Sons & Mothers

Wilco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CAYFIpi89k

How To Fight Lonelines

One day before Christmas, I took my little son to the mall. He was of that age when he had just learned to run, and in the crowd and bustle, he broke loose. Looking round, he did not see me, though no two steps behind him, blocked from view by people, legs and parcels.

Frightened by the thought that maybe he had been distracted and was lagging behind, he suddenly bolted and ran ahead, heading straight toward the doorway to the parking lot outside. I fought my way through the merry crowd after him, trying to keep up and shouting his name, but the Christmas din drowned me out, and the shoppers blocked my way. Running between the legs of the grown-ups, he was much faster than me; and losing him, I say him head straight for the cars driving through the snowy, slushy dusk past the entrance with their headlights already on. If he ran out, there was no way they wouldn't run him over; they wouldn't even see him, small as he was.

Luckily, most children instinctively won't cross a threshold; so in the corner of the doorway, he stopped dead in his tracks, and eyes wild with panic, glaring into the lamp-lit darkness outside filled with strangers pouring in and out, he clenched his little fists and doubled over with all his might, screaming my name in the scream of terror of mankind lost. I touched him on his shoulder and told him I was there.

Twenty years later, long divorced but still around, I swept his mother, who is of slight build, up off her feet and tossed her, laughing, into his young, strong arms. Not many have that privilege. And when she came down with bad illness, he called me from a city far away: will you please take care of her.

So here we are where we are...

Humans are finite.

Now, I sit in my room, windows open, and listen to the Stones screaming for "Shelter" from a garden party that's going on next door. Hell, I used to listen to that, some forty years ago... Young people have been moving in around me, replacing the old. War, children, it's just a shot away... it was the cold war then, what is it now? It seems my life has almost completed it's circle. One day, again, I shall be helpless. It is then that I shall be released.

Now, it is my GF, a one-time-nurse, who can foresee death. Sometimes, she dances for me on a moonlit clearing, and sometimes I am even allowed to dance with her. I cannot make it rain any more. In fact, the rain escapes me now. It never really rains where I am. It rains when I am not there. The clouds come, but they don't rain. And as I don't go out much any more, my back yard is drying up. Now, it is my son who claims he is sensitive to things going on below his feet.

But I did, once: After decades, my first GF and I were looking through old photographs, and she stated: travels and vacations with me were always horrible; it almost always rained. I told her my parents had said the same. It was useless to take me to the municipal swimming pool; the family trip would surely be ruined - by rain.

I used to know when things were about to happen. I opened doors for people before they pressed the doorbell. The later mother of my child used to visit me from far away, and I stood up and went out and opened the front gate to let her in the minute her car rounded the corner - no matter what the driving conditions had been - and they could be harsh for the 250 miles or so...

Like the time I drove before the storm...

The day the blizzard hit Germany, I was up north visiting her. At that time, I was driving a cheap seventies Italian sports car I had salvaged from a junk yard that was, then, a) Beautiful, b) Small, c) Light, d) Flimsy, e) Fast, f) Therefore extremely dangerous at any Time and g) Completely useless in Winter, as it was prone to fly off the road tail-first at the slightest prompt (and we used to race each other home from work to see who would land the other in a snowdrift).

It was basically a roofed motorcycle on four wheels, built for dry roads; a Fiat 850 Sport Coupé, if you want to look it up, known for its gaskets bursting at any given time. But with 70ies motorcycle instruments smack in the middle! Mph & rpm! And you were well off on your way if both needles (yes, needles!)  were quivering on the right, on yellow to red.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRQVQ-pR9hM

Fiat 850 Sport

The first blustery white winds had swept over the country, driving the people off the road and into their homes and causing the temperature to drop sharply, so the roads were clear. The services were out on the ready, clearing the autobahn, and the government had warned the people to stay put and batten down hatches and prepare for the onslaught.

If I had stayed, I would have been caught, but I had to get to work or whatever the next day. So I stepped outside, sniffed the air and said I'll take my chances.

The storm would hit at about 100 mph from the north; the autobahn was due south. 100 mph was about what the car was able to do. So I would chance it. Packing myself in winter clothes, as the car's heating was laid out for Mediterranean winters, I kissed good bye and said I'll call when I'm home.

The roads were empty, the people were heeding the warnings as I crept out of town over icy frozen streets, listening to the weather report, and took onto the white highway almost alone, slamming the foot down hard. With that little Italian rear motor howling in my ears and all instrument needles quivering flat right, I concentrated on keeping the tiny flimsy thing on the road, flying past road services spread over three lanes wide spraying me and the road with gravel and salt, while listening to the radio telling me of devastation and inundation coming up from the rear and the mayhem before me. I kept my speed, and rode out the storm under grey white skies, driving along right in the quiet lull between first gone and coming second squall, making it home in record time and in complete serenity and safety.

Then it hit. Rolling over the entire country in a blanket of white.

The next morning, it was clear and beautiful, and the country folk of my town took out their tractors and chains to pull the city cars of the city people out of the ditches and snowdrifts they had run them into one after the other the night before.

Transportation was down to nil.

Now, I have lost that ability. I feel nothing impending any more. And believe me, it is so much more comfortable NOT knowing that something will happen, without knowing what - or when and where. Remember Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? It applies. You either know what, or when, or where, but never everything at once. That makes it torturous but useless. And the nearer it is in time and space, the less you know of the content, and vice versa.

I used to get rid of the tension of knowing things beforehand by yelling out the morning news two minutes before the guy in the radio set reported it. And I still do - suddenly, some phrase or scene comes up in my mind, and I mutter it for days, or giggle it under my breath. And sure enough, there's a 50/50 chance of that scene or phrase or music coming over my favorite radio station in the next two or three days, only to be forgotten again for a decade (and the other 50 times I probably just missed it). But I don't mind any more.

But I still feel it sometimes. I felt the pressure of an impending suicide a hundred miles away... without having the possibility to help.

And then there was that time when the mother of a lifelong friend, therefore one generation above me, had just been taken to hospital for surgery.

The operation was successful, but the following complications caused her health to deteriorate really fast. So I went for a visit and told her I expected to see her out and about ASAP and other things you say in such a situation. When I asked her what the hell was she doing in there at all, she threw back the covers and showed me her leg with the operational wound - something she had never done in the many decades of our acquaintance.

I knew then that she was in a bad way. She looked so young and motionless with her white hair spread out over the pillow. I held her hand for a little while and then took my leave. At that moment she, who had been groaning in pain, suddenly opened her eyes and said "thank you" and called me by name in a deep, clear, steady voice that belied her fragile weakness. I quipped on the way out, but my heart sank. That was a good-bye, and a final one at that. Christ, the thanks should have been the over way round... There would not be a next time. When my now GF asked me, if death had been present in the room, I quoted Jackie Brown: No, but he was around.

Two days later she fell into a coma and went down to the Jordan River... but modern medicine dragged her back again, so I was able to wake her up by gently rocking her leg - that has an effect no amount of arm-touching will - and deliver my own whispered thanks for everything into her ear, which she returned again in a croaked whisper. But was that worth her pain... and why do we make our elders exit through the torture chamber, as one British MP once put it years ago?

I had already seen that in her husband, who had gone before. After years of vegetating in a state of demented mad disability, he, who had worked so hard and dirty all his able life (and had confided in me as his mind was slipping under the din of a family get together, that all he wanted was his peace, something he was subsequently denied), was finally able to let go.

They allowed me in for that, and as I muttered something like good-bye, old chap in a moment alone, he, now no more than a blind, gasping, mindless corpse-to-be, found the concentration and final strength to move his hand an inch or so towards mine out of the sheets in excruciating slowness, and I was able to shake his thumb. No more. He died that night.

They are more aware of what we do to them than we think.

Oh yes, she recovered all right. She returned to life, a bright-eyed 17-year-old with no recollection of what had happened. All her former life-long bitchiness was gone... and even her addiction to nicotine. She had up to then been a habitual chain smoker, and never asked for a cigarette again. But that did not change the facts of life, so she was going down again before too long.

And she began wondering if, since she had to die anyway, perhaps she should have died before, instead of now having to run a lap of honor of sorts in her decrepit state.

For what is life worth, if it is but waiting for death... especially if "the troubles of this world" ("Dead Man") begin to concern you again, in a bad way. So her bitchiness came back as well. I guess it never does you any good to overstay your visits.

Part of this could be due to the fact that she had quit smoking on a day's notice. This locked her out of the nicotine-coded memory since her youth. Smoking, by the way, was generally accepted, as long as there was smoke and fumes everywhere anyway, and people smelled, and their work effort mattered to society, more then their lives or health did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zfEkKs2ZM

Townes Van Zandt - Waiting 'Round To Die

You will find nerve- soothing, brain-, decision-, and especially memory- enhancing and thought- provoking smoking rife in developing countries. In developed ones, equipped with less children, future electric cars and central heating, where smoke and fumes are a thing of the past, you can ban it, and turn to your junior woodchuck attabrain pills for your daily performance enhancing braindope.

But, make no mistake - that will cost plenty as well... and, will it really produce a new Hemingway? And as for smoking being "costly" to your self and society - it will kill you quick and early instead of letting you die slowly and late. Take your pick... but take your pick early.

The trouble is, not only are the last days of your life the most expensive, but so are your last years, both in terms of money and care time.

As the cost of raising a child diminishes over time to zero, if all goes well, so the cost of caring for a parent reaching the end of his or her days arises to infinite. And infinity is closed to humans.

And so she began a downward trip through her life - you know, like a countdown for a rocket start: 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, .. Near the end of life hard decisions have to be made.

But as she said: It was a friendship for ever.

And when one generation leaves, the next one is automatically chambered.

I'm next.

My position at the moment is straddling the grave while being beaten by the gravediggers' shovels who want to get on with it.

I can still foresee the future - vaguely. Irritating pictures and schemes of the future keep interfering with those of the present... it really doesn't help. You never know is something is happening to you - or perhaps to someone else.

Yes, I can still predict the future.

Vaguely.

Like the time, long ago, when I told a female acquaintance of mine that if she went on like that, she would get into very serious trouble indeed. She spat at me, and soon after that she was raped at knifepoint in her very own home, by a serial rapist she herself  had picked up and invited inside to sleep over night. In fact, it was her description and testimony that helped the authorities finally take him off the streets. But she went on making trouble for good men and inviting the bad.

And it still happens: Some time ago, I became nervous and agitated and put it down to a lot of things around me... and one day I felt so strangely elated and detached from existence itself, that I uttered the words, while describing this feeling to a friend, that I could even kill myself now And I wouldn't feel a thing, not even fear; as I did not even feel alive.

The next day, or the one after that, I heard that another friend of mine, of the same age, had fallen into a coma - he died the next day. My nervousness left me instantly. He himself had been in a frenzy of activity before; I guess he had felt it coming himself.

A few years later his widow was found dead in her kitchen. And I still cannot bring myself to delete her Skype profile that contains her last, automated message. It says: "Signing off"

She had never gotten round to finish the house he had built in his two last remaining years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SmXVrLlZ4

The Be Good Tanyas - Waiting Around to Die