Bill of Health: Not the Physical Throes of Job, but . . .

As I ponder Medicare and the health insurance bridges thereunto, it is time to take stock of this body in its sixth and penultimate age, not yet “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” (Shakespeare, As You Like It,) but, alas, well on its way.

Teeth are in decent shape and of full number (sans one canine), though they have required some patching and capping over the years. The front uppers and lowers reveal a flatline across my bite, indicative, it seems, of grinding. This old man has known some stress even in a quiet academic life—usually having to do with university administration and collegiate athletics—with the lowers ground down almost to the pulp. One trusts that retirement will arrest this development.

“With spectacles on nose”

In my forties, my eyesight began to decline, perceptibly and steadily. From readers, + 1 to +2.5, I degraded to bifocals, then an inelegant and constant switch-out from bifocal to readers (for computer screen work) and back, lapsing into “progressive” lenses, which rather indicates the regression of one’s visual acuity. And now at 64, my eyes host cataracts and a retinal edema, both age-related, which will likely require increasing attention, including, possibly, eye injections and surgery. Yikes. While far from blindness and hardly unusual, this loss of dynamic focus, this blurring of outlook, like living in an impressionist, sometimes kaleidoscopic diorama, reminds me that vision at any age is a gift and not a given, and prone to depreciate.

“the lean and slipper’d pantaloons . . ./His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide/For his shrunk shank.”

Once an athlete, I no longer push and pound the body in old age in some effort to reprise my youth or even to excel within my age group. Those days are long gone, nothing to prove.  That long discipline has, however, left me fundamentally sound and confident physically, with a good training sense, along with memories, both muscle and cerebral, of competencies, some now lost and of questionable value to regain. Flexibility has diminished along with balance. Putting on my socks and taking off my pants can require conscious effort, frequent exterior support, and sometimes planning. Plantar fasciitis spikes the soles of my feet from time to time. MyChart records lumbar degeneration, arthritis, and bone spurs. I’ve suffered benign situational vertigo, an inner ear affliction not uncommon to my young ER doctor’s “older patients.” And now, Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition associated in my case with heredity, ethnicity, sex and age—“male over 40.” 

The Bard noted not the deterioration of our largest organ, the skin, in his roster of aging maladies. Once smooth and sun-bronzed, I now pay a price in sarcomic and melanomic lesions, actinic keratosis, tags, moles, erythematous scaly macules, lentigines, and cherry angiomas speckling my crepey epidermis, but, thankfully, not the highest price. The damages are mostly cosmetic at the moment.  All in all, my body has remained more than serviceable.

At the gym I encounter my elders, really old guys, in the seventh age. Flaccid-armed, pale, pot-bellied bodies shuffling about, their flat asses awattle from the shower, their glutes shriveling, but not as yet fully shriveled grapes. Live long enough, I become thee, old, old man. A bald, gray grizzled, deeply lined, almost blind, dizzy, splotchy, arthritic assembly of bone, stringy muscle, and webby skin. 

 

I can still hear pretty well, though, my wife saying “You’re all right”—for an old guy.

School’s. Out. For. Ever.

 

Specific last days of school I cannot easily recall, none without photographic documentation, and these tend to be graduations, not, strictly speaking, last days of school. So, for the record, I document, this, my last day of school.

‘Twas an unusual work day for me in this COVID era in that I actually went into the office and worked, pretty much the entire day, with little time for reflection on its lastness. Only one other person in the suite, and when she asked how it felt to be wrapping up my work, I had to cut short the conversation to wrap up my work. A few loose ends remain, but enough of the leave-taking has been accomplished over the past week to seem final enough. I’m done and gone.

I must confess that that last few days clearing my office and cleaning out my desk have prompted some wistfulness. Strangely subdued and pensive moments, I try to remember the faces of the names on my class list and cannot, easily, even those who have written unsolicited evaluations and appreciations, warm ones. Which make me feel as if my efforts have not been wasted or lost, much as I play them down, and preserve me from an all too false modesty. Okay, I did some good work, maybe more than I give myself credit for.  

For almost sixty years, I’ve looked forward, annually, to the last day of school, to the vacancy, the vagrancy of summer, the unclocked passage of time, the succession of mornings that sometimes  requires a conscious pause and momentary mental effort to establish day and date, and even, identity. One can get lost in that vastness. One can wake up in places one has not seen before in morning light, has not yet recorded in long-term memory, and ask, Where?... and then, almost spookily, Who?...before returning to self in real time. Here I stand on the last, the very last, of those last days, in the midst of a Minnesota winter, with all its discontents, both local and worldly, yet at the threshold of glorious personal summer.

Sung to the tune of

 

Now that I’m older, lost all my hair

All those years ago,

While you write me birthday cards and valentines,

Don’t you tire of dropping me lines?

 

Flattering me that I’ll be your guy

At least for one year more,

Hope we survive it, to sixty-five it,

Now I’m sixty-four.

 

In a month you’re here.

And if you think it through,

There’s not much to fear.

 

I have been handy, cementing front steps,

Tearing out the sod,

watering the evergreens, the boulevard,

making ours a bee-friendly yard.

 

Biking to market, farmers to back

Who grow organically,

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

No longer sixty-three.

 

Anniversaries we hike the northland

From the cabin by the lake—that’s Superior.

The future who can tell?

Grand-daughter by your side

Pela Moon-Casselle.

 

Doing the rhumba, follow my lead,

All else, otherwise.

Curse the drivers on the road, those idiots.

My wants and needs I’ll try vocalize.

 

Your health care agent, I, you be mine

Mine for evermore. 

I will still want thee, I will you still need thee.

Now I'm sixty-four.

One Hundred Days

I began university work forty-one years ago and will wrap up in one hundred days. Let the countdown begin.

While I have been attending to my advisees as fully as I have in the past, I must confess to attending less and less to the policy issues concerning the wider university and my own college and unit. Having studied our learning community at length—the universitas magisterium et scholarum—I’m quite confident that the rearrangement of academic deck chairs on this particular vessel will not significantly affect the cruise. I have been asked to consider and, as much as possible, inscribe “my legacy,” but it has been modest at best, merits no especial mention, and will likely endure or expire for reasons entirely beyond anyone’s control who cares. I am, in the current parlance, quietly quitting.

So my next hundred days I’ll attend largely to closing up shop: setting up my current advisees as perfectly as possible, coaching my successor colleagues, and saying good-bye to professional, by and large younger, colleagues. (Oh, and napping.) Having been here so long, many of my former colleagues are already retired, and more than a few, deceased, Alice, Phil, Susan, Laurel, Jim, Cindy, Judith, Vicki, Lois, Bev, Tina, John, and some whose names are not coming easily to mind. One has to focus . . . Ted. And Christine. My friends, we have done good work.

Epitaph of a Career

The last semester of my work life began last week. I have, tentatively, identified a last day, though I won’t begin a countdown just yet. Some principal colleagues and family know this will be my ultimate semester, along with a number of the already retired—who recommend it without exception. My advisees have been informed. I have not, however, declared my last day to the wider universe owing to a certain superstition about such announcements and the universe’s proclivity for mischief. One never wants to appear too sure about such things, such big things, lest the universe invite you to reconsider and recant. Which can be especially embarrassing for someone whose career has been all about careful consideration.

Retirement, to me, is a death of sorts, the end of a life of a certain kind of significance, of a life of “work,” which has, for most of us, been a source, if not the primary source, of our public sense of identity. We were condemned in an old book to a life of work, earning our bread by “the sweat of our brow,” owing to some relationship misunderstanding and miscommunication—who has not participated in that original sin! The consequence of which was a lifetime of tillage and shepherding. That modern life affords a respite from an entire lifetime of labor in fields and vineyards reveals a blessing of no small import, and yet, that blessing mixes rest and relief with anxiety and even a touch of remorse. What have we done with our work lives and what further in ending them?

We in education like to claim that our work and our impact on the world is categorically good, undeniably positive, incontestably positive, and everlasting to boot. (Maybe, maybe, maybe, and absolutely.) My dear Henry is often quoted in support of this attitude, “A parent gives life, but as a parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he [sic] can never tell where his influence stops.” This seemingly beneficent passage often gets boiled down to a slogan emblazonable on a T-shirt:  “A teacher affects eternity.”  Henry, more skeptical, noted that we make of our students—and advisees— “either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists," almost in spite of” ourselves.  An educator affects eternity, for better and worse. Whether by art or science, we instruct and profess and advise in the faith that… human beings are ennobled by learning, not merely enabled. “In the faith that,” which appears on the entablature of Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, now appears here as the epitaph of my work life.

Old Man Outlasting Grief

My brother Stevie died fifty years ago today. In November he would have joined his big brothers in old manhood, but instead, we reached old age without him, and his loss has been, at least for me, the most important fact of life. I grew up forlorn, prematurely elegiac, that is, hurt pretty bad. Twenty-five years later, with little relief to speak of, I found poetry that was not reassuring. “They say that time assuages,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “Time never did assuage. An actual suffering strengthens/as sinews do with age.” Except that Time does, actually, you know, assuage—you just need a lot of it, more of it than Emily had, and much much more than we are led to believe by the greeting card industry: time heals all wounds and everything happens for a reason (It doesn’t, and it doesn’t). But in this case, my case, it does assuage after another twenty-five years: for a total of fifty.

I returned to Mercer this week to observe and reflect upon those years this anniversary of his death. Every summer there has seemed less to remember—it might be just a seeming, of course—but not only do I recall and feel less, less remains of the world he died in to prompt my memory. Our mother and father are gone now. At Brandy Springs Park, the pool, from whose poolside I watched his body turn that single broken fatal somersault, is gone, too, a raw escarpment capped by a lunar kiddie playscape. The basketball courts remain in some repair, not yet in ruins, but with the park’s halting renewal come those changes that efface the destroyed Arcadia that was my childhood at that moment. Soon enough there will be no one to remember.

What is the metaphor for a life that formed around such loss? A hole in the heart that centers one, that terrible presence of absence about which this self is styled, that silence in which I have bespoken myself in low tones—now minus the terror. After all these years.

Photo Credit Steve Van Woert

 

 

 

Living Dead

My brother, Alex, received this fascinating and highly amusing fax last week regarding my untimely death and an official invitation to benefit therefrom. 

 

Good brother that he is, Alex inquired after my health; I replied that I was feeling fine. And actually, now that I reflect upon it, somewhat flattered in the error, or more precisely, the scam. Two of my favorite writers, Mark Twain and Henry Adams, were mistakenly identified as deceased in their early old age, so heady company, indeed.

The specifics of my alter ego’s life and passing raised a smile

The transaction pertains to an unclaimed “Payable on death” (“POD”) savings monetary deposit in the sum of Eleven Million, Five Hundred & Fifty Thousand, and One Hundred United States Dollars ($11,550,100.00). The policy holder was one of our clients, Late Dr. Charles BOROWICZ who was a real estate investor and precious stone dealer. He was a Covid-19 Victim. Who died about 2 years ago. Since His death no one has come forward for the claim and all our efforts to locate his relatives have proved unsuccessful.

and the thought “who thinks this stuff up?” Someone with more imagination—and effrontery—than intelligence, I suspect, unless, of course, this ruse actually worked. But that would speak more to the victim’s lack of intelligence than the grifter’s.

Still, one is tickled to have been done away with so casually and so deviously. But for the record, this report of my demise has been greatly exaggerated, as has my net worth, alas.