2/18/24

 Sunday,  February 18, 2024

In bed at 9:35, awake at 3:56, up at 4:11.  Let Lilly out at 4:18.  25°, clear, high of 36°, wind SW at 13 mph, 5-17/30.  Sunrise at 6:45, sunset at 5:26, 10+40, gaining almost 3 minutes of daylight each day.  

Treadmill; pain.  The shoulder is still painful but seems less a bit painful than before, the result of PT stretches yesterday?  The wrist is also a bit less painful than yesterday, able to type with all fingers, but the pain extends to mid-forearm. And, egad, now I've developed a pain in my lower back where I know from an x-ray that I have some "severe" arthritis.  I'm feeling surrounded!😱

I'm grateful for encountering the writer Anne Lamott in this morning's WaPo, where she has an essay titled "A Superpower of Older Age: Powerlessness."  Her words ring so true to me:

I woke up yesterday without too much going on except a cold and cough I’ve had for two weeks, and of course the whole world coming apart like a two-dollar watch. Also, beauty everywhere: clouds descended from the ridge into folds in the hills like puffs and swoops of light gray smoke. I went to wash my face with my glasses still on, and felt like I was in a carwash. For a minute, I believed I had a detached retina — I’ve had a floater for two years, and my ophthalmologist has told me to be on the lookout for changes in vision. I got things sorted and took my morning meds, but then five minutes later was not positive that I had indeed taken them or just meant to. . .   

I sat there awhile . . . because to get up from being seated on the floor, I need either a hand or some furniture to lean on, and found neither. I started to do a sowbug, roly-poly move that I’ve developed, where I roll to my side and push up off the ground, but instead I lay there, sad aged old misunderstood sowbug me. , .

Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope. Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end? 

 She reminded me of Emily Dickinson's couplet I read in near the end of my eulogy at Tom's funeral:  "In this short Life that only lasts an hour /How much - how little - is within our power."  I looked her up on Wikipedia where the footnotes led me to articles about her and to bits of her writing on Goodreads, like:

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

which reminded me of my amateur drawings and paintings, my lack of training and skill, and my persisting nonetheless with the belief that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.  If something is worth doing, it's worth doing even imperfectly, awkwardly, or clumsily.

Toward the end of her essay, Lamott wrote:

I have a number of close friends in their 80s whom I see regularly, some of them quite infirm. On bad days, they say angrily that old age sucks. This is part of the package. We stick together. Ram Dass said that ultimately we are all just walking each other home.

. . .

By 60 or so, you’ve had enough of participating in the Punch and Judy show of trying to get things to turn out the way you’re positive they should. You’ve learned to surrender. Otherwise, you’ll always be pissed off and exhausted, and that’s no way to live out whatever years you have left.

To which I say Amen. 

My FB posting today.

Every year at this time I think of my father and the thousands of other Marines on the troop ships stationed off the island of Iwo Jima, wondering whether they would be alive the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.  Wondering whether my mother would be a 23-year-old widow, my sister and I fatherless.  Today I think of all the military and civilian victims of wars, the victors and the vanquished, the fighters and the families of the fighters, all casualties in one way or another of War and of our species' apparently ineradicable bloodlust.

5 Years Ago

Charles D. Clausen is remembering my father.

February 18, 2019  · 

Tomorrow is the 74th anniversary of the assault on the island fortress of Iwo Jima by my 23-year-old father and thousands of other Marines.  He was on the island for a month, returning to an offshore troop carrier on St.Patrick's Day.  He would never be the same as the young man who landed on February 19th, carrying his emotional and spiritual wounds throughout the rest of his life, until his death 61 years after the battle.  I think of him and of the thousands of other war veterans who carry hidden wounds throughout their lives.  I remember visiting Paris and riding on public conveyances with seats reserved for the "mutilés de guerre" disabled veterans.  How accurate it seems to think of these men and women in terms of mutilation, for mutilated they were and are.  Some gave all, all gave some.  Let's not forget them.