Category Archives: Reminiscence

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.I answered his request in his column, “The Life Report.” I am quoting from his opening remarks.

“If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way. You can write this as a brief essay or divide your life into categories — career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge –and give yourself a grade in each area.

” If you send these life reports to me at dabrooks@nytimes.com, I’ll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

“I ask for this gift for two reasons.

“First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete pciture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

“More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relativelty little help in undersanding how a life devbelops, how careers and familes ev olve, what are are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.”

Dear Mr. Brooks:

I was a teacher for thirty-two years.It was the equivalent of having urine running down your leg. In this culture teaching, as presently constituted, is a significant agent of conditioning the young, making them dupes for the American dream, whatever that is. If you don’t know, it is marketing.

Since the Conant Report in 1957 about our secondary school system reported on its gross deficiencies, some decades later nothing really has significantly changed.

Was I a good teacher, which is sufficient in any case, or just a cranky discontent? I was one of the best. I lived a devastating split. It took the awakening of intelligence; Krishnamurti called it that, for me to realize that I was like Dathan on the way to Mt. Sinai, hectoring Moses to return to Egypt. No wonder it took forty years for that generation to die out so that metaphorically an unenslaved Jewish mentality could enter Canaan.

I trained to be a psychotherapist, so that I could come to my death knowing that I could be something other than an American teacher. It is not the occupation that is dreadful; it is the reality of it. So I wasted a third of my life a surly discontent in a mind-numbing occupation where to be excellent threatened the lives of others.I once told a group of parents that I was a writer who happened to be a teacher and because of that I could help their children in ways that an English teacher could not. On the morrow a guidance counselor tried to reprimand me for that “provocative” statement, for the tax-paying parents wanted me to be a teacher who happened to be a writer.

I have always been subversive, often surreptitiously. Call it passive-aggressive if the diagnosis helps you.And what a split that is. Allow me to brag: I see through crap, I see through large swaths of this rather decadent culture –just look at the array of pinheads running as Republicans. The fact that, except for one, they all believe in creationism attests to the failure of the school system in this country. Nothing wrong in being in decline, a natural historical process for empires. Just see it.

As a therapist I grew immeasurably so. I worked with clients to decondition themselves and finally to be free of me. I don’t brew disciples. Working with a school-phobic teenager, the school pressured the mother because they had not seen any results. They told her I was not a good therapist. Get this – school teachers commenting with their amazing erudition and expertise about another professional in an entirely different career. Aside: if more teachers went into treatment before becoming “educators,” we would see better teaching. Better still, if they went into treatment they might realize teaching is not the way to behave maturely

In short, I urged the mother to stand fast. I told her I was not an agent of the school system. It was not my task to make her son be good, nice, conform and all the delightful ways that schools want the herd to behave. Years later I met the now adult man who was my client. He was at college and all was well. He won. The school was defeated. Yippee!

All my life I have written. It kept me emotionally alive all during those dread years as a teacher. I have written three books, all favorably reviewed, not bad for someone in the last decades of his life. I will never play golf!

All this is career information, is it not? But there is more to every one of us. I have been reading and learning from that great spiritual genius, Krishnamurti, for more than three decades. Between him and Kazantzakis I almost have it down. The Freese motto is an epitaph from Kazantzakis’s: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” I am not dependent on either man. I just catch their rays for a good mental tan.

Teacher, shrink, writer, and all this does not assuage the griefs I have experienced in my life. A daughter who committed suicide because I was an inept and often not understanding father who lived far away. Closure is a moronic American cliché. It never closes. I don’t bathe in retrospective guilt. I just have regrets I did not see more deeply as a father into her pain. I lost a wife in a car accident and a daughter who was terribly mangled but survived, her boyfriend dying in the crash. I remember all this and I can do no more than to be a living sconce for each, for if I remember them they are “alive.”

This society considers me superannuated.In response, I just don’t consider this society. Krishnamurti said that all societies are essentially corrupt. I would tell anyone reading this essay that is all an aware human being needs to know. The rest is his or her struggle.

Several weeks now since I heard I had vascular problems; several tests taken and finally the cardiologist reading the “will” to me. Apparently I can live, have lived with one artery closed with plaque, dental or otherwise, a series of mild issues with the heart, the dosage of two baby aspirins to keep my arteries clear, teetering or tottering toward diabetes unless I significantly lose weight and then there are no guarantees and the prediction that I will live a long life. I will remember these weeks, for they are the testing one experiences as one ages, the torero’s red cape before the charging bull. I did not submit or sink into a depressive state, quite reasonable if I had; rather, it was as if I was being stressed, pruned, whittled on by the grim reaper. How many “escapes” does one get in life? I observed myself all the while feeling and experiencing myself. I did not play games with myself; I, in fact, seemed to become stoical, for what else is one to do with one’s mortality at large, and one’s mortality when under sharp and acute attack? It was, I imagine, a kind of acceptance without capitulation. I have been put on notice and that has not been lost on me at all. Never was. And never will be.

Hitting70 made me reflect more, as I usually do, about what intention I wish to give my life; as to meaning, I’ve thrown that out. The question is always: how best to avail myself of the time left, for it all ends? I will struggle with that. Those who do not, who do not reflect on this at all, who slough it off are made of the bread of ignorance is bliss. They are the “lucky” ones. Part of me says that my writing in my later years gives me pleasure and so I will continue until the tips of my fingers grow callused. I want to travel, see Costa Rica, to wit, a fantasy I’ve just chosen of late for all kinds of disparate reasons; it is the fountain of youth of my aging, for it guarantees nothing. Costa Rica is just a place, ah, but a place I project onto, for I like to travel. It will have to be deferred for a while (the years are running out like sand in an hourglass) so I “rush” to weigh carpe diem with tempus fugit. This balancing act, which is a mental chimera of my own making, is the task I set myself.

So you can have an idea of what keeps me canoeing toward the cataract, fear spuming aft and stern, ice on the oars, the roar of the falls ahead is in this snippet sent to me by a book reviewer last week:

Review should be done within a week, again you have mesmerized me with your writing. I sit and read the essays and sometimes I find myself in a place of deep soul searching and discovery, other times I am simply entertained but never disappointed.

Well, now, reader, what moves you? Money, granite countertops and an open floor plan, the next pay raise, politics, Bachmann, Obama, the slurry from the open pits which is American culture at this time. I didn’t need these past weeks to wake me up or to jar my sensibilities; what they have served to do is to simply remove the sand “sleepers” we accrue after a while. I am just more fully awake now, catching my balance, seeing more clearly what I need to do. What greater joy than to hear a reader say that I moved him or her into a place of self-discovery. I’ll match that, as a good competitive American soaked in the conditional lye of America, with what you come up with. Remove the conditioning and one is really shaken by the possibility of being Donald Trump for an hour, the retching that would entail.

In retrospect I feel a mild smugness, for I did not appeal to a non-existent god; I regard that as a man-made folly, a concoction of the human mind that takes up too much space and bends our wills to utter nonsense. I just saw Malicks’ “Tree of Life,” which is his attempt to assay this experience we call life and the whole concept of creation and what god is or is not. At the end it became a soup of religiosity and the light at the end of the tunnel kind of stuff. The platitudes about love, grace and meaning infiltrate the film like basement flooding and I thought to myself and I said to Jane in the theater, “It doesn’t make me feel, it doesn’t make me think.” I face my end alone, having a few close loved ones at my side, but alone in any case. I seek not succor or redemption, heaven or hell, the human projections that nauseate me for they lack courage and hard-thinking about life itself. We come, we suffer, we live, if that, we depart. Why suffuse it with prayer, sin and a call to be saved from sickness? The atheist may be accused of being dogmatic about god’s non-existence but the atheist registers the randomness of it all and bravely goes forth existentially, a kind of Sisyphus. Yes, there are atheists in foxholes.

I have time left, like we all do, moment to moment, regardless of the age. I cannot appeal to anything external for redress — there is only personal redress and I am working on that. I am preparing, if you can for such things, by being aware as my bottom falls away and I experience angst and personal terror of being no more. Nothing can be readily done to assuage aging or illness; all that can be done is in one’s self and in the abiding relationship to another self, for in that is some medicine for the pain. As I slip into nothingness, take it easy with the morphine, and hold my hand ever so firmly. Let me feel or know you are there, as I have been there for you. What more can I ask?

Centuries ago I lived in Brighton Beach, then Manhattan Beach, two communities on the south shore of Brooklyn. If you took transit, a bus or the el above Brighton Beach Avenue, you would come to Coney Island, even then a soiled slut of an area. It could serve as a set for “Nightmare Alley.” Steeplechase Park was here as well as the dizzying spire of the parachute ride which still stands like a frozen, rusted Transformer. I rode that aerial ride in my teens and it was frightening; in those days you “sat” on a skimpy  wooden plank with a chain across your lap for safety. I could see all the way to Manhattan Beach. Steeplechase was a memorable park, all kinds of rides and  with its very exciting and exquisite steeplechase ride about the park on vary colored and wild-maned horses, these wooden-carved stallions ending up in antique stores throughout the U.S  The park had two monstrous indoor slides that tested any youngster’s mettle and personal grit; all gone. The parachute ride, now inoperable, remains, like the Statue of Liberty in “The Planet of the Apes.” All this by the way of an introduction.

I recall corns as thick as one’s upper wrist slathered in butter, hawked on the boardwalk. It was not a favorite of mine but I liked to watch as a vendor using a paper cone wrapped up the silken threads of cotton candy until it grew like a beard about the cone itself. I dimly remember that the process had something of static electricity to it, as sugar fibers attached to the moving paper wand. It was much too sugary for my taste; however, Nathan’s franks and its great mustard and Hires root beer, always served in a paper disposable cup, were required food at Coney. The soft ice cream or custard was spectacular, vanilla my favorite. The breeze off the beach carried a tinge of salt to it, and the weathered boards were inlaid across the boardwalk like parquet. I mention all this as a kind of reverie,  for my associations to the past, especially the cotton candy, make me reflect. I reflect how much of time is about us as we trespass in life, wandering hither and thither like carousing sailors. It is as if I am a paper cone dipped into time and whirled about until I coalesce as a person in the passage of time. It is something done to me, and nothing that I can do to it. All and everything is done to me.

I think. I consider. It comes and goes but it is a common occurrence, for it is something I do, naturally now, it seems to me as I think about it. I send “kites” into the air, mental ribbons tied to their bottoms, gaily ballasts, I suppose. Each kite is a thought or a consideration. And what is it I consider or pose to myself as I spin like cotton candy to my end, the grim reaper, scythe in hand, sittting down, watching me patiently, until the spun cone is all wound up? I ask myself if, for example, I should draw up a list of books and read them, not as an attempt to get necessarily wiser, for books don’t make us wiser, but as an attempt to complete something in myself, perhaps a “should.” It is not a bucket list as the new slang has it. I don’t want attainments or achievements before I die. It is more thoughtful than that. Here I am, a miniscule human effort, given such and such amount of days and years, and what should I be doing at this time in my life when I have more time to reflect on the life I have led.

So, I ask myself what would be the purposeful thing to do given the limitations of my life, circumstance, health, family, wifely companion. What should any human being do at 70 — pick your age — so as to round out his days in a way that has some inner purpose? And what I come up with is not very satisfying, it all seems mundane. What I do observe is the grand amount of waste in my life — days unseen by the eyes, unfelt, unlived, thrown away at night without regard, reverence and the experience of them. I ask if it is at all possible to bite deeply into my life like one bites deeply into a pastrami on rye.

Recent medical issues, really threats to my way of living, recent diagnoses, unfavorable at that but sustainable, creating fears, of course make me more alert to issues I have wrestled with for years. The recent experience with the Rapture hints at latent issues, what if this were the last day of your life? What would you do? What are the rents in your relationships that need attending to? And so forth. For me rapture, as I interpret it, would be an epiphany of a kind, some kind of transcendent moment free of religiosity, but flinty spiritual stuff, if you will. To seek all this is a fool’s errand, I know. Many things in life come to us, wanted and unwanted, like the next spin around the cotton candy bowl. Even if we imagine the list of pleasures we might have before we die –Maui, the Parthenon at sundown, rapturous spiritual lovemaking with one’s significant other, a cruise to a Greek island unknown to tourists. . . I stop here  and observe that my hit list has nothing to do with material possessions but more to do with sharing with one’s significant others — how apparent, is it not? I spin off, away from the nagging “kite” at hand.

I get up in the mornings (mournings?) now, often resistant to doing anything, but I nag myself into trying to do something for my writing, or my life, or my shared existence with Jane. I try to make merry with or without money — and there are many rich things you can do without too much money. I struggle to sit down by my desk and to write this blog, to rewrite a story or to send out an article — I feel good because I sent an article out to Mensa journal, “To Ms. Foley, With Gratitude.” All this makes me feel good, writing this blog about my personal feelings feels good.  I try to Be. Well, I have always had a philosophical cast to my feelings, and self. Not good for an American.

I have not answered the question I posed — What is to be done? At moments I feel I am a ventriloquist’s dummy without his master. I suppose if I come into it, if I wade into this ineffable “it,” I will have a way, a tao, to bring my life to its final ends, not that I am in a rush. It is the old and ancient question broken down into the historic threes –Who am I? What am I do while I am  here? And where am I going? The last one is for the believer; the second one is a savage master. The first question is forever.

Upon awakening tomorrow, I will face once more what I want to do in the days remaining, what intent can I give some congruency — or peace — to that inner directed self that queries life, not so much in search of an answer, but of posing a better question. And while all this goes on some mighty wind may simply come by and tatter all the kites aloft. Knowing this only makes me at 70 feel more of the immediacy of my questions. And then I see you, any you, on the street and assume he may not even be awake to the questions he should be posing. But that’s a kite of a different color.