Saturday, May 26, 2018

Micromanaging Moments



Mother, at 76, peered up from her guest-bed in my home and asked, “Those six books up there, with the spine with the gold pillar that crumbles a little more each time; what are they?" I did not need to look. “That’s Gibbon's Decline and Fall of Rome," I answered. "A pity," Mom responded, "everything must die." Some six weeks later, she was dead.

Our memories die too. We open them up, like flipping through a photo album, but we do not necessarily recall the details. And slowly but surely our recollections crumble. Precision of phraseology goes. Recollection of the other's shape and mannerisms and voice inflection alters ever so slightly, here and there, until one retains the essence of one's feelings for the long-lost friend, or relative, or loved one, but much of accuracy fades. Like those pillars, the crumbling ensues, no matter how often we may prop them up. (A now-a-days absent friend once said that memory is like opening up a document in a computer, and alter so much as a comma, and one saves it as a new document.) Add the strokes and sighs and contemplations of a lifetime, and one is bound to have the memory-file alter quite substantially from the original, of say, 40 years ago!

Forty years! That's how much time has gone by without my seeing friends that meant the world to me, that formed a fulcrum in my own journey, so long ago. And when considering the vast amount of persons one meets along the way, it becomes natural, year by year of losing them, of no longer staying in contact, not as intensely to care, to love, to extend those intimacies of a vital connection. The past is the past. Focus on the moment. And so love and care can become a thing of the moment, a sort of safety guard, paradoxically, because one can be (like swapping life-stories with a stranger in an aircraft) attenuated to the moment, and then forget it. Next?

Rolling stones gather no moss, goes the idiom. (Mick Jagger by now has well disproved it!) Yet the image sticks. Rolling, there is little longevity established with friendships, with settling into dwelling places, with attending the schools or the workplaces or even the pleasure-places one has visited. Like being on very many little holidays, in which one meets variously interesting people and sees variegated interesting vistas, there remains a distinct sense of impermanence when going forward. Looking back, the story of one's perceptions is in the immediate. The recollected appreciation can be intense, but replaceable. There is always a new place, a new friend, a new occasion to be had. And in memory, truly, it's amazing how things change.

Not all of us have great change. Some of us stay and stay and establish friends and families and zones of familiarity that seem impervious to non-obvious change. Yes, we lose our pet and our grandparents, and we lose others too. Dear ones. And subtly, around us, things change. (Or do we change from within?) We lose jobs and health and possessions and interest. We both accommodate and wear down. We stop venturing and voyaging and experimenting. We grow staid and can be overly comfortable. Why rock the boat? And so we let go of the anxiety over moments, become untidy, (or else grow yet more anxious, and get uptight.) We adjust into the ripeness of our age. It is the human condition! "I am too old to do that!" (Been there?)

Yet growing old gracefully and letting go the things of youth is rather Biblical. Even Desiderata advocates that much! It is to be expected. All those physical things can pass, may have to be given up, can even be forgotten. But love, moment for moment; care; and interest in another, and in the world around oneself, remains a choice (one hopes) to be managed; breathing, breath for breath. Or does one simply allow oneself no longer to feel at all?

Mother noticed my books. And in her question was the universal drive of the human spirit expressed: "Why? What? When? Who? And how?" Moment, for moment.


Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Mice, Mankind, And Marvellous Moments!



Nellie McLung's great-granddaughter sat in the aircraft seat beside me as we waited for takeoff from Vancouver Island's main airport. I did not know her, then. Around my age, she wedged down in row 6B. A young man eventually arrived from amidst the turgid stream of boarders, plonked down beside her, his earphones in. The woman looked over at my script. "You're reading a play?" she asked, pleasantly. "Tuesdays with Morrie," I replied. "Loved the book," she said. "Yes," I said, and I got on with visualizing my lines. Possibly because of the slight weaving of my hand as I internalized a monologue, she offered: "You're learning lines! You've got to be Morrie!" I smiled and looked out my window as the plane began hurtling down the Victoria airport runway, then responded, "Canmore production. Mid-month. I'm off to meet my fellow actor for the first time. Rob Murray. We have a week to rehearse." She seemed surprised. "A week! Well then, let me help you! I'll play Mitch Albom." Whereupon she took the script from me, and we began my recital; she reading. All the 90 minutes to Calgary we flew over mountains and lakes and wondrous scenery; I spoke into the window pane; she had her eyes glued to the script. And she was good! Her being 'Mitch' was fluent. And just before we landed, we finished!

And so, naturally, we fell to introducing ourselves. "Rosemary," she said. Only later did she make reference to Nellie McLung.  Now, I knew of The Valiant Five*, as far as Canadian History is concerned, and I knew there is a school named after her, in Calgary, and that she configures in the downtown statue of those five radical women, of that time. But to confess, I was not clear, then, as to when 'that time' really was. Rosemary took my card. "This is going to make for an interesting entry into my journal tonight," she declared. And with our landing, she was gone.

"The Nellie McLung school is just across the road from here," Jessie Peters informed, gesturing from her armchair, two weeks later. The wife of Vic (whose horrid disease of ALS over two plus years, back in 06/07 had taught me how physically to portray 'Morrie',) Jessie had yet again driven the 80km from Calgary to see my performance. This time she’d brought Vic's brother, Bill and his wife, Lorna. Last year, when I'd performed the play in Victoria (with Perry Burton as ‘Mitch’,) Jessie had flown out to see it with her daughter, Sharon. Their bravery in facing death, and in encountering ALS head on, has been for me such a model of endurance and love and care. Yet like the mouse in the closet in the middle of the night with the hosts where Jessie and Vic once visited deciding to empty all the closet-contents in order to find that mouse, “right there and then, in the middle of the night,” one can allow for the brain's inevitable ramble and chatter and distraction of what's the matter and where exactly are my thoughts now leading?

Distraction! That's what happened, opening night. I fell in front of the audience! For the first time in over ten years of performing the play, in the fifth act, instead of tipping my wheelchair forward, it lurched sideways and slid out from my behind, and whump!, I landed with several jolts of pain immediately coursing through me. 'What's my next line?' my brain chattered. "Mitch," I called, rather desperately. Thing is, Mitch was supposed to be nattering away, distracted. (‘Morrie slumps over’ was a move designed by the playwright, Mitch Albom.)  Eventually, Mitch (the empathetically gifted actor, Rob Murray) did save me, and hauled my supposedly limp body back up onto my chair, and then, when my limp arms and feet had all been replaced in proper position, he at last says, "what happened?" I pause, breathe, and announce, "I was playing hockey!" And the audience laughs. Always. Their relief for Morrie is palpable. They did not know that right then, given my lack of fluid between my vertebrae, I was in quite a crucial state of discombobulation. My brain raced through alternative scenarios; paralysis was a real fear. And the instant chatter of ‘what's the matter and what's the next right thing to do’ coursed through me like a squeaking mouse, scurrying in the corridors of my mind. But I persevered, and the audience, none the wiser, thought it all part of the act. Yet the fifth act was only half way, there were five more acts to go!

The decades we have mount up quickly. All the while we struggle to be at peace with ourselves. We try to be fully human, but our concentration is indeed confounded by the distractions and insecurities and particularities of circumstance and advent. And so we scramble at times for the next right thing to do. Often, someone is watching us. Yet inside ourselves, we are mostly alone, the captain of our thoughts. Marshalling our reserves, counting on experience, and directing our responses becomes the very art of living. Or does one simply withdraw from life and shrivel into old age, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans ears, sans everything? Ah, the plays (with life) are the very thing by which we may capture the real essence of living! To contribute to the health of the whole; or what is one here for? Such are the marvelous moments among men and women, and the course of our thinking and feelings too. Connected as we are. Bring on The Singularity! Or does my brain now chatter with "what's the matter with that," or even this? Anon! "Next?"