I was wrong to wait so long to read Cormac McCarthy’s novel THE ROAD, which has been out a couple of years. I have believed that Cormac McCarthy should be the next American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I had concluded since All the Pretty Horses that like Hemingway after For Whom the Bell Tolls, his best writing was behind him. Also, I am not a big fan of post-apocalyptic sensationalism. I respect Dr Strangelove, A Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, some others well enough, but they are so few and far between.
Heading south down THE ROAD, a father and his young son, seek relief from the desolate cold of their torched and ruined world. Cormac McCarthy goes out of his way to omit exactly which pointless human vanity befell planet earth. Father and son scavenge abandoned houses for canned food, shoes, blankets. They push a grocery cart from out of the mountains to the sea, evading bands of marauding cannibals. They carry a pistol that contains only one last bullet, which the father saves to prevent his son from further suffering when the time comes. When the father’s time comes,
Just take me with you. Please.
I cant.
Please, Papa.
I cant. I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
You said you wouldn’t ever leave me….
If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
There are lots of things fathers cannot do for their sons. Nothing they can provide is more enduring and powerful than their genetics and their own example. Often when I am working, concentrating intensely, perhaps even straining with some physical effort, I suddenly become aware of a way of holding my mouth that I recognize immediately from my Daddy, who looked like John Wayne. As a lanky young man, he could have passed for the handsome star of Stagecoach. In the fullness of his life, he looked like The Quiet Man. He grew old at John Wayne’s pace, all the way to the booze-bellied, one-eyed has-been of True Grit. In my mind, John Wayne and my Daddy might as well have been the same person. My Daddy was a Marine Corps veteran of WWII in the Pacific. He was very much the strong, silent type. Still waters run somewhere nobody ever knows. Although he only graduated from the seventh grade, he took great pride in the fact that he could read and write. He enjoyed working the jumble word puzzle in the newspaper. He loved a good joke. He loved a bad joke. He took me to Atlanta Cracker games at Ponce de Leon Ballpark. On hot days and nights, he would say, “They need to turn on the fans.” My love for baseball made me a reader.
One Saturday, my sister and I sat at his bedside in the hospice with Sisters of Mercy scurrying in the halls, as he lay dying. My Daddy, the anti-Papist and past master of the Grant Park Masonic Lodge, had not spoken for days. My sister and I were remembering the women’s softball games on summer nights in Piedmont Park long before the days of Title IX requirements of equal opportunity for women’s athletics. “What was the name of that team that was so good?” my sister tried to recall. After a long silence of neither she nor I being able to come up with the answer, from my Daddy’s pillow came the last words I ever heard him say: “Dixie Darlings.”
Showing posts with label Fathers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fathers. Show all posts
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Sixty-Six
My oldest best friend Pascal reminded me this morning that he had seen nothing on the news about D-Day. Here's something I posted last year, on my previous birthday:
The armada of American Allies invaded the coast of France at Normandy 65 anniversaries ago. Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Pointe du Hoc. Paratroopers and gliders floated silently from the sky into French farm fields and towns. Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Bayeux, Carentan. The charming fishing village of Arromanches was turned into an instant deep water port. Sixty-five birthdays ago for me, as I was born the same day. Sixty-five. Retirement age. It is too late for me to think about retiring, since I already left the employment roles three years ago when I was hospitalized, in a coma for three weeks, woke up deaf. Nowadays I stay plenty busy. I just don’t have a job. Lately, I have been remodeling the condo that belonged to my oldest sister, who died the day before Christmas Eve 2007. I am almost finished with that project and look forward to some quality time this summer with my grandchildren, spending some of their inheritance on sunscreen, floppy straw hats, and restaurant meals. I also want to re-read one of my favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, do some research for an article. Retired is in the eye of the beholder.
Three years after my Daddy retired, I received a letter saying he would come to visit me in Europe, if I invited him. I worked for the U.S. Department of State in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. My Daddy had crossed the ocean borders of the U.S.A. only once before, in WWII when the Marine Corps had put him on a troop ship as cannon fodder for the invasion of Japan, just before Hiroshima. From Brussels, my wife and I took my Daddy to the Ardennes and Amsterdam. We went to Paris and drove to Normandy. We visited the American Cemetery, 172 acres of white markers, on a cliff, overlooking Omaha Beach.
We stayed at a charming hotel in the waterfront village of Arromanches, location of the D-Day Museum. My Daddy and I posed together for a photograph in front of the museum, with the large letters prominent behind us, 6 Juin 1944, D-Day. In the picture, my Daddy is 68. I am 35. At sunset, my Daddy and I stood each with one foot resting on the rail of the sea wall, wordlessly smoking American cigarettes and watching the ocean channel. Our hotel was four stories high across the narrow street from the waterfront. During the night, the crashing waves alternately kept me awake and drummed me to sleep.
At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, my Daddy, drew stares by complaining about the crowded attraction in terms that would be overly dignified by suggesting an analogy to moneychangers in the temple. I can only think he believed that nobody could understand him, since he could not understand the other languages being spoken all around him. In France, the steaks were cooked too rare for him, and he missed his bacon and eggs for breakfast. “How long did it take you before you could stand this coffee?” he asked me. I was happy to tell him, “Daddy, the first time I ever put it in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” I always remember this as a substitute for the discussion we never had about French wines, which my Daddy never tasted, and the special quality of light in northern France captured by Impressionist paintings, which never caught my Daddy's eye.
The armada of American Allies invaded the coast of France at Normandy 65 anniversaries ago. Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Pointe du Hoc. Paratroopers and gliders floated silently from the sky into French farm fields and towns. Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Bayeux, Carentan. The charming fishing village of Arromanches was turned into an instant deep water port. Sixty-five birthdays ago for me, as I was born the same day. Sixty-five. Retirement age. It is too late for me to think about retiring, since I already left the employment roles three years ago when I was hospitalized, in a coma for three weeks, woke up deaf. Nowadays I stay plenty busy. I just don’t have a job. Lately, I have been remodeling the condo that belonged to my oldest sister, who died the day before Christmas Eve 2007. I am almost finished with that project and look forward to some quality time this summer with my grandchildren, spending some of their inheritance on sunscreen, floppy straw hats, and restaurant meals. I also want to re-read one of my favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, do some research for an article. Retired is in the eye of the beholder.
Three years after my Daddy retired, I received a letter saying he would come to visit me in Europe, if I invited him. I worked for the U.S. Department of State in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. My Daddy had crossed the ocean borders of the U.S.A. only once before, in WWII when the Marine Corps had put him on a troop ship as cannon fodder for the invasion of Japan, just before Hiroshima. From Brussels, my wife and I took my Daddy to the Ardennes and Amsterdam. We went to Paris and drove to Normandy. We visited the American Cemetery, 172 acres of white markers, on a cliff, overlooking Omaha Beach.
We stayed at a charming hotel in the waterfront village of Arromanches, location of the D-Day Museum. My Daddy and I posed together for a photograph in front of the museum, with the large letters prominent behind us, 6 Juin 1944, D-Day. In the picture, my Daddy is 68. I am 35. At sunset, my Daddy and I stood each with one foot resting on the rail of the sea wall, wordlessly smoking American cigarettes and watching the ocean channel. Our hotel was four stories high across the narrow street from the waterfront. During the night, the crashing waves alternately kept me awake and drummed me to sleep.
At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, my Daddy, drew stares by complaining about the crowded attraction in terms that would be overly dignified by suggesting an analogy to moneychangers in the temple. I can only think he believed that nobody could understand him, since he could not understand the other languages being spoken all around him. In France, the steaks were cooked too rare for him, and he missed his bacon and eggs for breakfast. “How long did it take you before you could stand this coffee?” he asked me. I was happy to tell him, “Daddy, the first time I ever put it in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” I always remember this as a substitute for the discussion we never had about French wines, which my Daddy never tasted, and the special quality of light in northern France captured by Impressionist paintings, which never caught my Daddy's eye.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Our Fathers
I was wrong to wait so long to read Cormac McCarthy’s novel THE ROAD, which has been out a couple of years. I have believed that Cormac McCarthy should be the next American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I had concluded since All the Pretty Horses that like Hemingway after For Whom the Bell Tolls, his best writing was behind him. Also, I am not a big fan of post-apocalyptic sensationalism. I respect Dr Strangelove, A Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, some others well enough, but they are so few and far between.
Heading south down THE ROAD, a father and his young son, seek relief from the desolate cold of their torched and ruined world. Cormac McCarthy goes out of his way to omit exactly which pointless human vanity befell planet earth. Father and son scavenge abandoned houses for canned food, shoes, blankets. They push a grocery cart from out of the mountains to the sea, evading bands of marauding cannibals. They carry a pistol that contains only one last bullet, which the father saves to prevent his son from further suffering when the time comes. When the father’s time comes,
Just take me with you. Please.
I cant.
Please, Papa.
I cant. I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
You said you wouldn’t ever leave me….
If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
There are lots of things fathers cannot do for their sons. Nothing they can provide is more enduring and powerful than their genetics and their own example. Often when I am working, concentrating intensely, perhaps even straining with some physical effort, I suddenly become aware of a way of holding my mouth that I recognize immediately from my Daddy, who looked like John Wayne. As a lanky young man, he could have passed for the handsome star of Stagecoach. In the fullness of his life, he looked like The Quiet Man. He grew old at John Wayne’s pace, all the way to the booze-bellied, one-eyed has-been of True Grit. In my mind, John Wayne and my Daddy might as well have been the same person. My Daddy was a Marine Corps veteran of WWII in the Pacific. He was very much the strong, silent type. Still waters run somewhere nobody ever knows. Although he only graduated from the seventh grade, he took great pride in the fact that he could read and write. He enjoyed working the jumble word puzzle in the newspaper. He loved a good joke. He loved a bad joke. He took me to Atlanta Cracker games at Ponce de Leon Ballpark. On hot days and nights, he would say, “They need to turn on the fans.” My love for baseball made me a reader.
One Saturday, my sister and I sat at his bedside in the hospice with Sisters of Mercy scurrying in the halls, as he lay dying. My Daddy, the anti-Papist and past master of the Grant Park Masonic Lodge, had not spoken for days. My sister and I were remembering the women’s softball games on summer nights in Piedmont Park long before the days of Title IX requirements of equal opportunity for women’s athletics. “What was the name of that team that was so good?” my sister tried to recall. After a long silence of neither she nor I being able to come up with the answer, from my Daddy’s pillow came the last words I ever heard him say: “Dixie Darlings.”
Heading south down THE ROAD, a father and his young son, seek relief from the desolate cold of their torched and ruined world. Cormac McCarthy goes out of his way to omit exactly which pointless human vanity befell planet earth. Father and son scavenge abandoned houses for canned food, shoes, blankets. They push a grocery cart from out of the mountains to the sea, evading bands of marauding cannibals. They carry a pistol that contains only one last bullet, which the father saves to prevent his son from further suffering when the time comes. When the father’s time comes,
Just take me with you. Please.
I cant.
Please, Papa.
I cant. I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant.
You said you wouldn’t ever leave me….
If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
There are lots of things fathers cannot do for their sons. Nothing they can provide is more enduring and powerful than their genetics and their own example. Often when I am working, concentrating intensely, perhaps even straining with some physical effort, I suddenly become aware of a way of holding my mouth that I recognize immediately from my Daddy, who looked like John Wayne. As a lanky young man, he could have passed for the handsome star of Stagecoach. In the fullness of his life, he looked like The Quiet Man. He grew old at John Wayne’s pace, all the way to the booze-bellied, one-eyed has-been of True Grit. In my mind, John Wayne and my Daddy might as well have been the same person. My Daddy was a Marine Corps veteran of WWII in the Pacific. He was very much the strong, silent type. Still waters run somewhere nobody ever knows. Although he only graduated from the seventh grade, he took great pride in the fact that he could read and write. He enjoyed working the jumble word puzzle in the newspaper. He loved a good joke. He loved a bad joke. He took me to Atlanta Cracker games at Ponce de Leon Ballpark. On hot days and nights, he would say, “They need to turn on the fans.” My love for baseball made me a reader.
One Saturday, my sister and I sat at his bedside in the hospice with Sisters of Mercy scurrying in the halls, as he lay dying. My Daddy, the anti-Papist and past master of the Grant Park Masonic Lodge, had not spoken for days. My sister and I were remembering the women’s softball games on summer nights in Piedmont Park long before the days of Title IX requirements of equal opportunity for women’s athletics. “What was the name of that team that was so good?” my sister tried to recall. After a long silence of neither she nor I being able to come up with the answer, from my Daddy’s pillow came the last words I ever heard him say: “Dixie Darlings.”
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Obama On Fathers
When John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States, many men still wore the easy to manage crew cuts they brought back from WWII and Korea. Some parted their hair left, right, or center but slicked down like their fathers. Throughout my childhood, I combed a big wave in the front as if announcing surf was up. By the end of the Kennedy years, my hair looked as much like President Kennedy’s as it could, what was called “the dry look,” while the market for the “greasy kid stuff” vanished. This was beyond politics. Remember Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich.
Barrack Obama’s Father’s Day speech has been reported with interpretations as if from a dart board. Racist. Throw a dart at a definition. Pandering for votes. Aim at an exit poll. Pardon my shameless understatement: U. S. politics is entirely too Balkanized. Let's put it this way. I have never voted Republican for an office that would serve in Washington, D.C. Nonetheless I say, just because something appeals to Conservatives does not make it wrong. Sometimes they are right. And sometimes somebody else is right. Barack Obama gets my vote for even trying to reach out beyond the boneheaded divisions crippling our politics.
Rod Williams, a former Nashville-Davidson County Councilman and self-styled “right-leaning, pragmatic, centrist, disgruntled Republican,” blogged from Tennessee, “Barrack Obama’s Father's Day speech was a breath of fresh air. The state of the Black family is such an incredibly sensitive matter, only a Black person can raise the issue.” In my first Paw Paw Bill blog that endorsed Barack Obama, I said, “There are things about my country that are broken and can only be fixed, wounds that can only be healed by the first African-American to be elected President.” Throw the darts anywhere you want. If you think fatherless children exist and suffer only in certain communities, look again.
Here are excerpts from the speech by Sen. Obama:
Too many fathers are missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. You and I know how true this is in the African-American community… that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households… that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.
We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception… that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one. I know what it means to have an absent father…. I was luckier than most, and had two wonderful grandparents from Kansas who poured everything they had into helping my mother raise my sister and me.
…black or white; rich or poor; from the South Side or the wealthiest suburb.... It’s up to us to say to our daughters, don’t ever let images on TV tell you what you are worth, because I expect you to dream without limit and reach for those goals. It’s up to us to tell our sons, those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we give glory to achievement, self respect, and hard work. It’s up to us to set these high expectations…. meeting those expectations ourselves.
…we can pass on to our children…the gift of hope… that spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it.
Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter
Barrack Obama’s Father’s Day speech has been reported with interpretations as if from a dart board. Racist. Throw a dart at a definition. Pandering for votes. Aim at an exit poll. Pardon my shameless understatement: U. S. politics is entirely too Balkanized. Let's put it this way. I have never voted Republican for an office that would serve in Washington, D.C. Nonetheless I say, just because something appeals to Conservatives does not make it wrong. Sometimes they are right. And sometimes somebody else is right. Barack Obama gets my vote for even trying to reach out beyond the boneheaded divisions crippling our politics.
Rod Williams, a former Nashville-Davidson County Councilman and self-styled “right-leaning, pragmatic, centrist, disgruntled Republican,” blogged from Tennessee, “Barrack Obama’s Father's Day speech was a breath of fresh air. The state of the Black family is such an incredibly sensitive matter, only a Black person can raise the issue.” In my first Paw Paw Bill blog that endorsed Barack Obama, I said, “There are things about my country that are broken and can only be fixed, wounds that can only be healed by the first African-American to be elected President.” Throw the darts anywhere you want. If you think fatherless children exist and suffer only in certain communities, look again.
Here are excerpts from the speech by Sen. Obama:
Too many fathers are missing – missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. You and I know how true this is in the African-American community… that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households… that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.
We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception… that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one. I know what it means to have an absent father…. I was luckier than most, and had two wonderful grandparents from Kansas who poured everything they had into helping my mother raise my sister and me.
…black or white; rich or poor; from the South Side or the wealthiest suburb.... It’s up to us to say to our daughters, don’t ever let images on TV tell you what you are worth, because I expect you to dream without limit and reach for those goals. It’s up to us to tell our sons, those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we give glory to achievement, self respect, and hard work. It’s up to us to set these high expectations…. meeting those expectations ourselves.
…we can pass on to our children…the gift of hope… that spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it.
Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter
Friday, June 6, 2008
Birthday Greeting, Bottle of Wine
“Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I’m 64?” We were all twenty-something when we sang that for the first times, the Beatles, me, my friends. The challenges of ever being such an advanced age as 64 could only be contemplated in whimsy.
Three years after my Daddy retired, I received a letter saying he would come to visit me in Europe, if I invited him. I worked for the U.S. Department of State in Brussels, Belgium. The only other time my Daddy had crossed the ocean borders of the U.S.A. was in WWII when the Marine Corps had put him on a troop ship as cannon fodder for the invasion of Japan, just before Hiroshima. From Brussels, my wife and I took my Daddy to the Ardennes and Amsterdam. We went to Paris and drove to Normandy. We visited the American Cemetery, 172 acres of white markers, on a cliff, overlooking Omaha Beach. We stayed at a charming hotel in the waterfront village of Arromanches, location of the D-Day Museum. My Daddy and I posed together for a photograph in front of the museum, with the large letters prominent behind us, 6 Juin 1944, D-Day, also the date of my birth. In the picture, my Daddy is 68. I am 35.
At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, my Daddy, drew stares by complaining about the crowded attraction in terms that would be overly dignified by suggesting an analogy to moneychangers in the temple. I can only think he believed that nobody could understand him, since he could not understand the other languages being spoken all around him. In France, the steaks were cooked too rare for him, and he missed his bacon and eggs for breakfast. “How long did it take you before you could stand this coffee?” he asked me. I was happy to tell him, “Daddy, the first time I ever put it in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
My wife and I often take our grandson to play at Glenlake park in Decatur. It has modern plastic playground equipment on a bed of woodchips, a creek that the children love to play in, and picnic tables and cookout facilities. One recent visit we shared with the reunion of a nearby high school’s class of 1961, only one year before my own high school graduation. I watched the arrivals of the reunited, former prom prince and princess, stag or drag, wearing relax-fit jeans and t-shirts bulging in all the wrong places. I confided to my wife, “I don’t think we look that old.”
Our longtime friend Tina Simms, who lives in Perry, recently wrote us:
Yesterday was quite the busy day and fun too. I was in WR by 10:00 am, setting up a voter education/voter registration table in front of Giant Foods on Davis Dr. When the other volunteers arrived, I left about 11:00a and picked up Claudia and took her to get her hair shampooed and cut. Then we went to a Chinese buffet and did some shopping, and then I went back to the voter activity until nearly 4:00 pm. When I got home I was fairly tired but not exhausted. Went to sleep around 10:30p and woke up at 6:30 a. Got up, ate a banana and some bran crackers, but I was still sleepy so I went back to bed and slept until 9:30! Then I felt fine. But I still don't want to do anything today except "home stuff." If I go fast for a day or two, then I have to go slow for a day or two. I am the same age, 71, as John McCain and actually in pretty good health. Like McCain, I am a cancer survivor but I don't have heart trouble or diabetes. If a day of activity necessitates my sleeping the next day until 9:30, I wonder how he manages to keep campaigning, or how in the heck he could manage the presidency without getting exhausted and cranky. Maybe we will get to see some of that famous temper of his yet.
I also forget words. Yesterday I forgot John Lennon's name, but it came to me later. If I were President, would I not forget words? Will he not forget words? The occasional forgetfulness of aging is annoying, but really doesn't bother me a whole lot because I am retired and I really don't HAVE to remember all sorts of stuff on the spur of the moment. But what if I had to speak extemporaneously and couldn't remember a name or a world capital? Eeeesh. :-(
I am probably an atypical 71-going-on-72 year old, in that I have had a lot of formal and informal education and still do a lot of mental work--reading, audio courses, writing. So it's not as if my gray matter had been allowed to get stale. IT'S JUST AGING! I'm not exempt from any of the typical symptoms, and I don't think McCain is either.
Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter
Three years after my Daddy retired, I received a letter saying he would come to visit me in Europe, if I invited him. I worked for the U.S. Department of State in Brussels, Belgium. The only other time my Daddy had crossed the ocean borders of the U.S.A. was in WWII when the Marine Corps had put him on a troop ship as cannon fodder for the invasion of Japan, just before Hiroshima. From Brussels, my wife and I took my Daddy to the Ardennes and Amsterdam. We went to Paris and drove to Normandy. We visited the American Cemetery, 172 acres of white markers, on a cliff, overlooking Omaha Beach. We stayed at a charming hotel in the waterfront village of Arromanches, location of the D-Day Museum. My Daddy and I posed together for a photograph in front of the museum, with the large letters prominent behind us, 6 Juin 1944, D-Day, also the date of my birth. In the picture, my Daddy is 68. I am 35.
At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, my Daddy, drew stares by complaining about the crowded attraction in terms that would be overly dignified by suggesting an analogy to moneychangers in the temple. I can only think he believed that nobody could understand him, since he could not understand the other languages being spoken all around him. In France, the steaks were cooked too rare for him, and he missed his bacon and eggs for breakfast. “How long did it take you before you could stand this coffee?” he asked me. I was happy to tell him, “Daddy, the first time I ever put it in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
My wife and I often take our grandson to play at Glenlake park in Decatur. It has modern plastic playground equipment on a bed of woodchips, a creek that the children love to play in, and picnic tables and cookout facilities. One recent visit we shared with the reunion of a nearby high school’s class of 1961, only one year before my own high school graduation. I watched the arrivals of the reunited, former prom prince and princess, stag or drag, wearing relax-fit jeans and t-shirts bulging in all the wrong places. I confided to my wife, “I don’t think we look that old.”
Our longtime friend Tina Simms, who lives in Perry, recently wrote us:
Yesterday was quite the busy day and fun too. I was in WR by 10:00 am, setting up a voter education/voter registration table in front of Giant Foods on Davis Dr. When the other volunteers arrived, I left about 11:00a and picked up Claudia and took her to get her hair shampooed and cut. Then we went to a Chinese buffet and did some shopping, and then I went back to the voter activity until nearly 4:00 pm. When I got home I was fairly tired but not exhausted. Went to sleep around 10:30p and woke up at 6:30 a. Got up, ate a banana and some bran crackers, but I was still sleepy so I went back to bed and slept until 9:30! Then I felt fine. But I still don't want to do anything today except "home stuff." If I go fast for a day or two, then I have to go slow for a day or two. I am the same age, 71, as John McCain and actually in pretty good health. Like McCain, I am a cancer survivor but I don't have heart trouble or diabetes. If a day of activity necessitates my sleeping the next day until 9:30, I wonder how he manages to keep campaigning, or how in the heck he could manage the presidency without getting exhausted and cranky. Maybe we will get to see some of that famous temper of his yet.
I also forget words. Yesterday I forgot John Lennon's name, but it came to me later. If I were President, would I not forget words? Will he not forget words? The occasional forgetfulness of aging is annoying, but really doesn't bother me a whole lot because I am retired and I really don't HAVE to remember all sorts of stuff on the spur of the moment. But what if I had to speak extemporaneously and couldn't remember a name or a world capital? Eeeesh. :-(
I am probably an atypical 71-going-on-72 year old, in that I have had a lot of formal and informal education and still do a lot of mental work--reading, audio courses, writing. So it's not as if my gray matter had been allowed to get stale. IT'S JUST AGING! I'm not exempt from any of the typical symptoms, and I don't think McCain is either.
Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter
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