"I pray to God my soul to keep" are the thoughts I had upon awakening on this day marking my 100th blog going back to the 15th day of May in the year of 2013:
THERE IS A VALID ARGUMENT THAT NO WORDS...
NO PICTURES, NO MOVIES CAN EVER EXPRESS the horror of the Holocaust or the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki any more than we can explain the the despotic furies of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, now known as ISIS. These are visions of hallucination and nightmare that are always present in our collective imagination, viewed by most in awed silence and utter fright. There also remains the attempt in memory to relieve some other tangled feelings of national guilt; for the incineration of so many Japanese civilians, for failing to act to save the European Jews when it was clear that the Holocaust had begun. As I ease my way toward the final curtain of my Earthly existence, I don't pretend to have the answers to such cosmic questions.
But I can now look back to when I was twenty-one, full of possibilities , with my whole life spread out before me. When I realize where I truly am, and that I am seventy-eight and no longer that confused and romantic boy I once was, I now know that I have committed my share of stupidities. I was a dreadful husband. I tried to be a good father, but made many mistakes. Faced with the enormous crimes of the world and particularly the horrors of this appalling century, you acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misdemeanors and tend to push the cosmic questions aside.
My thoughts now drift to the problems of the self and back again, measuring my own triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, against the experience of others. The damage of the past is done; nothing can be done to avoid it or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I'm sometimes comforted by remembering that to many people I was also kind. For good or ill, I remain human. That is to say, imperfect. Today, I accept the inevitable more serenely. I know that I will never write as many books as I wished to write. Nor will I ever enter a game in late September to triple up the alley in center field and win a pennant for the Yankees. More frequently now, I read history, biographies, memoirs, and journals because they have the effect of lengthening my life backward into the past, and because the complicated stories of other lives layer and multiply my own.
I begin to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my daughter, Traci. My son, Scott. My grandchildren Taylor, and Keeko; my friends Barbara and Glen; the women I had loved and who had loved me back. Their faces move in and out of my consciousness; I think also of other things that have made my life a life: Max Roach and Ray Charles; tabloid headlines, the poems of Yeats, and the painting in fine museums and the jazz played in smoke-filled nightclubs. It seems absurd, even outrageous, to think that I would never see Casablanca again, read Hemingway and Elmore Leonard, sit in John's Pizzeria on Bleeker Street, glance up at the ChryslerBuilding, the most elegant in the city, spend another evening in a bar called Extra-Extra on 42nd Street, then walk back home with my daughter in the glistening night rain along 3nd Avenue in the City of New York, singing songs from our favorite musicals and clasping hands with an umbrella over our heads. And sitting on a Sacramento sofa with my son watching television and cracking jokes about what we were wasting our time watching. If I died now I'd never know what Harper Lee's new book was about, written 50 years after To Kill A Mockingbird had made her famous. And what about all the words I hadn't written (or said) to the people I had truly cared about, people I didn't see much because I was too lazy to make a call? The places I had yet visit out there in the world? Never, goddammit, hear Sinatra singing I Did It My Way, or sit beneath a tree on a Sunday afternoon seeing the light of the sun spilling down and giving me warmth? Or smell garlands of flowers and cherish the taste if strawberry ice cream?
I now know that I will never be able to answer the cosmic questions of life, much less resolve the minor crimes and misdemeanors of my own, but I can always be thankful for the people that I have met and loved along the way, give a glance upward to where God theoretically resides and pray that at least a small portion of my soul has remained intact along the way...
...And that may be the best that any of us can do...
But I can now look back to when I was twenty-one, full of possibilities , with my whole life spread out before me. When I realize where I truly am, and that I am seventy-eight and no longer that confused and romantic boy I once was, I now know that I have committed my share of stupidities. I was a dreadful husband. I tried to be a good father, but made many mistakes. Faced with the enormous crimes of the world and particularly the horrors of this appalling century, you acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misdemeanors and tend to push the cosmic questions aside.
My thoughts now drift to the problems of the self and back again, measuring my own triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, against the experience of others. The damage of the past is done; nothing can be done to avoid it or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I'm sometimes comforted by remembering that to many people I was also kind. For good or ill, I remain human. That is to say, imperfect. Today, I accept the inevitable more serenely. I know that I will never write as many books as I wished to write. Nor will I ever enter a game in late September to triple up the alley in center field and win a pennant for the Yankees. More frequently now, I read history, biographies, memoirs, and journals because they have the effect of lengthening my life backward into the past, and because the complicated stories of other lives layer and multiply my own.
I begin to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my daughter, Traci. My son, Scott. My grandchildren Taylor, and Keeko; my friends Barbara and Glen; the women I had loved and who had loved me back. Their faces move in and out of my consciousness; I think also of other things that have made my life a life: Max Roach and Ray Charles; tabloid headlines, the poems of Yeats, and the painting in fine museums and the jazz played in smoke-filled nightclubs. It seems absurd, even outrageous, to think that I would never see Casablanca again, read Hemingway and Elmore Leonard, sit in John's Pizzeria on Bleeker Street, glance up at the ChryslerBuilding, the most elegant in the city, spend another evening in a bar called Extra-Extra on 42nd Street, then walk back home with my daughter in the glistening night rain along 3nd Avenue in the City of New York, singing songs from our favorite musicals and clasping hands with an umbrella over our heads. And sitting on a Sacramento sofa with my son watching television and cracking jokes about what we were wasting our time watching. If I died now I'd never know what Harper Lee's new book was about, written 50 years after To Kill A Mockingbird had made her famous. And what about all the words I hadn't written (or said) to the people I had truly cared about, people I didn't see much because I was too lazy to make a call? The places I had yet visit out there in the world? Never, goddammit, hear Sinatra singing I Did It My Way, or sit beneath a tree on a Sunday afternoon seeing the light of the sun spilling down and giving me warmth? Or smell garlands of flowers and cherish the taste if strawberry ice cream?
I now know that I will never be able to answer the cosmic questions of life, much less resolve the minor crimes and misdemeanors of my own, but I can always be thankful for the people that I have met and loved along the way, give a glance upward to where God theoretically resides and pray that at least a small portion of my soul has remained intact along the way...
...And that may be the best that any of us can do...
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