Suffer, Little Children

No, I do not want little children to suffer. It’s just that I was considering the difference between being childlike and being childish. I truly like to think of myself as having retained my childlike views of life, but too often—at the moment, for example—I am more childish than childlike. When things do not happen exactly as I expect or want them to happen, I throw emotional tantrums that would do any two-year-old proud. Fortunately, these are usually internal, but they are not pleasant. I hate them, in fact…which does nothing to prevent me from having them, or from being largely unable to control them until they pass like a violent thunderstorm, rumbling and grumbling into the distance.

I am downloading…let’s make that trying to download…some photos for a book video trailer. Each photo is purchased separately. The first photo I downloaded and lost somehow. So I had to buy it again. The second photo I bought was in the process of downloading when I got an “Error” message. So I shall probably have to buy it again, too. But rather than go through this with the third photo (I need about a dozen) I threw a mental hissy-fit and just closed out the site completely.

Not having slept well last night for reasons I will not bore you with here (but may well crop up on a future blog), I decided that I would just stay in today. Not go anywhere. Not even to my ritual go-out-for-coffee with Gary. I put on my pajamas and settled in for a day of work.

My friend Norm called. He wants me to help him move some furniture, and haul Christmas ornaments up from his storage room. Today. I love Norm. Really, I do. But, damn it, I do not want to get dressed, shovel the snow off my car, probably lose my parking space when I return, run the four or five miles over, etc. Can we say “Petty!” and “Shame on you!” boys and girls?

A degree of spontaneity is a good thing. But I really, really prefer to know in advance if I’m expected to go somewhere or do something. But I really couldn’t say no to Norm. I know he would help me any time I asked him to. He once drove all the way from Chicago to Mayo to drive me home to Pence (nearly a 1,000 mile trip for him) after my release from my cancer-related neck surgery, and he did it without my asking. So how can I say no when he needs something? But, I mean, couldn’t we move the furniture and haul out the ornaments tomorrow or the day after, okay? A little advance notice is all I ask.

And then, of course, I am awash in guilt for being such a lousy friend and so petty about taking time out of my day.

Being childlike is charming and a quality I always admire in people. Being childish (“It’s mine!” “No, you can’t have it.” “No, I won’t and you can’t make me!” Pouting. Figurative foot stomping. Mentally throwing things. Swearing. Seething with totally out-of-proportion anger) is not. So how is it that I can realize this with such calm detachment, yet insist on flying off into a fury the very next time anything happens the way I do not want it to happen?

Writing is most certainly cathartic, as this blog is proving. Okay, so blowing off steam is healthy. But why do I have to blow it at you? Excellent question, to which I had an answer other than a lame “because I have never been one to suffer in silence.” Believe me, if I get a paper cut, I will tell anyone I can button-hole about it, complete with a detailed accounting of how it happened, the excruciating pain involved, how I nobly overcame the agony, etc. What is the point in being terribly brave and noble if no one knows you’re being terribly brave an noble?

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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.

It Is to Weep

It is always nice to see the old year out fondly, and with renewed hope for the future, but it isn’t always easy. A friend sent me a video clip from a British news show, in which the reporter quizzed Americans on our knowledge of the world. Considering that the future of this country depends upon the intelligence of our voters, this was a valid, if admittedly a bit skewered, way of determining how qualified we really are to have the right to vote.

When five people were asked to name a country beginning with the letter “U,” three could not think of a single one. A fourth said “Yugoslavia.” A fifth said “Utah. Is Utah a country?”

Asked for the primary religion of Israel, not one of the five knew. One volunteered “Catholic?” When asked “What religion do Buddhist monks practice?” four blank stares and one, again, “Catholic?”

And the most disheartening thing about it, to me, was the fact that the response of each and every one of them to being exposed as prime candidates for euthanasia was to laugh merrily and dismissively. And they’re absolutely right. I mean, come on…who cares about all this politics and geography stuff? That Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson were seen holding hands at L’Pissant…now that’s important.

And these people are allowed to breed! Their children are doomed before they are even conceived. It increasingly seems that knowledge is to ignorance as a diamond is to a grain of sand.

That the American political system relies on a public whose intelligence seems just about on a par with a stewed tomato is amply witnessed by the current occupant of the White House. But surely we have learned our lesson? (“Name a country beginning with the letter ‘U’.”)

It is, truly, to weep.

Now, I know that in the course of filming the segment, there were undoubtedly many people who did know the answers (oh, God, I hope so!) and the producers only picked out the most outrageously stupid. But even so....

We live in a world where the vast majority of all the knowledge of our race, accumulated over thousands of years, is now at our fingertips, available to all. We are living longer and healthier than ever before. I was born into a world in which television, cell phones, and computers did not exist, and in which millions died each year of diseases which have all but been eradicated. Tens of millions of others who would have died without medical techniques and treatments are still alive.  And much of this progress has emerged from the same nation far too many of whose citizens today can’t name three of the members of the Supreme Court or locate Washington, D.C. on a map. Our educational system is an embarrassment to the world, and we are increasingly a nation of “who got gets more” and to hell with anyone who doesn’t.

I know, I know…the world has always been going to hell in a handbasket, and we have always survived. We probably will survive again. As I’ve said so often before, we must all have hope. But when one is sitting in a canoe at risk of being swept over a waterfall, just hoping it will be all right won’t make it so. We have to paddle like hell.

So, who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.

Holiday Blues

I’m listening to a choir singing Christmas carols, and I was for the ten millionth time in my life acutely aware of how much joy and sorrow are like the writing on two sides of a thin piece of paper. Hold the paper up to the light, and no matter what side you are looking at, what is written on the other side comes through.

While you might not be able to tell it from the common themes of many of these blogs, I don’t like to dwell on sadness or sorrow, or loss, or yearning, and unlike many people, I am not really depressed by the holidays. But I am more aware of the sense of loss which always accompanies thinking of people once so important to me who are no longer part of my life. It is precisely because I realize just how blessed I am to have had so much love and happiness in my life that holiday reminders of their importance heightens the sense of their loss.

In a way, love is a form of emotional blood, flowing back and forth between the one loving and the one loved. But when a loved one dies, the effect is not unlike a physical amputation. The heart keeps pumping, and we create an emotional tourniquet keep us from bleeding to death. And during the holidays, we tend to loosen the tourniquet to relieve some of the pressure. The older one gets, the more tourniquets we must apply, and the more pressure there is to be relieved.

The older one becomes, the more these thoughts intrude themselves, however unwanted, on our lives. It is simply a part of life and something which must be faced and dealt with. To this day I cannot listen to “Silent Night,” one of my favorite Christmas carols, because it was also my mom’s favorite, and to hear it is to think of her, and to think of her not being here makes me sad. So when I hear the first strains of “Silent Night”, I simply turn it off and spare myself emotions I do not need and do no good. It's another form of ignoring reality, but it works for me. I just pretend that the holidays are just…well, days.

That we are never satisfied with what we have at the moment is, I’m sure, part of our DNA, for contentment and progress are not, at the core of it all, compatible. How much change have we each seen just in our own lifetimes, and how much more will we undoubtedly see in the time remaining to us is truly awe-inspiring, if we’re able to step back from ourselves just far enough to put things into perspective.

The purpose of this blog is not to reflect or induce depression, sorrow, or longing, but to encourage us all to step back, look at our lives, and appreciate the fact that all we have…all we will ever have…is now, and we should make as much of it as we possibly can. Sorrow is yesterday, Hope is tomorrow, and it is up to each of us in which direction we should turn ourselves.
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.

Memory

The further one is from the source of a memory, the more likely time is to alter and rearrange things, rather like a well-meaning mental housekeeper who thinks the couch would look better over there. Most people never even realize that what they’re sure happened at a certain time in a certain place in fact did not. But because I have so much of my life laid out in the form of letters and other non-fiction writing over the years, I often running across incontrovertible evidence that what I was sure I remember clearly simply either didn’t happen that way, or didn’t happen at all. This is not pleasant, and it most certainly is not reassuring.

I think I mentioned this before, but I was absolutely positive that I had been in Genoa, Italy, on the day that the Italian liner, Andrea Doria, set sail on her final voyage in 1956. I clearly remember looking up as our liberty boat passed under her stern, and wondering...rather presciently…how anything so huge could possibly ever sink. (Surely, I thought, the bottom of the ship would hit the bottom of the ocean before the water ever reached the superstructure.)  It was a story I told many times and believed with all my heart and soul.

But on re-reading the letters I wrote my folks from our several times in Genoa, I find no mention of the fact and, on checking to see when the Andria Doria last left Genoa, found the Ticonderoga had been nowhere near Genoa at the time.  On reflection, the liner may have been the Constitution, which I do mention in a letter. Odd how the mind works.

Memory’s malleability can also be seen in the fact that, depending on the emotional makeup of the individual, our recollections of past events are tend to either enhance the pleasant memories or intensify the bad. I now look back on my days in the Navy with far more fondness than my letters…and a closer look at reality…warrant. But I suspect that is simply because we are too busy living in the present to see its true impact on our lives with the perspective time provides.

How many times have we heard the caveat to live (and appreciate) every day as if it were our last? And how often, on hearing it, do we realize the validity of the advice only to have in almost instantly buried by the minute-by-minute demands of our lives. And though we may fully agree on the value and importance of letting those people in our lives know how we feel about them, we do not do so out of fear of seeming “odd.”

We seldom think, in the “now,” of how much we might some day want to remember how the events of our lives truly unfolded. Diaries and journals are the surest way of making sure that future memories will be accurate, but few of us keep them.  In lieu of those, I have a few suggestions: take more photographs, even of things which do not seem at all important to us now. And with every photograph be sure to write down as much information about it as you can: date, location, the people shown. Of course we know all about them as the photo is taken, but again, the years will blur the details. 

As with good wine, and anything at all collectible, memories age and mellow with the passage of time, and become more ever more precious as we reach the point in life where so many of the people who form the foundations of our lives are no longer there, and all we have of them are memories. Always remember that today is tomorrow’s memory, and do whatever you can to preserve as much of it as you can.
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.