Showing posts with label old age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old age. Show all posts

Stumblers



I stumbled today just as my father started stumbling when he was about my age—64. He was also in pain everyday, although he never talked about where the pain was or what it felt like; he just groaned, grimaced, and threw tantrums. Another thing he did was that if someone asked him how he was, he would say, “Not good,” 100% of the time, but then he would change the subject. He drank to keep the pain under control, and that might have increased his stumbling, but not by much.

Not many remodelers walk around the job site with a can of Miller High Life sticking out of their striped overall pocket, but he did, and his employers kept rehiring us, so I guess they didn’t object too much. We worked for everyone from teetotalers to hardcore alcoholics, and I liked them all. I remember one of the alcoholics saying that he had pretty much traded eating for drinking. Before I knew what lushes he and his wife were, I thought she was simply the friendliest person I had ever known, and I became angry when my father suggested otherwise, but he was right, and I was naïve.

When I wanted to say something nice to my father, I would tell him that he could work as hard as a man half his age. It was a bit of an exaggeration, although he was able to work nearly full-time until he was his mid-seventies. I had no idea how devastating age and pain could be, and therefore no idea how remarkable he really was. Now that I spend a fair amount of time trying to remember what it was like to not hurt every minute of everyday, I often recall that he still had ten working years ahead of him when he was my age. I’m not even optimistic that I’ll be alive in ten years.

I don’t know if my father starting drinking more in his sixties in order to quiet the pain in his body or the pain in his mind. Now, I wonder the same about me in regard to drugs because they just don’t help that much unless I take enough to pass out, but drugs are what I know to do, and I would be hard-put without them, although, along with pain and age, they isolate me. Just yesterday, I realized that I no longer have a single friend other than those whom Peggy and I see together and who, I suspect, tolerate me for her sake.


Dad was 73 and mixing concrete at the time of the photo. That’s me in the bellbottoms.

Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, time stays, we go*


I imagine myself standing on a conveyer belt like the ones people walk on at airports, only I can neither hasten nor retard the progress of this belt for it is carrying me through time. I wave goodbye forever to the passing moments: to my 64th birthday last Friday; to the sad face of my beloved neighbor who left a half hour ago for a new home in another state; and to the newness of a baby girl named Sidney who was born less than two days ago. As I held Sidney, I thought back to 1949 when I was born, to the people who were in their sixties then who saw me as I was seeing her, knowing that they would die as I was coming into maturity. So does each generation watch its successor enter the world helpless, and its successor watch it leave the world helpless. If only the helplessness of the old could be as cherished as the helplessness of the young. But even for the young there is the foreboding of sorrow, for who can contemplate the pain that they will know and not grieve for them and wish in vain to protect them? 

*Henry Austin Dobson

The wisdom of Rodney


The following post consists of quotations from Rodney Dangerfields book: RODNEY DANGERFIELD It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me.

I began writing jokes when I was fifteen. I think I was so unhappy all the time that I was trying to forget reality with jokes. I was always depressed, but I could tell a joke and get a laugh. But not from my mother…
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I guess that’s why I went into show business—to get some love. I wanted people to tell me I was good, tell me I’m okay…. I’ll take love anyway I can get it.
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Show business was my escape from life. I had to have it. It was like a fix. I needed it to survive.
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At twenty-eight, I decided to quit show business…. To give you an idea of how well I was doing at the time I quit, I was the only one who knew I quit.
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I sold aluminum siding for twelve years. I made a decent living, but I wasn’t living. I was out of show business, but show business wasn’t out of me, so I did the only thing that made sense—I created a character based upon my feeling that nothing goes right.
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…I remember sitting in my dressing room waiting for the show to start. I looked out the window. It was raining, but the streets of midtown Manhattan were crowded, and I thought to myself. Look at all those people who are going to miss seeing me tonight on the Ed Sullivan Show.
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Forty years ago, I was feeling really depressed even more than I usually do, so Joe recommended a famous psychologist…. I still remember two things he told me:  People are all fucking crazy, and most of them are unethical.”
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I’ve talked with many psychologists and psychiatrists. It has cost me a lot of money, but at least I got a few jokes out of it.
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…I didn’t go because I knew I couldn’t be myself with Jack Benny…. Can you picture me saying to Jack Benny, “Man, I’m so depressed. It’s all too fucking much.”
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The worst depression I had was when I was in my seventies…. For two years, I couldn’t function.
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I first started smoking pot back in 1942. I was twenty-one…
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All the stories you hear about being getting wild on marijuana are ridiculous…. Booze is the real culprit in our society.
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When you’re high, you become an avid reader…. one night I smoked some pot, then started reading the newspaper. An hour later, I said to myself, What am I doing? I was reading about fishing conditions in Anchorage. And I don’t even fish. And the paper was a month old.
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I was sitting in an airport…. There was no one around, so I lit up a joint…. Suddenly a cop came running toward me.
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…I ended up in intensive care…. I thought, Hey, there aren’t too many people here, and it’s dark. I’ll light up a joint… Two minutes later, a security guard came over….
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…I now have written authorization from a California doctor that allows me to smoke pot…. Wish I’d had that prescription thirty years ago; life would have been easier.
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It’s hard for me to accept the fact that soon my life will be over. No more Super Bowls. No more Chinese food. No more sex. And the big one, no more smoking pot.
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One time I said to him [Rodney’s father], “You’ve travelled all over the country, must have slept with a hundred women. You’ve done everything, been through it all. What’s life all about? What’s the answer?”
He twirled his cigar and said, “It’s all bullshit.”
You can’t fully appreciate that line until you’re old.
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Living as long as I have, you can’t help but look back on life and wonder what does it all mean. Sometimes I don’t even think I’ve made it. Even today, if I check into a hotel and the bellman picks up my suitcase, I feel awkward.
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I can accept getting older. I can even accept getting old, but dying? Man, that’s a tough one to accept.
Life’s a short trip. You’ll find out.
You were seventeen yesterday. You’ll be fifty tomorrow. Life is tough…. 
What do you think life is? Moonlight and canoes? That’s not life. That’s in the movies.
Life is fear and tension and worry and disappointments.
Life. I’ll tell you what life is. Life is having a mother-in-law who sucks and a wife who don’t. That’s what life is.

Photo by Alan Light