Dispirit of '76

My friend Maryann in Philadelphia has a boyfriend whose last name is Schmidt. I’ve not yet met him. The other day, I asked her in an email if she’s asked him if he’s seen the movie About Schmidt, since it’s, well, about Schmidt and all. The whole idea struck me as hilarious. I was thinking about how, should he respond that he hasn’t seen it, Maryann could mock-seriously question his self-awareness and his commitment to introspection. “It’s about Schmidt! How could you not be curious?”

Never mind that About Schmidt came out 14 years ago and was hardly a blockbuster. In it, Jack Nicholson plays a curmudgeonly retiree and recent widower who finds it difficult to relate to other people, including his daughter. His emotional breakthrough finally comes when he weeps for an African kid he’s never met, to whom he’s been sending money and letters through a charity organization. I knew when I asked Maryann the question that it was quite possible that her Schmidt had never so much as heard of the movie, let alone seen it. But I was pretty sure that Maryann, a film buff, at least had heard of About Schmidt. Which gave me the opening to ask my utterly hilarious question. Which of course, like many things that strike me as comic gold, went over like the proverbial lead zeppelin, per a comment by The Who’s Keith Moon that became (with a slight spelling change) the name of another iconic rock band.

Predictably in retrospect, Maryann earnestly wrote back, “I haven’t asked [boyfriend] if he’s seen About Schmidt. Is it good? Would I like it?” Cripes! I internally shouted the words of mad scientists in a hundred 1950s horror movies—“The fools! They know nothing of my work!” But I simultaneously understood that this gag was uproarious only to me, so what I wrote back was, “Never mind. That’s not the point. But yeah, I thought it was good, from what I remember.” I do suspect she’d like the flick, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, the exchange got me to thinking about Jack Nicholson and, by extension, Gene Hackman. I say “by extension” because both actors were incredibly prolific for decades and then disappeared from films seemingly overnight. There are other actors and actresses and one-time media darlings in other realms who fall into this category, although I can’t name any at the moment. What they all have in common is that we—or at least I, but I don’t think I’m alone in this—only take note of their long absence from public view when they one day resurface on the cover of a supermarket tabloid, looking like the hideous portrait of Dorian Gray, gasping for one last breath beneath a headline alleging shocking elder abuse. Although the “facts” in the articles always seem dubious—was the housekeeper really force-feeding dog food to the former Oscar winner, and pounding on his bedsores with a baseball bat?—there’s the realization that the photo itself, while horribly unflattering, actually does accurately reflect what must be the age of the long out-of-sight, out-of-mind celebrity. It’s the moment at which we understand that, while we were going about our lives and not paying attention, yesterday’s stars were getting Old As Hell.

I just now Googled Jack Nicholson. It turns out that he’s 79. Which isn’t quite ancient, but, given the hard-charging life he’s led, it probably works out to most other people’s 90. According to Wikipedia, he hasn’t retired from films, but he’s very selective about his roles. The way I read this is, “Only cameos I can squeeze between my 10 am and 2 pm naps.” My guess is that Jack is hoping similarly-aged director Woody Allen can write him into the final minutes of a period piece about Casanova in which the great lover bags his final conquest—played by previous Allen cast member Scarlett Johansson—then dies a happy man.

In the long hiatus between my last blog post and this one, a lot has happened in both the big, wide world and my little one. High-profile police shootings. High profile-shootings of police. The nightclub deaths in Orlando. Brexit. The continued rise, then self-inflicted fall (fingers crossed it’s permanent) of Donald Trump. At our house, the biggest and worst news was the death on August 1 of our beloved cat Tess, who, beset with diabetes and other serious health issues for years, nevertheless had outlived her nine feline lives in relative comfort until she suddenly and dramatically gave up the ghost. We got a vet to make a house call and end her suffering.

Also, I turned 58 in early July, and at around the same time received in the mail a postcard inviting me to my 40-year high school reunion. Although it’s simple math—both 1958 + 58 and 1976 + 40 equal 2016—it’s somehow a lot to take in. I was talking about this over dinner in DC last night with my friend Erika, who I’ve known since college and see once or twice a year, as she lives locally. We hashed over old times, happy times, sad times, regrets and retirement plans, as two friends of a certain age will do. Neither of us could quite believe that we’re the age we are, the retirement talk notwithstanding. We don’t feel as if we’re on the cusp of 60. We look nothing like those scary walking-dead celebrities in the tabloids, if we do say so ourselves. (That written, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to hair dyes.) When Erika and I talked last night about the upcoming post-work phase of our lives, it was with enthusiasm for the activities we plan to pursue, not dread of the senescence into which we eventually may sink. Still, time does march on.

This 40th high school reunion thing is a bit of a conundrum for me—and not because attending it would confirm what’s undeniable anyway—that I’m old enough to be having a 40th high school reunion. Rather, it’s a question of motives, utility, and who else will be there.

I remember my 20th high school reunion as if it was yesterday. I’d attended it neither for the joy of seeing hundreds of former classmates I barely knew as a teenager—I wasn’t popular and had only a small clique of friends—nor to reinvigorate my school spirit. I attended zero football games in the three years I attended Grimsely Senior High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I have no absolutely recollection of how the school’s sports teams fared during those years. Last-period pep rallies were my cue to drive to nearby Krispy Kreme for a late-afternoon doughnut or three. But I knew that a few key former classmates would be at that 20-year reunion, so I wanted to see them. I also had it in mind to show off Lynn to anyone who might have thought, back in the Gerald Ford years, that a pudgy one-handed doofus like me would never marry, period, let alone score a fox. (Probably no one had even considered my future marital status, but that lonely scenario had been my own working assumption.) Also, by 1996 I wasn’t pudgy anymore. In fact, I fancied that I looked pretty damn good at age 38, all things considered. As the date neared, I savored the prospect of wearing a name tag bearing a yearbook photo of fat-faced Eric Ries.

I deemed that 20th reunion a success. I had some great conversations with people I hadn’t seen in years, although I also drank too much and missed some other opportunities. I enjoyed the fact that several people almost didn’t recognize me (until they spotted the telltale empty sleeve) because I’d aged for the better and not (per many former sports stars and cheerleaders) for the worse. Lynn had a good time. I felt proud to have her as my date for the evening and my partner in life.

But now it’s 20 years later, as hard as that is to believe. One of the classmates with whom I spoke at length that night in 1996 killed herself last year. My closest friend from my high school class already has told me he hasn’t the time off, spare cash or inclination to drive over from the eastern part of the state. I’m not on Facebook, so I don’t keep up with a vast network of peripheral friends and acquaintances the way a lot of people do, but I’ve put out a few email feelers to former classmates who I’d like to see. No answers yet.

With Tess’s death, Lynn is freed from her intensive care needs, and we can leave our dog Bean with friends. My mom has long griped about never seeing Lynn when I visit Greensboro, so the reunion weekend would be as good a time as any for us to visit with my parents, who are even older than Jack Nicholson. But, what if none of the people I want to show up can make it? What point will it serve to spend a few hours milling around awkwardly in a refurbished downtown theater amid a bunch of near-strangers, while overenthusiastic emcees and cheesy music seek to gin up nostalgia for a time and place that I’d in many ways just as soon forget, and largely have? Do I want to be dragging Lynn into that situation, however game she might be?

On the other hand, maybe I’d look around the room and determine that time hasn’t ravaged me to the extent that it has others, and that’d make me feel good about myself. Perhaps I’d surprise myself by feeling real kinship with a group of people with whom I share only a thin slice of the past, but many of whom I’m unlikely ever to see again. Still, are those sufficient reasons to plunk down nearly a hundred bucks for the two of us and Do This Thing?

At the moment I’m thinking probably yes. Especially if my emails bear fruit, but perhaps even if not. Because, however young I may feel in my mind that I am, the cold, hard facts are that I’m old and getting older. It'll only be a few hours of my time, and it could be fun. It probably won’t be dreadful. Anyway, there’ll be alcohol, although I’d best go a little easier on that this time around.

I feel that I’ve got plenty of life in me yet. But as Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman and other once-hot celebrities attest, in the seeming blink of an eye you can come to resemble a sad victim of time (and, possibly, of cruel caretakers as well). So, I’m thinking that maybe I should engage with my fellow members of the Class of 1976 at least one more time while we’re all still upright and lucid.

Maybe I’ll even outline the About Schmidt gag to somebody, since I’ll have no investment in his or her reaction. Maybe somebody will get it, and will laugh. That would be sweet. A happy memory to consider 10 years from now, when the next reunion postcard arrives in the mail.

Kind of a Big Hairy Deal

You may or may not have seen the viral video of the Texas woman in the Chewbacca mask. I knew nothing about it until it had been tweeted, texted and emailed around  the planet a few times. Somebody told Lynn about it. She, in turn, told me.

She’d been highly skeptical that it would amuse her to the extent that it had many millions of viewers before her. And even after she informed me that it had, indeed, sent her into hysterics, I was a reluctant viewer. Why? Because—take your pick here—(a) we are considerably more discriminating in our tastes than are the stupid masses, or (b) we are humor snobs.

This video originated on Facebook, for crying out loud! I’ll tell you how many hours a week Lynn and I spend on Facebook. Zero hours. That’s how many. Why? Because the vast majority of what’s on Facebook is time-sucking, self-absorbed crap, that’s why. (Not that we generalize or anything. And I'll have you know that my writing a blog is something entirely different from self-absorption. No, I won’t tell you how it’s different. Just shut up.)

As it turned out, in our estimation, the hoi polloi actually got this one right.

OK, I didn’t find the Chewbacca Mask Woman’s video quite as hilarious as had Lynn, because I am, if possible, even snob—, um, more exacting in my judgments, than is she when it comes to What’s Really Funny. But I must say, the giddy laughter of that Texas woman having the time of her life channeling a fur-faced Star Wars character is super infectious. It’s like how the cast of the old Carol Burnett Show used to crack each other up on camera, lapsing out of character in the middle of a skit. Their laughter somehow reflexively became ours, sitting at home in our gaudy 1970s fashions.

But with Chewbacca Mask Woman it’s more than just High Silly. Her laughter in the video is so explosive, uncontrolled and joyful. It’s self-deprecating and defiant at the same time. Hers is the unrehearsed, unrestrained happiness of a person in the midst of pleasure that has no any particular rhyme, reason or bounds. It’s primal bliss, in a way—like what prehistoric humans might have experienced when they first located their funny bones. Chewbacca Mask Woman whoop-growls in concert with the mask’s sound effects in a way that says, “I’m aware that this entire situation is ridiculous—a grown woman buying a children's item and absolutely Losing It when she sees how it makes her look and sound. But I will stay in this euphoric sweet spot for as long as I possibly can, because, well, why wouldn’t I?”

When Chewbacca Mask Woman says she’s tempted to drive around town with the mask on, I totally get it. Prolong the high and share the wealth! Teach the world to sing in imperfect harmony! Evangelize mirth in a largely mirthless world! But I’m glad that she apparently did not subsequently don and drive. America’s drivers already are plenty distracted at the wheel. They don’t need, also, to encounter a chortling Chewbacca in the turn lane.

I wasn’t yet thinking about Chewbacca Mask Woman earlier today as I sifted through the small stack of newspaper articles, op-ed pieces and entertainment items I’d printed out as possible blog fodder. A motley and largely grim collection it was. These were some of the headlines: “Poll: Election 2016 Shapes Up As a Contest of Negatives” (Trump-Clinton presidential race now a statistical dead heat), “Stephen King Raises Cry of Alarm Against Terrifying Orange-Skinned Monster” (600+ authors sign an anti-Trump manifesto), “Primed To Fight” (about the growing number of armed anti-government militia members in the United States) and “Sanders’s Scorched-Earth Campaign is a Gift To Trump” (Bernie helps the Donald by staying in the race and further souring voters on Hillary).

Do you by any chance see a pattern there?

If you’re guessing that I am petrified by the prospect of ignorant, childish, conspiracy-spouting, dangerous, megalomaniacal Donald Trump (how do you really feel, Ries?) quite possibly becoming the next POTUS—and more than a little depressed that Sanders has become the GOP-aiding Ralph Nader of this election cycle, and that this is how the literary intelligentsia intends to Make a Difference this fall—you are correct.

(After I’d read about the “Open Letter To the American People” that “Writers Speak Out Against Donald Trump” has written to rally the populace to outrage, I exclaimed to a workmate, in the imagined voice of the instantly-sobered American people, “What?! Michael Chabon’s against Trump?! That tears it! He just lost my vote!” My coworker added, “I can’t in good conscience vote for anyone Dave Eggers deems unworthy of our highest office!”)

But then I came across the lone happy news clip in my printout pile—the one that got me to thinking about Chewbacca Mask Woman, and about how therapeutic it is to laugh with abandon, heedless of all the storm clouds in our skies.

The headline was not in itself happy, but the place that it took me was: “Alan Young, the Affable Owner of ‘Mr Ed,’ Dies at 96.”

As the obituary pointed out, Young had a very long and impressive resume as a radio and television personality, film actor and, in his career’s final act, voiceover artist in animated films. But to Americans of a certain age, including me, he first and foremost was architect Wilbur Post, described perfectly by the New York Times as “an unlikely second fiddle—the hapless straight man to a talking horse.”

Mr Ed aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966. I was only 8 years old at the end of its run, so I know the show mostly from reruns (which continue to be broadcast on various cable TV channels). Even as a kid I surely recognized that a talking horse was a ludicrous premise—if no more so than say, a favorite Martian, a suburban witch or an ageless Persian genie on Florida’s Space Coast. But if Mr Ed was fluff, it was smartly written and thoroughly winning fluff.

The horse was the star, and his dubbed words the catalysts, but Young was the key. The story goes that legendary comedian George Burns, whose production company created the show, told his casting director, “Get Alan Young. He’s the kind of guy a horse would talk to.” And he was! Young was a gifted comic actor who provided precisely the combination of good-natured smirk, forgiving anger and duped confusion that his role as nominal “owner” of the irrepressible Ed demanded. Young’s Wilbur Post was the perfect all-American goofball—the actor’s English birth and Canadian upbringing notwithstanding. Wilbur was Mr Ed’s protector and foil—his buddy in the barn and the butt of the jokes.

One of the online obituaries of Young imbedded a video clip from Mr Ed that I vaguely remembered. For some absurd reason that’s beyond my recall, Wilbur and Ed are at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Wilbur is talking with Leo Durocher, the team’s real-life manager at that time, during batting practice. Ed stands at home plate with a bat dangling from his mouth. One of the players suggests it would be a great publicity gag for ace southpaw Sandy Koufax to pitch to the horse.

Well, you can guess the rest. Ed wallops the future hall of famer’s offering. Wilbur implores his equine pal to slide ahead of the throw to the plate. The sight of the charging palomino sends the Dodgers’ catcher leaping up onto the batting-cage netting and hanging on for dear life. Unchallenged, Mr Ed—now a sliding as well as a talking horse, thanks to special effects—completes his inside-the-park home run and cockily shakes the infield dirt from his mane.

“That’s the smartest horse I’ve ever seen!” Durocher exclaims, praising Ed’s hitting process and base-running savvy. (It’s not, however, a comment on Ed’s vocabulary, as the horse speaks only to Wilbur—and to those he pranks on the phone.)

“Ed’s not that smart,” Wilbur responds. “He missed second base.”   

 Ha! God, I loved that show—from the catchy opening song (“A horse is a horse, of course of course …”) to the closing credits. Mr Ed was crazy like a fox. So stupid that it was brilliant. Reading Alan Young’s obit and watching that clip brought it all back to me.

It brought me back, too, to Chewbacca Mask Woman, and to the profound truth underlying her simple message that life is all about about—or, rather, that life should be all about—the little things. The things that cumulatively hold the power to get us through the day, whatever the trials and challenges the wider world poses. The things that might fuel us, if only we’d recognize them and let them work their incremental magic. The things in our daily lives that not only don't hinder us, but that actually help us—because they bespeak kindness, or touch us in some way, or provide the glorious release of making us laugh out loud.

When I was watching Chewbacca Mask Woman laugh her silly face silly, when I was watching Mr Ed best Sandy Koufax to Wilbur’s utter delight, I wasn’t thinking of anything other than how happy I was in that moment. My mind was not on the rise of Donald Trump and what it Says About This Country. It wasn’t on an increasingly angry, armed America that I don’t understand and feel powerless to change. It wasn’t even on whether Chewbacca Mask Woman, when she’s not modeling Star Wars products, is politically representative of the Hard-Right Texas with which I so passionately would love to mess. All I was doing in those moments was laughing. It felt awesome. It was that simple.

I’ll probably always be distrustful of the alleged hilarity of videos that become web phenomena. I’m hard-wired to assume that if everybody loves something, it’s almost certainly overrated. But I’ll concede that some video viruses are positively—and I mean that literally—infectious.

If only that had more staying power. Perhaps that's something we all could work on.

Yo! I Voted

When I arrived at Bannockburn Elementary School at 6:45 am today, I was the fourth person in line to vote in Maryland’s presidential primary. By the time I left 10 minutes after the doors opened at 7 am, the line of white people—most about my age or older, with a few early-rising younger folks mixed in—extended all the way down the hallway outside the voting room and into the school’s front lobby.

Diversity is not my neighborhood’s strong suit. Not that Maryland election district/precinct 07-02—per the voter information card I’ve kept in my wallet since its issue date on April 19, 1996—is lily-white. There are some African American families, but residents of darker hues more often are ethic Asians of one lineage or another who probably are university professors or federal employees or scientists at the National Institutes of Health.

It’s not by any means an ostentatiously wealthy neighborhood, but it’s comfortably middle-class in a location desirable enough that Lynn and I are clearly the riffraff. If we hadn’t bought our house cheap (relatively speaking) during the middle years of the Clinton administration and subsequently maintained a sufficient bank account from salary and investments to pay the state and county’s ruinous taxes, we would not be residents of ZIP code 20816.

Even now, I often feel like an imposter on my own street. I’ll be out working in the yard on a Saturday afternoon, one of the few locals who actually mows his own grass, and I’ll half-expect enforcers from a homeowners association I hadn’t previously known existed stride purposefully up my driveway, toss my ass into a Mercedes-Benz paddy wagon and throw me in a briar patch in some socioeconomic area more appropriate to my job description, economic ambition, market savvy and heredity.

But the thing is, on election days, I feel like I’m with my peeps. Mine is the kind of neighborhood in which yard signs for Democratic candidates are the rule and lawn advertisements for Republicans so profoundly the exception that I frankly fear just a little bit for the apostates. For example, a house up the street and around the corner from ours has a Trump sign in the yard and another in the window. I look at those signs and think a couple of different things. One is that the home's occupants surely are NOT illustrative of the oft-cited talking point that, supposedly at least, more people in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District (of which my precinct is a part) have advanced degrees than do residents of any other congressional district in the nation. (Not that I myself have an advanced degree—yet another reason my eyes stay peeled for that paddy wagon.) The other thing I think when I see a Trump (or, in past years, a Romney, Bush, or whatever the name of the GOP standard-bearer) sign anywhere along the not-so-mean-streets of my precinct is, “It’s lucky for those people that most of the liberals around here don’t own or even like guns." Elsewise, I’m envisioning a bullet hole between the ‘T’ and the ‘rump,’ and maybe a puncture or two in the tires of that honking-big SUV out front.

(Not that mayhem is unknown in these parts. Why, in the heat of swim-meet season, I’ve seen ENTIRE ROLLS of toilet paper carpet-bombing the homes of kids whose success at the breaststroke has embittered bathroom tissue-wielding ruffians from rival swim clubs. Indulge me one brief aside here. One neighborhood team is called the Merrimack Maniacs. Our next-door neighbors, back when their girls were younger and themselves Maniacs, sported a bumper sticker on one of their cars that bore the team’s name, illustrated by a cartoon drawing of two swim cap-clad crazoids. I told the dad one day that every time I saw that bumper sticker I thought of Charlton Heston’s character in The Planet of the Apes, at the moment when he sees the Statue of Liberty rising out of the sand in the Forbidden Zone and realizes he’s been on Earth all along—only far in the future, after humankind has blown itself up and allowed the apes to evolve and take over. “You MANIACS!” Heston shouts—indicting his own species with a fervor he’d later, in real life, reserve for anyone advocating gun control. Still, I have to say, TPing yards seems a far cry from provoking a nuclear holocaust and ushering in a simian master race.)

Where was I? Oh, so, yes, my neighborhood is about as reliably Democratic in voter registration as they come. Probably even more so—though I don’t know the numbers and am too lazy to seek them out—than is my deep Blue state as a whole, where the Democratic “edge” in voter registration is more like a chasm, at about two-to-one. (In Maryland, a sparsely populated and heavily Republican east and west sandwich a voter-rich Democratic center that includes such population centers as Baltimore, Prince George’s County, and my county, Montgomery.) So, when I arrive at the elementary school on election mornings and stand in line to cast my vote, I always feel good about the company I’m keeping and the general results I can expect my precinct-mates to produce—not necessarily voting for “my” candidates in every instance, but at least for my party.

Although, don’t get me wrong. Lynn and I still, after two decades walking among them, find most Bethesdans (with notable exceptions) to be incredibly snooty and self-absorbed. It isn’t like my fellow voters are looking up from their cell phones, where they monitor the stock market and studiously avoid any facial display that might be misconstrued as goodwill, in order to greet me with a hearty, “Howya doin’, Champ? Great to see ya!” But knowing that most of my neighbors are likely to vote the “right” way, by my lights, forgives a lot of grievances.

And the poll workers, at least, always are cheery and helpful, which further enhances the experience for me. That they are donating their time for no reward beyond facilitating the democratic process makes me appreciate them that much more. Especially given that, in keeping with their trademark assholicness, many Bethesdans tend to be in a Big Damn Hurry and take unkindly to things like standing in line and having to countenance a verification process that can take as long as 90 seconds. Anyway, by the time I’ve secured my bilingual “I Voted”/”Yo voteˊ (literally, I think, “Yo! I Voted”) sticker and affixed it to my shirt, I’m feeling about as optimistic about the world as I ever do.

Which isn’t, of course, very optimistic at all. I mean, global warming is still happening, and movie-astronaut Charlton Heston wasn’t wrong about the self-destructive stupidity of the human race. But, all in all, I find voting to be a delightful way to start the day. Just having the opportunity to vote, and having that vote be counted, is a great thing about America at a time when there’s a lot not to like about this country—starting with, but hardly limited to, the utter lack of civility in political discourse and refusal to compromise in order to get done anything that desperately needs doing. (And yes, I'm mindful of the fact that this entire post is about how I never vote for Republicans now—given the intolerant, science-hating and theocracy-favoring cesspool the GOP has become. But I have voted for individual Republican candidates in the past, and I might well do so again if any would seem to prioritize the needs of the planet. Beyond that, though, I plaintively ask: Can’t folks on both sides of the aisle just give a little and find some common ground? To invoke the existential question of the late police-brutality victim and PCP philosopher Rodney King, why can’t everybody just get along?)

But voting in Montgomery County is, of course, a funhouse-mirror experience. I’ve walked away from that elementary school feeling that maybe, just maybe, John Kerry actually might beat George W. Bush in the presidential race. I’ve been stunned when my state has elected Republican governors twice on my watch, even though I hadn’t been much impressed by the Democratic candidate’s campaign in either case. Fairly often, this county is like Las Vegas in a way: What happens here on Election Day stays here, results-wise—a delightfully sinful Democratic secret on a big Republican day.

But today is a bit different here, in that it’s the day of the two major political parties’ primaries, not the general election. My precinct homies—the vast majority of them fellow Democrats—might not in aggregate favor my Democrat of choice for the 8th congressional district seat, or for the US Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Barbara Mikulski, or for the presidency of these United States. History suggests, however, that, given those voter-registration numbers and Maryland’s prevailing progressive bent, whoever the party faithful elect today, locally and statewide, will be the next 8th District congressperson and US senator come November. (I expect the state also to provide another win for Hillary Clinton, who may or may not win in November but is certain to be the party’s nominee for president.)

So, for me, there’s a lot to like on any given Election Day. There’s the fact that I live in a democracy that, whatever its abundant problems and corruptions, still guarantees its citizens the right to vote. (Not that there aren’t always efforts afoot to disenfranchise people for various nefarious reasons; I did just write the word “corruptions.”) There’s the fact that my vote counts, whether or not the final tally is what I’d like it to be. There’s the fact that, when I walk through that elementary school’s front door, the chance is close to nil that anyone among the queued will be overheard inveighing against abortion or thanking God for the opportunity to stop evil liberals from further debasing our great nation.

And not insignificantly, given my psychic fears, there’s that happy illusion, for the half-hour or so that I’m on premises at my polling place, that my fellow Bethesdans are just, well, gosh, A-OK. Not at all the kind of folks who might one day smash my cheap old boom box as it blares classic rock, separate me from my nearby lawnmower, and spirit my underachieving, low-net worth butt off to a waiting briar patch a safe distance down the road.

Pictures At An Exhibition

I read an article in the Washington Post this morning about a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that I’m certain to see. It’s a series of nine pencil sketches, accompanied by audio clips, called “Thoughts in Passing.” All of the subjects were in hospice care when their likenesses were drawn. The story of each senior citizen’s life and impending death literally is written into his or her clothing, and is amplified in an accompanying audio clip.

It’s the work of Claudia Bicen, a 29-year-old self-taught artist who was born in Britain but lives and works in the San Francisco area. The oeuvre couldn’t be any more in my wheelhouse, given that I’ve visited with the very elderly for nearly two decades now (I write “very” to distinguish them from me at this stage of my life), and given that I’ve been a hospice volunteer. The invisibility of the elderly in our society deeply saddens me, as does the isolated anonymity of their death in so many cases. I vastly enjoy learning who they are, who they were, and what they make of a world so very different from the one they once knew.

In the article, Bicen says, “I wanted to create a feeling of compassion and empathy, of seeing yourself in that person.” That line really struck me, because I do see something of myself in every elderly person I’ve come to know and befriend over the years. And I don’t just mean that I recognize that I, too, may one day face the same physical and/or cognitive issues with which they grapple. What I see are the various points of intersection they and I have—the cultural references we share, the likes and dislikes, the nostalgia for people and things that no longer exist.

I was a hospice volunteer for only about 18 months, up until I moved to Washington, DC, in late 1992 from Savannah, Georgia. But those were rich months, filled with memorable experiences. I helped one terminally ill man sneak a smoke, for example, and took another on a manic grocery spree. I’ll never forget, either, the time when an octogenarian widower told me, out of the blue, that what he hated worst was that his “pecker” no longer got hard. Which brings to mind another thing Bicen says: “I went into this thinking that every person was going to provide me with some kind of wisdom. But people die as themselves. There isn’t going to necessarily be some kind of revelation or change. This it it.”

Isn’t that enough, though? Clearly Bicen thinks so. I do, too. True, not everyone is profound. But everyone has a story. That simple truth can, and too often does, get lost when we enter an assisted living facility, nursing home or hospice house and are greeted by a sea of infirm bodies, blasting TVs and medicinal smells that generically shout “old people.” But man, can those old people be uniquely interesting! And funny. And lewd. And angry. And bitter. And maddening. And philosophical. And more or less content—or damn tired of it all. Each in his or her own way.

But that’s only part of what I want to say today. Lately death not only hasn’t taken a holiday, but it’s practically been living with me. I just got back Sunday from a group remembrance in Greensboro, North Carolina, for a high school friend of mine who killed herself last summer after a decades-long battle with depression. The very next day came the news that a long-ago newspaper colleague of mine had died of lung cancer. The first woman was my exactly age, 57. The second was not much older, 64.

As I’ve noted before in this space, for whatever reason—maybe some combination of my appreciation of impermanence, fascination with darkness and utter cluelessness as to what if anything comes next—death has been an oft-visited theme in the six years I’ve been doing this blog. I’ve written of my love of the true-crime Investigation Discovery cable television channel, with its gruesome details and cheesy reenactments. I’ve drafted eulogies to the famous and infamous upon their entry into the Big Sleep. I’ve sketched my own portraits—literary ones—of some of the seniors I befriended very late in their lives. Just a few blog posts back, I announced plans for a “Dead of Winter” tour that would encompass the gravesites of a couple of those women. (It didn’t happen, but I may get to one of those burial sites very soon. Stay tuned!)

In the June 2, 2012, post about my Investigation Discovery obsession (“Grim-Reality TV”), I listed some of the homicide sites past which I regularly run near my Bethesda home and in the District—benign-looking homes in which individuals or entire families have been slain, and, in one case, a neighborhood from which a woman disappeared, never to be seen again.

Well, recently I ran, for perhaps the hundredth time, past a peculiar death site that I hadn’t mentioned in 2012. But think I will now, since I’m on the subject.

There’s a lovely little tableau on a far corner of the Georgetown University campus that memorializes with a plaque the 20-year lifespan of David A. Shick. His name means nothing to today’s Hoyas, though he was one of them not so very long ago. The junior from Connecticut died in February 2000 after an altercation in the school library’s parking lot between two groups of drunk students. Shick was punched, fell, hit his head on concrete, and died three days later at Georgetown University Medical Center. It was ruled a homicide, but charges were not pursued, given the unlikelihood of conviction. Shick himself, after all, had been a fist-wielding participant in the mayhem.

Per the school newspaper The Hoya, on October 11, 2000, “The David Shick Memorial was dedicated in front of a group of about 150 students, faculty and family members on what would have been Shick’s 21st birthday. His parents were joined in prayer by University President Leo J O’Donovan while an a capella group performed.”

The memorial, funded by the Friends of David Shick, is described in the piece as including “a small pond stocked with fish, flowers, stonework, shrubbery and two cascading waterfalls.” A family friend told The Hoya that the memorial was meant to serve as both a tribute and a warning—a reminder of the tragedy that foolish behavior can cause. “The running stream symbolizes the waters of chaos,” was how President O’Donovan rather eloquently put it. “The waters of the River of Jordan and their healing quality. The baptismal font and waters of life.”

Sixteen years later, the memorial remains a lovely and tranquil site. I’m not sure, though, that its presence is meeting the stated purpose of “facilitat[ing] the continued retelling of David’s story among future generations, so that they will have the opportunity to internalize those lessons.” It would have a better chance of doing that if an addendum to the plaque were to read “Victim of a drunken fight. Think about that before you booze and brawl.”

Still, as someone who had read the newspaper story when the incident happened and subsequently doubled down on the details online, I can assure the Friends of David Shick that I indeed think of their son, their sibling, their friend every time I run past the memorial. No, I didn’t know the guy. He might have been a great kid. He just as easily might have been a rich, entitled asshole. I have no idea. What I do know is that he was a real person who many people loved, and that he died in an incredibly stupid way. Like the hospice dwellers in Claudia Bicen’s sketches and the scores of elderly people I’ve known, David Shick had his own unique story.

As did Franklin Manzaneres and Gradys Mendoza, whose lives still are commemorated, nearly six years after I first blogged about them, with makeshift crosses near where they plummeted to their death in July 2009.

I wrote on August 12, 2000, in a post titled “The Fallen,” of how I’d seen the crosses near a highway overpass, read the names on them, and decided to see what I could find out online about the deceased. I learned that they were the victims of an infamous drunk-driving case about which I’d read the previous summer. Their car had been forced off the Beltway by a woman who’d had several too many drinks at a Bethesda restaurant.

Mendoza, I’d learned, was a 39-year-old Honduran immigrant who’d made good in America, rising from restaurant worker to owner of his own construction company. He lived in Springfield, Virginia, was married and had three kids. Manzaneres, his friend, was 37. The Internet otherwise is silent on him. He was the passenger, Mendoza the driver when a Jeep Cherokee driven by 33-year-old Kelli Loos rammed Mendoza’s truck, sending it through a guardrail and down a 60-foot ravine very near where those crosses now stand. Loos kept driving, crossing the nearby American Legion Bridge into Virginia, where she crashed and registered a blood-alcohol level of .20—more than twice the legal limit.

The reason I mention this now is the Kelli Loos recently was back in the news.

The last line of my blog post in 2000 was this: “I can’t imagine ever again running past the site without thinking about two men on their last ride, a grieving widow, three fatherless kids, a convicted killer with a lifetime of guilt coiled cancer-like in her chest, and a bereaved old Army man living out the rest of his days missing the Honduran man he loved like a son.”

As it turned out, I had discounted the power of addiction, while overestimating the power of guilt. After serving four years of a 10-year jail sentence, Loos was paroled in 2013 and permitted to resume driving if she blew into a device that would prevent her car from starting were she to be legally drunk. Per a story published in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago, Loos was ordered back to prison after having failed the interlock test at least three times.

The article quoted an “exasperated” Montgomery County Circuit Court judge as telling Loos, who now is 40, “I don’t know what to do with you. I truly don’t.” This was after Loos recanted her story that a breath mint somehow had triggered the interlock.

Loos expressed deep remorse at the recent court appearance, as she had upon her initial sentencing in 2009. She told the judge that she continues to make “poor decisions” because “I’m an alcoholic.”

But if that judge doesn’t know what to do with Kelli Loos other than send her back to jail, Maryland lawmakers do. She’s now a poster drunk for pending legislation that seeks to lower the state’s interlock-activating blood-alcohol level from a surprising .15—well above the legal limit—to the legal limit of .08. The bill is given a good chance of passing, boosted by the high-profile recent death of a law enforcement officer who was run down by a drunk driver while he approached a different drunk driver he’d just pulled over.

If I can briefly editorialize, I’m not personally sure why the interlock threshold isn’t .00—a single drop of alcohol on your breath and this car sits idle. But then, I’m not a state legislator who’s apparently sitting snugly in the back pocket of the liquor industry.

Anyway. I hope the path I’ve taken to get here hasn’t seemed too strained, but when I saw that article this morning about the art exhibit, it presented a way to link together the various thoughts about death that were on my mind. To die, one must first have lived. Everyone dies, so that’s uniform. But lives are infinitely varied. Because of that, there are pieces of every one of the dead in all of us.

I mourn my friends who died, with whom I shared time and space.

I wonder what David Shick was all about, what he might have become, and even what idiotic argument proved fatal to him.

I think about Gradys Mendosa living a life he couldn’t have imagined growing up in Central America, then losing it in an instant.

I see Kelli Loos, committer of vehicular homicide, back in her cell—safely removed from society but never safe from herself.

“See yourself in that person,” Claudia Bicen urges. As someone who went to school with, worked with, and befriended those who now are dead, and as a man who more times than once has driven a car when he really shouldn’t have, I  hardly can do otherwise.