it will be unnerved by my boldness (while thinking it highly unlikely), “I’ve decided to accept you as a fact of life. You and I are now one – or two verging on two and a half depending on the light – but we needn’t let numbers bog us down now. I admit that I am powerless over Fat, that my life and my thighs have become unmanageable.”

Fat looks at me suspiciously, as though I’ve offered it a deal on a bridge in New York. After a moment Fat asks, “What is this, a trick?”

“No,” I chuckle, at last the jolly fat person of fable. “I’ve given up tricks. No more sacks of Oreos hidden in the laundry hamper. I’ve realized that only a force greater than Metrecal and my will power combined can restore me to thinnity. Put ‘er there, Fat.” And I reach out my pudgy hand to shake.

Fat shudders a little, but, still confident, puts ‘er there. “Remember chocolate cheese cake,” Fat says, expecting that the mere thought will turn me into a quivering mass of blubber, as usual.

“Oh, yes, I remember it,” I say, and Fat does a little smart-alecky swagger, which I have come to loath over all these years. “But I’ve decided to turn chocolate cheesecake over to a power bigger than both of us, if you can imagine anything that big.”

Fat stops in mid-swagger. It looks at me like a bookmaker sizing up horse flesh. To be honest, I find Fat’s grouping me with horses a bit insulting, but I have vowed no longer to nourish resentments. I’ve taken that first step. I back off a few waddles to regroup. I waver, but I hold firm. To the untrained eye I may still look as “plumped up” as ever, but Fat and I both know that things are different now. I may still look fat, but inside I’m getting thinner.

West End Word (St. Louis), January 9, 1986, p8A – revised July 2023

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“… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself –
nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes …”
(Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933)

OMG, isn’t that enough to fear?!

It’s true that FDR didn’t stop there. He went on for hundreds of words more in his quest to give hope, courage and backbone to a depression-pummeled people. By the end of his 20 minutes of rhetorical CPR, he’d transformed fear into an engine of resuscitation, leaving terror and paralysis in the metaphorical dust. Seen now on YouTube, it’s an electrifying feat.

I, on the other hand, usually stop at fear.

They say you have to face your fears to conquer them. Well, I face mine every day, because they give me no choice, but so far all the conquering has flowed from them to me. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified they may be, but there they still are anyway.

As with most things, there’s probably a whole academic science of FEAR intended to identify, analyze, classify, and ultimately tame the monster through rational examination and explanation. Of that, I know nothing. What I do know is the cold, sickening, breath-sucking – yes, paralyzing – tsunami of it.

I suppose I can’t actually remember my first experience of fear. Maybe it had something to do with that first birth day – which I imagine to have included shrieks of pain, and epithets, mostly focused on me, and a thrusting out into a stark new world of cold and lights and slaps so unlike the aqueous serenity I’d known till then. What had I done to deserve such a fate?

Or maybe it happened even before that. I’m told I started kicking early. Could fear of the fear to come have been the reason?

Later on there were the usual fears of childhood: that someone might steal my favorite toy; that monsters might grab me in the night; that I might burn up in nuclear Armageddon. And then the fears of youth and young adulthood: that someone might steal my boyfriend; AIDS; that I might burn up in nuclear Armageddon.

To every season there is a fear, to paraphrase the Bible – or a clutch of them – but the fears haven’t so much replaced each other from one life season to the next, as accumulated, piled up one on top of the other, till now I have almost a whole lifetime of fears to pick from in all seasons.

I’m not sure I’m getting more fearful as I get older, but I’m sure as hell not getting any less so. And as so many other things get sloughed off with age – ambition, libido, acquisitiveness, rock-hard pecs – fear always seems to be there to fill the gaps.

These days I find myself focusing on the fears I used to associate with old age – the ones I now associate with MY age.

And so what are my fears now? I suppose I should say, my fears today, since they may be different by tomorrow.

First, the fear of a shrinking world. I watched my mother’s world, never wide, dwindle to a padded lift chair in a living room, as the pain of a back twisted like a pretzel made moving excruciating. But even before the pain, her world had begun to narrow – as I see mine narrowing now, every time I question setting foot outside the house, for fear of … Who knows what? Something unreal, no doubt, but real enough to keep the door shut too often. COVID didn’t help with that, of course.

And I fear the loss of control – control of the functions of daily life – control of the functions literally – control that allows us to live with the illusion of independence, the illusion of dignity. Control that may be an illusion itself, but a comforting one.

And I fear the prospect of dying old and alone, no children, no grandchildren, no kin of any kind to mask the reality that we all die alone, whether we do it young or old.

I suspect that dealing with such fears as these is really what religion was invented for, so losing religion has opened a gigantic fear sinkhole for us. For ME that is, since I’m really always only talking about me, though sometimes I try to feel less alone by saying “us.” But the religion that I lost, or left, had me roasting for eternity in HELL because I’m gay, so how could I not leave it? That, however, is another story, for another day.

Eternity: such a long time for regret and retribution in case, you know, you put your money on the wrong side of the God/no God, afterlife/no afterlife, Hell/no Hell crap shoot. Without eternity would we know fear at all?

As with so many things, Emily Dickinson got at this unflinchingly with her poem:

Those – dying then,
            Knew where they went –
            They went to God’s Right Hand –
            That Hand is amputated now
            And God cannot be found –
            The abdication of Belief
            Makes the Behavior small –
            Better an ignis fatuus
            Than no illume at all –

I'm coming to terms with the reality that nothing, as relates to me, is going to matter in the now not too distant future – a possibly depressing illume, I grant, but how can I argue with reality.

Is facing reality the same as facing fears? I don’t know. I do know that as a compassionate fellow human, I should now offer hope to any who have read this far – stiff-upper-lip encouragement to look on the brighter – or at least less glum – side of fear.

So here goes.

I’m looking at you, FEAR. Prepare to be conquered. Fear not, fellow fearfuls. Whatever happens, the falling rain will still rustle the banana leaves in the courtyard; toward dawn, the birds will still chirp; cool breezes will still waft through open windows in spring. (Is this helping with the fear?)

But here comes REALITY again: all that will still happen, yes, BUT SOON ALL FOR SOMEONE ELSE. That’s just the way it is.

Sorry, that’s the best I could do. What hope and courage and compassion giveth, FEAR taketh away!

(Dear Friends: No need to worry about my mental state as you read this. It’s no darker than usual. The piece is mostly tongue-in-cheek, except for the parts that aren’t. Anyway, I’m not flirting with offing myself, or anything like that, as some seemed to think as they read an early piece - and lovingly emailed with comforting thoughts - and the phone numbers of suicide hotlines. I’m just toying with some of the not so comforting facets of life. But thank you for your concern, if you did worry about me, even a little bit. I appreciate you and your watching out for my well-being. It almost makes the fear less frightening.)

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(I’m re-posting a somewhat revised older piece which may still have some relevance - and maybe some smiles.)

Once there was a blissful, innocent time B.C. (before cholesterol), when one could live his or her or their short, sedentary life in peace, taking stroke or heart attack in stride as the natural course of things. There was no guilt in Fritos then, and the term “butterfat” had not yet become profanity. Abstinence and exercise were the hobgoblins of fanatics, and “overweight,” in polite society, referred only to luggage taken on transatlantic flights.

In those days I only ran to remove myself from the proximity of muggers and Republicans; I knew nothing of swimmer’s ear, tennis elbow or athlete’s foot. The maladies that worried me were beer-drinker’s bladder, channel changer’s thumb, and smoker’s finger – that little yellow stain that developed on my f***-you finger every day about halfway through the second pack.

Those, as they say, were the days! Those days, as they also say, are gone forever. The “ME” decade came along, the middle class discovered cholesterol and the serenity of a whole complacent nation went up in incense. Overnight, millions of formerly sane adults let jogging supplant cigarettes and sloth. No longer were people bent on buying their way to happiness; suddenly we all seemed intent on denying our way to it.

In the face of all this, the thought occurred to me that just maybe, even my life could be improved, could be better. A wise man would have shrugged off this crazy notion, aware that tradition and Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream should not be discarded lightly. I, on the other hand, decided to check it out. Little did I know how difficult it would be to turn back.

To begin, I Tik-Toked a quality-of-life guru (some might call him a doctor - of the Witch variety) recommended by some of my dearest – and, I now suspect, most malicious – friends.

“M-m-m-master,” I stammered, “How can I make my life better?”

“Self-denial, my son. That’s the answer. First you must accept that pleasure is an outmoded concept. Pain is in. Pain and deprivation. If it hurts, do it, if it’s pleasant, eschew it! Down with anything that tastes good, smells good, feels good or passes time without strenuous effort and boredom.”

“And will my three score and ten be better for it?”

“Three score and ten? Peanuts! We’re shooting for the big time: if Methuselah could make 900, you can too. Maybe more. After all, he didn’t have Zumba.”

I went away intent on denying myself every pleasure if it would pave the way to a more perfect me. I visited my running gear consultant to select the vestments of my new vocation: shoes with just the right tread, shorts with just the right sheen, a head band to absorb the sweat my brow would soon know for the first time. Though I could have taken a transatlantic flight for less, including the excess baggage fees for suitcases filled with plus-size shirts and pants, what matter? Now I could run until my chest ached and my heart pounded till it seemed it might burst, never fearing the embarrassment of shin splints.

With the help of my dietary consultant, I discovered a whole new cuisine I’d never imagined: tenderloin of tofu, sprouts sans hollandaise, ginseng on the rocks. I joyfully embraced the extremes of Culinary Conversion Therapy, with it’s disgusting images of the dissolute satiating their degenerate tastes for caster sugar and crème fraîche – and the shocks that followed.

For months I avoided pleasure like the plague, and a miraculous change occurred. I came to look forward with longing to kombucha, and to added decades of abstemious jogging on the cinder track of life.

But as the years passed, a recurring nightmare began to disturb my exhausted sleep. Though, for endless decades, stretching back into the heart of those B.C. dark ages,  I’d denied every pleasure and popped every pill as directed, I was dead at 95, of a disease for which acupuncture had no needles. My friends and relatives, gathered around the coffin weeping, lamented my too-soon death.

But then the guru’s voice rang out: “I have no pity for him. The foolish reprobate drank a soda once after he took the vows. What else could he expect?”

I awoke with a shriek, tears streaming down my emaciated cheeks, begging forgiveness. I racked my troubled mind to think of what lapses reaffirmed my guilt, what more I could have denied as I strove to rival Methuselah’s 969.  But there was no forgiveness. Only the mantra that had come to haunt both my waking and my sleeping hours:

Loose massive weight

Get uber exercise

Or bear the guilt

For your own demise.

Suddenly the prospect of demise seemed almost comforting.

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(This is a re-post from a couple of years ago. Still counting up – or is it down – the fabled seven ages, THANK GOODNESS!)

Most days these days I'm hanging on by an elastic. Thread isn't nearly tough enough for the task. Due to a personality which is flourishing as I age (some might call it a "belly," but that sounds so coarse), I have entered my suspenders phase.

This is not one of Shakespeare's seven ages, though it should be - would be, no doubt, if suspenders had been invented then. On the Shakespeare scale, I estimate that I’m somewhere between FIVE (“In fair round belly with good capon lined”) and SIX (“His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide / for his shrunk shank”). The belly (I mean, “personality”) is definitely round – so round that there’s now nothing below extending out far enough to catch the pants as they surrender to gravity – hence the suspenders. But the shank is not yet shrunk, though no longer as rock-hard toned as it once was (as if!). So, yes, between FIVE and SIX.

Which is somewhat comforting at my age: still one and a half to go! And no more of that bothersome “Sighing like furnace” of age THREE, with its requited or unrequited loves; or, now that I’m retired, “Creeping like snail / unwillingly to school” (or work, nasty word) of age TWO. Though there may still be a reprise of age ONE in my future –  “Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” –  to go along with the “sans everything” joys of age SEVEN.

I may no longer quite be in the “prime” that Miss Jean Brodie (i.e. Maggie Smith, in HER prime) proclaimed so magnificently, but now that I can loosen my belt enough, thanks to suspenders(!), to breathe, without risking the embarrassment of falling pants, it’s not too bad.

It took me years – indeed, decades – to reach my suspenders age. Not that they wouldn’t have been efficacious earlier, but as one who grew up at a time and place where only fat old men and farmers wore them, there were psychological barriers to wrestle. I could not, after all, take the role of Farmer Randy, no matter the play, no matter the stage.

Now that I’ve got here, life is easier. I even manage to suspend disbelief, and look on them as stylish statements; breathe easier without the suspense: Will the pants stay up or not?; proudly present to the world as an engineering wonder, a Brooklyn (Suspension) Bridge among men. All thanks to suspenders. Now I wonder that I took so long, capitulating to an inevitable that is not really so bad after all.

I suspect there’s a lesson here that I can (should!) apply elsewhere in my life. It’s not only my personality that has evolved with age. And so holding on to (“desperately clutching” seems too strong a term) youthful preconceptions (some might call them “misconceptions,” but that sounds so blaming) of what life – my life – should be like now that I’m old may not always be my best approach.

I remember when 30 was old – and also the ideal (and attainable)  waist measurement. Neither is now the case. Time to let go of both notions. Long past time. Time to send the size 30 jeans, even the size 40 ones, to Goodwill. Time to admit that one car will do for us, since we go everywhere together anyway – and don’t go anywhere all that much: home is where it’s at now, not gay discos and shopping malls. Time to stop calling it a “trekking stick”; it’s a balance bar now. Time to stop thinking that maybe Indian food will sit easy this once; that a full night’s sleep is 8 hours; that sex is little more than a concept. Time to admit that springing out of bed in the morning – as I so vividly remember doing at 25 – is a young man’s sport; time to be grateful for still getting out of bed anyway at all.

As with suspenders, there’s still resistance to confront. I still try Indian food once or twice a year – insanity for me, considering the same result. I still sometimes curse the darkness at 3 AM, instead of turning on the light and reading chapter 6 – and some nights, chapter 7 too. I still hold on to those size 40 jeans, just in case. “To every thing there is a season,” is still a lesson in the process of being learned, not without resistance, too bad for my serenity.

But there’s still hope. Where would we be in this life without hope? After all, I’ve embraced my suspenders age, however belatedly, and now I’m breathing easier – and my pants stay up.

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I think I’ve been here before.

Yes, I know I have.

A time when the days are in turmoil and the nights, terrible. Never knowing when the turmoil will descend – but knowing for sure that it will – sometime – soon.

Never able to be sure that the tranquility of this moment will survive the next.

Never able to feel comfort knowing that the one meant by nature to nurture and protect, will not, again this time, morph into nemesis.

Never able to plan for tomorrow since yesterday’s plan for today flamed to ashes in an instant.

Knowing always the fear that the fear will return, a fear more fearsome than the fear itself – a lurking constant, even when the cause for the fear itself has taken a temporary break.

As the son of an active (sometimes raging) alcoholic, I’ve been here before; and for all my bravado of maturity and survival, it’s as though I’m five or six or ten again – and back in that time of fear and chaos, which I foolishly tried to believe I’d left behind (but in my heart of hearts knew that, really, I hadn’t).

The alcoholic father is now long dead, and I’ve had decades to attempt understanding, even forgiving, that it was the disease of alcoholism, the demon whisky, and not a demon in the man, that thrust me, even now sometimes thrusts me back, into those cold nights of terror under ominous stars. Reaching understanding, forgiveness, should be easier for me, an alcoholic myself – but it isn’t, when the terrors are back.

And the terrors are back. They may never really have gone away, completely. (No, they didn’t.) And now they’re back, bigly: insecure days, sleepless nights, constant anxiety, periodic panic.

But it’s not the alcoholic father, and his disease of alcoholism (and the demon whisky) that have brought them back so fiercely this time. This time it’s our President.

I know I’ll sound pathetically infantile when I say it, but most of us have been raised from birth to believe that the President is the Father of our Country. Yes, George Washington specifically – a man with flaws for sure, but also virtues. With the Father/Country thing as with so much else related to our civic selves, Washington set a precedent that lived after him and encompassed his successor-Presidents, and the rest of us, his civic descendants. Even when we didn’t agree completely with his politics, we felt in our guts – most of us – that our President had our best interest at heart, that he was looking out for us, looking to protect us as best he could. Not always succeeding at it, but trying to. It’s what fathers do, the natural thing, fathers of sons and daughters, and fathers of countries too.

Call me naïve (likely some of you have already called me infantile), but I think that most of them did try; and sometimes they succeeded.

But with this President? The chaos seems to be the point, the terrible cold nights under sinister stars, inevitable. It takes me back.

This assessment will not surprise most of you. Others have noted as much, a million different ways by now. For months I, and others, have been sunk in paralyzing despair, lying awake nights in cold sweats, looking up at those frigging stars (metaphorically anyway).

So taking note is only the first step, and I may not even have taken it fully yet – an infantile baby half-step. Many steps to go. I think back to that time when I was at this place before, try to believe that there’s some disease at work, and not some demon too, try to remember how I survived it then.

But it’s hard. I may not have learned much about surviving in that earlier time except survival, and even that may have been just accident, just gritting through, not knowing there was anything else a scared kid could do.

Now, of course, I’m old and wise. I’m a functional adult who’s seen many troubles through the decades, had much therapy. I know how to cope with it all now, how to go on living through the depths of it, how to come out on the other side. In fact, I put a picture of me coping up above. I’ll put it in again here at the end, just to reinforce the point. I’ve been here before, and I survived. I’ll survive again this time too – and so can you. MAYBE!

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Recently I've had the recurring urge to clean out closets. I take this as a VERY bad sign. I distinctly remember my brother’s troubling observation, years ago, when our mother, quite out of character, set in to cleaning out a closet of hers:

"Cleaning out closets - getting ready to die," he said.

A chill went down my spine.

So whenever that closet purge urge recurs it makes me really nervous. I think you'll understand why.

There is another mental approach to closet clearing, a more positive one than this “getting ready to die” thing:

Clearing out closets, getting ready to live.

You might think that I, a gay man (don’t be shocked, if you didn’t already know), would take that view, since I did it myself – more or less – 50 some years ago. That closet clearing has turned out pretty well. At least I’ve made it through the 50 years, have not been too often discriminated against for it (that I know of), have never heard that unsettling phrase yelled directly at me:

“Throw another faggot on the fire!”

Who knows what may be coming in my remaining time, but so far so good.

And yet still I lean toward the negative. Perhaps it’s because negativity is my natural bent; perhaps I just can’t shake the superstitious fear that my brother might have been right; or perhaps it’s because I glanced in that closet and the magnitude of the mess almost scared the life (and the s***) out of me. Who knows what might be lurking in there. Black widow spiders, rats, photos of me from the 70s wearing a bow tie and floppy hat?!

But whatever is in there, all the precious items, stowed away (and forgotten) in each overstuffed closet must be looked at one-by-one. Because they are treasures; or could be. So each one has to be dealt with on its own. Like the years of mail stashed in Aunt Fern’s off-limits extra bedroom. Just enough unopened dividend checks that each piece of the whole mail mountain had to be handled – just in case. (Remember Aunt Fern? If not, you can meet her HERE.) So it is with the mountain of treasures in my closets.

And yet, so many treasures, so little time.

As it turned out, my brother was right: Mother cleaned the closet, and then she died. True, several years intervened between the cause and the consequence, and the perilous closet in question actually filled up again before her end, but there was no disputing the sequence.

Getting the timing right is crucial.

“Isn't it rich?
Isn't it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career …”

It may sound brutal, but our mother got her timing wrong. She emptied her closet, yes, but then she lived long enough to stuff it full anew. I don’t begrudge her those extra years. But when it came time, I had to do the final clearing (my brother took no part), after she’d made her penultimate move, to elder care.

Getting the house ready to sell fell to me, on weekend visits back home from Houston. The whole house became a closet stuffed with her treasures, and mine. There was the humiliating dining table that Mrs. Faye Williams disappeared beneath during that infamous Sunday dinner of the slowly collapsing chair. There was the Matterhorn of shoes of both father and mother, pairs and pairs of slip-on loafers and pointed toed spike high heals: clearly the shoe gene, which both my parents had, did not come down to one-pair-at-a-time me. There was the little metal box of gay erotica I’d stashed, decades and decades before, in the crawlspace above my childhood closet ceiling! Treasures all, at least treasures of memory, all begging to be cleared out one-by-one.

I did my best on those weekend visits, both for Mother’s sake and for mine. I asked her help in deciding which were treasures, which not. We both did the best we could. And the closets got cleared, the house sold. I almost thought we’d made a good job of it – until she asked for something neither of us had pegged a treasure in the rush. And it was gone. Imagine the feelings we each felt at that moment.

So really I should take a lesson from that feeling, which is still as vivid for me as my brother’s comment. But, no, of course I won’t. The terrifying acceptance of brutal reality that would require is more than I can muster. So, no closet cleaning for me, despite those vividly remembered feelings.

Besides, we only have so much time on earth – so little time, in fact, even if we’re among the lucky ones who get to live that relative thing we call l-o-n-g life. Do we really want to spend that precious time cleaning out closets?

HELL NO we don’t. Let the kids do it. Or the executrix, for those of us who are childless instead of child-blessed(?). It will give them a chance to fondly(?) remember us as they sift lovingly(?) through each precious item, remembering it’s significance, re-feeling its sentimental pull. They’ll thank us for the chance to do it. We know they will.

But wait. What’s that I hear. Could it be …? Oh, surely not. The sound of a dumpster someone’s putting in our drive? Whatever, do you suppose, could that be for?

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(Note: Last week I ran into a friend at the supermarket. She did me the great honor of saying that she enjoyed my Substack pieces. THANK YOU VERY MUCH! You know who you are. But she also mentioned that she sometimes wished I didn’t write about DEATH so much. So as a nod to her wish, which may be shared by some others of you, I’m sharing this piece from a couple of years ago: a piece in which NO ONE DIES - if you don’t count the chicken.)

A dear friend has asked me to write a piece about friendship and love in which no one dies. I won’t say that this is impossible for me – but it will be a stretch.

I’m at that dangerous stage – properly called Old Age, I suppose, though the phrase rankles – when every memory seems as precious as gold, at least to the rememberer, and when so many of them focus on former friends and lovers who are no longer here, either because they left, or, forgive me but it’s true, because they died. I no longer go to sleep at night with the youthful certainty of waking up in the morning – because one night, one morning, perhaps all too soon, it won’t be so. Not that I’m waiting morbidly for that morning-that-does-not-come. No, some mornings I still awake as excited as a shaken up Coke at what the day might bring. Though those awakenings are fewer now.

But at some point – a point I’ve passed – it becomes unignorable that life is short, and getting shorter at an unnerving rate – that there’s no guarantee of future memories. With the midpoint already far behind, and the endpoint somewhere in the mist not far ahead, memories, especially those from the time of youth and vigor, are in their glory. Looking back becomes a bittersweet defense against the fears that come with looking forward. I’m not one who can claim I have no such fears – though I envy, admire – and slightly disbelieve –  those who claim they don’t.

Also, there are practical advantages in writing about those who have “passed on.” (The least I can do, out of deference to my friend, is soften the blow of death through euphemism.) The “departed” can’t dispute my faulty memory, present another side to my heart-rending (self-serving?) recollection, sue for libel, don’t even complain – though sometimes their relatives do, this comment left online by one such relative, a case in point: “No one has given this Tibbits man permission to read, write, and speculate about her lifestyle.” What hot water I’d be in if the “her” in question weren’t already long “gone over!”

So a piece in which no one dies?

Perhaps I could write something about Miss Honey, my high school English teacher. There’s now an elementary school named after her in Lubbock. “Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye,” like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, but Miss Honey had never been a wife, and surely her diastema carried no hint of the sensuality that Chaucer suggests. Though who really knows? Aside from her introduction to English classics (and her beguiling smile, of course), all I remember about her is her tale of a weekend with sorority sisters, at Houston’s magnificently reborn Warwick Hotel, in 1964 – about the same time the Duke & Duchess of Windsor stayed there too. We can only imagine what those Windsors and those sisters might have gotten up to, in the midst of the French antiques and boiserie the place was then famous for. At least one of us in her English class imagined it – though it was a chaste, and longed for, fantasy of elegance. And no one died in my fantasy.

Or maybe something about W***, in New York City, in 1974. I met him one wild night at Le Jardin, then a place to be, especially for young, big-city deprived gays on forays from St. Louis. A son of Virginia, he was blond and beautiful. He’d gone to the right New England prep school, and the right Ivy League college. He’d interned at the Smithsonian; he had an apartment in the West 80s; he’d helped Scavullo photograph Janis Joplin. And improbably, miraculously, that night at Le Jardin he picked me.

He took me to a Fire Island beach house one Wednesday in mid-summer, for a day made to fulfill a 1970s gay boy’s dreams. I wrote in my diary afterwards: “The romantic interlude has done its insidious magic. I've fallen in love with the romance and now, since the place and the person are so far away, the romance and the fantasy have nothing of reality to keep them in balance. In fact, the only reality, that around me now, here in St. Louis, is so overshadowed by them that it hasn't a chance.”

After a while he didn’t stay in touch much. His last card told about how exhausting all the outdoor activity was, at his family’s summer house in Northern Canada, after our quiet time on “the Island.” He never did buy the ticket to Bette Midler’s Clams On the Half Shell, as he said he would – even though I sent him the money. At least he didn’t buy it for me. I had to buy one myself, the next time I got to “the City.” And I had to go to the show alone.

Maybe something about Max, my beagle. I was never really much for pets. My father was. Over the years he had a menagerie: not just ho-hum dogs and cats, but racoons and foxes, pigeons and ponies, turkeys and guinea fowl, and on and on. But I took after my mother in the pet regard, for whom animals were for use, mostly as dinner. She didn’t miss a beat when it came time to take off the chicken’s head under a hoe handle. And the blood spewing over the grass as dinner flopped around the backyard phased her not at all. But cats in the house? No thank you.

I picked Max myself, as my own dog. All the previous ones – Taffy and Smokie, and many more – had been my father’s, really, even though we tried to pretend they were mine. But Max – he was mine from the start. And I did like him: I can’t say, love. He came to live with us as a puppy when I was in 9^th grade. I was much more interested in school, frankly, than in Max.

He was still going strong when I graduated from high school and went away to college. That’s when he became officially my father’s dog. I don’t think he missed me much – Max, I mean, though maybe not my father either. I’m sure Father saw to it he had a happy life.

OK, almost to the end, and still no one’s died (except the chicken). But you know that can’t go on forever, and I bet you’ve already figured out that by now they ALL have died. I won’t dwell on it, but I won’t resort to euphemisms any longer either. I can’t help it. It’s just the way life works. Sorry, Dear Friend. I tried.

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I’ve reached the stage of life when I don’t just read the obituaries in the newspaper everyday. I also maintain a list of names from my past which I Google periodically, since newspapers are no longer adequate for keeping up-to-date with those who are no longer with us. I don’t do my ghoulish Googling on a set schedule: it’s not the first Monday of every month, or anything like that. Though I’m thinking it may be time to consider more regularity as we all get older (Alert: double entendre here intentional). Names are coming – and GOING – on my list with increasing frequency.

If you’re wondering who’s on my list – wondering more especially if YOU are on it – see above.

But no. I’ve blurred the names out of deference to those of my reader friends who may still be saying, “If I die.” My Friend, it’s not IF, but WHEN – and the WHENdow for it gets closer and closer to closed with each passing minute – IF you get my drift.

Even with the blur, however, you can see that the left side, “Still holding on,” is getting much shorter than the right, “Already gone.” This should not be a surprise for those of us mature and wise enough to know how these things work – always flowing left to right. Though those with vision still good enough (squinting may be necessary), will notice one gap on the right, where I realized I’d made a grave (Alert: double entendre here intentional) Google mistake, and a lucky one of you got to move the other way. (Alert: this happens infrequently, so don’t put your hopes on it, IF you don’t want to be disappointed. Though I assure you that disappointment will be the least of your concerns WHEN the window closes.)

But sometimes I don’t find the obituary I’m looking for, even though I Google a hundred ways. In my experience, there are two major reasons why: 1. They're not dead yet; 2. No one remained after them who cared enough to write and publish one. There may also be a few other less likely reasons, but Not yet dead and No one cares are the biggies.

Recently, I had an embarrassing encounter with my reason ONE. I observed to a former colleague that I couldn’t find the obituary of another colleague, graduate of our local university in 1950, retired from our mutual employer (said university) 20 years ago. I felt certain there must be one since she was much loved by many, an active member of her church, and an alumna who’d spent almost her whole life at our university: development offices keep close tabs on such, in case of “bequest maturity.” I wondered why I couldn’t find it.

“Because she’s not dead yet,” the colleague said. Yes, I’m quoting her in my reasons above. “She came to a staff party just last week.”

Not dead yet!? How is that possible? Methuselah, prepare to be deposed.

Our colleague kindly agreed not to mention either my mistake, or my incredulity.

And then there was the evening when my husband, Rick, and I were nesting cozily in our back room sanctuary, far enough from the street that only the most obnoxious traffic noises penetrated, preparing to enjoy our supper of reheated leftovers, the Netflix DVD already popped into the player (this was long ago, before we streamed, or even knew what “streaming” was). Just across the back fence, our neighbor, Vangie’s, house sat dark, as it had sat for months and months. I’d been searching her “name” AND “obituary” for a while. Not unreasonable, I think you’ll agree: we’d attended her 100^th Birthday celebration some years before. We wanted to send condolences to the family. The card, personalized and signed, awaited only an address.

The phone rang. (This was a long time ago, when an instrument, with a wire, sat on the low table between our easy chairs.) Rick picked it up. Then he went white. Over the wire he heard Vangie’s voice, as though calling in from Heaven. (We’ll assume Heaven; she was nice.) As she explained, she’d been living with her daughter/caretaker (83 herself) in a distant city; had come home only for a while to replace her air conditioner: “You really shouldn’t have to do that at 103,” she laughed. She’d decided not to take the extended warranty. Still it was years yet before I found her obituary at last.

Only last week I did find one obit I’d been expecting for a while: that of a former boss from 25 years ago (and more), a woman almost exactly 10 years my senior – and so the closing of the WHENdow to be expected at any time. Though she and I had our clashes - the meeting of two strong (some might say, stubborn) wills grappling in life-or-death struggles) - the tempering passage of so much time made possible a corner-of-my-eye tear. I even wondered if all our strife had really been worth the effort. The issues don’t seem quite so life-or-death now.

For a few I’ve done what I could to fill the gap when I haven’t found their obituary, or not the one I sought: for my dear friend Claudia who killed herself at 31; my childhood friend Reed, taken by AIDS; Fern (remember her?); someone from the distant past.

It’s not that I have some morbid fascination with obituaries. Like most, I never used to read them at all. Also like most – those lucky enough to get old, at least – they’ve taken on a more compelling relevance as the decades have mounted. They’re a memorial, certainly, insubstantial like everything in newspapers (though a little more lasting in the digital age perhaps). But like open caskets and probate courts, they give an irrefutable certainty, mark an undeniable end that helps make moving on possible. Without them, we can find ourselves adrift in the sea of maybe-not.

An obit I’m looking for now will be the final proof that our friend, Ellen, is gone. She lives (lived?) far away, and we knew her only from a couple of fun travel adventures of a couple of weeks each – followed by email exchanges and Substack comments. But we came to build a love for her, even on such a slight foundation. What a sad day it was when she messaged that her cancer had returned. What bursts of hope when she shared news of the next new treatment suggested by her doctors – and then the next. What a blow when she said that they all had failed – that now it was “only a matter of time,” and that the time would be short.

Along the way we continued sending messages, and she continued her trying-to-be-upbeat replies.

Our last message to her:

Hi, Ellen! Just a short note to say we are thinking of you & are sending our love. I am raising a glass of red wine as I hope for your comfort and peace.
Love,
Rick & Randy

And the reply, one of the saddest messages I’ve ever read, the sadder perhaps because so brief and unadorned, but so true to Ellen – sent by Jackie, whom we’ve never met – the kind friend seeing her through last days:

I read Ellen your email, but she is on morphine now. If she weren’t, your email would have made her smile.
Jackie

I’ve only heard third hand, from California, by way of Chicago, that Ellen is really gone, some weeks ago now. We all remember from childhood how unreliable such “playing telephone” news can be, so maybe it’s not true. Maybe Ellen (and all the others) haven’t really …

And so I keep searching for her obituary. With no children and no spouse, and even with kind friend Jackie, it’s likely Ellen falls into my reason No. 2, above: no one left to write and publish one.

But wouldn’t it be lovely if the playing-telephone news were wrong, and I could move Ellen (and everyone) from the right-hand column back to the left? And after all, there’s no obituary, so maybe …

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A picture is worth a thousand words? Hoping so, on a day when the words didn’t flow.

Sending two, just in case - from a walk in the Japanese Garden, Hermann Park, Houston, Texas, USA.

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(Note: Some of you may have seen this piece already on Facebook, where I posted it a while ago. Apologies for the duplication. And apologies to any dealer subscribers who may find it in any way hurtful. Be assured that it is not about YOU!)

You know you've hit rock bottom when even your dealers stop calling.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not talking drug dealers here. I know, from watching crime shows on TV, that drug dealers don't call. They just sit tight and wait for the desperate to call THEM.

No, I'm talking ART DEALERS. Art dealers definitely DO call, or did once upon a time, and often. But now, me, no longer. I'm wondering if someone has spread the vicious rumor that my money is no longer green. Or that there's no longer any of it left, that they (that is, the dealers) already have it all. 

For the record: Dear Dealers, my money IS still green - and I DO still have a little of it – not nearly as much as would have been if you’d never called at all – but a little, that could be added to that lot you already have, if only you'd call now.

Could it be you thought I’d never find out about your infidelity – and after all my years of faithful buying? Or did you want me to? No! I can’t even grasp that possibility. You can be tempters. I learned that over many years. But cruel? No, surely not. Not MY dealers. Not YOU.

So why was I NOT offered that latest piece, that would have been so perfect for my walls? It would have filled one of the last gaps in my collection. Or maybe not “one of the last,” but for sure one of the remaining. And it would have perfectly filled that spot on the wall, which, you’re right, is not empty, but which has been filled for so many years by a piece (bought from one of you, I’ll note) holding the place in anticipation of this perfect one coming along. But now that it has come along, who got the call? Someone else, not ME!

For years it was: “I picked this just for you”; “I always call you first”; “No one else could appreciate it more.” And I believed you. But now what am I to think?

I guess I should have known you said that to all of us. I wasn’t born yesterday. Though where the charms of that “perfect painting” are concerned, I might as well have been. And you knew it.

I wish I knew how to quit you – but I don’t. We were so good together once upon a time, and surely could be good, together, again.

Now that I’ve seen the truth about our “special” relationship, will I ever be able to trust again? I doubt it. But maybe. Try me. Let’s see. Call. PLEASE CALL!

I’m floor-to-ceiling with paintings already, largely thanks to you all. Both a blessing and a curse, especially now that I’m getting old and have begun planning for the “home.”

I suppose it’s possible you think you’re doing it – calling someone else, not me –  for my own good, knowing how full my walls already are, and how perilous (and slow) the walk down, and especially UP, the stairs has become on ancient legs – what danger the paintings hang in, on their salon-stuffed walls, should I lose my footing, and fall into them. So perhaps you think you’re doing it for my own good, and for theirs.

Or did you spot that one amongst the many that I bought from someone else? My own collector/dealer infidelity. I knew I shouldn’t have as I did it. I knew it would come back to haunt me, haunt US. But don’t let that little slip destroy the brilliant thing we’ve had together for so long. It was only once (or maybe twice, or maybe …), forgotten as soon as consummation climaxed with the signing of the check. It didn’t mean anything. It was that well documented syndrome, CCC (Craven Collector Compulsion) careening uncontrolled. You knew from the beginning that I’m just a boy who can’t say NO to a pretty landscape.

Or can it be that, after all these years, you’ve grown tired of plucking (which rhymes with … ) me, and found someone else you prefer to pluck instead?

But that’s just bitterness and disappointment speaking. Don’t take offense. Don’t hold it against me. All will be forgiven, and my checkbook spread wide open for you, if you’ll only text or call. My number, in case you lost your contact list (yes, I’m sure that must be it), is – 1-800-BrokenHearted, ext. Disconsolate-that-we’ve-parted. Yes, yes, please DO call. We CAN be good again. I KNOW we can. Let’s TRY.

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As I write, it’s been a week since Hurricane Beryl blew through Houston with devastating effect. Electricity has been restored to most, though sadly not all, of the 2M+ households and businesses that lost it. Cleanup has begun: that will take a long time; mountains of debris still litter the streets; stumps remind us where, a week and a day ago, trees rose tall, now fallen, cut up, left for the heavy waste pickup – whenever that might be. A long time.

Though I’ve been through some storms in 40 years of living here, this one seems to have hit me harder than any of the ones that came before. I haven’t been able to write since that day. I sit at my keyboard in a daze. I’ve started many pieces that have trailed off into …

I tried to convince myself that life would level out when our power came back; but the power came back, and the level didn’t.  Then, that normal would return when our visitor had his own power restored and could go back to his own home; still no “normal.” And then that a few nights sleep, in our own house, just to ourselves, would do it. Not so.

I made a rich, lovely chicken stock just before Beryl arrived – which had to be thrown out along with everything else in the refrigerator when the power failed.

Likewise, the crème fraiche.

I’ve replace those in recent days, now that the power is back on, which has helped some – but not enough to bring back serenity. Not even chicken soup can cure all ills, it seems.

Even the New York Times has taken note of our trauma with something approaching sympathy, and when they take that approach about Houston, you know we’ve had a hard time: ‘This Storm Has Broken People’: After Beryl, Some Consider Leaving.

I’ve begun to wonder what it’s going to take to come back, not just for our city, but for our spirits and psyches too. I’d love to hear from you about how you’re coping. They say that community helps at times like these – even virtual community. In this Substack community of ours, I suspect I’m not the only one in distress right now. I know I’m not as I look around, chat with others, read the news.

I invite you to leave a comment on this post to help build that sense of community we all need in trying times. Even if you’re not in Houston, you’ve lived through natural disasters of your own, so please let us know how you coped too. Maybe that way we can do a bit to help each other make our way through this, and find our way back. I need that right now for sure; I think we all do.

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We have lots of books about Paris in our house. This will come as no surprise to those of you who are regular readers of my Substack pieces. By lots, I mean well over a hundred, what with the pretty picture books and the décor books, and the cookbooks, and the garden books and the guide books and the map books and the Paris-as-it-was history books … We could easily fill the shelves of a belle, petit boiseried salle de livre (which may not actually be the right term ; I don’t speak French) with only books on Paris. Picture me leafing through volume after volume as I sit in an enveloping fauteuil upholstered centuries ago in supple leather of an antique hue. Sipping an apéro or bonnet de nuit – in reverie.

Once upon a time I thought I’d live in Paris. Now I know I never will. But that’s OK. I’ve done the next best thing: I’ve declared our house a Paris suburb – one of the more distant, leafier ones. And I’ve been lucky enough to visit the actual Paris scores of times. Enough times that I even felt comfortable that I know the city well enough – at least “our” neighborhood, the 5^th – to set a novella there. And as a visitor I haven’t had to trouble with keeping the plumbing working, or carrying the street-market treasures home through sudden showers, and up flights and flights of stairs. Or getting internet service that works. All challenges I’ve read about in the laments of others actually living there. Lucky me, I’ve just had to live the dream.

And a dream I know it’s been, being in a place – oh, a lovely place – where someone else always does the cooking and cleaning, and the doctor’s office – and the ailments that get diagnosed there –  is back home, where the real-life things happen – things left behind for little excursions to paradise. (You’re right. Not everything about Paris is paradise – but enough is to keep the dream alive.)

“I thought it would last my time,” to quote a line from Philip Larkin – a line that has nothing to do with Paris, but comes to mind for me so often lately.  A recent medical adventure (nothing serious; recovering nicely) has reminded me that while Paris may last – we’ll see if it survives the Olympics – my time there will not.

My medical involved general anesthesia, so I don’t remember any of it after the nurse said, “You won’t feel a thi …” No, I don’t remember a thing, until I heard another nurse’s voice: “…ow are you feeling?” as my head spun and my eyes tried to focus on the revolving walls.

For that hour between the two nurses - it couldn't have been much more than that  - I'd given over any pretense of control - my person and fate completely in the hands of others. People I hardly knew – the surgeon, talked to only twice; the anesthetist met only once, minutes before he did his job; the operating room nurses not met at all, just there as someone rolled me in. Everything I am, have been, might hope to be, in the hands of strangers, just humans, “only people”  – just like me. What an act of faith. In retrospect, it takes my breath away.

But that amazement at faith isn’t the thing that stays with me most about this recent adventure. My fear is that this is the beginning of the decline, or at least a noteworthy acceleration of it. We cancelled a trip for my medical reasons – the first time we’ve ever done that. And like falls among the elderly (do I have the courage to say, “Us elderly?”), once they begin, so often they just keep happening until the final fall – the one from which there’s no getting up. I saw it in my mother’s final phase. She wanted – don’t we all – to spend her last time of life at home.

And then the falls began, and they dictated that she’d spend her last five months – disrupted months during which everything that had been her life, except the being alive itself, fell away – away from home. And yet, knowing that about falls, and having seen her last bit of life, and having taken falls myself (so far I have managed to get up), I still refuse to accept that I have reached the stage of old-manhood when I should (yes, SHOULD, for my own good) sit down to put on my pants: that’s the one best thing old men can do to help keep themselves (“ourselves”) from falling, they say. But what an admission of “I’m old,” what a giving up of the illusion of control, that simple act embodies. And so I still foolishly put mine on standing up.

This time it’s likely I’ll recover to go to Paris again, maybe many times. I hope so. But this morning, as I leafed through one of those Paris volumes, I thought of a friend of long standing – acquaintance I should probably say now; we’ve fallen out of closeness; it happens, even when you have no idea why – an acquaintance who loves Paris, and the idea of it, at least as much as I, and whose time there is over. At 90, and mobility restricted, she’ll likely never go again, except, possibly, through Hemingway’s “moveable feast” – or maybe as ashes. Paris is now, for her, all memory or dream. And I know that I’ll be there all too soon myself. I admit it, a tear came into my eye as I thought of her (and me).

As with my acquaintance, so with me as well before too many more years (so with us all, but I’ll leave you to get to that conclusion on your own). It was ever thus, and always will be. The way of nature. So philosophical of me to say that, don’t you think? And with hardly any bitterness in my tone.

And now, I wait to recover. Get better, anyway: recover sounds too grand at my age. Get better for what? Another trip to Paris? I hope so. My friend (I think I’ll call her friend again, even though she’ll likely never know, she taught me so much about living) has taught me not to take that for granted – not to expect it – maybe not even to hope for it.

If I do make that trip – I think I will; I now know I’m a person of previously unimaginable faith – I’ll do it in honor of her. Though she’ll likely never know. I won’t tell her. That might be too painful for her, knowing that I still can go to Paris and she never can again. But it could be that as I’m thinking of her on the Rue Mouffetard or in the Luxembourg she’ll sense it and feel a warmth – she won’t know why – and think back to when we still were close and both could dream that our Paris dreams still might be possible.

As my own act of defiance against the fate awaiting me, I’m ordering another book about Paris, rush delivery! It should be here tomorrow.

Gather ye Paris books as ye may,
	Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today
        Tomorrow will be [long gone, at least where you are concerned, 
         you better believe it!]

I’m ordering another one, that is, if I can find one we don’t already have. But not to worry about that, I guess. One thing you can always count on in this life, in addition to death and taxes, is another book about Paris.

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My father died from an intestinal aneurysm that burst without warning one evening when he was in his mid-70s – exactly my age now. He’d just that morning been in for a routine physical, and received a clean bill of health – except for the emphysema and other ravages that came with 60 years of heavy smoking  and hard drinking. But basically, as healthy as he’d been for years. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” the doctor had said. “Except for the drinking and smoking,” went unspoken, as understood.

Then suddenly, only hours later, dead. Bled to death, so the doctor said, from a burst artery, likely grazed by a bullet while he fought in North Africa during the War – THE WAR, World War II. So basically he bled to death from a war wound that had been lurking inside him for forty years, biding time until it made the decision, at last, to kill him. He died within minutes of the rupture, as they put him on a stretcher in his living room, icy cold to the touch, so my mother told me later. Nothing could have been done to stop it. His death had been sealed in the North African desert decades earlier.

So bleeding in that region, as sometimes happens for old men, has always terrified me.

I remember one midnight, a few years ago now, on the anniversary of his death, waking suddenly out of a deep sleep with a piercing pain in my gut. Even I, ever the skeptic, knew that it was too coincidental to be coincidence. It was a night of panic for me – of anticipation, expectation of imminent death. I lay there sucking shallow breaths, listening to my heart pound, pound, pound, my chest like an empty oil barrel, that heart pounding to get out, the sound pumping in my inner ear. Longing for the escape of sleep (though knowing sleep is no escape), but struggling to stay awake, for fear the sleep would be final. It was, of course, the death of sleep for that night. But lost sleep seemed the least of it. It was, once again, a panic attack.

And, once again, as all the times before, I didn’t die. My heart grew quieter eventually, my breathing deeper, and sleep came – the temporary sleep from which I awakened in the morning – not refreshed, but reassured that death might still be a future milestone, to be faced more bravely when it did come, instead of with the panic of the night just past.

I had panic attacks all through my young adult years – almost reaching to middle age. The first one came on without warning in my middle 20s. I suppose I’d been what might be called a “nervous” child: thanks mother for the heredity and father for the midnight terrors of a rampant alcoholic who might rage at any moment. But before that first attack there’d been nothing to hint at the complete conflagration of panic that engulfed me in a second, leaving me trembling and whimpering and certain of my imminent end.

Despite my Calvinist background, I’ve never much held with predestination. But one thing certain: From the instant of conception, we’re all predestined to die sometime within a hundred years or so, no way to avoid it. The only uncertainty is when. It’s always there lurking, like my Father’s war wound, biding time.

That first attack struck shortly after my first, and only, LSD trip – a very bad trip – one that I’ve never had any wish to repeat. I never had been a voracious druggy. Joints, of course, once I’d learned to smoke enough to tolerate them, but everyone smoked joints then; a few other experiments that came with the company I kept; and drinks aplenty - so many drinks. The typical fare of a went-to-college-in-the-60s, came-out-gay-in-the-70s guy finding his way into adulthood – an exploration that has, perhaps, not ended yet, though no longer drug enhanced.

But one night my lover of the time had LSD on offer, and so, Why not?

As I said, bad trip, not forgotten in any fraction, even now.

Shortly after, the lover left, taking his LSD with him. The panic, when it arrived – I’m not saying there was any connection – hung around for years.

The first one came on suddenly, as they all did, with little warning and hardly any reason: a missed heartbeat, perhaps, or a tingle in fingers or toes, which may only have been static electricity – things that happen all the time, and usually get ignored. But at panic time, once the idea was planted, there was no ignoring it, no matter how much biofeedback I employed. Because panic time meant death, certain, unavoidable, instantaneous death. Biofeedback has a hard time facing that down.

The attacks sunk in their talons regardless of time or place, sparked by their own secret triggers – though some externals seemed to factor in. Air travel became terrifying – death with strangers trapped in a plunging metal tube. Going over bridges? Almost impossible. The capsule taking me to the top of the St. Louis Arch (I lived in St. Louis at the time) - a coffin. Caves transformed to catacombs in which my shelf beckoned. But even more day-to-day, the inevitability of food, or other, poisoning, or just breaking into pieces loomed ever-present. Life became a desperate attempt to stave off, not death itself, but those crushing attacks of the fear of it – attacks that would not be staved off when they decided their time had arrived, much like my father’s war wound lying in wait.

More than once I got myself to emergency rooms  (or friends or family got me there), begging to be saved – the body, that is: a Church of Christ childhood told me the soul was already most likely lost.

When ER nurses would say, “There’s no need to panic,” I knew there almost certainly WAS. Otherwise why would the phrase even come to their minds. Once, at least, my exasperated doctor, when they’d reached him at last, instructed them to, “Give him a Valium and send him home.” Did I actually hear the doctor say it; did the ER staff report it to me; or did I hear it only in my panic addled head? Valium – the wonder drug of choice then, for so many of us – even my mother took it.

After a while, the fear of panic’s return became almost as terrifying as the panic itself. Not quite, but almost.

Then, after 15 years, as suddenly as the panic attacks had arrived, they left. It took some time, but I began to grow confident that I no longer had to live in perpetual fear of their return. The remaining tablets in my Valium prescription bottle grew dusty with age, their expiry date years, then decades, in the past. Though I never summoned the confidence and courage to flush them away – always caried them in my dopp kit, I almost knew I’d never swallow them. Almost.

That one attack, on the anniversary of my Father’s death, though real, had seemed to be a one-off that proved the truth of what the doctor told me: they were most often a Female Trouble (it was the era of the film), though in that case, why me? And that most aged out of them. “Keep taking the Valium as needed.”

But that was medical wisdom of 50 years ago, and, it would appear, wrong. Terror of terrors: they have returned. I seem to have aged back in. “Pride cometh before a fall,” the saying goes. And also, it would appear, “Confidence before a panic attack.”

This is destined to be an essay with an end, but no resolution. I’d consult the doctor again for his updated medical wisdom – I always had such confidence in him – but I’ve just learned from Google searching that he died only last year at age 91. A long, and I hope panic-free life.

So here we are once again, after all these years – just me, ineffectual biofeedback and the doctor’s last advice: Keep taking the Valium as needed. I wonder if I should dust them off before taking?

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I’ve just learned that my husband has a file folder of stories to share at my funeral!

Heartwarming and amusing stories, no doubt, but he won’t tell me what they are, so I guess I’ll have to be there to find out. This is not an entirely appealing prospect, no matter how gratifying it might be hearing my friends and acquaintances chuckle at my foibles and amen at his recitation of my virtues. Surely it will only be virtues recited. No grieving husband would remember faults at such a time. Or dwell on them if he did. Would he?

I’ve only been, at most, to a dozen funerals in my life. Not many for 75 years. So unless things pick up smartly in coming years (and for the sake of my family and friends, I hope they don’t!), my own will make it a baker’s dozen. Or perhaps more aptly under the circumstances, an undertaker’s dozen. The only undertaker I’ve ever known personally – and he was “ex” by then, gone on to ventures in which his clients were not quite such silent partners – termed the stage of “life” with which he then dealt “the dirt nap.” Not surprisingly, it’s a phrase that has stuck with me ever since.

The assumption with the folder of funeral notes, of course, is that I’ll be going first – by no means a certainty, though I will allow as how it may be a hope some days (very few, on balance, surely) depending on how the virtues balance the faults that particular day.

It’s something of a shock to realize that others have begun to plan for my demise – and not just in an abstract way, but with folders. Sure, I made a will, but not because I thought I’d really ever need it. It’s just something responsible people do, and so I did it – mostly in a wan effort to convince others (and myself) that I am “responsible people” too. And as to the “do not resuscitate” order, and the “cremation of remains” directive, and all the rest: the less said about them, the better. And the less thought.

But, of course, others have thought of my death, just as I’ve thought of theirs. Thinking about that final step for others, even the near and dear, is just part of observing life, especially by the time we’ve observed so many decades of it. Perhaps it’s a way of starting the grief process early to help ease the shock when the time comes, so maybe it even makes evolutionary sense.

Thinking about it FOR OTHERS, that is. But for ourselves? Realizing that is quit another kettle of fish. (FYI, I’ve never written “another kettle of fish” before, and I promise never to do so again.)

Perhaps my perplexity is not so much with the actual death part, as with the not being here anymore that it implies. I confess that some days, especially after sleepless nights, I already feel as though I’m only half here. So I sort of understand when other people seem to respond to me as though I’m “not all there.” But to be “not there at all?!” Oh my, how can I grasp that without going completely off my rocker? (“Off my rocker?” Never again!)

We spend a lifetime as though (even the unselfish among us, I’m convinced, though I wouldn’t claim to be one of them ) we’re the center of the world – and we are the center of at least our own world. How could it be otherwise? Then somewhere along the way, most of us realize (certain politicians perhaps excluded) that somehow the world is going to keep spinning on without us as its center when we’re gone. Responsible people don’t actually say it – Le monde, c’est moi, to paraphrase – but can I be the only one who deep down feels that way?

If a world there be without me, does it exist? Well, of course it doesn’t – FOR ME. This is not a condition which even the existentialists can help me with. I’ll need a new philosophy to grapple with that. Perhaps Non-existentialism?! That’s getting rather deep for my limited philosophical skills, however.

There was a time when I sank deep into the bog of genealogy, though I like to think it wasn’t just so I could strut before folks who had no ancestors of their own. (Yes, we genealogists sometimes seem to forget that everyone has ancestors, even when their trees are not leafed out, and that there’s not much more boring to other people than our begets.) I tell myself that I traced back to give myself a sense of orientation in the world – and it did bring some comfort, if nothing else, to one old queer Texas liberal to find that “my people” had been here a long, long time (take THAT some of you carpetbagger Texas politicians, and some of you almost-just-off-the-boat national ones too!), and so I have as much right to be here as anyone. I’m not saying more, but just as much.

Of those ancestors, I never met any beyond my parents. The others were all gone by the time I came – except for my father’s father, though he was “estranged” and never mentioned, which amounted to the same. They were all already just names on paper – a few generations further back, not even that – though they all culminated in ME, which was the really important thing about them. Back then, I never thought how shocked they might have been, could they have known that’s what they would become: my ancestors, names on paper – they, with their own lives as the centers of their worlds. And, back then, I certainly never thought that’s all that I’d become someday too.

In the big picture it’s good, of course, that we get out of the way after our expiration date. Otherwise the world would get over cluttered with us decrepit relics of past times. It may be a plan; it may not. Either way, it’s the way it is. I’m not disputing that.

But what still perplexes me is that “not being here” thing. Even though I know it’s the way it will be, how do I get my head around that? Some nights, as I think about it in those wee hours, it’s a thought almost too close to the cliff.

They say we’re not really dead as long as we’re remembered. I’ve said it myself about friends who are gone: Claudia, Reed, Fern, past lovers, others. Unless I’m the last leaf, I suppose I’ll be remembered too, but not for long. All who remember me will soon enough not be here either. And then?

Then, only a name on a piece of paper – or a computer screen these days. And no one will even be looking me up, since I will be nobody’s ancestor.

Which brings us back to that file folder, and what it might contain. News flash, Husband! I have stories to tell at your funeral too. Though they’re not in a folder, only in my head, which I realize is a perilously porous pot to put them in – so I may be borrowing that folder idea from you. I’m not going to tell you what’s in it, but keep in mind, I may not be going first. It may be your funeral guests who hear stories of your foibles, faults, VIRTUES. So let’s make a deal: VIRTUES only. What do you say? And if the deal gets broken at the end? HAUNTING may ensue.

But what a relief that would be, come to think of it! Not completely “not here” after all!! Even if only still around as a HAINT, but who’s quibbling? So let the FAULTS pour forth!!!

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Ode To Spring

O dear, Sunday morning – 
Time to post – 
And I have nothing ready.

Always eager to give that
     Which is owed, 
I offer this little Ode To Spring.

A sunny walk amongst the flowers – 
Can you smell their odor?
(O drat, that’s “scent!” – My mistake.)

Well, I hope you like it – 
Even though a bit un-odinary.

Happy Sunday!

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