A Big Da! For Seniors

 

Google, Google, come online,

Tell me what has slipped my mind:

The Russian word for no is nyet

Thank God for the internet!

WOW

After listening to Republicans grill the unflappable Kitanji Brown Jackson during the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, I wondered what a concerned, fair-minded nobody would say? What if that concerned nobody was me?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, after watching hours of questioning from those whose duty it was to ascertain whether you are fit to be appointed to the highest court of the land, I had many condign comments, but I shall leave the  descanting  on that all too often scurrilous testimony to professionals. I will limit my response to one word.

WOW

I am glad (in a way) that many Republicans performed so abominably. Their wretched darkness contrasted all the more with the bright light of your intellect and integrity. The sun shining at midday is striking--but if the sun shone at midnight, that really would be something. That beaming something, I'm delighted to say, was and is you, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

WOW

Slava Ukraini!

 "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!" An updated version would replace Mexico with Ukraine and the United States with Russia. Geography supplies a turbulent history in both cases. 

I was born a few months after the Second World War. Unlike many of my younger compatriots, I am familiar with the horror--millions starved--that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine and the even greater horror of the subsequent Nazi invasion, the brutality of which caused the death of millions of lives.

I periodically imagine the terror of aerial bombardment. Lying in a bed while the ceiling falls over me after a bomb struck my house. Running down a street flanked by exploding houses. Waking from a  nightmare to discover that my house and I are still there. For now, I tell myself, for now.

I once met a woman who survived the terrible fire-bombing of Dresden, which took place in February 1945. I wrote a poem a few years later to commemorate the fiftieth year of the city's destruction.

The Survivor

She saw on her home street
a host of Judgement soldiers
plunder everything,
crack shock troops of total war,
each one  a six-foot flame.

Moma, that was many years ago.
It's as if she hears angels,
confined to the head of a match,
scream in pain as it ignites: among them
her parents and their youngest child.

Her family fled to the cellar;
she ran outside, terrorized
by an army of flames,
running without looking back
until she reached New Jersey.

She never talked about it
until one day in her old age
the low drone of a jet became
a flock of bombers: she ran outside,
fleeing the heat of her stove.

Our house is on fire, our house is on fire--
Come, this will put the fire out,
I tell her, a Sisyphus task,
trying to put out the fires of hell
with spoonfuls of nursing-home Jell-O.

2.

Well, it has happened many times since. And it is happening again.

I remember talking with a man whose parents were both Holocaust survivors.  He told me he had been convinced that, after the brutalities of the Second World War, civilization had learned its hard-won lesson. No country would be stupid enough to wage war again; its citizens wouldn't let them, he told me. This was during the Viet Nam war. He had long since realized his illustion. People haven't changed at all.

For seven decades after 1945, much of the world has enjoyed a long stretch of unprecedented peace. Alas, this is due solely to the fact of the presence of nuclear weapons. Although individuals can act "Gospely," that is, treating each other with loving-kindness, in aggregate the old saying homo homini lupus (man behaves like a wolf to man) still very much holds. Individuals, however, often act savagely as well. If, say, a terrorist had his way, I, as an American, even if I were as good as Gandhi,  would be killed, felled by the poison darts hurtling from his vicious eyes. There is enough hate in this world to bury all saints and sinners alike. It's sad to say, but if you live in a major country, only nuclear weapons assure, however temporarily, that you haven't been incinerated yet.  Things haven't changed for the past 100,000 years; like chimpanzees, we can be loving and kind, like chimpanzees, we can be wickedly vicious. When one crazy, powerful chimpanzee has amassed weapons', including nuclear weapons, and is willing to use them, one realizes that the separation of humanity from thuggery is merely a step and a thought.

3.

Many years ago I translated from the German a group of poems and a diary by a young Jewish woman. Ruth Rosenfeld, who escaped Germany just before the border closed. Here is what she wrote in 1934:

Worse than beasts, they struggle, even kill
For power: men, more ruthless than a pack
Of wolves preparing to attack.
They eat, yet they remain unfilled,
Full-filled with one desire--hate, still?

Without end, human animals wage war,
No longer heed their center. Tearing peace asunder,
They rush on, greed-obsessed, to plunder
Everything. What's good they godlessly ignore,
And God remains beyond us, more and more.

Hate, still? Yes, Ruth, unfortunately, yes. This poem could have been written today, and--if we survive--probably could be written tomorrow.

A thug with delusions of grandeur is running amuck. Over Ukraine, his neighbor. Fear of nuclear war limits intervention. The result is alas! the slaughter of innocents. Pity that poor invaded country, so far from God, like us all, and so close to Russia!

Putin obviously underestimated the resisitance of the patriots south of the border. They are fighting valiently for their country,  and will eventually win. When his identity is at stake, a thug, however, will not back down. That vile man has painted himself into a corner. Good news? Ultimately, perhaps; but it will take a lot of death and destruction before he reaps what he has sewn. When a rat is cornered, it bites.

The worst might be yet to come, but I am confident that Ukraine will survive. It has to. But at what cost?

Adam has Cancer

 You know Adam, you know Eve. No, not in the biblical sense, of course, but in the history-of-mythology sense. (If you believe literally in Partriarch Uno and Matriarch Una--and if I were a lot more devious than I am--I would be tempted to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.) Well, if you know those two, you certainly know what came between them. Though at my age I know a great deal about the problem of good and evil, I am not exactly their symbol, the apple. O yes I am. Or soon will be. Let me explain.

Plato recounted the myth that primordial man was neither male nor female,  but a combination of the two. Why did Zeus decide to split the androgenous thing apart? Let me guess. They suffered from fatigue; they lacked goals; they were phlegmatic; they were, no matter their age, old. After his sword went snickersnack, howwever, each half became obsessed with hooking up with the other. Sex was born; vitality increased; romantic love as well as sexual obsession have been with us ever since.

Now let us put both myths together. Let us write our own myth; let the  ruddy little sphere between them, the apple, represent a half-Eve, half-Adam androgynous blob. Now let's go from myth to reality: that adrogenous blob will soon be me.

An aggressive form of prostate cancer forces me to take a course of hormone therapy before I begin a six-week course of radiation. You  may recall that Alan Turing, so important in the development of computers, was also  the man who used his Turing Machine to break a Nazi code, which greatly aided the Allied war effort. His reward: chemical castration. Homosexuality was illegal in those days; he was given the choice to rot in jail or become an Eve-and-Adam apple.

What have I got to complain about? Old age unites old men and old women. Wrinkles and ageism go hand in hand.  Before one's forgotten completly, being ignored can help make a crabapple wise.

There I go again! Like most human beings, I have done some terrible things over the years, including acts of commssion and sins of omission, but, like most human beings, I've gotten away with it. My path doesn't lead to a fork in the road, hormones to the left, jail to the right; I have no choice but to walk straight on and join all those pitiful apples in the sad orchard ahead. There I go again!

If any reader is in the same condition as I am now, here is good advice; cheer up and walk on; it's not so bad. Since I made the decision to proceed, I have experienced feelings of relief. Go with the flow and all that. And, besides, there is a good chance that after treatment I will leave the androgynous apple of good and evil behind and become an  incarnation of good and evil, Adam, again. 

Yes, the fruit of research is good, very good indeed. Without it, without the support of the medical experts and staff at Hopkins, I would soon be looking up at that orchard for a very, very long time. Yet I have miles to go berfore I sleep. And I shall sleep soundly tonight.

(P,S,, I've read that women in Japan rarely suffer form hot flashes during menopause. This is probably due to the consumption of tofu, a food which contains naturally occurring estrogens. Arigato, Sisters!--lucky for me, we cook tofu a lot.)

To self and other selves all over the world: Be thankful! Keep breathing! And at the very least, survive.

Comments welcome. Especially from those who suffer from a  serious illness.