What’s It All About, Alfie
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…
For the past seventy-five years, I have had the occasion to stop and ask, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”
This life, this existence, what’s it all about? But then life came calling. First, Uncle Sam asked for four years of my life, barring sudden death at Vietnamese hands. Then afterward, college, thanks to that same Uncle Sammy. Then children and picking up one child from a dance recital while rushing the other one to the dentist’s office because her opponent in Karate kicked her in the mouth. Then finally home and time to grade a few papers before stopping to read to the girls before they head off to the land of nod. In the sad, mournful words of Sandy Denny, ‘I have no thought of time for who knows where the time goes?’[1] Then, late in the evening, a moment alone with a book, then a fleeting thought about what the meaning of this life is all about. But I close my eyes and one, two, three, and I close the door on all the great philosophical questions about life. The questions that keep us up late at night. The questions that may have induced you to purchase this book. Hopefully, scattershooting about my life, does not hamper your pursuits for some meaningful truth about this life. Maybe the stories about the process of aging will enhance your search for the truth. All I can tell you is that growing old is like training for the Olympics. Everything hurts – Chronic back pains, tooth pain that costs too much to fix, bone-on-bone joint pain that can only be relieved by another joint, relatives and friends that treat you like you’re going to die with your next breath. You secretly know you are way more alive than any of those human pain-in-the-asses, and you can’t wait for them to get on with their lives. You wonder at the inexplicable enigma of buying hearing aids that work just fine, but everyone continues to yell at you, just the same. Every day that you awake, you are thankful, you may not remember why you are grateful, but you are. Then the symphony begins as your joints snap, crackle, and pop like a bowl of Rice Krispies. Where are my meds? Oh, thank God and the Chinese for these little plastic boxes with the days clearly stamped on them! Honey, what day is it? No, not the date, honey, the DAY.
Each morning you still look forward to that cup of coffee that promises so much hope in a world full of chaos. And like the Talking Heads, “… you may ask yourself how did I get here?”[2] And you might pause and think about all those special moments that brought you great joy and those moments that brought you great pain. And you may remember moments that passed you by, because of guilt or regrets about your past or because of worry or anticipation about your future. All of these thoughts might fill your head and soon you cannot smell the aroma of the coffee, “…same as it ever was.”[3]
Now, it’s time for your morning ablutions, typically, a stable routine in your life. But even that is subject to change as you age. I spend much more time with purifying my CPAP apparatus than I do purifying myself, which I find works much better if I am wearing my glasses. Wearing glasses also helps me locate my wife better. I see her standing there. I walk over and put my arms around her and ask, “Have I told you how much I love you today?”
“Yes,” she says, “But you can tell me as many times as you like!”
Now it may sound like I’m losing it, but in reality, I’m just going for a how many hugs can I get before she gets wise to me. Love, like life, is a once in a lifetime thing and you want to nurture it, care for it, support it, and do whatever you have to do to encourage it to grow. Because one thing is still true, even at seventy-five, if you are not growing, you are dying. The same is true with love. You do not have to have a partner or significant other to have a heart full of love that you nurture and share with others. I know this will be one of those ‘debatable remarks,’ but I find it to be true for me. My grandmother, who grew up on a farm in deep East Texas, used to say, “If you have a have a hoe in your hands from can’t see to can’t see, you won’t have time to think about a divorce.” I thought, If I were married to someone who made me hoe cotton from Sun-up to Sun-down, I would be out of that relationship in a New York minute! That is not what I would call a nurturing and loving relationship. It reminds me of the time I was sitting in the Quiet Man Lounge on McKinney Avenue in Dallas when Kenny Rogers came on the Jukebox singing, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille…” The young woman I was with looked at me and said, “Hell, I would have left him too.” Sorry, grandmother, I know how much you loved my grandfather and how you supported each other and nurtured each other, and, in the end, you were there for him.
So, looking back, is there anything I would have done differently? In the words of Satchel Paige, “Never look back, somethin’ might be gainin’ on you.” My answer is, I would probably have been a lot more forgiving of those who I thought treated me unfairly. It has taken a lifetime for me to figure out what seems to come naturally to many who practice the philosophy of forgiveness as their world view. In the words of the eastern philosopher, Willie Nelson, “I’ve forgiven everything, that forgiveness will allow, and there ain’t nothing I can do about it now.” The fact that I have forgiven others has not been the hard part of the forgiveness philosophy.
I once thought that flying around the skies of Southeast Asia as Marine Corps crew chief was the most challenging thing I would ever have to do in life. After Vietnam, I was thankful for each day and made it my mission to reduce the suffering in the world where I found it. When faced with an insurmountable problem or some disgusting task (like cleaning the toilet), I smile and say, “It beats shovelin’ shit in the South China Sea.” But Vietnam was not the most difficult thing I would ever have to do. Asking those that I had harmed, in some way, for forgiveness turned out to be the most challenging thing I would ever have to do. It also turned out to be the bravest thing I have ever done. It takes a lot of courage to recognize when you have brought harm to another person, whether physical or mental. It is so much easier to say, they had it coming, or they got what they deserved, and just write that person off as undeserving of your time or forgiveness. Stop for a moment and think about our current President, Donald Trump, I hear people say that they cannot forgive him for what he’s done. But if he came to you, with a heart full of remorse, and asked for forgiveness, could you find the courage to forgive?
My life has been full of these conundrums. Red wine or white? I have a friend who solved this dilemma by saying, “Both, thank you.” I have often wondered if I had the courage to stand up for my beliefs. I mean, we all believe that we will stand up for our beliefs, but when confronted with a situation that calls for us to do so, would we put our beliefs into practice? Standing up for your beliefs can be a positive experience, so in this era of social unrest over reforming our Justice and Law Enforcement systems, why do we not see more of this? “Oh, but we do.” People say. No, I do not mean marching and carrying signs after the event, I mean during the event itself that challenges your belief system. For example, you see a man pinned down on the street, being choked, do you interfere and try and stop it, or do you pull out your phone and start videoing the incident? How about if it’s the police? Right, you could go to jail for interfering in police business, so better to stand back and get the video. I ask, is this standing up for your beliefs? I often wonder if I would have the courage to interfere in a situation like that, that calls my most basic beliefs into questions. I am seventy-five, and I won’t be sure until the situation arises. I just hope my knees don’t give out.
My sister battled cancer for seventeen years. She underwent multiple surgeries, chemotherapies, radiation treatments, and many new and diverse treatments during her time fighting for life. During that time, she managed to lead a positive, heart-full-of-love life. She always had funny anecdotal stories about her visits with the doctors and couldn’t wait to tell me about how wonderful her granddaughters were doing. She always wanted to know about my family and how we were doing, and she wanted my daughters and granddaughters to know how much she loved and cared for them. Toward the end, she grew very tired of fighting for her life. She tried, in her way, to prepare all of us for her transition. There is no key to the next life, and if there is an art to letting go of this life, my sister certainly mastered that art. She was the personification of beauty inside and out until the very end. For her, God lived in the relationships she maintained with her family and friends. She used to tell me, “If your heart isn’t full of love, it doesn’t matter what’s in your head.” I think she might have been on to something.
Which brings us back to, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I still do not have any definitive answers, but in the words of Dicky Fox, Jerry Maguire’s mentor, “Hey, I don’t have all the answers in this life. To be honest, I failed as much as I have succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish everyone my kind of success.”[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Knows_Where_the_Time_Goes%3F
[2] https://genius.com/Talking-heads-once-in-a-lifetime-lyrics
[3] https://genius.com/Talking-heads-once-in-a-lifetime-lyrics
[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116695/
