Fortunately, I have a friend my age who learned how to fly his own plane after he reached the age of 50. Brian lives in upstate New York and flies his plane all over the East Coast. Sometimes he flies down to a small airport in New Jersey and visits with me and my wife (we were all college classmates together). And sometimes we drive to where he is and he takes us up for a scenic view.
Recently, we drove to Cape Cod to meet Brian and his 92-year-old mom. Brian had his plane at the Provincetown airport and he took my wife and me up for a leisurely tour of the end of Cape Cod. We were high enough to get the Google Earth perspective of the Cape, but close enough to the ground to see the details of houses and shoreline below us. It was marvelous.
While we were out flying, there were some hot air balloons in the distance and it occurred to me that that is another way to get a leisurely air view. It’s travel where the trip is all the fun and you get there when you get there. That type of travel is more and more appealing to me all the time. My wife and I will be taking a Mediterranean cruise next month and I look forward to just sitting on my balcony and watching the world go by. I don’t know whether that means I’m getting old, or just that I have come to appreciate taking the time to stop and smell the roses. I like to think it’s the latter.
We’ll always have …
September 2013
Those who follow my writings on this blog may have picked up on a theme that runs through most of my favorite books, movies and even songs. I am a lover of stories of people who meet, enjoy a brief time together and then are forced to move on. It’s been described as “ships passing in the night” fiction.
A famous example of this is Casablanca. Rick and Ilsa enjoy a short time together in both Paris and Casablanca, but they part at the airport. And as Rick reminds Ilsa, “We’ll always have Paris.” And that’s the way I like to refer to these stories. To me they are the “we’ll always have [fill in the blank]” stories.
Over the years there have been many “we’ll always have” stories. One of my favorites is Two For The Seesaw, a 1962 film starring Shirley MacLaine and Robert Mitchum that was made into the musical Seesaw a decade later. Stories like this are naturals for musicalization because the emotional level is so high.
A more recent example of this is The Bridges of Madison County. A few weeks ago I saw a performance of the pre-Broadway run of Bridges up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Most people know the story from the 1995 Clint Eastwood – Meryl Streep movie, but the original Robert James Waller novel is much more heartfelt. Anyway, the musical version of the story comes to Broadway early next year and I heartily recommend it for those who love a good “we’ll always have” story.
For the uninitiated, The Bridges of Madison County revolves around Francesca Johnson, an Italian-born war bride who marries an American GI right after World War II and accompanies him home to his farm in Winterset, Iowa. She raises a family and has a good life there. But then one day a photographer named Robert Kincaid arrives at her farmhouse. He’s lost and looking for directions to a nearby covered bridge. Francesca is home alone because her family is at the Illinois State Fair. What transpires over the next week is one of the great love stories of all time. But just as Rick knew that the right thing to do was to let Ilsa go off with her husband, Robert and Francesca painfully reach the same decision. Francesca must stay with her husband and children. And so, even though they would never see each other again, they’d always have that week in Winterset.
But perhaps you have experienced your own “we’ll always have” story in real life. It doesn’t have to have been the love of your life. Maybe you had a dear childhood friend and the family had to move away. I can imagine a tearful farewell scene where you promised to write and never forget one another.
I had that kind of tearful farewell 40 years ago at a train station in Baden-Oos, Germany (now known as Baden-Baden). My cousin Bob and I were in college and backpacking through Europe. We met two sisters in Budapest and hit it off so well that we couldn’t bear to say goodbye when our planned time there ended. So they invited us to visit them at their home on a Canadian military base in Germany. We had such a tremendous time in those few days that there were tears at the train station when we had to get back to Munich for our flight home. We promised to write and I did diligently for several years. Eventually life moved on for all of us. But even though Bob and I are not likely to ever meet Rosemarie or Linda again, we’ll always have Germany.
While there is something sad about two friends or lovers separated by life, what makes these stories bittersweet rather than tragedies is the fact that they did enjoy a brief time of true happiness. In fact their happiness is so strong that it’s enough to last a lifetime. So whether it’s Robert and Francesca, Rick and Ilsa or even you and that special someone you had to leave behind, there is much truth in the words of Tennyson: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” And we’ll always have our memories.
My trip to Turkey:
Did Mary actually sleep here?
October 2013
Years ago, I vacationed on Prince Edward Island in Canada. While there, we visited the house of Anne of Green Gables. It was a beautiful house, full of tourists and a gift shop where my wife bought an Anne of Green Gables doll. The only problem with all this is that Anne of Green Gables never existed except in the imagination of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne was a fictional character. Yet the tourists came in droves and literally, and figuratively, bought the myth.
I bring this up because as I am writing this I’m on a ship in the Mediterranean having just visited what is purported to be the house of the Virgin Mary near the ancient city of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. There is evidence that Jesus existed and that Mary was his mother. But there is scant evidence that Mary ever set foot in Ephesus. In fact, the only evidence is that Saint John lived there and he was told by Jesus to take care of Mary. But no matter, the tourists come anyway, and those tourists include three popes.
So our ship docked in Izmir, Turkey, and we got on a bus that took us to the ruins of ancient Ephesus – a 90-minute ride to the south. We toured Mary’s house and the ruins at Ephesus. Our guide made no bones about it – no one knows if Mary ever lived in Ephesus. But we were all here so let’s pretend that Mary was here once upon a time.
After touring Mary’s house and the nearby ruins at Ephesus, we got back on our bus and headed for the commercial advertisement of the tour – a Turkish rug store that apparently pays the tour operator to deliver tourists for a sales pitch. The rugs were gorgeous, but the prices were high. Needless to say, we didn’t buy anything. And that’s when the real adventure began.
We boarded our bus for the ride back to the ship. It was 3:00. We were due back at 4:30, and the ship was scheduled to leave at 5:00. A minute later, our guide gave us the bad news: the bus would not start. The guide asked everyone to get off the bus and then he asked the men to get behind the bus and push it to help it start. So we all got off the bus, but no amount of pushing would budge the bus. It was now 3:15, and we still were 90 minutes from the ship.
The purported house where Mary lived after Jesus died
The tour guide called for a new bus. That arrived at 3:30, and we all got aboard. We were relieved because the 90-minute trip back to the ship would get us there just before the ship was scheduled to leave. The bus headed back to Izmir at top speed. And then about 45 minutes later, there was a sudden smell of steam, and the driver pulled over. Smoke was coming from the back of the bus. One of the passengers shouted, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” as we all realized that it had happened again. A second bus had broken down. So we all got off the bus once more and stood by the side of a Turkish highway while we waited for our third bus.
This proved to be a much longer wait. Our five-hour tour was quickly turning into something like the SS Minnow. We all began to have visions of being left behind in Izmir.
Finally at 5:00, the time our ship was scheduled to sa
il, the third bus came. Fortunately, our tour guide had a cell phone and he contacted the ship. We broke Turkish speeding laws as we made it back to the ship at 5:35. The ship’s engines were on, smoke was coming out of the smokestack, and they were waiting impatiently, ready to go. We jumped aboard quickly (bypassing Turkish Customs), and our adventure was over.
Despite the stress, it was a great tour and we made some friends who helped us keep in good spirits as the minutes ticked by. So all in all, it was a good experience. But after all this, I sure hope that Mary actually lived in that house!
The dark side of aging
November 2013
One thing that all we over-50s have in common is that if we have living parents, they’re nearing the end of their lives. It’s difficult to face that reality until we are forced to by catastrophic events.
I had one of those catastrophic events recently when I was told that my mother had a tumor on her pancreas. My mother is 85 and so illnesses like this are deadly serious. As it turned out, her surgeon was able to remove the cancerous tumor and we are hopeful she will have a few more years with us. As a two-time cancer survivor, I know that cancer is an intractable foe, and the rest of her life will be a battle against it.
Dealing with my mother’s serious illness has made me realize that the decline and fall of parents is part of the fabric of life after 50. It’s an ordeal not just for the parent, but for the over-50 child as well. Parents are our bulwark aginst death. As long as we have a parent alive, the grim reaper will take the parent before the child. It’s the natural order of things. But once we don’t have the parent ahead of us, we’re next. And that’s kinda scary.
It seems to me that American society in general, and our healthcare system in particular, do not handle well the illnesses of people at the end of their lives. Instead of concentrating on the quality of life and the patient’s wishes, we do everything we can to increase the quantity of life. To add a few months to life we take extraordinary steps like respirators. Rather than give up fighting for life, we bring out radiation therapy and chemotherapy, knowing full well the misery they will cause.
But who determines when a parent will be forced to fight for life or be allowed to peacefully expire? When the issue came up during the Obamacare debate, people like Sarah Palin criticized the “death panels” that would decide who lived and who died. We find it impossible to let go of people who sometimes are begging us to let them go.
Issues like living wills, hospice care and assisted suicide become all too real once you have an aged, sick parent. It’s the side of life after 50 you won’t hear talked about on other blogs. But this blog is dedicated to presenting the “warts and all” picture of life after 50 from the white of a daughter’s bridal gown to the black of a father’s funeral drape. After all, we all are in the same boat. It may help to talk about it.
It doesn’t have to be grim. The end of life can be a celebration of what that person has meant to us, a celebration of the difference that person’s life has made. It can be a time to finally say “I love you” and to show it by our actions. It’s up to us over-50s to show our children, through our example, how we want to be treated at the end of our lives. In effect, while our parents are teaching us how to gracefully exit this life, the best thing we can show our children is how to be good children.
In celebration of a musician who made a difference
November 2013
In the course of any lifetime there are memorable historic events, you know, those “where were you when…” events. We recently passed the 50th anniversary of the President Kennedy assassination. That was certainly one of those days. I have long held the opinion that you cannot call yourself a Baby Boomer unless you were in school when JFK was killed.
We’re coming up on another of those events for me. It’s the day that John Lennon was killed. It was a frigid December night in 1980 as I walked from Lincoln Center to Columbus Circle to catch the A train. There were a lot of sirens that night going toward nearby Roosevelt Hospital, but there are always sirens in the City and so it didn’t make a big impression. But by the time I got home, the news was on the radio. John Lennon had been killed.
My immediate reaction was that Mark Chapman had not just killed John Lennon, he had killed The Beatles. Just a few months before, Lorne Michaels had offered a ridiculously small amount of money if The Beatles would reunite on Saturday Night Live as Simon & Garfunkel did. In an interview, Lennon said that coincidentally, Paul McCartney was visiting him at The Dakota that night and they were watching Saturday Night Live when Michaels made the joke offer. They even considered getting into a cab and going to 30 Rock as a surprise stunt. But now, Mark Chapman had made any Beatles reunion impossible.
The outpouring of grief and affection for John Lennon was striking. People congregated for weeks near The Dakota just to be near where John had lived. Months later, Elton John did for his friend what he had earlier done for Marilyn Monroe with “Candle in the Wind.” He immortalized John Lennon in a song called “Empty Garden” that poignantly expressed our collective grief. Elton’s song characterized Lennon as a compassionate gardener whose absence leaves an empty garden. In the words of the song:
He must have been a gardener that cared a lot
Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop
And we are so amazed we’re crippled and we’re dazed
A gardener like that one no one can replace
And I’ve been knocking but no one answers
And I’ve been knocking most all the day
Oh and I’ve been calling oh hey hey Johnny
Can’t you come out to play
I can’t think of a better way to remember John Lennon. He was a man who fought for peace. He was a man who told us “All You Need Is Love.” And he was the man who got us all to “Imagine” a better world. For all these reasons, December 8 will always be John Lennon day for me.
Serendipity leads down a path to understanding
November 2013
As someone born after World War II who is not Jewish, the Holocaust has always been just a historical event. It has always lacked a personal connection for me. Oh sure, on a human level everyone can feel the tragedy, but not in the same way that people who lost members of their family can. And so I think I am not alone among Christians in sometimes tuning out many Holocaust stories.
But in the last month I have had three experiences with Holocaust-based stories (a movie, a book and a play) that have deeply affected me. In all three cases, it was serendipitous that I came upon these stories. I did not seek them out; they found me.
I was on a cruise last month and one evening, rather than attend the on-board entertainment in the ship’s theater, my wife and I just relaxed in our cabin and turned on the television. The ship had only a couple of English language entertainment channels. But one of them was playing the 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, starring Roberto Benigni. It’s a touching story about a Jewish man who shields his son from the horrors of Nazi oppression, even when he and the child are sent to a concentration camp. I had not seen the film since it first came out more than a decade ago and I was moved by its simple themes of love and survival in perilous times.
Later in the cruise, I was looking for a book to read and I opened my Kindle app and found Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller. When I started reading it, I had no idea about its content. I bought it simply on the basis of the fact that I love Picoult’s books and have read them all. I soon found out that the book was about a young woman who has a grandmother who is a Holocaust survivor. The young woman is a baker and one of her customers is an old man who used to teach German in the local high school. The man reveals to the young woman that he was a Nazi during World War II. It turns out that the man was an officer in the very camp where the young woman’s grandmother was a prisoner. The old man asks the young woman to kill him because he can no longer live with the guilt and wants to be killed by a Jew (even though the young woman is an atheist). The
book explores the ethical dilemma the young woman faces. It does that by spending most of the book telling the grandmother’s story of life under Nazi domination. Picoult also tells the story of the old Nazi and in doing so makes us understand how good people can do terrible deeds. The book made the Holocaust more real and understandable to me than anything I have ever read.
Finally, just a week after we returned home from our cruise, we went to see a play called A Shayna Maidel performed by the Bergen County Players in Oradell, New Jersey. We have season tickets and so again I went to the play with no knowledge of what the subject matter was going to be. I knew it probably had a Jewish theme, but I had no idea what that might be.
It turned out that this play written by Barbara Lebow tells the story of a Jewish family in 1946 in New York. The family, living in Poland, was split up before the war with the father and younger daughter coming to America while the mother and older daughter stayed behind because the older daughter had scarlet fever at the time and could not travel. By the time arrangements could be made for the mother and older daughter to come to America, the Nazis had invaded Poland and they could not get out. The play revolves around what happens when the older daughter finally comes to America in 1946 after having survived the Holocaust. I don’t want to give away any of the plot twists but suffice it to say that this is a very emotional play that brought me to tears several times. I recommend seeking out A Shayna Maidel, particularly if you are not Jewish, because it shows how Jewish families living in the U.S. were affected in the aftermath of the Nazi horror.
The fact that I was presented with three different stories within a few weeks, all dealing on a very personal level with the Holocaust, is beyond coincidence for me. Whatever the psychic cause, it gave me the chance to understand better one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
Tales of the Tarantula Page 6