The Incredible Shrinking Man

I had my annual physical recently.  I was pleased that all was well (although I’m still awaiting the results of various regular tests).  But there was one shock when the nurse decided, for the first time in many years, to measure my height: I’ve shrunk two inches!  And that was with my shoes on.  By standing up as straight as I could, I managed to reduce that to one and a half inches--still with shoes on, so the figure remains at two inches.  How and when did I shrink two inches?

I know losing height is natural as one ages.  No: it’s natural as others age.  It’s not natural for me to shrink.  I have always been six feet and I am having a hard time accepting that I have lost two inches.  I know I tend to stoop a bit.  And, like a lot of people my age, I tend to walk with head down; that’s just a defense mechanism: falling is very hard on someone 69 years old, and Chicago sidewalks are often uneven and broken.  Apparently, there’s basically nothing I can do about the shrinking. 

Just like there is nothing I can do about aging.  I’ve never been especially troubled by aging, and I don’t fight it generally.  But two inches?  That’s hard to take.

As for the “Incredible” part of the title, well, there’s nothing incredible about me.  But the term certainly describes what I think of the fact that I have shrunk: that’s incredible.

Short-Lived Resolution

Before I even start, let’s get one thing out of the way: “short-lived” is pronounced with a long I, as in “short life,” from whence it came.  Anyone who was ever in my class or sipped a beer with me knows how I feel on this.  And I don’t get a crap who says “short-lived,” as in “short live” (which anyone can see does not make a lick of sense), I (my ashes, actually) will go to my watery grave saying “short-lived” with a long I.  Now on to the resolution:

A few days ago I decided I was watching too much television.  So, I resolved to go without TV for a week.  I worked out some details--movies didn’t count nor did downloading Rachel Maddow on the iPad--set my jaw firmly, and went back to my book and coffee.  Later that evening, 20 minutes into The Evening News with Diane Sawyer, I remembered my resolution.  Not only had I broken my firm resolution, I hadn’t even remembered that I had made such a resolution.  Only one thing to do at that point: say “fuck it” and spend the rest of the evening watching TV.

And thus with most of my resolutions . . .

John Deere Day

I don’t trust my memory.  And the further back I go in time the less reliable I’m sure it is.  But I’m going back today to one of my fondest memories from the 50s: John Deere Day.  Maybe some of it is accurate.

We actually didn’t have a John Deere tractor.  We had a Farmall.  At least we did until my brother, Ken, broke it in half; but that’s a story for another blog.  It didn’t make any difference what kind of tractor you had for John Deere Day, or even if you had one; everyone showed up for the social event of the year.  As I remember the day, it happened once a year in the spring.  The John Deere company sponsored food and games and, no doubt the main reason for the event, a display of new tractors.  All this took place on the grounds of my elementary school, State Center. 

The games were silly and the food unexceptional, and we all crawled over the tractors, and generally ran around like idiots.  But the part I remember most vividly were the movies.  Of course, we lived in the country and had only one movie theater in the area, a tiny theater in Jones, Oklahoma, which showed second string movies (but they also showed the wonderful Flash Gordon serials!).  So it was the highlight of the John Deere Day when, as the sun set, a sheet was stretched out (between trees? poles? I don’t remember), the school’s 16 mm projector was brought out, and the movie began.  There was a pause between each reel as it was rewound and the new reel strung up.  And I don’t remember a single movie!  It really wasn’t about the movie; it was about the event, the time away from studies and chores.  John Deere Day was more fun than the State Fair, which, since we exhibited a variety of things, was always about work.  And John Deere Day was about innocence and laughing.  I have no doubt that my memory idealizes the whole event.  That’s okay; I’ll keep those memories, reality be damned.

The Smell of Stale Beer

I miss sleazy bars.  I miss the smell of stale beer and the tinny music from a jukebox.  I miss the clack of the cue ball against carefully racked balls.  I miss the camaraderie, the cheap brew, the taste of soggy pretzels, and the sweat-permeated ambiance of a neighborhood bar.  I never was much of a drinker, although I’ve had my moments.  But I loved the socialization of bars where, well, “everyone knows your name.” 

What brought this train of thought about was a visit last week to B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted(1), a legendary blues bar not far from where I live.  I’ve been there before, usually to hear my friend Rob Stone perform, as was the case this time.  But for some reason, this visit brought back a stream of memories of all those bars I’ve hung out in over the years--and rarely go to now.

The ugly truth of the matter is that being old makes the bar experience far less fun than it used to be.  One becomes invisible anywhere, once one reaches a certain age; in a bar it’s even worse.  I have occasionally, since moving to Chicago, accompanied younger folk to bars, but I just would not go on my own any more.  Even at B.L.U.E.S., I was with my young friends Geri and Carolyn.  I’ve even been there with former students.  But never by myself.  And I miss those days.

One must move on . . .

As for B.L.U.E.S., it’s a great place to hear Chicago style blues.  I encourage you to go there.  Last Tuesday (area residents get in without a cover charge on Tuesdays), as I say, I went to hear Rob Stone(2).  But while there he was joined by the magnificent Big Time Sarah(3), who sang at B.L.U.E.S. on the night it opened in 1979.  Truly a legend.  But if you’re a prude, stay away!  She is  down and dirty.

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1. http://www.wineandleisure.com/sweethomechicago/blues/index.html
2. http://www.robstone.com/index.html
3. http://www.wineandleisure.com/blueswebchicago/bigtimesarah.html

The Father of us All

Blog is a portmanteau word; that is, it’s a mashing up of two other words, in this case web and log.  So, by definition, a blog is something written for the web.  But I’m going to extend that definition just a bit.  I do this with the probably specious logic that if the web had been around 432 years ago, “The Father of Us All” would have written for the web.  But of course that wasn’t the case, so Michel Eyquem de Montaigne wrote his blogs for publication, his only way of sharing them.  But in any modern sense of the word blog, blogs are what Montaigne wrote.

Montaigne is generally credited with being the first to use the term essay to describe his writing, drawing from the French word essai, meaning trial or attempt.  And that is exactly what he set out to do in his essays: attempt to understand himself.  And through himself understand something of the world.  The continued popularity of his essays attests to how well he succeeded.

Everything is grist for Montaigne’s verbal mill.  Most importantly, his main topic is “How to Live”; or, more accurately, how to live a good life, a correct or honorable life.*  And in the exploration of that seminal question, he wrote about the major perplexities of life: how to cope with the fear of death; how to you deal with the loss of a dear friend; how to live with failure.  But he also wrote about the minor perplexities of life: how to cheer up a sad friend; wondering what his cat is thinking; and what to do if a friend thinks a witch has cast a spell on him.  The answers he found came from examining his own life--and sharing that life with us, his reader.

The tower on his estate where Montaigne wrote his essays.

And it’s a fascinating life!  We find out he likes melons, “that he prefers to have sex lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee”* and oh so much more.

Montaigne doesn’t have an agenda; he’s not pushing some point of view.  The Montaigne at the beginning of the essays is not the same Montaigne we find at the end.  He often comes up short of definitive answers.  But the reader of these essays will not come away unchanged.

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Some selected quotes, located on-line:
--“When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”
--“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”
--“Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.”
--“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
--“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
--“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
--“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.”
--And perhaps his most famous: “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?)
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*I encourage you read a delightful and insightful book about Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell: How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. There are many translations of Montaigne’s essays; I use the M. A. Screech translation, available most everywhere, including as an e-book.

The Tao of Blogging

And so I return to blogging.  My last entry was December 28, 2011.  I quit mostly because I had to figure out how to deal with losing my website software from Mac; it’s moving into the “cloud,” or, since it’s an Apple gizmo, the iCloud.  I still have only the foggiest notion of what that means.  But I do know that in June, all my previous blogs and my web site are going to disappear.  Don’t panic!  I’ve saved them all and will be publishing them--and starting a new web site.  Ah, I hear a great collective sigh of relief.  I am gratified.

But from the last blog to this one has given me some time to think about why I do these blogs.  All kidding aside, it’s not because of a thunderous demand for them; in fact, my readership over the years mostly consisted of a few close friends.  And yet here I go again.  Why? 

I think the answer is, quite simply, that I write these because I enjoy writing them.  We clearly don’t need another blog out there.  In 2008 there were 184 million blogs; the number must be exponentially higher now.  I grow weak thinking about it.  It hardly seems worth the effort.  A grain of sand on a very big beach.  And yet here I go again.

I can’t even argue that it’s some sort of immortality; once I’m gone, these blogs will disappear. And I certainly can’t argue that this is great prose; I hope it’s adequate, but I have no higher hopes than that.  And yet here I go again. 

I do hope some will read these blogs.  If you’re interested in my life in Chicago, the events I go to, my thoughts on politics and culture and . . .  Well, this blog isn’t restricted to subject. It will go where it may.  And when.

I’ll end this blog--and begin the blogs--with a quote from the Tao Te Ching (the Cleary translation), which in its wonderfully paradoxical way states my goals:

81.
True words are not beautiful,
beautiful words are not true.
The good are not argumentative,
the argumentative are not good.
Knowers do not generalize,
generalists do not know.
Sages do not accumulate anything
but give everything to others,
having more the more they give.
The Way of heaven
helps and does not harm.
The Way for humans
is to act without contention.