Going Home

When you’re retired, going on vacation, that is, taking time away from your normal routine of doing as little as possible, carries almost exponential possibilities for sloth, especially if you’re “going home,” that is, returning to your place of origin, where your family takes complete care of you, and doubly especially, if your “home” is Mercer, Pennsylvania, where, according to loved ones who still live there, “nothing ever happens.” If indolence is one’s objective, Mercer is the place to do it—or not do whatever it is that makes for it.

We watch the big screen TV, sports: NCAA women’s softball, NCAA men’s baseball, MLB baseball, the Buccos, an LPGA tournament, men’s professional golf, the NBA quarterfinals, a few minutes of the NHL, the French Open, and, yes, the American Cornhole League. And fishing, an actual broadcast of others’ impressive and yet imperfect attempt at inactivity. The chair into which I sink to spectate folds in around me, a throne of comfort, with an ottoman of ease at my feet, a nap-enabling matched set of cushions affording light dozes that restore my attention to mindless observational sufficiency but never, thankfully, to critical cognition. I’m not sure the world merits it anymore. We did get out to golf once, the most indolent, the least active of activities—the brothers carted. I walked the good walk spoiled. Then it rained. And we returned to the big screen.

When the weather allows—when it is warmer and less drizzly—I lounge in the sun, passively absorbing solar radiation, dissipating energy into the boundless universe, then golf again, a stressless bogey round, two pars, two double bogeys, and the rest bogey, not unlike the ideal even-par round of two birdies, two bogeys, and the rest pars—only bogey. Of a good morning I’ll sit on the front porch with a cup of tea and watch the traffic, truckers trucking, people going to work, poor devils.

Today, a visit to the cemetery: to the only population less active than myself. They’ve perfected repose. I commune with my dead. They don’t say much. We listen to the wind in the trees, the cooing of a mourning dove, a single fly buzzing. I leave a token of the visit for my father, a golf tee from St. Andrew’s, though I miss my mother more. They walk the earth no longer these five years. I see a stone for Frank D__, whom I had, coincidentally, just seen up at my brother’s, spry as ever, though recounting the recent implant of a pacemaker. His wife had died in 2019. Only Frank’s birthdate was recorded. I calculate he’s eighty-five.

I am agnostic about posthumous consciousness. Of many possibilities are these two, which come to mind:  Heaven is either an extension of retirement or retirement the only heaven many of us will know.

Traveling While Old

Traveling some months ago in a southern city I was sucker-punched in my left ear by an apparently disturbed younger man passing by in the opposite direction. (They are all younger now, it seems.) Though momentarily stunned by the blow, I sustained little pain and no serious damage, and by the time I turned to confront my assailant, he had moved on at some distance, verbalizing and gesticulating, though in truth I retain few details. My dear KSylvie, however, whose sense of righteousness and justice far exceeds my own, took off in vocal pursuit, which, in a state where firearm ownership is sort of a thing, I thought not the wisest course. And my dear tends toward the petite such that a physical confrontation with someone not likely to respect gender conventions as well might result in more than one boxed ear. So we settled on at least reporting to the cops, a number of whom happened to be in the vicinity.

Just like on Law and Order—and nowhere else in real life—they tracked down the perp after an hour or so, and I was invited to press charges because, as an old man (I’m sure being white didn’t hurt), I was in a sort of privileged victim status. The other folks who had experienced assault at his hands that afternoon, including someone whose hearing aid was damaged, were younger apparently, and assault against them fell only into the misdemeanor category, punishable by a citation. Punching an old fart in the ear, however, qualifies as a third-degree felony. Don’t fuck with the jerontion. To get that young sucker puncher off the street, I said okay.

So he’s been off the street in jail for a couple of months now and set to go on trial for up to two years, when the D.A.’s victim support office called today to update me on the case, including alternative options, like a Pre-Trial Diversion program. Which, of course, I’m cool with. Old and wise and not vindictive, I appreciate that the criminal justice system takes age into consideration in these matters, but really, I ain’t no candy ass.

 And you cross my spouse at your own peril.

Two Months Later

Two months later we’ve hit the streets, more than once, even in the persistent cold. Not only are our once republican institutions functionally inert, owing to the Republicans who occupy them, we are now in an economic/tariff war with the entire world, including neighbors, allies, and penguins. If it were not so profoundly sad, the absurdity would be entertaining as a Netflix farce. Alas, though, innocent people, thousands, even millions will suffer, some even unto death. This Devolution will be televised on Fox Lies—and cheered on.

For an old man who has seen sixty-plus years and read many, many volumes of history, these days seem historic—beyond the simple, genuine historicity of the everyday—quite possibly historically bad, red-letter days, one of those moments when large-scale systems verge on collapse, tipping the secular apocalyptic. How we confront, resist, finesse, escape this predicament, I do not know. Holding a sign, I suspect, will not be enough. 

I remind myself that the Fall of the Roman Republic did not lead immediately to the Fall of Rome, but then, Donald Trump is no Julius Caesar. And if stupidity is infinite, as Einstein quipped, the consequences of it in key positions of complex systems, like, say, a presidency of the United States, could dwarf all the geopolitical disasters of the past. In which case, I will have lived too long.     

 

Decline and Free Fall

Well past the decline phase, the republic appears to be in a free fall in my old age, with the Republican Party the chief engine and proverbial handbasket—“republican” in name only since, well, Eisenhower, maybe as late as Ford. Its current House representation gathers the sorriest collection of the weak, the loud, and the bizarre; its Senatorial majority, a self-deluding parade of embarrassing invertebrates. Only the Republican-dominated Supreme Court remains as a possible check on our collective disgrace. I’m not encouraged. But institutionally, they’re all that’s left.

And then there’s the streets. My old lady, who has deeper experience of the 60s, is ready to hit ‘em now. “It’s -20, dear. Maybe let’s wait until spring, or at least a thaw.” Snow pants, she says, snow pants.