Pax et Bonum to All!

 https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/592927301726877053/2023989654651543547

This was my Christmas message from several years ago. I still play the song on the piano with my friend Chris, who plays the flute; the problems mentioned in the essay have only grown worse; still hanging on over the precipice, although my muscles have became a lot weaker; still happy.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas! My advice when I was young would have been: Change the world. Much later, my advice would have been, Keep Breathing. Current advice: I am no one to give advice; Yet, keep breathing!!

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. On the 25th, we invited some people over. Philip, my son; Tina, his  sister; Roger, my nephew; Sonia, his friend; and a most gracious host, my dear wife, Nirmala. Little gifts for everyone as well

Age, illness. vision problems,  and politics have made my world a lot darker. So I decided to hanukkuh up everything: bright,  colored lights everywhere. It does indeed lift the spirits, We took advantage of other ways to bring light into our world as well: we  exercised a lot;  read a lot; wrote greeting cards--better  than never-- and, most of all, we enjoyed each other's company. We are very lucky indeed.

Hope you are too~ Keep doing what you love; love,

Blogger Thomas 

Parkinson's Diary, Episode Six: Another Progress Report

 

About a month ago, maybe a little more, I fell while taking a little hike on a local trail. There I was, lying flat on my back in a forest clearing, without any stumps or bushes near with which I could haul myself up. I couldn’t get up. Nirmala was there with me, but she couldn’t get me upright either. I tried to scoot over to the nearest stump to no avail; my muscles simply weren’t strong enough. I attempted a sort of wiggle dance to worm me over to some source of support, but could hardly move an inch. The nearest stump, about three feet away, became a last straw just beyond a drowning man’s reach. After a while, we both were exhausted. I just lay there.

After a while, two hikers approached. “Do you need any help?” one of them asked, a thin woman less than half my age. “Yes, Yes!,” I replied. Before I knew it, I was upright again, thanking the women who soon disappeared into the forest, accompanied by an overpowering smell of marijuana.

Although I almost lost my balance on several occasions since, that was the last time I fell.  If I did fall again, would I be able to get up? Probably, but I don’t want to find out.

In other words, I’ve made considerable progress in the past month: I walk better and talk louder--my wife can now hear me---my facial expression is more expressive. Best of all, I get up from a chair faster...

Not so fast!  I just came back from an hour’s walk with Nirmala; I didn’t do very well. I plopped along from bench to bench like a bent Neanderthal. (The latter with P.D. probably would have been thankful that there were no chairs in their day.)

Guess Tom wasn’t (re)built in a day!

In general, things are looking up.

A four-poem addendum to my last blog

 

This is a four-poem addendum to my last blog, in which I commented on a wonderful passage from a wonderful book. In it, President Lincoln confronts mortality in a very graphic manner, attains wisdom, and moves on. Something I hope we’re all doing or, if you’re one of the lucky and industrious few,  have done.

The scene, excerpted from George Saunders’s novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, begins with the image of the dead body of Lincoln’s beloved son, draped across the president’s lap, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pieta. At the end, he realizes that nothing is going to bring his beloved son back to life. He must realize that what remains of his son is not his son, but…meat. This horrible conclusion, namely that we are not immortal, not immortal at all, and that a deceased person’s corpse is as much that being who once was alive as is hair or pared nails. Meat which decays. Meat.

This image affected me deeply and was the springboard of the following four poems.

1. Meat

I’m meat, as yet unrotting flesh,

Cells safe from floods in Bangladesh

Only because they live in a different mess,

About as far from Dacca as difficulty can get.

 

What will be left? Bones and ash,

Not-I  shall rest unprotected though

Gratitude while the fever lasts

Is endearing in what might as well be

 

Pork. Fellowship and belief, imagine

Two holy men in an arctic toboggin;

A distant polar bear approaches;

Meat is all it sees and smells—Imagine

 

Meat sitting on a wheelchair in a forest;

Birds fly by and leave the eyes intact

Because  consciousness is breathing;

Mortality,  ubiquitous predator, be

 

Patient; in the meantime, eat somebody else.

Microbacteria, teams of teeming

Putrefactors. you’ll just have to wait;

Life’s still bloody good. Self’s more, self’s less.

 

2. The Condign Response is Silence

The second poem continues the theme of mortality,

 

If a raptor-threatened chick

Appealed to myths, it wouldn’t last

Three score and ten seconds longer.

The instinct to survive is stronger;

That’s why birds don’t give a peep

About belief in heaven. Yet Christians think

Self’s contained within God’s hands,

Despite nature’s talons.

 

Note: a friend thought I was being ‘tongue-in-cheek’ with the conclusion of this poem. Not so. Not so much criticizing Christianity, the ending exposes something that all religions must face: How to reconcile transcendent love with nature’s red-in-tooth-and-claw indifference?

3. more of the same in a different vein.

 

Whole E. Combustible,

Still got a face?  Have you exploded yet?

 

Impermanence! Brothers and Sisters,

are you enjoying what’s left?

 

Beneath the surface of a waveless pool,

Is that your imagined address?

 

“Óne doesn’t see stars until it gets dark”

Indifference is no consolation.

 

Scarebody wants to know—Really?

Existence! Endless Scarebody fears love?

 

4, This one I wrote this morning.

 

Meat beyond meat are you; who?

 

Lincoln was a remarkable steak;

Nevertheless, all meat is fungible,

Muscle and fiber, poet and miser,

Apple and lemon; intermittently

Glorious gristle and immortal worm,

Consciousness, meat with a name,

I, too, am moody and grateful;

Why must I come and go naked? Fall?

Yet with a host of metaphors, admit it,

Meat spirit, you’re heaven, you’re soil.

The Transformation, A Path to Wisdom

Nirmala and I recently read, Lincoln in the Bardo, by the well-known author, George Saunders. The subject is the death of Willie Lincoln, and how this unexpected tragedy affected the life of his father, President Lincoln. (Nirmala and I are familiar with the term, bardo, or bardo state, the interim between death and rebirth as depicted in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.)The irony of the title is that it is not President Lincoln who is in the bardo state, but his son Willie, although this irony is perhaps tempered by the fact that the President, too, is in the bardo state, as it were, as the death of his dear son causes so much grief as to put the President in a state between death and life. The many characters in the book are all recently deceased, but this insight hasn’t set in yet. Once they realize they’re dead, they fall back into the depths of the bardo and disappear. Willie refuses to do this out of love for his father, who so desperately grieves for him. The grieving father has placed his son in a temporary tomb; he borrows the key to the tomb from the owner and visits the tomb at night, alone. He removes the well-embalmed body, cradles it in his arms, reminiscent of Michelangelo's famous Pieta statue. The description of what was going through the President’s mind is, for me, the most profound description of the predicament that we all are in, namely, the awful reality of death--and how to get beyond it.

The subject of this little essay is the analysis of Lincoln’s ‘meditation’ over the body of his dead son. I think this is the most beautiful section of a very beautiful book. Although it is untitled, I call it “The Transformation,” since Lincoln learns what is most important during this encounter. The section is partly in italics, representing Lincoln’s thoughts; the unitalicized sentences are Willie’s thoughts, who has refused to abandon his body and get on with his next life, out of love for his father. 

The scene takes place in the cemetery, with the corpse of Willie laid across lap of the President.

The scene begins with the following words: Outside an owl shrieked. (My comments on the text will always be italicized within parentheses. The owl, which has night vision and large eyes is an iconic symbol of wisdom. It shrieks, instead of sounding a more friendly hoot, since  Lincoln must pass through the valley of death, as it were, to reach the pinnacle of wisdom. There is no other way.)

This sentence is followed by Lincoln’s thoughts; I thought not to come here again. Yet here I am. One last look.

(Lincoln is at the height of grief due to the death of his son,can do little else but mourn—an apt depiction of the intensity of the shattering the death of a loved one usually produces.)

(Lincoln continues with his internal monologue.) The little face again. Little hands. Here they are. Ever will be. Just so. No smile…The mouth a tight line. He does not, no, look like he is asleep. He was an open-mouthed sleeper, and many expressions would play upon his face as he dreamed and sometimes would mumble a few silly words.

(Lincoln comes here to the realization that Willie is not asleep, but quite dead. At his point on the road to wisdom, however, the grieving father cannot accept the fact of his son’s death, as the next passage will make abundantly clear.

If there really was a Lazarus, there should be nothing preventing the conditions that pertained at that time to pertain here and now…Still this is a vast world and anything might happen.

Please, please, please.

(This passage indicates the dangers of literal belief in Scripture. For a miracle to happen, such as the resurrection of a corpse, physical laws would have to be broken, the evidence for which never occurs. This is Lincoln at his most desperate. Most of us have, or will, be there. Yet one must abandon wishful thinking, if one is to obtain wisdom.)

 But no. This is superstition. Will not do.

(Lincoln passes this test as well, for without the acceptance of death, one encounters a roadblock on the path to wisdom, and can progress no further. Remaining at this point of this very difficult path too often leads to suicide, despair, or cynicism.)

(If somehow Willie seemed to have woken up, Lincoln would have been very happy, but not wise. The wise must give up all traces of magical thinking, since desperate responses are not compatible with highest wisdom.

(At this point, the spirit of Willie, encourages his father to be wise.) Come around, sir, to good sense.

(What does one gain after accepting the finality of death? What follows is a remarkable passage.)

I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed and stable, but always just a passing, temporary, energy-burst. I had reason to know this. Had he not looked this way at birth, that way at four, another way at seven, been made entirely anew at nine? He had never been the same, even instant to instant.

He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, and was always bound to return to nothingness.

(This bitter pill, the fact that we, as the Bible says, arise from and return to dust, is hard to swallow, and is quite often washed down with a hefty dose of magical thinking. For instance, I remember that at my stepfather’s funeral, someone told me that she was convinced that my mother and he were now in a ‘better place,’ as if, to quote Emily Dickinson, the chart were given.

The fact that everything is born and dies is relatively new to the West, but not to the East. According to Buddhism, one of the characteristics of reality is anicca, or non-permanence. Even stars and galaxies, as we know now, come into existence and must all pass out of it, albeit on a time scale that is vastly more than the proverbial four score and ten years of human existence. The fact of birth and death’s application to all things had to be rediscovered in the Enlightenment. Previously, from Aristotle on, the belief was widespread that change was limited to Earth. The moon and the stars were thought to be permanent. Although permanence was not to be found on Earth, one could glimpse eternity, as it were, by simply looking at the night sky. To believe otherwise was deemed heresy by the Catholic Church; the assertion by Bruno, for instance, that the stars in the sky were distant suns, was punished by burning him at the stake in 1600. Science and secularism, or at the very least, non-dogmatic spirituality, have been dominant among the educated in the West ever since.
Permanence is not an aspect of objective reality. That we and our loved ones must die; accepting this is extremely difficult, but necessary , as Lincoln discovers in this beautiful passage. I am convinced that the denial of death is the root cause of much earthly suffering.)
(The passage continues.) Only I did not think it would be so soon. Or that he would precede me.
(Lincoln is quite rational now since periods of mourning must come to us all. Yet accepting the death of a son is especially difficult. In my own life, the death of a nephew this year, helped shatter my belief in permanence. He was the same age as my much-loved son. His death was totally unexpected. The conviction that he would outlive me by many years prevented me from saying what needed to be said, and doing what needed to be  done. I will never now have the opportunity to tell and show him how much he meant to me; I miss him terribly.
Are you comforted? Lincoln asks himself. No. It is time to go.
Willie at his point enters, as a very precious entry, into his father’s memory bank. The memories of deceased loved ones remain with us as long as we live, not a minor consolation. Lincoln has one more lesson to learn, however, a very difficult one indeed.
(The excerpt from the novel continues.) Look down. At him. At it… Is it him? It is not. What is it? It is what used to bear him around. The essential thing, that which we loved, is gone. Though this was part of what we loved—we loved the way he, the combination of spark and bearer, looked and walked and skipped and laughed and played the clown—this, this here, is the lesser part of that beloved contraption. Absent that spark, this, this lying here, is merely—
That’s it. Go ahead. Allow yourself to say that word.
I would rather not.
It is true. It will help.
I need not say it, to feel it, and act upon it.
It is not right to make a fetish of the thing.
I will go. I am going. I need no further convincing.
Say It, though, the truth. Say the word rising up in you.
Oh, my dear little fellow.
Absent that spark, this lying here, is merely—Say it.
Meat…
A most unfortunate conclusion.
(Indeed! But a necessary one. Modern secularism, backed by science, goes even further, denying the duality of mind and body. The living being is the unitary function of “spark and bearer’; according to the materialistic view of reality, when death occurs, both mind and body cease. Therefore, there is, at least according to this view, no heaven.
I remember watching a nature show on TV. Two individuals, along with a team of dogs, were in the Arctic. In the distance, one noticed a polar bear gradually getting closer. One of the men finally figured out that the polar bear was hunting what for him was biped portions of meat.
Lincoln has gone through hell, and has completed his journey to wisdom. He has internalized his dead son, has faced reality, and now can face life anew as a changed man, a wise man. The section ends with a riveting ending.) Love, love, I know what you are.
(So ends a remarkable account of the two things most important in life, love and wisdom. Wisdom can be defined as the knowledge of the interconnectedness of all things, and love as the impulse to act accordingly. The two reinforce each other, for wisdom alone can be dull and dry, while love alone can focus on ‘false love’, for instance, the love of someone whose actions counter the fact that everything is connected. Love is thus wisdom in action. I find this excerpt from the novel to be one of the most beautiful and profound analyses of what we all know, or should know, namely the importance of love and wisdom. Lincoln’s path on this difficult journey was an astounding success; I hope you, dear readers, won’t get lost on the thorny sections of this path; I hope you all attain wisdom, however painfully, and have the courage and the will to put wisdom into deeds!

Parkinson's Diary: Episode Five, A Progress Report

 

7 a.m., 11/8/2023. Nature called, but I took my unmerry old time to respond. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get out of bed. Nirmala, half-asleep beside me, advised, quite reasonably, that I should do a few leg exercises first to wake up my rigid limbs. Lying flat on my back, I bicycled the air for a while; soon I felt like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, as I observed my lower limbs struggling to no avail. I eventually got up, and made it—just in time!

And, oh! the fatigue.

Waking up tired; after a nap, tired; early to bed, exhausted; waking up, tired, etc.

Falling down in the park and unable to get up; falling out of bed and unable to get up; breakfast- lunch- and dinner-time, unable to rise from the chair. Way too much time spent on getting dressed; way too little time spent on moving. You get the idea.

Of the four major criteria used in diagnosing Parkinson’s, I have all four: bradykinesia, slow movement; tremors; mobility issues including balance problems and, muscle stiffness.

As  mentioned before, the cause of Parkinson’s is multifactorial;  In most cases, it remains unknown. On average, 60% of the dopamine-generating cells in the substancia nigra area of the brain are already dead at the time of diagnosis. The health of the substancia nigra is what is revealed by the DaTscan, a test which I underwent on October 8, 2123 (see my previous blog entry, Parkinson’s Disease: Episode Four).

Not an especially sanguine person, I expected the results of the scan to show devastation of the substancia nigra and of the basal ganglia. I was surprised:

“There is visualization of the bilateral caudate nuclei and the putamen, (which, along with the globus pallidus--my note—compose the basal ganglia, which receive dopamine from the substancia nigra), although the putamen is slightly decreased. The findings are less likely to support a diagnosis of presynaptic Parkinson’s Disease."  Italics mine.

The results are of a basically normal scan. I was indeed surprised. What was causing my symptoms then? (Including all those minor symptoms as well: flat affect, buildup of saliva, rather severe illegibly small handwriting called micrographia, etc.) When I told my physical therapist, she was surprised as well and informed me that my Parkinson’s symptoms were more advanced than her average client’s.  (Usually, she tells me, clinicians start a patient on medication, based on clinical symptoms alone, and then refer to a neurologist.) The neurologist at the Physical Therapy center says that she knows of many cases like mine/ The clinical presentation is what's important, and mine is that of PD.

One possibility is a medication I had been prescribed for depression years ago, a low dosage of bupropion, Wellbutrin.  I had to discontinue this medication for eight days prior to the scan. There is a case I read online (Google To Be or Not Bupropion—Conclusion: “Despite the widely known benefits of bupropion…rare cases of tremor, Parkinsonism and dystonia have been reported.” It took the seventy year old man in question a month to recover from his symptoms; I haven’t taken bupropion since the first week of October. I have seen some minor improvements since then; very minor indeed.

Since the diagnosis of PD is primarily clinical, I asked my neurologist if he would agree to a trial of Sinemet, the carbi/levodopa combination that is the standard in treating PD. He agreed. I am to take ½ tablet three times daily for two weeks, followed by three tablets daily after that. So far, I have tolerated the medicine well and have seen definite improvement of symptoms. (I can get up from chairs better, and no longer have a lot of difficulty getting out of the car.)

Hope the future will bring more improvements; I have a long way to go.

This is me, sandwiched between Nirmala in the background and the shadow of Philip taking the picture. The Alpine walking sticks, which I have dubbed as les cannes jumelles d'un vieux, have helped my mobility a lot by transferring some of the work to my hands and arms.

Youth and Experience

According to an ancient Chinese proverb, “An elderly person at home is like a golden treasure.” This adage, alas! hasn’t aged very well, neither in China nor in the rest of the world. How did a “golden treasure” devolve into a heavy burden of lead? A contemporary cartoon says it all; how did we get to be so mean?

Having a loved-one at home with a debilitating disease such as Alzheimer’s can be, of course, a difficult burden to bear. When I returned from a year abroad in 1966, I was dismayed to find my grandmother irrevocably altered. Her mind was slipping rapidly. In her decline, she had been fond of wandering through the house. On one occasion, I was sitting in the kitchen when she wandered upstairs. (My grandparents lived downstairs in our three-story Jersey City house.) When she reached the kitchen, I offered her a seat on my lap which she readily accepted. A few minutes later, she wandered off again. A few months later, she was dead. Even in our dysfunctional family, however, we treated her well and were sorry to see her go.

The Ancient Chinese, however, knew nothing about Alzheimer’s. They had a Confucian reverence for older persons not because they were weaker, which their bodies certainly were, but because of a factor which made them stronger and more of a golden treasure: experience. As another Chinese proverb attests, “The gray hair of experience is the splendor of old age."

2.

My mother, Mabel Lemonie, (1914-2001), was a beautiful woman, even in old age. She never wanted to admit she was old, however. Her idea of an old woman was a frumpy, retired librarian who wore those hideous black orthopedic shoes. She would also have had thin, gray hair which had been dyed, ‘tinted,’ a nauseating hue of blue. (I remember having once recommended that she join a senior citizen center in order to keep active and to socialize. “That’s for old people,” she replied, even though social isolation, a demon of old age, began to affect her quality of life.)

My mother’s response to growing older was to remain as youthful as possible, a worthy habit indeed. However, due to a limited education and lack of professional opportunities, growing in experience was less a feature of her goals. The woman’s movement, which came too late for her, might have changed her life, for she was intelligent and willing to learn. She did grow in life experience, however, but had few opportunities to mentor others. She remained youthful until old age began to take over. She succumbed to Alzheimer’s like her mother did, but remained cognitively intact for a decade longer. Who knows what her future might have been, if she had had more cerebral activities to occupy her time? She knew what was most important in life, however. Human relationships, especially regarding my brother and me, were always foremost in her mind and behavior. I still miss her.

Here is a poem I dedicated to her, written while she still was very much alive:

The Goldfish

Nothing could be more mongrel, more common
       than this five-and-dime store species
 of  tropical, egg-laying tooth carp

 

or brighter gold.  No fish is cheaper
    or hardier, able to survive fungus,
chlorine, changes in temperature, and

 

even the on-and-off care of a child.
  For two months, no neighbor fed
 them; we came back, half-dead from jet  lag,

 

and found them thinner and swimming in
      what evaporation left; a little puddle,
  black with plant decay. A change of

 

water, a pinch of dried worms, and
     Presto! starvation becomes perfect health.
 Always swimming, almost always searching

 

for something more than food, these creatures,
   whether in tanks in American bedrooms or
 in ponds of Buddhist temples in Japan,

 

calm and delight minds everywhere.
     For what is more striking and odder
 than moving gold, being, as we are, alive?

 

 

 

3.

How did we learn to view the old as poor imitations of the young? How did we learn to discount the experience of older Americans? Can’t one limp and be wise at the same time?

A poem by John Greenlief Whittier comes to mind, one more familiar to me through James Thurber’s comic volume, Famous Poems Illustrated, which I loved as a young man. The poem is based on a true incident. It was 1862 as Confederate hordes, under the leadership of Stonewall Jackson, entered Frederick, Maryland, in search of food and supplies. Out of fear, all Union flags had been removed as the Confederate troops approached. The 96 year-old Barbara Frietschie continued to wave the American flag defiantly from her attic window. She shouts—in the poem, at least—these defiant words to Stonewall Jackson, “Shout, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” she said. The Confederate general was so moved by her bravery, that he forbade his troops from harming her. I can only imagine how this even would have occurred today.

“General, look at that old bat in the window, defiantly waving the enemy’s flag in our faces. Doesn’t she know she’s risking death? She’s undoubtedly loony! Let me take her down.”

“Let’s ignore the old bat until it flies away—besides, she can’t help it; she’s senile…”

4,

Let us explore that ancient Chinese proverb which states that the gray hair of experience is the splendor of old age, this time with a reference to contemporary American politics. Our ex-president Trump constantly refers to our current president Biden as being obviously cognitively impaired. There is, of course, no evidence of this. Biden has been a very effective president so far, having passed many important bills into law. (The 1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan comes to mind.) He did this with bipartisan support, a remarkable accomplishment considering the political divisions in Congress. His 35 years of experience in politics have obviously paid off. Yet everyone pounces on any sign of old age. Yes, experience and arthritis are not mutually exclusive. Yet any slip or evidence of arthritis is used as proof that Biden is in his dotage. What about experience, which Biden has in abundance; no one seems to mention that. I remember a clip of Biden jogging to a lectern to give a speech; he felt obliged to demonstrate that he was still spry.

The Chinese proverb doesn’t claim that physical decline doesn’t increase as one’s hair grays do; experience often compensates for the inevitable physical decline, however.

Biden is not a middle-aged man in an old man’s body; he is an old man who has perhaps more to offer the nation now than ever before. The stress of the presidency however is great; although fewer than three years older than I am; I certainly doubt if I could handle the stress of the presidency now.

Yet it angers me that any slip of the tongue or foot on Biden’s part is viewed as a sign of  increasing senility. (Biden was never silver-tongued throughout his career.)

I’m afraid that the model of our nation is a reality show in which all the contestants and judges are fairly young. There’s nothing like being young; being old, however, is not  nothing, and when combined with the wisdom of experience, can be a great advantage. Just because you use a cane, doesn’t mean you lack a  brain.

I’m convinced that our slick, sick Youth-worshiping culture is depriving us of the wisdom and experience of older individuals, at a time when we can ill afford the lack of those gifts. It’s as if we force a wise old man to do the Charleston in order to prove that he has the stamina to deliver a contemporary version of the Gettysburg Address. What a mess!

I will conclude with a recent poem of mine, Youth and Experience:

 

Youth and Experience, blood
brothers though decades apart.
One is a rosy-cheedked lad who imagines
he's gold, the other, a duller alloy.

 

A prune decaying in the sun
was once an ambitious plum.
Yet a cracked voice whose source is strong
attempts to reverse callow wrongs:

 

Your pocketful of dimes; spend them
on relationships, the only things that last.
Why don’t younger people listen?
Must sages have holes in their shoes?                                                                                                                         Socrates eating spaghetti
in an empty cafeteria--
If he uses a cane,
he cannot be wise.

A Visit to the Shakespeare Theater

 

My wife and I have enjoyed our subscription to The Shakespeare Theater in Washington, for many years. We especially enjoyed it when there was more Shakespeare than there is now. Our first play there was a stellar performance of the Tempest, many years ago. It was more of a reperatory theater then; we enjoyed performances of regulars such as Floyd King, whose comedic performances were quite memorable, Andrew Long, etc. etc. We especially loved Wallace Atkins performance as Ariel. There are many other great performances that come to mind, too many to mention.

The pandemic intervened, just before we were to attend a performance of Timon of Athens. Not the greatest play, but one touted to provide its audience with a memorable evening.

We live in Baltimore, and enjoy taking day trips to Washington via Amtrak.

October fourth’s performance was the first one we attended since I came down with Parkinson’s Disease; I had some trepidation, but everything went smoothly, Slowly but surely is how this Shuffleupagus negotiated the pavement.

We enjoyed  the performance very much, albeit with some reservations. Our main problem was the voice of the understudy, Isabella Bria Lopez, who played the most important role in the musical, that of Evita. A Broadway star of the past, whom I remember well, Ethel Merman, was known as the woman with a trumpet in her throat, due to her loud singing voice. This could apply to Ms Lopez as well, except that in her case the trumpet was not of stellar quality. I could well picture her singing an ad for used cars on TV—she was no Dinah Shor, for those of you who remember that voice of the past. The other character/singers did much better.

The choreography was good; the dancers were spectacular. The staging was, at best, adequate.

I have always been haunted by the “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” balcony scene. It is hauntingly beautiful; nothing else in the score comes close. When the violins began that iconic scene, it was as if we entered a different world. Although I cannot boast of having a very good ear, I have been playing on the piano that enchanting rhumba ever since.

I am not quite sure what to make of the rest of the play. Che, admirably sung and acted by Omar Lopez-Cepero, was brought in presumably to help bust the myth of Evita. He advises her, for instance, to ‘stop this pantomime' toward the end of the musical. Thus, quite unlike the mythic Venus who rises from painted waves in the Uffizi Gallery, Eva, more like a frightened child named Norma Jeane Mortenson, who later was renamed Marilyn Monroe, rising from dirty  orphanage bathwater. It is difficult to be moved by the death of someone so flawed. Certainly in a musical,  realism should not be the most important factor. Evita obviously had charm; I don’t think this was emphasized enough. Who exactly was the woman who filled the gown? That was, at least as I see it, the theme of the production we saw:

A musical, however, must be more myth than reportage.

Despite these criticisms, we had a very good time.

After the performance, as was our wont to do for years, we ate at our favorite Chinese restaurant in China Town. I remember eating there after a STC performance in 2020, just as the pandemic became dominant. We were the only ones in the restaurant. We felt self-conscious as one who didn't get a joke everyone else understood. And the joke was on us, all of us. Business has yet to completely recover, said our waitress in broken English.

Things change; at least I have. Still we enjoyed quite a memorable day!

In Memoriam: Ranjit Jose (1980-2023)

 Note: On September 24, 2023, my niece, Amita Sudhir, arranged a yacht-ride around Manhattan to celebrate the life of my nephew, her cousin, Ranjit Jose, who passed away at the age of 42 last summer.  A group, a fraction of his many friends around the world, came to pay tribute to an amazing person. I'm not going to mention them by name, since my vision was frequently unable to attach a name to a voice. Suffice it to say that it was a lovely, lively group. What follows is a eulogy which I prepared for my blog before the boat trip. It consists largely of the comments which I gave onboard. Poor Ranji! His death profoundly affected us all.

Shortly after our dear nephew passed away, my wife Nirmala and I were sitting on our porch, drinking tea, while enjoying a beautiful morning of early summer. We have many potted plants and flowers on the porch. Suddenly, out of nowhere, something happened: a hummingbird swooped down to gather nectar from one of the flowers. “Look!” said my wife in hushed tones. We live in the city; I don’t recall ever seeing a hummingbird in our yard before. I looked on amazed, but after a few seconds, when I looked again, it had already flown away. I remember thinking that this was a message from Ranji. A few days ago, I wrote this haiku-like poem:

The Hummingbird

How lovely last summer while

Sweet nectar flowed! Wings hovered,

Then vanished. Where did he go?

 

Where did that sweet hummingbird go, indeed. Nearly every day, I exercise on my stationary bike while listening to a Mozart piano concerto. The bike faces the stairs. It was on these same stairs that Ranji, on his first visit to the United States, learned to walk in 1981, with the help of my son Philip, who was born at the same time Ranji was born. I remember carrying him all over the place! He was so light, he was so young!

There are so many incidents in Ranji’s life that I was privileged to have witnessed. I will mention only two of them. When Ranji graduated from the New School with a masters degree, we were very proud. The graduation ceremony was in Madison Square Garden in New York City. Ranji was sitting next to an African American friend. I was busy taking pictures, when I heard his friend say, “Who is that white dude who keeps taking our picture.” ‘That’s my uncle,” Ranji replied to his surprised companion. I beamed with pride.

Fast forward a few years. It is now November 2, 2016, Ranji, visiting us from Indonesia, and I were watching on TV  the results coming in  of the U.S. presidential election.  It was after midnight, when I decided to go to bed. The race was still undecided. “Don’t worry, Ranji—The American people are not so stupid as to elect Trump! Go to bed!” The next day, the expression on Ranji’s face conveyed the results to me. “Sorry, dear Uncle, but you were wrong.”

Where did that sweet hummingbird go?

Twice weekly a musician friend comes over. He plays the flute, while I accompany him on the piano. A few days ago, we played all the songs by Stephen Forster that we could remember. I recall singing to myself  the following doggerel lyrics to one of his once-famous songs:

Flown from our sight, to a country far away,

Left us with stairs where he learned to walk and play;

Gone from this Earth, to a better land I know,

And yet my mourning can’t help asking, ‘Why did you go?’

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low,

Yet in mourning, I’m still asking, Why did you go?

 

We’ll never know why he left us so early, but we do know this, Ranji loved the world, and we loved him. He taught us what is most important in life: human relationships. It is not success or fame, as research has shown, but the quality of our relationships that brings happiness. As you that are here, and so many who are not here, know: Ranji learned this lesson early, and he knew it well. We shall miss him.

   

Parkinson's Diary, Episode Four: DaTscan

Today I underwent a DaTscan test at the University of Maryland. The study, conducted by the Nuclear Medicine department, consists of an IV injection of a radionuclear, pharmologic agent, DaTscan, which takes three hours to circulate throughout the body. After three hours, a gamma camera takes photos of the brain to assess the status of dopamine-producing neurons in the substancia nigra, an area in the brain just above the brainstem. This is the area of the brain which produces dopamine, a neurotransmitter which facilitates movement throughout the body. It is the death of these dopamine-producing neuorns that are responsible for most of the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. 

PD is a disease of insidious onset; it is estimated that in classic PD 60% of those neurons are already non-functional. Unrecognized symptoms will have existed for several years at the time of diagnosis. Since there is no blood test or other formal test to ascertain the condition, doctors are left with piecing together symptoms that have been  going on for years. In my case, I had an abnormal gait that affected my walking for about two years prior to diagnosis. The clinical signs, temor, rigidity, and slow movement are usually readily apparent at the time the diagnosis is made. It is a common disorder, affecting males more than females; over 70,000 new cases occur in the United States yearly. It is the second most common neurodegenrative disorder, Alzheimer's being the most frequent. 

The test is not painful, although the substance stung a little as it was being infused. Since the diagnosis is clinical, the results of the test, whatever they are, will be inconclusive. It helps, though, to differentiate non-Parkinson's tremors from Parkinsonian tremors. It also helps to indicate Parkinsonian syndrome, a separate condition, which usually become Parkinson's in time.

Well, here I am just before the scan began:

Whatever the results, I will take them in stride. Wish me luck!

Parkinson"s Diary, Episode Three: A fall

 On what started to be a very pleasant autumnal walk in the woods, I stumbled, fell onto the ground, and couldn't get up. Couldn't get up at all.

My wife, Nirmala, had suggested taking a walk. We chose to walk in Cylburn  Arboretum, a Baltimore City park fairly close to our house. It is a mini-Longwood gardens, located in North Baltimore, just a few miles away. The park, before it was sold to the city, had been the home of a wealthy capitalist. Sitting in one of the many little gardens of the park, surrounded by statues on pedestals, one can imagine the exclusive and dazzling parties that once occurred there. It is now an arboretum, containing many types of tree and many beautiful flower arrangements that are changed with the seasons. It also contains many wooded trails, a little bit of (mostly) untouched  nature in the center of Baltimore.

One of the trails was the site of my fall. I do have balance and mobility issues due to Parkinson's desease. I had been walking with poor control, trying my best to negotiate the roots and stones on the path. Suddenly I found myself on the ground. I remember falling quite gently--I simply lost my balance and fell down without injury. That was the beginning of my difficulty, however. I could not get to my feet, no matter how hard I tried. Get on you knees, then get up, I told myself; to no avail. Scoot over to a log, sit on it, then get up, I told myself, again to no avail. This went on for about a half hour. 

Finally, a hiker appeared, who, with the help of my wife, managed to get me up.

It was an odd feeling, feeling as able as I had been, yet not to be able to lift myself off the ground. 

I thanked the two hikers, one of whom had helped me, profusely. They left, leaving behind a very strong smell of marijuana. This might have given the hiker a boost of energy, for she weighed a good deal less than I. Thank you, strangers, thank you! Without you, I probably would have struggled to get up a lot longer.

The spirit was willing, but, yes, yes, the flesh had become very weak indeed.

The first serious symptom of the disease was, in my case,  the inability to rise from a chair. I--usually-still am able to rise without assistance, however. But my gait has been poor, increasingly poor, during the past few years. Science tells us that at the time of diagnosis of Parkinson's, the brain of the affected person had  already lost about 60% of the dopamine-producing cells in the brain--resulting in severe and progressive symptoms of neurodegeneration.

I thought I was almost normal when I traveled to Europe a few months ago.  I wasn't--at the airport, officials brought  a wheel chair without my having to ask for one. --Later on that day, at a museum in Amsterdam, a guard supplied me with a walker, also without my having requested one. I obviously had difficulty walking.

It isn't easy being handicapped when you feel almost normal. The handicapped sign for our car, however, has come in handy on several occasions.

Even though depression often accompanies Parkinson's, I do not feel depressed at all. Perhaps a confluence of Lewey bodies in my brain is the reason for my being sanguine, who knows? I do know, however, that despite the facial rigidity characteristic of Parkinson's, I'm still smiling on the inside. Che sara, sara.

Parkinson's Diary, Episode Two: I saw a man upon the stair...

 

A few days ago, my wife was driving us back from the grocery store, when I noticed that we were about to pass an old man—younger than I am, to be sure—who was riding a bicycle. He had on a blue shirt and a white helmet. Since he was ahead of us, I didn’t see his face, nor did I turn around after we had gone on. How did I know he was old? He was moving quite slowly and was hunched over his means of transportation. I couldn’t be sure of his age, but the impression was of a man who bicycled with difficulty. More power to him, I thought. “Why didn’t you slow down as you usually do, and let the old man pass?” I asked. "Passing him at normal speed increases the chance of a serious  accident."

Her reply, which  I will soon divulge, startled me greatly.

That night I was assiduously working at the computer, typing something or other into Microsoft Word. After some time, I noticed from the corner of my eye a mouse, which darted from the living room incredibly fast, then vanished underneath my desk. We had a few mice during spring; this was not anything unusual, except for the speed of the little critter. I resumed work and, when finished, noticed the mouse again, this time darting  from beneath the desk back out into the living room. The mouse must have been doing aerobics for some time, for it, again, was incredibly fast. But something was strange. The mouse headed straight across the living room where I quickly lost sight of it. It didn’t take cover behind the radiator or hide under a bookshelf, as I would have expected. Even stranger, the mouse must have been a student of Zeno. It never managed to outrun itself. I was left with a series of murine images \\darting into the living room, much like stills of a silent film. This was really weird, but I laughed it off. “Perhaps I’m about to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past,” I thought, and got up to go to bed. Before I reached the stairs that lead to the bedroom, I saw my beloved cat, Gopi, resting on a couch. His head was lowered slightly; he didn’t look up at me, but I could tell he knew I was there. He had a  sour expression that conveyed, “He’s about to pick me up, and I don’t want to be picked up.” Cats will be cats, I thought, and proceeded up the stairs.

The time has come to answer the question about the man on  the bike. My wife didn’t slow down, because, she told me, there was no man and no bike. “You were seeing things again,’” she said. Similarly, the darting mouse was an illusion as well. And, as I turned off the light, I realized, as I lay in bed,  that Gopi had been dead for several years.

Hallucinations are not at all a rare manifestation of Parkinson’s Disease. Here is what a reliable site has to say about it:

Among people with PD, visual hallucinations are most common, often of people or animals. They tend to be vividly colored and to happen at night. Usually they are not frightening and can become familiar. For example, a person might regularly hallucinate a puppy with a red collar.

That sums up my situation nicely. The old man had on a bright blue shirt; 

the mouse was a vivid dark-brown, and Gopi lay there with black 

and white fur; a loveable cat,  just as he had been in life. I wasn’t 

frightened at all.

I read somewhere that Parkinsonian hallucinations are indicative of a

more serious prognosis. Let’s hope that that had been an illusion as 

well!

The Mugshot: Need We Say More?

             

                                            

Cute and sultry                              Vain and culty

A winner                                        A whiner

A doozer                                        A loser

What a talented kid!                      What a schmuck

Where are all the aliens?

“Where are all the aliens?” asked Enrico Fermi in 1950. Fast forwards seventy years, just about my entire lifetime, and we’re asking the same question: despite enticing hints, we have yet to find direct evidence of extraterrestrial life. There is a good chance that that will change in the  coming decade.

First, I’d like to document my attitude towards extraterrestrial life when I was a kid. Let us now fast backwards in time to a time not long after Enrico Fermi said his famous assessment of life beyond the solar system. I was almost an adolescent. My uncle Arthur (1898-1958) was building a little retirement cottage in Forked River, New Jersey—the reality of stomach cancer, alas! prevented the realization of his dreams. Our family visited the nearly-completed bungalow many times before my uncle’s death in 1958.

The incomplete kitchen walls were covered with cardboard. All visitors were invited to sign their names on the wall. My brother, Robert, wrote the following:

Arthur Dorsett

3^rd Canal Drive, Mars

Reminiscence of Percival Lowell! Lowell was an American businessman and amateur astronomer, who became famous for his assertion that Mars was inhabited by intelligent life. He saw—or at least thought he saw-- a pattern of lines on Mars that he assumed were canals that brought water from the poles to a dying civilization.

At the time of my brother’s writing on my uncle’s wall, it was still possible to believe that Mars possessed intelligent life. These hopes were dashed when Mariner fly-bys revealed Mars to be a frigid, red desert.

(I remember listening with interest to a re-broadcast of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds, based on a book by H. G. Wells. The original broadcast  caused a great deal of panic by its realistic presentation of a Martian invasion.)

By the time of my yearly adolescence, however, there was little hope that extraterrestrial life would ever be found in our solar system. Now I’m not so sure.

I had been fascinated with Mars. I remember writing with fascination about the red planet and its two moons, Deimos and Phobus. I could almost imagine these two little moons, probably asteroids captured long ago by Martian gravity, passing overhead, no brighter than first magnitude stars, as I imagined myself standing next to a Martian crater. I had been convinced, however, that Mars was a lifeless, frigid desert.

(Ditto with the possibility of life in the rest of the solar system. Who could imagine life on a planet other than ours? Possibly on moons? In our solar system, however, the majority of moons are around gas giants with atmospheres and temperatures that made life as we know it impossible. Or so we thought.

In modern times, the possibility of life on Mars is once again a serious possibility. If life actually exists on that planet, however, there will be no little green men, but, at best, microbial life.

Recent flvbys over Mars have indicated that in the remote past, that  is, billions of years ago, Mars was a much more habitable planet than it is now. There is evidence that the planet once had a surface ocean, perhaps even a kilometer deep. Photos reveal dry riverbeds, shorelines, and strong indications of water erosion. Unfortunately, Mars has a very thin atmosphere and no magnetic field to protect life from cosmic rays. The surface water dissipated into space long ago, but there is evidence that water  exists underground. There are probably aquifers beneath the surface in many areas of the planet. There is evidence of seasonal variations of methane in the atmosphere; methane is a biomarker for life on earth. There is other indirect evidence that has convinced many scientists that life either once existed on the planet or has gone underground. We’ll see.

Perhaps soon: A Mars rover is set to drill about ten meters into the surface, and will analyze the soil for signs of fossils or living organisms.

There is also the theory of panspermia, the premise that life began elsewhere in the universe and came to earth via a comet. It has been proven that primitive life could have survived such a journey. Many comets from Mars have struck the earth. Perhaps we’re all Martians!

Possibilities of life exist in other areas of the solar system as well. Enceladus, for instance, a small moon of Saturn, has a large ocean buried beneath ten kilometers or so of ice. Plumes from that ocean regularly ‘geyser-up’ from the depths of Enceladus. (Material from these geysers form one of the rings of Saturn.) Organic compounds, and more recently, phosphorus, have been discovered in these plumes, further indirect evidence of life.  Other moons, for instance, Jupiter’s Europa, contain subterranean oceans filled with who knows what? Life? We will soon find out.

Even if there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life in our solar system, we must not forget that the universe is an incredibly large place, filled with billions of stars, most of which contain planets. Although no earth-like candidate has been found  among  the five thousand exoplanets discovered so far, search for earth-like planets is just beginning. Some one has said that we have analyzed a glass of water, as it were, while the ocean of the  vast universe remains undiscovered.

Life didn't necessarily begin in a warm little pool that Darwin advocated, it just might have arisen during extreme conditions in oceanic vents. So called extremophiles today live under boiling conditions--no worry about climate change for these guys! When life originated on earth, over 3 billion years ago, conditions were far too hot to support human life. Some scientists believe that primitive life might exist  in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the surface of which is hot enough to melt lead!

There are thus at least several possibilities of life in our solar system. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if extraterrestrial life is discovered while I’m still alive--and I've been a senior citizen for almost twenty years! Even when we lower our expectations from sublime to slime, the headlines will be splendid. And slime might be a lot more attractive than the slimy humans making headlines today. Who knows? We don’t—yet.

 

Deimos and Phobus, the moons of Mars  with which I was fascinated with when I was a kid, are almost certainly dead. But they probably contain enough precious metals to make a fortune many times over. The mining of asteroids is a distinct possibility for the next generation. This has the potential of enriching humanity to an extreme degree--if we're fair that is, and humankind hasn't been fair in the past, to say the least. Aber das ist ein weites Feld; enough for now.