Honored

There's the eye thing.  And there's the I thing.

There's also the I Ching, a staple of my university days, and maybe it's time to give the old text another go.  The Chinese book of changes, and my knowledge of the tome does not extend beyond its English title, offered a perspective on fate.  In my 20s, fate having dealt a rather startling blow to my spinal cord, I was much concerned with the workings of fortune.  Over time, my imagination has drifted in other directions.  But at this point in 2008, I'm grabbing it back, pulling the sucker my way, the way bad vaudeville performers used to get hooked and dragged offstage.

My father-in-law and I are heading off for morning coffee.  He's visiting from Hawaii, and over the last two years, as Marlou's health has been on the line, we have seen more of each other and developed a rapport.  He is an intensely private man, and he tends to conceive of one's life course in highly traditional terms.  Since I'm at a stage of writing about and finally coming to grips with my own biography, the unfolding of a human existence is uppermost in my mind.

Uppermost in his, these days, is one of his grandsons.  The latter has encountered a mishap, has reached an early-20s crisis.  His grandparents want the best for him, so does Marlou, and the nephew-grandson is the topic of the day.  On this day, Dick and I are making our way to Peet's.  This has become something of a ritual, bonding in caffeine.  And we are not fifty meters up the road before the eye thing rolls through my mind.  Is the day bright, or is that the eye thing, what my ophthalmologist's nurse describes as an ocular migraine?  It's neither, I know.  I am becoming panicky.  The day is no brighter than any other.  Panic.  For what?

Inside Peet's, air-conditioned and, yes, shady behind the smoked glass of its windows, the panic has dissolved and our conversation begun.  Marlou suggested it might unfold this way, and it has.  Dick is discussing the grandson.  He lays things out, tells me his concerns, looks to me for my perspective.  Our perspectives are different, but that's why we are having this discussion.  And the panic?  Hard to say.  But the father wound can be deep.  I know some things Dick doesn't.  He know some things I don't.  And here we are.  What is important is that, differences or not, a father figure values my thoughts.  My perspective is worthy.  And somehow, being a modest 61 years old, there's a newfound and threatening power in this.

Threatening?  Two hours later it's lunch time and Alan and I are having a ritual Jewish meal, that is, Chinese.  I've been asked to write a recitation.  Alan's stepdaughter is getting married, and as I did for his own wedding, I am writing a comic, rhymed poem.  My shrimp with black bean sauce is proving too much.  The weather is hot, I am old, and I want this plate of food to go away.  But it's air-conditioned here, and Alan is reminiscing.  He is mercilessly critical in his self-assessment, naturally realistic and committedly unromantic.  So his recollections of his own wedding and the satirical epic poem I read aloud have the ring of absolute truth.  After my reading, he says, people gave up making toasts.  Everyone had laughed so hard, the wedding principals captured so well, there was nothing more to say.  

A conversation stopper, I chime in.  But as my words emerge, they sound false.  The stoppage of conversation was hardly a negative.  I'm trying to absorb Alan's high compliment.  Made even higher by his credibility and grounded, almost glib, sincerity.  I wrote a great piece, he is telling me.  He has told me this several times over the years, even adding that one of his cousins who reads plenty of scripts for the film industry, was hugely impressed by my effort.

Power.  Empowerment.  When it comes at you, it is there to take, acknowledge and appreciate.  Maybe the power isn't all mine.  Maybe fate or the universe or something beyond the I -- maybe that's the source.  Just as creativity flows at us, as artists have always said, from the Muses.  Or from Athena.  Or from Cleveland.  Whatever, wherever.  I think this may be a key to both the eye problem, and the I problem.  True, obstacles to empowerment exist on a psychological level, in the old and twisted links to the parent figures.  But there's another way to look at things.  When life gives us gifts, we must receive them, be thankful, and express that thanks by passing them on.

When Alan's stepdaughter asked me to write her wedding poem, I was in Italy.  From the Wi-Fi lobby of the Relaise della Rovere, I wrote her quite sincerely, and in ways beyond my momentary understanding, that I would be honored.