The last thing I want to write about....

Suicide.

I don't want to write about that. But the truth is, Robin Williams' suicide has put the issue front and center. Never mind that hundreds? thousands? each day commit suicide. All of that hasn't made it the thing that dominates social media. So, I feel I have to write about it, want to or not....

First of all, I'm the worst person to write about suicide since, and I believe this is true, I've never had a suicidal moment, not ever. I'm not sure I've ever even been 'depressed' in a way that deserves that title. I've seen a lot of psychologists and counselors in my life--but it was never about 'depression' in any clinical sense, it was always about: 'what do I do next in my life'.

I have, however, known suicidal people. One of the wards I covered in my Clinical Pastoral Counseling summer Spring Grove Mental hospital in Maryland was a ward of suicidal teenage girls. Most of them had tried more than once and most of them would keep trying, I believe, until they succeeded. They were dead set (excuse the pun) on killing themselves. They talked to me about it very matter-of-factly. It was what they were eventually going to do as soon as they could figure out how to have their doctor check all the right boxes and let them out of the hospital--where suicide was more difficult than out in the world. (One girl got her wish without getting out of the hospital--she filed down the tend of a plastic fork she stole from the cafeteria until it was sharp enough to slit her wrists, which she did.

The day after, in the ward, everyone was trying to counsel girls to not be upset, when, in fact, all they were upset about was it wasn't them in the morgue.

So, here's my first observation about something I have no first-hand, experiential knowledge about: for the person committing suicide, it is an act of hope.

Those girls convinced me of that during that summer of 1974. People who commit suicide think of it as a hopeful act since they seem to assume that death is 'better' than life.

One thing lots of mental health care folks got upset about regarding Robin Williams' suicide was that somebody involved in the movie Aladdin (where Robin was the voice of the Genie) and a movie critic on National Public Radio reflected on the reaction of the Genie upon getting out of the lamp and compared that to Robin's death. "He's free of his demons", both those people said. I disagree. What I believe is 'the demons WON'.

Joan Rivers, of all people, not my top echelon of psychological experts, said that Robin's suicide was 'a permanent solution to a temporary problem'. An amazing insight.

Suicide doesn't 'free' us--it kills us.

Now, I don't think any of us has the right to judge anyone who chooses that 'permanent solution'. We haven't walked in their moccasins. Not for a moment. No one can understand why someone kills themselves any more than I can imagine being Nigerian or Palestinian. I just can't imagine that. So, don't judge them.

It's possible to disagree and not judge. It really is.

Of course, great pain is left behind and visited on people who didn't decide to kill themselves. That much is obvious to the point of being overstated. Robin Williams' wife and children and friends will be second guessing themselves for the rest of their lives. "What could I have said/done/been that would have mattered?" they will ask themselves always.

But here's my second observation: someone who 'hopes' death is better than life is not held responsible for the pain their suicide causes. They just didn't consider all that--probably 'couldn't consider' any of that. Life had simply become so globally unbearable that nothing and no one could have possibly considered into the decision.

I don't think people should kill themselves, though faced with unendurable pain--psychical or psychological--pain I can't imagine since I've never had it...well, who am I to say.

I never met him, of course, but I think of Robin as my friend. Rest in Peace, my friend. I'm sorry you felt you had to grab for this particular hope. And I will miss you always.

Happy Birthday, Baby Boy...

My son, Joshua Dylan (after 'Bob', not 'Thomas'!) turned 39 today. What on earth are we doing with a 39 year old son??? We're barely that ourselves....How did I live this long? After all, I was part of the 'live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory' generation....

I have a picture of him in my desk that was taken shortly after they cleaned him up by the hospital. He looks a little confused and is holding his hands up by his face as if to say, 'what are these things'.

The little holder the hospital gave us says "our new manager". Ain't it the truth! He weighed 7 pounds and 1 ounce and we had no idea what to do with him....First children are a fly by the seat of your pants kind of thing. By the time Mimi came along three years later we'd learned owner's manual and were much calmer and confident.

The birth announcements Bern and I made (being still semi-hippies) were in the shape of an apple and said, "Guard him, O Lord, as the apple of your eye...." I pray that still, every day.

He was a great baby, fun, a good sleeper, fast to adjust to his life. And he has grown into a great man. (On their birthdays each year, whether in person or on the phone, Bern tells Josh and Mimi the story of their birth. They've heard it enough that I think they look forward to it and they're old enough to not think it's 'dumb' as they did as teenagers

Oh, we had our moments: I used to tell people, "Josh spent his Junior Year of high school abroad and forgot to leave the country". That year he went from 8th in his class to 48th and when we heard from him much later about skipped classes and drinking beer and smoking dope, we were horrified and blessed the powers that be that kept it from us at the time....And his first semester at U. Mass, Amherst, his GPA was like 1.9. That's when we told him we were paying for 8 semesters and no more--not even summer school. Give him credit, he finished in 8 semester with (somehow given that start!) a cumulative GPA of 3.4 in History.

He spent the year after college in England, working at a pub in Chelsea. He came home and worked at the Rare Books library at Yale and even caught a guy who was defacing valuable books, while he decided to go to law school in Brooklyn.

That's where he met Cathy Chen, our daughter-in-law and they are both lawyers in Baltimore--Josh at a firm that does lots of 'out of court' stuff and Cathy in the Prosecutor's office, specializing in prosecuting spousal abuse defendants.

Together they gave us the loves of our life: Emma, Morgan and Tegan, our grand-daughters par excellant.

I love Josh immensely and so very proud of him--not just for making twice the amount of money I ever made, but because of the man and husband and father he is.

They do an incredible job--Josh and Cathy--of making those girls life wonderful. As busy as the two of them are and as crazy as it is to raise children in an urban center these days, they get it done.

So, happy birthday 'bonnie Bobby Shaftoe' (one of our many nicknames for him). Be happy and content and fulfilled. You couldn't have turned out any better....I love you....

I would be so very happy if I could be sure Josh knows how much I love him and how proud I am of him. Fathers and sons are complicated, you all know, and I'm not sure he does 'really know it' though I tell him all the time.

Reading too much?

Since last Friday, when I found John Stanford's Field of Prey on the shelves at the library after being on the call list since April, I've read that, Robert Galbraith's (aka J.K. Rowling) The Silkworm, Vicki Delany's Canadian mystery Under Cold Stone, The Hollow Girl by Reed Farrel Coleman, Mark Billingham's The Bones Beneath and am entranced by The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (which the jacket says is 'a pseudonym').

So, I'm 127 pages into my 6th book since Friday--5 days.

I had a friend once who I thought 'meditated too much'. He was always just a tad beyond contact on a meaningful level.

I think maybe, just maybe, I read too much.

I tend to live in the novels rather than in the world I share with Bern and the rest of the world. I think about what I'm reading a lot when I'm not reading. I read when I eat breakfast and lunch. I read on the deck or at a table or in a rocking chair in the living room or standing up while I'm cooking or on the back porch standing up having a cigarette.

I truly love to read. I'm just not sure if I'm keeping it in check....

I don't watch much TV at all. I used to watch Yankee games and college football and pro football and college basketball a lot. One year--maybe a decade ago--I either watched or listened to about 130 Yankee games in one summer.

No more. I'll watch an inning or two or a few games of the tennis Bern is addicted to before going off to my addiction--reading.

Maybe it's that I'm 67 (How in the Hell did that Happen???) and realize there are a finite number of books I can read between now and when I shuffle off this mortal coil....Who knows? I could be addicted to drugs or alcohol--we'll I do drink a considerable amount of Pino Grigio--the only thing I drink....But this reading thing in my real addiction. A book always, always goes to the bathroom with me....I always, always have a book in the car....When I go to movies, I read through the previews until the lights go down....I read outside until it is so dark my opthmologist would have a fit.

Maybe when I finish the Claire North book--sometime tomorrow evening, I suspect--I'll see if I can go through Friday and Saturday without reading...just to see if I can or if I need a Bibliophile 12 Step Group....R.A. it would be....

Robin Williams--may the souls of all the departed rest in peace

So funny.

So wondrous.

So unpredictable.

So needed right now.

Maybe I can be logical in a day or two.

I feel like a part of my youth and my life is gone....

Our hawk

We have a hawk--well, obviously we don't 'have' a hawk, hawk's cant be had. But for the last month or so a yellow tailed hawk and his/her family have been around. We know because we hear them.

If you've ever watched "The Colbert Report" with Stephen Colbert, there is a sequence where an bald eagle comes flying through and makes a scary sound. Bald eagle's don't make that sound. Hawk's do.

I know this because I listen to National Public Radio's 'Bird Note Moments' and they told me this.

So, I know what a hawk sounds like--a really creepy, scary shriek. Which we've heard for the last month or so on a regular basis. We think the hawk's had chicks in a tree in the vacant lot behind our back yard. Lots of shrieks from the trees around our yard and the tree out there. So, we've had hawk patrol for a while.

I haven't seen a squirrel or chipmunk for over a week in our yard. Maybe they just moved on, but something tells me hawks like squirrels and chipmunks for snacks.

There was a bunny that came into our yard from time to time. I hope the hawks didn't get the bunny. I'm not sure why I like a bunny more than squirrels and chipmunks but I know I do.

I imagine that sense the area seems rather clear of fuzzy things, the hawks will find a new home base soon. It must be like that for them. I've seen one of them soaring over the graveyard of St. Peter's Church last week. Lots of squirrels there. Maybe they're moving a little to the north.

If they leave, I'll miss their shrieks. It's good drama, hearing hawks shriek.....

Just something to ponder...

I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner (I cooked fresh green beans and potatoes, grilled red and yellow and orange peppers, baby cucumbers in balsamic vinegar and sliced tomatoes--a vegetarian meal--except for the massive amount of bacon that was in the beans!) when a song came on the radio, sung by a beautiful soprano voice without accompaniment, except for a bridge to the last verse on a mandolin.

Here are the words to that song--you probably know them already:

I peeked in to say goodnight
And then I heard my child in prayer:
"And for me some scarlet ribbons
Scarlet ribbons for my hair."

All the stores were closed and shuttered
All the streets were dark and bare
And in our town no scarlet ribbons
Not one ribbon for her hair.

Through the night, my heart was aching.
Just before the dawn was breaking,
I peeked in and on her bed,
In gay profusion lying there,
Lovely ribbons, scarlet ribbons,
Scarlet ribbons for her hair.

If I live to be a hundred
I will never know from where,
came those lovely scarlet ribbons,
Scarlet ribbons for her hair.

When the mandolin came in for the bridge to the last verse, I burst into tears, so full of joy and wonder I doubted I could breathe.

***

This is about what happens when we age. The popular opinion is that we get more conservative as we age--draw in on ourselves, as it were.

That's not my opinion. I believe as we age we get more like we are already.

It's true for me: I get more liberal and open every day. And more weepy. I've always tended toward tears, but the older I get, the more I find myself weeping at the least provocation. More often tears of joy and wonder, but listening to a radio report on what's happening in Gaza the other day, tears started running down my cheeks at the awfulness of it all.

As you age (and you do every single day!) pay attention and ponder whether you're changing or just becoming more and more who you have always been. My money is on the latter....

Conversation with myself in the basement

I was down in the basement getting my clothes from the dryer when I noticed about half my shirts were 'inside out'. As I was turning them 'right side out' I realized that's what I've always called turning inside out shirts the right way--turning them 'right side out'.

Often as small children new to dressing themselves, Josh and Mimi would put on a tee-shirt 'inside out'. I'd see it and smile and say, "you need to turn your shirt 'right side out'."

But down there in our low ceiling-ed, mostly dirt floor basement with many rooms (I think I've told you before that our house was built in 1850 by a Congregationalist minister named, of all things, Bradley--there are many rooms and I've pondered whether or not he was part of the underground rail-road, though it seems runaway slaves would have stopped before Connecticut) anyway, taking clothes out of the dryer is mindless work and I suddenly realized that what you should probably say to a child or adult (I do it from time to time!) who puts a shirt on inside-out is this: "turn your shirt outside out."

Since the wrong way is 'inside out' the right way should be 'outside out', not 'right side out'.

Dumb as I now realize that is, in the moment I thought it was a brilliant insight so, when I carried my clothes upstairs I went to tell Bern, watching tennis on TV, about my 'brilliant insight'.

After I told her my pondering about what to say to someone with a tee-shirt inside out that I'd been talking to myself about in the basement, she looked at me the way she would have looked at me had I said: "I found a wombat in the basement."

Like that.

After a long silence when she must have realized what the silence was saying to me, she said, "that's interesting." Being told some profound insight you've had is 'interesting' is on the same level of reaction that you would have if someone said they found a wombat in the basement.

After another long silence and a gaze from her that seemed to indicate she was going over the nursing homes she knew in her head, she said: "I don't think there is a term for what's 'the right side' of a shirt. There's only a term for what isn't the 'right side'...'inside out'...."

Incredibly chastened, I went to go fold my underwear (or 'roll' it, since that's what I do to boxer shorts...though you probably would have been fine not knowing that fact...) and considered what she'd said. I pondered her words for a while and decided she was quite wrong. There's 'in-sync' to balance 'out of sync' and 'plumb' to balance 'not plumb' and 'in tune' to balance 'out of tune'....I thought of a couple of dozen and was about to go tell her how horribly wrong she was to think there was no value in the distinction between 'inside out' and 'outside out' when I decided I truly didn't have a dog in that fight and let it go. What would be the point, anyway....