It’s here. The season of the score crawl, the focused read, the set position, the early exit.
Most people call it the baseball season. I call it personal hell.
To people who know the sport, all I need say is, “I’m a longtime Pittsburgh Pirates fan.” To those who track the standings each year, that simple statement is shorthand for self-inflicted despair. It’s another way of saying, “I hit myself in the head with a hammer from April through September.” Only, were I actually doing that, I’d presumably feel better once I laid the hammer down and the pounding headache subsided. For me, October is a culminating pain, as the playoffs begin and my guys go home, having been statistically pared from the postseason hunt in early September but realistically eliminated before spring training games ended.
It all started in 1970. I had not particularly followed baseball until the previous fall, when the “Miracle” New York Mets had shocked the American sports world by winning the 1969 World Series after having been so abysmal for most of their previous seven seasons in the National League that they had inspired a plaintive, now-legendary quote from their first manager, Casey Stengel: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” In the summer of 1969, when magic coincidentally was happening at Woodstock elsewhere in New York state, suddenly the Mets could indeed play the game, and play it well.
They surged to the National League East title in that very first season of division play, leaving the collapsing Chicago Cubs in their wake, swept the West Division-winning Atlanta Braves in the league playoffs, then, most improbably of all, bested the powerful Baltimore Orioles 4 games to 1 in the Fall Classic.
I was in the sixth grade in northern New Jersey that autumn, and I remember my elementary school as a sea of transistor radios. It seemed that every kid was following the Series, whose games were played during the day back then. All was blue and orange, the Mets’ colors. For that week, the rock stars weren’t the Stones and the Beatles, but guys with names like Tom Seaver, Jerry Grote, Tommie Agee, Cleon Jones. For that moment in time, there were no cliques in the classrooms. We all were in this together.
Except me, of course. Then as now, I hated nothing so much as The Thing That Was Wildly Popular, that Everybody Was Doing. In the space of those few days I went from giving not a hoot about baseball to following along with every pitch (within school-day logistics). Not so that I could meld into the cult-like frenzy, but in a desperate attempt to counteract that mania and send the Mets to defeat by the awesome power of my own bad vibes.
Not that I was overt about it. As a pudgy, somewhat dyspeptic 11-year-old kid who wore a hook, I wasn’t exactly Mr Popular as it was. I was disagreeable but not suicidal. I wasn’t about to shout the words I muttered to myself, such as “Seaver sucks!” and “What the hell kind of name is ‘Cleon,’ anyway?” No way. Although my fury rose as the Mets kept winning—my barbs having all the seeming impact of Nerf balls—I didn’t show it. When the Series was won and the schoolyard cheering reached a collective crescendo, I was merely lip-syncing.
Rather, I bided my time, determining that if I couldn’t join them, I’d beat them. When the 1970 baseball season began in the spring, I was there at the starting line as a full-fledged fan of a rival team in the Mets’ division: The Pittsburgh Pirates.
Why the Pirates? Well, I was peripherally aware that they didn’t stink (then). So it struck me that they might have a chance of overtaking the Mets. But as much as I’d like to say that I’d crunched numbers, or read up on the club’s history, or picked them in awed homage to such Pirates as future Hall of Famers Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell, the plain fact of the matter was that I thought the name “Pirates” and the team’s snarling buccaneer logo were cool. If I’d found equally awesome the image of a young bear I might have pledged fealty to another contending team—those same Chicago Cubs whose epic nosedive months before had set in motion my baseball awakening.
So, Pittsburgh it was. And once I was in, I was in all the way. In fact, by mid-summer I was beginning to concern my mom with radical OCD manifestations of rabid and irrational fan-dom. She would come down to the rec room of our suburban split-level to find me pacing the floor in precise, repetitive and painstaking patterns during televised Mets-Pirates games, utterly convinced that my geometric devotion had a direct impact, for good or ill, on events on the ball field and the contest’s ultimate outcome. Where my worried mother saw a kid who was taking this whole baseball thing Far Too Seriously, I felt a kinship to Peanuts’ Linus, who knew the Great Pumpkin would shower him with blessings if only his pumpkin patch was deemed sincere enough. If my behaviors, I felt similarly, were physically unwavering, and my mental concentration laser-like, the Baseball Gods might smile upon me and lead the Pirates to victory.
And if they didn’t, it was probably because my well-meaning but clueless mom had broken my concentration by walking in on me and inquiring whether I was crazy, or what.
Anyway, as it turned out, the Pirates did beat the Mets for the National League Eastern Division title that 1970 season. But by that clinching day in late September, the Bucs were so much more to me than some swashbuckling vehicle for Mets heresy. They truly were My Team. Their wins and losses affected my daily moods. Sometimes even my appetite, though it would be another 15 years and the adoption of running as an exercise outlet before I’d finally, truly de-pudge.
When they were swept in the divisional playoffs that year by the Cincinnati Reds, I was devastated. And my dysfunction would only get worse before it would get (marginally) better. In the 1970s, the Pirates had good players and smart management, and the sport’s economics were not yet such that so-called “small-market” teams such as Pittsburgh found themselves at a competitive disadvantage. The team actually won the World Series in 1971 and 1979, and played decent baseball most of the seasons in between. But I was far too nervous to watch the decisive game sevens of the ’71 or ’79 series on TV. Rather, each time I checked in periodically by radio, celebrating only when I could see the champagne-soaked players doing likewise on TV.
As it happens, 1979 was the Pirates’ last true hurrah to date. They won a couple of division titles in the early ‘90s, but last won more games than they lost an astounding 19 years ago—an American pro sports record for consecutive losing seasons. Their unrelenting standard over those years of on-field mediocrity, front-office incompetence and hope-draining budgetary miserliness would set a Guinness Book standard were Cumulative Haplessness a quantifiable and measurable thing.
A lot has changed since that last Pirates World Series victory way back during the Carter administration. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist, the Cold War has ended, China has emerged as an economic juggernaut. Environmentally, the whole world’s warming. Personally, I’ve married and settled into a happy home life and stable career. But what hasn’t quite changed, for me, is the anxiety and painfulness of the baseball season. (Nor, I might add, my scornful rejection of most things that are wildly popular: Facebook, the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, “apps”-laden telephonery, viral videos, Lady Gaga, American Idol, Glee, etc.)
Well, I can say the baseball season isn’t, in fact, quite “hell” for me anymore. It’s more like “extreme heck.” My existence is so charmed in many ways—home, job, family, friends—that not even my baseball sickness can completely drown me in misery. Still, there are the lingering manifestations with which I opened this post: the score crawl, the focused read, the set position, the early exit.
The score crawl is what I do on Yahoo! Baseball when a Pirates game is in progress. I slowly and with great trepidation scroll down to the score, until I can first see how many runs the opposing team has (if it’s a Pirates home game) or the Bucs have (if it’s a road game). I’ll then try to guess what the other run total is (before scrolling down to it), what inning the game likely is in, and what all this portends for the contest’s ultimate outcome. Finally, I hold my breath, resume scrolling, and get the whole story. At that point I’ll see a replica of a baseball diamond that will tell me which team is batting, which bases are currently occupied and how many outs there are. I may be thrilled, appalled, cautiously optimistic or mostly pessimistic about this news. I may check back several times a game. What I see will, to some extent, color my mood that evening or afternoon.
The focused read and the set position bespeak my “maturity” in the years since I paced the floor in precise patterns like a crazy person in some mystical attempt to give my team the edge. Now I superstitiously do things like pick a random newspaper story or Internet item and read it in full, or sit with my legs and arms in a predetermined position or stance, before checking the game score.
Finally, there’s the early exit. This lingering symptom of my baseball pathology bothers me the most. It’s when I’m at a Washington Nationals game in DC (I’m a partial season ticket holder), ostensibly to enjoy live baseball, yet I can’t stop myself from obsessing about the Pirates’ score on the stadium’s out-of-town scoreboard. I am emotionally and economically chagrined to admit that I’ve sometimes exited Nationals games before their completion because the Pirates were losing badly or had lost and I felt so disgusted with the entire game of baseball that I had to literally distance myself from the stupid sport. (This also can apply when I’m watching a Nationals or Orioles game on TV and feel compelled by Pirates results to change the channel to something less depressing—like, say, Hoarders, or a look at the Blitzkrieg on the History Channel. But at least then I’m not wasting part of my ticket price.)
I haven’t yet faced a potential early-exit situation this young season at Nationals Park. But I am not fooled by the Pirates record at this writing of 4 wins versus 3 losses. There is every reason to believe the club will again reach season’s end with far more losses than wins, and that I’ll many times be sitting in the stands at Nationals Park, stealing dejected glances at a hostile out-of-town scoreboard. But my goal this year will be to remain seated through the last pitch, cheering on the home team and exiting afterward along with all the other fans, happy either that the Nats won or, if they didn’t, that I’d just spent three hours out in the fresh air with 25,000 other people, watching an entertaining game, drinking beer and eating deliciously unhealthy food.
If I can do that, I figure, it might be a start, however incremental, on the road to perspective and better mental health. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, decades of Mad Fan Disease won’t be undone in a single season. If I can resist all urges this year to bolt Nationals Park when the Pirates’ game goes south, maybe next season I can let go of some of the OCD stuff. From there, perhaps at some point I lose the compulsion to do the score crawl. Maybe—who knows?—at some point in the indefinite future, the games, win or lose, will become just that to me—games. I have to start somewhere.
I don’t, however, see any reason ever to stop loathing the Mets. Or to watch Glee, for that matter.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Answering the Call
I was telling my friend and office buddy Jason the other day about how I’d recently had a serious case of blogger’s block. I hadn’t wanted to call it writer’s block. To me, writer’s block is an affliction of novelists and poets and published essayists and maybe paid columnists. “Writing” strikes me as a ludicrously grandiose term for the act of sharing random thoughts with a very small audience that presumably appreciates the phrase “you get what you pay for” and thus tends to judge me kindly.
So, call it blogger’s block. I’d described to Jason how my recent energy-sapping flu had left a residue of ennui in its wake. How, even after my physical fatigue had lifted, my mojo had badly lagged. I’d no sooner think of a potential blog topic than I’d dismiss it because it completely bored me. I was feeling no creative spark, no energy, no nothing. I was thinking of shutting down Lassitude Come Home—pulling the plug on this little hobby less than a year after it had begun. I might’ve done so, too, except that I couldn’t even muster the words to shape a halfway entertaining sendoff post.
But then Lynn and I received the bizarre middle-of-the-night phone call a few nights ago that proved to be my block-breaker. Finally, something had happened that I'd found interesting enough to write about. I seized that opportunity and wound up reasonably pleased with the results.
So, I was starting to tell Jason about my blogging struggles, and what finally had broken the impasse. He interrupted me and cracked, “Was it something about death?” Ever since I’d noted a few posts back that the Grim Reaper seems to loom over this blog, he’s been giving me shit about it. It probably hadn’t helped that I’d begun the conversation by noting that, after having nearly bought the farm seemingly about 80,000 times over the last 20 or 30 years, Elizabeth Taylor finally had given up the ghost this week. I’d already posted my thoughts related to the deaths of several big- and not-so-big-name people over the past nine months, so why not Liz, too?
But, no, I told Jason. I hadn’t posted about death at all, wise guy. Rather, I’d riffed about a weird phone call we’d received. (In truth, death had made a cameo appearance in that post. But it hadn’t by any stretch been the major focus.)
Jason and I moved on to other subjects. The upcoming baseball season. The redesigned APTA Web site, the fruit of months of painstaking labor on his part and those of others. And this topic: I’d been telling Jason for the past few weeks about a story I’d been agonizingly struggling to write for the association’s magazine. I now was, at last, in position to complete that tale of woe. I told him how my final draft easily had been the worst thing I’d written in my 10-plus years of employment at APTA—about how I’d never grasped the material, hadn’t felt so stupid and defeated in a very long time, and had ended up simply pasting together the few odds and ends of my transcribed notes that I vaguely understood.
The result had been an article with some degree of coherence that, however, said essentially nothing, delivering on none of its promises of illumination and insight. At some point I’d lost all hope of making the thing better, and simply had elected to offer it up as the written equivalent of human sacrifice. I’d expected and braced myself to be excoriated by the many pairs of internal and external eyes that would need to vet my piece—the director of APTA’s Practice Department, my bosses in Publications, the physical therapists I’d interviewed. “Go ahead and savage it!” I’d effectively urged them.
But to my profound surprise, great relief, and abashed shame, the collective “WTF?!” I’d fully expected never arrived scribbled on my hard copy or typed into e-mails. My reviewers made only minor cosmetic edits. A few grammatical tweaks. The addition of a clarifying word here or there. I encountered no indictment of my utter vacuity. I endured no concern for my precipitous loss of IQ.
This lack of fury, this dearth of alarmed bewilderment frankly stunned me. It got me to thinking about the other times in my life when the other shoe inexplicably had failed to drop or when I’d otherwise been blessed with thoroughly undeserved providence. Jason contributed the observation that anyone who writes—for a living and/or as an avocation—suspects much of his or her output is total excrement, whether or not it truly is. He generously indicted himself, never mind that his copious writings about film on the Internet are smart, insightful and often hilarious.
His point was well taken, I allowed. On any given day, simply rereading what I’ve previously written for this blog nearly is sufficient to convince me to pack it in. But that wasn’t what I was talking about, I said. What I was getting at was how fortunate yet depressing at the same time it can feel to write just well enough—in this world of ever-declining literacy—to sometimes skate smoothly past the rough spot where the ice should have cracked and sent you plummeting to your hypothermic death.
I cited to Jason the term papers I fairly bullshitted my way through in college, the Phi Beta Kappa induction that arose from those inflated grades, the feeling I always get when The American Scholar arrives in the mail—suggesting I’m the sort of guy who actually reads the books on philosophy, ethics, literature and intellectual history that typically are reviewed in its pages. I was starting to seriously bum myself out dwelling on all this. But then, as we continued talking and the dimensions of my fraud grew in my own mind, I began rather happily envisioning a new blog post that might be fun and wouldn’t revolve around death: imposter syndrome!
Why, hadn’t Lynn and I just been comparing notes the other week on how stupid and ill-equipped for our work we often feel? I’d been whining about my magazine story, and Lynn had been despairing of her struggles to keep up with the mathematics and paperwork of her part-time job as assistant to a daily money manager. Conversations with various friends of mine over the years have suggested, in fact, that a whole lot of us don’t feel we know what the hell we’re doing, and that we all live in some degree of fear that we’ll soon be unmasked and added to the rolls of the chronically unemployed.
I wasn’t quite sure what my wider point would be about imposter syndrome, but it did seem promising as a blog subject. Maybe I’d play around with it on my next day off work. I was ruminating about this a couple nights ago when the phone rang. Lynn picked up, but I couldn’t immediately tell who was on the other end.
Finally, Lynn motioned for me to pass her a piece of scrap paper. She wrote down that the caller was a wonderfully warm and wise and articulate friend of ours whose energy and spirit belie her 94 years. Mildred was phoning from her assisted living residence in Georgia to tell us she’d been diagnosed with leukemia, had been advised by her doctor to get her affairs in order and was preparing to be placed under hospice care.
Armed with this knowledge, the gist of the conversation came into focus for me. Lynn was asking Mildred if the shock of her prognosis was outweighed by the opportunity to plan for her death and tie up loose ends over the course of her few remaining days. I knew without hearing her response what Mildred’s answer would be. She's a remarkably strong and practical woman who’s been a widow for more than 40 years, buried a 38-year-old son (my college friend John) after he died of brain cancer in 1997, had maintained the family home and a beautiful garden until beyond her 90th year, and lives for her surviving son and daughter and their families. I knew her overriding desire in the matter of her death would be not to be a bother. Within minutes of absorbing the news, she would have moved on to seeing this heads up on her imminent demise as a gift.
Lynn handed me the phone. Of course, the first thing Mildred did was thank me for my recent letter and tell me she’d been carrying it around in her purse, the better to pull it out for occasional re-readings. “I’d rather read you than a novel,” she said. “There are a lot of really bad novels,” I pointed out. I said Lynn had passed me a note, so I already knew her big news. I asked how she’d found out about the fatal illness. Mildred sounded a little bored with the subject and replied, “Lynn can tell you.” (She’d gone to the doctor with itchy skin and had been urged to undergo blood tests, which found the leukemia.)
She expressed outrage at funeral costs, including those of caskets, which she’d been pricing. She fretted over the logistics of living in Georgia but needing to be transported after her death to the family cemetery in Northern Virginia, where she will be laid to rest next to her husband and son. (Clearly, this not-wanting-to-be-a-bother thing was being compromised by circumstances.) She wondered what the Washington Post’s obituary policies might be, and said she planned to give them a call. I told her I’d check into that for her. She apologized for not having a computer, reluctantly conceding that my ability to research things electronically might help, if I didn’t mind.
It was classic Mildred, highlighting her selflessness, practicality and generosity. I heard not a hint of self-pity or morbidity in anything she said. Even as I began the process of inwardly mourning her imminent departure from our lives, I once again felt deep gratitude, as I have so often over the nearly 35 years of our acquaintance, to have intersected with this proper and patrician yet never stuffy, always down-to-earth Daughter of Virginia—a woman who is entirely her own person, but who symbolizes to me a gentility and bonhomie now nearly lost to time and coarseness and the many distractions of what’s known as progress.
Years ago, Mildred had shown Lynn and me the house in which she’d grown up, located in what now is bustling, traffic-clogged downtown Vienna. The contrast between what her mind’s eye described to us and what the streetscape now showed was stark and dispiriting. But at least we caught a glimpse of that lost world, through her.
The phone call eventually wound to a close. She had things to attend to and at any rate didn’t want to keep us. We affirmed our mutual love and affection and signed off, perhaps for the last time, perhaps not. I hung up the phone. Lynn and I agreed that the news was sad but the messenger had been typically extraordinary.
I started this post by talking about blogger’s block. All these words later, that seems a vanquished concern, at least for now. But I do seem to have circled back to death as a subject, though it took me a while get there. Suffice it to say, it’s been a week of strange phone calls. Mildred’s call, though, strikes me as having been more the encapsulation and celebration of a remarkable life than anything as mundane as a death notice.
So, call it blogger’s block. I’d described to Jason how my recent energy-sapping flu had left a residue of ennui in its wake. How, even after my physical fatigue had lifted, my mojo had badly lagged. I’d no sooner think of a potential blog topic than I’d dismiss it because it completely bored me. I was feeling no creative spark, no energy, no nothing. I was thinking of shutting down Lassitude Come Home—pulling the plug on this little hobby less than a year after it had begun. I might’ve done so, too, except that I couldn’t even muster the words to shape a halfway entertaining sendoff post.
But then Lynn and I received the bizarre middle-of-the-night phone call a few nights ago that proved to be my block-breaker. Finally, something had happened that I'd found interesting enough to write about. I seized that opportunity and wound up reasonably pleased with the results.
So, I was starting to tell Jason about my blogging struggles, and what finally had broken the impasse. He interrupted me and cracked, “Was it something about death?” Ever since I’d noted a few posts back that the Grim Reaper seems to loom over this blog, he’s been giving me shit about it. It probably hadn’t helped that I’d begun the conversation by noting that, after having nearly bought the farm seemingly about 80,000 times over the last 20 or 30 years, Elizabeth Taylor finally had given up the ghost this week. I’d already posted my thoughts related to the deaths of several big- and not-so-big-name people over the past nine months, so why not Liz, too?
But, no, I told Jason. I hadn’t posted about death at all, wise guy. Rather, I’d riffed about a weird phone call we’d received. (In truth, death had made a cameo appearance in that post. But it hadn’t by any stretch been the major focus.)
Jason and I moved on to other subjects. The upcoming baseball season. The redesigned APTA Web site, the fruit of months of painstaking labor on his part and those of others. And this topic: I’d been telling Jason for the past few weeks about a story I’d been agonizingly struggling to write for the association’s magazine. I now was, at last, in position to complete that tale of woe. I told him how my final draft easily had been the worst thing I’d written in my 10-plus years of employment at APTA—about how I’d never grasped the material, hadn’t felt so stupid and defeated in a very long time, and had ended up simply pasting together the few odds and ends of my transcribed notes that I vaguely understood.
The result had been an article with some degree of coherence that, however, said essentially nothing, delivering on none of its promises of illumination and insight. At some point I’d lost all hope of making the thing better, and simply had elected to offer it up as the written equivalent of human sacrifice. I’d expected and braced myself to be excoriated by the many pairs of internal and external eyes that would need to vet my piece—the director of APTA’s Practice Department, my bosses in Publications, the physical therapists I’d interviewed. “Go ahead and savage it!” I’d effectively urged them.
But to my profound surprise, great relief, and abashed shame, the collective “WTF?!” I’d fully expected never arrived scribbled on my hard copy or typed into e-mails. My reviewers made only minor cosmetic edits. A few grammatical tweaks. The addition of a clarifying word here or there. I encountered no indictment of my utter vacuity. I endured no concern for my precipitous loss of IQ.
This lack of fury, this dearth of alarmed bewilderment frankly stunned me. It got me to thinking about the other times in my life when the other shoe inexplicably had failed to drop or when I’d otherwise been blessed with thoroughly undeserved providence. Jason contributed the observation that anyone who writes—for a living and/or as an avocation—suspects much of his or her output is total excrement, whether or not it truly is. He generously indicted himself, never mind that his copious writings about film on the Internet are smart, insightful and often hilarious.
His point was well taken, I allowed. On any given day, simply rereading what I’ve previously written for this blog nearly is sufficient to convince me to pack it in. But that wasn’t what I was talking about, I said. What I was getting at was how fortunate yet depressing at the same time it can feel to write just well enough—in this world of ever-declining literacy—to sometimes skate smoothly past the rough spot where the ice should have cracked and sent you plummeting to your hypothermic death.
I cited to Jason the term papers I fairly bullshitted my way through in college, the Phi Beta Kappa induction that arose from those inflated grades, the feeling I always get when The American Scholar arrives in the mail—suggesting I’m the sort of guy who actually reads the books on philosophy, ethics, literature and intellectual history that typically are reviewed in its pages. I was starting to seriously bum myself out dwelling on all this. But then, as we continued talking and the dimensions of my fraud grew in my own mind, I began rather happily envisioning a new blog post that might be fun and wouldn’t revolve around death: imposter syndrome!
Why, hadn’t Lynn and I just been comparing notes the other week on how stupid and ill-equipped for our work we often feel? I’d been whining about my magazine story, and Lynn had been despairing of her struggles to keep up with the mathematics and paperwork of her part-time job as assistant to a daily money manager. Conversations with various friends of mine over the years have suggested, in fact, that a whole lot of us don’t feel we know what the hell we’re doing, and that we all live in some degree of fear that we’ll soon be unmasked and added to the rolls of the chronically unemployed.
I wasn’t quite sure what my wider point would be about imposter syndrome, but it did seem promising as a blog subject. Maybe I’d play around with it on my next day off work. I was ruminating about this a couple nights ago when the phone rang. Lynn picked up, but I couldn’t immediately tell who was on the other end.
Finally, Lynn motioned for me to pass her a piece of scrap paper. She wrote down that the caller was a wonderfully warm and wise and articulate friend of ours whose energy and spirit belie her 94 years. Mildred was phoning from her assisted living residence in Georgia to tell us she’d been diagnosed with leukemia, had been advised by her doctor to get her affairs in order and was preparing to be placed under hospice care.
Armed with this knowledge, the gist of the conversation came into focus for me. Lynn was asking Mildred if the shock of her prognosis was outweighed by the opportunity to plan for her death and tie up loose ends over the course of her few remaining days. I knew without hearing her response what Mildred’s answer would be. She's a remarkably strong and practical woman who’s been a widow for more than 40 years, buried a 38-year-old son (my college friend John) after he died of brain cancer in 1997, had maintained the family home and a beautiful garden until beyond her 90th year, and lives for her surviving son and daughter and their families. I knew her overriding desire in the matter of her death would be not to be a bother. Within minutes of absorbing the news, she would have moved on to seeing this heads up on her imminent demise as a gift.
Lynn handed me the phone. Of course, the first thing Mildred did was thank me for my recent letter and tell me she’d been carrying it around in her purse, the better to pull it out for occasional re-readings. “I’d rather read you than a novel,” she said. “There are a lot of really bad novels,” I pointed out. I said Lynn had passed me a note, so I already knew her big news. I asked how she’d found out about the fatal illness. Mildred sounded a little bored with the subject and replied, “Lynn can tell you.” (She’d gone to the doctor with itchy skin and had been urged to undergo blood tests, which found the leukemia.)
She expressed outrage at funeral costs, including those of caskets, which she’d been pricing. She fretted over the logistics of living in Georgia but needing to be transported after her death to the family cemetery in Northern Virginia, where she will be laid to rest next to her husband and son. (Clearly, this not-wanting-to-be-a-bother thing was being compromised by circumstances.) She wondered what the Washington Post’s obituary policies might be, and said she planned to give them a call. I told her I’d check into that for her. She apologized for not having a computer, reluctantly conceding that my ability to research things electronically might help, if I didn’t mind.
It was classic Mildred, highlighting her selflessness, practicality and generosity. I heard not a hint of self-pity or morbidity in anything she said. Even as I began the process of inwardly mourning her imminent departure from our lives, I once again felt deep gratitude, as I have so often over the nearly 35 years of our acquaintance, to have intersected with this proper and patrician yet never stuffy, always down-to-earth Daughter of Virginia—a woman who is entirely her own person, but who symbolizes to me a gentility and bonhomie now nearly lost to time and coarseness and the many distractions of what’s known as progress.
Years ago, Mildred had shown Lynn and me the house in which she’d grown up, located in what now is bustling, traffic-clogged downtown Vienna. The contrast between what her mind’s eye described to us and what the streetscape now showed was stark and dispiriting. But at least we caught a glimpse of that lost world, through her.
The phone call eventually wound to a close. She had things to attend to and at any rate didn’t want to keep us. We affirmed our mutual love and affection and signed off, perhaps for the last time, perhaps not. I hung up the phone. Lynn and I agreed that the news was sad but the messenger had been typically extraordinary.
I started this post by talking about blogger’s block. All these words later, that seems a vanquished concern, at least for now. But I do seem to have circled back to death as a subject, though it took me a while get there. Suffice it to say, it’s been a week of strange phone calls. Mildred’s call, though, strikes me as having been more the encapsulation and celebration of a remarkable life than anything as mundane as a death notice.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Incantation
Helen, I’ve said it out loud today several times—sounding to myself like a devout Muslim at his call to prayer.
“Fatuh Malek. Fatuh Malek. Fatuh Malek.” I fairly chanted it while I was on the exercise bicycle this morning. I said it in the car on my way to work this morning. I repeated it while I was pumping gas at the On the Run Station on Jefferson Davis Highway. I’m on my lunch break now, and I again uttered it softly just now from behind my closed office door. I’ll keep it up at intervals throughout this day, at least.
I know I’m pronouncing and spelling it right, because you were very particular in those details when we spoke at 1:30 this morning. In fact, it had been a long time since I’d heard your voice so strong and clear. When I last saw you at the nursing home a few weeks ago, you’d just gotten back from a lengthy hospital stay for pneumonia, and your speech still was raspy and weak. But you were all crispness and clarity this morning, with an overtone of insistence. In fact, some of your first words to me were, “This is no joke.” I wondered if someone was holding the phone to your ear, because even your “good” hand—the one your MS hasn’t rendered completely useless—tends not to be up to the task of grasping the receiver for as long as we spoke last night—a good five minutes.
Lynn had picked up the phone. You’d greeted her by name and asked for me. The story you told me frankly didn’t make much sense, but at no time did I think it a joke. You were dead serious. Your tone quickly shook me awake and made me ask you questions, trying to shape a coherent whole out of what you were telling me.
You’d just been out in front of Rodman’s, you said—that crazy, cramped, two-level emporium of beer and wine and international canned goods and Marzipan and cleaning products and produce and greeting cards and toiletries and pharmaceuticals on upper Wisconsin Avenue NW where I’d picked up prescriptions for you many times when you were still living at The Towers on Cathedral Avenue near American University. It seemed unlikely to me that you’d really been at Rodman’s, given that you must be lifted out of your bed to go anywhere. But that was your story and you stuck to it.
A crowd of people had been in front of the store, you said, and they’d shouted words that promised good luck, good fortune, a brighter future to those uttering them. I was still clearing the sleep from my head, so I misheard you a couple of times. I kept asking what those transformative words had been. Matah? No, you said. Fatah? Yes—F as in Frank, you confirmed. But not with two “a”s—just one. And a “u.” F-A-T-U-H, you spelled out. You’re typically quite impatient on the phone, but this time you weren’t. It was important to you that I get it right. I sensed that you didn’t want to fluster me.
What was the rest of it, then? Malik? Should that be pronounced Mal-EEK? No. M-A-L-E-K, you said. As in Fred Malek, I thought—the rich guy who’d been a buddy of Richard Nixon’s and later was an unsuccessful bidder for ownership of the Washington Nationals when Major League Baseball moved the Montreal Expos to DC in 2005. But you clearly weren’t talking about mundane multimillionaire Fred Malek, so I saw no point in bringing him up. Your implication was that “Fatuh Malek”—the words captured on the junk-mail envelope I’m looking at right now, on which I’d jotted them down in the kitchen at about 1:33 this morning—was an incantation, not a name.
You told me to listen to all-news radio station WTOP later in the morning for more about the big crowd scene at Rodman’s. I said I would. You seemed pleased. You said you’d been permitted just one phone call—by whom, you didn’t specify—and that I was the one you’d wanted to tell. Just to clarify, I asked, since you seemed poised to hang up by that point, was I supposed to call Rodman’s and ask someone there about Fatuh Malek? Was I to share the words Fatuh Malek with friends, family, strangers? Was there some protocol to unleashing these words’ power? Was a degree of evangelization necessary for this thing to work?
“Just say the words out loud,” you told me. “That’s all you have to do. It might help.”
“I will,” I responded. "Good," you replied, and hung up. I handed the phone back to Lynn and said, “She’s crazy.” I meant you.
But that wasn’t quite right. I hope you’ll forgive me. That was middle-of-the-night shorthand for a jumble of thoughts that were running through my head. I wondered if you’d called me from somewhere deep inside a dream you’d been having. It did strike me as possible, if not likely, that you’d had a vision that had touched on some great truth. I thought of chain letters and chain e-mails, and how one breaks the string only at one’s potential peril.
It occurred to me, too, that your surprisingly powerful voice might have been a particularly resonant last gasp. That, like the script from some old Twilight Zone episode, I might later reconstruct with the help of nursing home staff the fact that you’d died—weakened by years of cancer and MS—sometime in the wee hours of March 22, 2011, a telephone receiver in your hand.
The first thing I did after powering up my office PC this morning, I want you to know, Helen, was look up “Rodman’s” and “Fatuh Malek” on both WTOP.com and WashingtonPost.com. The WTOP searches yielded absolutely nothing. The newspaper site turned up old Valentine’s Day wine recommendations from Rodman’s.
A subsequent Google search informed me that one Fatih Malik Mimaroglu, of Istanbul, is on Facebook.
I found no mention anywhere on the World Wide Web of Fatuh Malek, some mystical pass-phrase to prosperity that had been group-chanted in Friendship Heights DC sometime last night or early this morning—let alone any notation of the surprise presence in the crowd of a wasted, nearly immobile nursing home resident in her late 70s who was making her first appearance at Rodman’s in 25 or 30 years.
Regardless, though, I’ve been saying Fatuh Malek out loud all day long, just as you instructed me to do. Not just to bring myself good luck and good fortune, but in hopes of conferring it upon you, too. Whatever “good fortune” might mean in your context, even if only the curtailment of suffering.
I can’t speak for Lynn, but I don’t mind in the least that you woke me up, Helen. To the contrary, I want to thank you for making me your one phone call. It feels like an honor.
Fatuh Malek, my friend. I’m saying it loud and I’m saying it proud. Not in public spaces, perhaps, but still. Here’s hoping it helps.
“Fatuh Malek. Fatuh Malek. Fatuh Malek.” I fairly chanted it while I was on the exercise bicycle this morning. I said it in the car on my way to work this morning. I repeated it while I was pumping gas at the On the Run Station on Jefferson Davis Highway. I’m on my lunch break now, and I again uttered it softly just now from behind my closed office door. I’ll keep it up at intervals throughout this day, at least.
I know I’m pronouncing and spelling it right, because you were very particular in those details when we spoke at 1:30 this morning. In fact, it had been a long time since I’d heard your voice so strong and clear. When I last saw you at the nursing home a few weeks ago, you’d just gotten back from a lengthy hospital stay for pneumonia, and your speech still was raspy and weak. But you were all crispness and clarity this morning, with an overtone of insistence. In fact, some of your first words to me were, “This is no joke.” I wondered if someone was holding the phone to your ear, because even your “good” hand—the one your MS hasn’t rendered completely useless—tends not to be up to the task of grasping the receiver for as long as we spoke last night—a good five minutes.
Lynn had picked up the phone. You’d greeted her by name and asked for me. The story you told me frankly didn’t make much sense, but at no time did I think it a joke. You were dead serious. Your tone quickly shook me awake and made me ask you questions, trying to shape a coherent whole out of what you were telling me.
You’d just been out in front of Rodman’s, you said—that crazy, cramped, two-level emporium of beer and wine and international canned goods and Marzipan and cleaning products and produce and greeting cards and toiletries and pharmaceuticals on upper Wisconsin Avenue NW where I’d picked up prescriptions for you many times when you were still living at The Towers on Cathedral Avenue near American University. It seemed unlikely to me that you’d really been at Rodman’s, given that you must be lifted out of your bed to go anywhere. But that was your story and you stuck to it.
A crowd of people had been in front of the store, you said, and they’d shouted words that promised good luck, good fortune, a brighter future to those uttering them. I was still clearing the sleep from my head, so I misheard you a couple of times. I kept asking what those transformative words had been. Matah? No, you said. Fatah? Yes—F as in Frank, you confirmed. But not with two “a”s—just one. And a “u.” F-A-T-U-H, you spelled out. You’re typically quite impatient on the phone, but this time you weren’t. It was important to you that I get it right. I sensed that you didn’t want to fluster me.
What was the rest of it, then? Malik? Should that be pronounced Mal-EEK? No. M-A-L-E-K, you said. As in Fred Malek, I thought—the rich guy who’d been a buddy of Richard Nixon’s and later was an unsuccessful bidder for ownership of the Washington Nationals when Major League Baseball moved the Montreal Expos to DC in 2005. But you clearly weren’t talking about mundane multimillionaire Fred Malek, so I saw no point in bringing him up. Your implication was that “Fatuh Malek”—the words captured on the junk-mail envelope I’m looking at right now, on which I’d jotted them down in the kitchen at about 1:33 this morning—was an incantation, not a name.
You told me to listen to all-news radio station WTOP later in the morning for more about the big crowd scene at Rodman’s. I said I would. You seemed pleased. You said you’d been permitted just one phone call—by whom, you didn’t specify—and that I was the one you’d wanted to tell. Just to clarify, I asked, since you seemed poised to hang up by that point, was I supposed to call Rodman’s and ask someone there about Fatuh Malek? Was I to share the words Fatuh Malek with friends, family, strangers? Was there some protocol to unleashing these words’ power? Was a degree of evangelization necessary for this thing to work?
“Just say the words out loud,” you told me. “That’s all you have to do. It might help.”
“I will,” I responded. "Good," you replied, and hung up. I handed the phone back to Lynn and said, “She’s crazy.” I meant you.
But that wasn’t quite right. I hope you’ll forgive me. That was middle-of-the-night shorthand for a jumble of thoughts that were running through my head. I wondered if you’d called me from somewhere deep inside a dream you’d been having. It did strike me as possible, if not likely, that you’d had a vision that had touched on some great truth. I thought of chain letters and chain e-mails, and how one breaks the string only at one’s potential peril.
It occurred to me, too, that your surprisingly powerful voice might have been a particularly resonant last gasp. That, like the script from some old Twilight Zone episode, I might later reconstruct with the help of nursing home staff the fact that you’d died—weakened by years of cancer and MS—sometime in the wee hours of March 22, 2011, a telephone receiver in your hand.
The first thing I did after powering up my office PC this morning, I want you to know, Helen, was look up “Rodman’s” and “Fatuh Malek” on both WTOP.com and WashingtonPost.com. The WTOP searches yielded absolutely nothing. The newspaper site turned up old Valentine’s Day wine recommendations from Rodman’s.
A subsequent Google search informed me that one Fatih Malik Mimaroglu, of Istanbul, is on Facebook.
I found no mention anywhere on the World Wide Web of Fatuh Malek, some mystical pass-phrase to prosperity that had been group-chanted in Friendship Heights DC sometime last night or early this morning—let alone any notation of the surprise presence in the crowd of a wasted, nearly immobile nursing home resident in her late 70s who was making her first appearance at Rodman’s in 25 or 30 years.
Regardless, though, I’ve been saying Fatuh Malek out loud all day long, just as you instructed me to do. Not just to bring myself good luck and good fortune, but in hopes of conferring it upon you, too. Whatever “good fortune” might mean in your context, even if only the curtailment of suffering.
I can’t speak for Lynn, but I don’t mind in the least that you woke me up, Helen. To the contrary, I want to thank you for making me your one phone call. It feels like an honor.
Fatuh Malek, my friend. I’m saying it loud and I’m saying it proud. Not in public spaces, perhaps, but still. Here’s hoping it helps.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Waking Images
Just one thing has stuck with me in the 22 years since the movie Sex, Lies & Videotape came out—and it’s not the sex, the lies or the videotape. In fact, I don’t even remember any of those details. What still resonates with me is the opening monologue about garbage, by the character played by Andie MacDowell.
She’s upset about all the garbage in the world. Where it goes, how much room it’s taking up, the sustainability of an environmental model that pits an ever-growing human population casting off an endless supply of trash against a beleaguered and finite planet.
I’ve been laid up at home for the past several days with a touch of the flu or mono or something. A virus of some sort that zapped me of all energy and appetite for the first two or three of those days but is lifting now. I’ve done a lot of sleeping, some reading, much struggling to reach a comfortable body temperature as I’ve fluctuated from chilly to hot. I’ve also watched a fair amount of TV, including much coverage of the horrific destruction in Japan caused by the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
That’s been the biggest and most graphic tragedy in the news—it’s hard to top the leveling of entire prefectures, the loss of more than 10,000 lives and the real potential for nuclear disaster—but, as always, it’s a grudge match between Mother Nature and Man. We’ll see your tsunami and give you Libya. There also was a brutal crime in typically safe downtown Bethesda the other night, in which two female employees were raped and beaten, and one killed, inside a yoga studio.
None of these things—garbage, natural disaster, nuclear peril, armed conflict, loosed pathologies—are linked, yet they all feel of a piece to me. Especially from where I’ve been laying the last few days, absent most of the distractions of workaday life. In the eerie calm of the house, where I’ve been alone much of the time with a sleeping dog and cat while Lynn’s been out and about in the world, I’ve felt more than my usual sense that It’s All Closing In. Have I mentioned that I’ve been reading newspaper stories and op-ed pieces about looming global food and water shortages?
The debt crisis? Oh yeah, that, too.
How much more can the Earth stand? How long till it all reaches us, rattles our bedsheets, rouses our pets? What comes first, the tornado or the knife?
When the virus was at its height I was sleeping through everything. The darkest news images were no match for overwhelming torpor. But when I turned out the lights last night, I retained for a troubling time the image of that hammerhead of water propelling fleets of vehicles and matchstick remnants of cities across northern Japan. And the explosions at the power plants. The experts say that even in a worst-case scenario, there’s little threat of nuclear contamination in the United States. Ah, but that’s this time, from this disaster, in that country, isn’t it?
The one thing I'll miss as I reenter the world is the instant sleep my illness brought. But laying around the house all day is boring and unproductive. And the worst thing is, it can make you feel like a sitting duck.
She’s upset about all the garbage in the world. Where it goes, how much room it’s taking up, the sustainability of an environmental model that pits an ever-growing human population casting off an endless supply of trash against a beleaguered and finite planet.
I’ve been laid up at home for the past several days with a touch of the flu or mono or something. A virus of some sort that zapped me of all energy and appetite for the first two or three of those days but is lifting now. I’ve done a lot of sleeping, some reading, much struggling to reach a comfortable body temperature as I’ve fluctuated from chilly to hot. I’ve also watched a fair amount of TV, including much coverage of the horrific destruction in Japan caused by the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
That’s been the biggest and most graphic tragedy in the news—it’s hard to top the leveling of entire prefectures, the loss of more than 10,000 lives and the real potential for nuclear disaster—but, as always, it’s a grudge match between Mother Nature and Man. We’ll see your tsunami and give you Libya. There also was a brutal crime in typically safe downtown Bethesda the other night, in which two female employees were raped and beaten, and one killed, inside a yoga studio.
None of these things—garbage, natural disaster, nuclear peril, armed conflict, loosed pathologies—are linked, yet they all feel of a piece to me. Especially from where I’ve been laying the last few days, absent most of the distractions of workaday life. In the eerie calm of the house, where I’ve been alone much of the time with a sleeping dog and cat while Lynn’s been out and about in the world, I’ve felt more than my usual sense that It’s All Closing In. Have I mentioned that I’ve been reading newspaper stories and op-ed pieces about looming global food and water shortages?
The debt crisis? Oh yeah, that, too.
How much more can the Earth stand? How long till it all reaches us, rattles our bedsheets, rouses our pets? What comes first, the tornado or the knife?
When the virus was at its height I was sleeping through everything. The darkest news images were no match for overwhelming torpor. But when I turned out the lights last night, I retained for a troubling time the image of that hammerhead of water propelling fleets of vehicles and matchstick remnants of cities across northern Japan. And the explosions at the power plants. The experts say that even in a worst-case scenario, there’s little threat of nuclear contamination in the United States. Ah, but that’s this time, from this disaster, in that country, isn’t it?
The one thing I'll miss as I reenter the world is the instant sleep my illness brought. But laying around the house all day is boring and unproductive. And the worst thing is, it can make you feel like a sitting duck.
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