Day: December 17, 2012

Joseph Campbell wrote that you need to know where you are in life, and acknowledge it, or you have lost your place in the world. Amen. I am understanding where I am. I am an Older Man, and that has special meaning for me, an important passage that I welcome and work to understand. In America, Older Men are not considered important in our culture, except for their retirement funds and pensions and diapers and medications and friendly chats with the doctor and nursing home and assisted care payment plans. In our media, the only older people that appear are in ads for pills or stories about the national debt.

People talk to me about “our age,” and of memory loss and most especially, of their medications and tests and aches and pains. They make assumptions about me – that I want to talk about my sore feet or my blood pressure or my health. My health care provider called today and asked if I need transportation to my doctors, if I could drive myself, if I could tie my own shoes or needed a special “silver sneaker” program for seniors who need velcro. This, I assume, is because I am now on Medicare.  I wanted to tell her I did not use diapers.  I told her I was healthy, very much at work, very much intending to stay that way. The woman on the phone asked how many medications I was on, and I said none, and she very quickly thanked me and got off the phone. There was nothing to sell me. I am not buying their idea of aging.

At the dentist, the receptionists said I was the first male over 45 they had ever seen fill out the patient information forms who was not on medications for prostate or blood pressure or blood sugar or high cholesterol or circulation. I told her I was either crazy or fortunate.  “Good for  you,” she said.

I know where I am in life, I am in a good place and my life is not about their pills or special offerings or assumptions that I am a withering, sexless, cripple who can’t get to the doctor. What could be unhealthier for people to hear?

For me, being an Older Man is a proud thing. I am in love. I have seen six decades of things, war and peace, Presidents, conflicts, issues, cities. I take seriously my sacred role to pass along what I know to younger people. To the students in my writing workshop. To friends who seek voice in blogs. To people struggling with fear and insecurities. To young writers starting out. An Older Man has a Magic Wand. He knows some magic. He can touch the spirits of people if he will, encourage their hearts and souls, if he will. Whisper his secrets and tricks in ears that are open and understand that wisdom and experience is a kind of currency. He can write what he knows in books, on blogs, on Facebook pages. Despite the efforts of our corporatized world to take my dignity and steal my pride and independence and worth, I am happy to be an Older Man. I knew nothing when I was young, and me and many others paid dearly for that. Now I know a few things, and I am very happy to pass it on.

An Older Man is not young, and I do not wish to live forever. Just well. That is up to me, not them.

I told the woman on the phone that I was not at the end of something, I was at the beginning of something. And that is the truth. I know my place in the world, and that is a very strong and loving hand at my back. Every chance I get I will write my messages and  I will polish my Magic Wand and light up some lives.

George Forss inspires me to think about my photographs, to watch for the light and understand it, to see that any photo can be a good photo if the photographer thinks about it.  Check out the blog of this photographic genius.

A truly great dog – a companionable and indispensable dog – is a rare thing, a freak of nature, an accident. You can’t breed for it, you can’t choose one from a litter, you can’t buy one or rescue one knowingly. Great dogs happen along, they appear out of the blue, sometimes you find them, sometimes they find you. We all love our dogs and think they are wonderful, but if I am being honest, I have to say there have been only a few great dogs in my life, dogs that truly faithful, trustworthy, noble and loving. Like human beings, all dogs are not equal.

I remember my first great dog, Sam the mulish bassett hound (they are all that way). Sam was impervious to training, instruction or the wishes of humans. Every night when I was very small,  he crawled into my bed, and bit by he would stretch out and push me  until I fell off the bed and onto the floor. If I tried to get back into bed, he would growl and snap at me and I spent many nights on the floor with blankets wrapped over me. My mother whaled Sam with a rolled-up newspaper every time he got up on the sofa – she could see him looking out the window when she pulled into the driveway – and every day he was there, ready to take his punishment, indifferent to it. Sam was a hero to me.

My mother was a kitchen tyrant and whenever she would cook a turkey, brisket or juicy steak, Sam would wait until it got to the table, then make a lunge for it. I remember one Thanksgiving when Sam reached up over the table, pulled an entire turkey off of its roasting dish and tried to drag it away across the new living room carpet. My mother tackled him, and the two of them (three including the hot and moist turkey) ended up in a brawl across the carpet and into the kitchen.  Sam ended up in the basement for a week after that, and on his first day back, he went after some brisket. He was a great dog. Only later did I realize how much she loved that dog. When we moved to Atlantic City, she drove him over to a neighbor’s and left him there. Years later I found out that he was so disconsolate and then aggressive towards his new owners that he was put down. My mother never forgave herself.

King, our free-wheeling and adventurous German Shepherd, was also a great dog. My father let him out in the morning and then let him after dinner (he was not allowed in the house, only the basement). King came home every now and then with the pants of the mailman, dragged our neighbor’s garbage all over the block, impregnated any number of dogs in the neighborhood, and lay in wait for the milkman, who would open his door a crack, run for the door and rush back to his truck. Most days, not all, he made it. This was, of course, before lawyers rose up and took over the lives of us and our dogs.

Rose was a great dog, courageous and dutiful and invaluable. There were others, but I now have another great dog, Red. He is my constant companion. This morning, he came with me to the dentist and sat under my chair while my teeth were cleaned. There are not so many lawyers in the country, so there is still some freedom for dogs. Red is essential to the running of the farm and the perfect companion for me. He vanishes when I am writing (he is under my desk), and understands the bells that time my meditation. He meditates with me, sleeps at the foot of my bed – on the floor –  and defines much of my life. I did not buy or breed him, of course, he was brought to me by an angel, Dr. Karen Thompson, who knew she had a great dog on her hands and wanted a rich and full life for him.

You never know where a great dog will come from. I am always open to getting a great dog, and I have been fortunate. I already have many memories of Red, one that sticks in my mind is the recent morning when freezing rain and snow were falling and I had bring the sheep and lie down, and he was so still that when I came into the house to work I forget him out there and when I went out looking for him two hours later (when I am writing, the world disappears), he was just in the spot where I had left him, soaking wet, covered in snow, willing to endure cold, snow and freezing rain rather than hurt my feelings or displease me.

I never forget a great dog, and my wish for every dog lover in the world is that they experience one.

It was during meditation on a recent morning that I realized that many mornings, I tend to wake up edgy and my mind is running through a long list of resentments – I have no money, a friend I cared about turned away from me, I should have handled my divorce differently, my parents didn’t treat me well, someone I trusted betrayed my trust, my publisher doesn’t care about me.  This is not really how I think normally, at least not consciously but at the beginning of the day, I seem to be working through a lot of slights, betrayals, resentments. “Hey,” I told Maria. “Every morning, I am tuning into the Resentment Channel.” I also have a “Fear” and an “Anger” Channel I sometimes tune into, and this has also presented itself clearly in my meditation work.

We live in a world of channels – hundreds on cable, more streaming in all the time on the Internet. We have channels outside of our heads, channels inside. Yesterday, I decided to change some channels. I turned to the love channel, and then the creative channel, and am opening a holiday channel. On these new channels, all opened up during my spiritual work, I can broaden, soften and enrich the programming inside of my head. I have been on the Resentment and Fear Channels all of my life, they have at times because my default channels.

Meditation is a mesmerizing thing. You see all kinds of thoughts and habits whizzing by like a speeding train, and if you work hard and go deep, you can drop some new ones in there. I think of my next book coming out, of my remarkable and wonderful wife, of my daughter’s growing list of accomplishments, of Simon’s bray, and Red’s focus, and Lenore’s great heart and the channel brightens and changes. This morning, I turned off the Fear and Resentment Channels. It is a little harder than using a switcher, but not that hard. The Resentment Channel is a waste of time. I am more excited all the time about my  new programming schedule.

We set up the Bedlam Tree last night, striking some simple LED lights on it, putting it by the front window. We plan on having a happy and meaningful Christmas this year, and that changes. For us, it will be a quiet day alone. My daughter usually comes up for Christmas but she can’t make it this year, so it will be me, Maria, some dogs, donkeys, a barn cat, chickens. This will be the first Christmas in memory without anyone from my family or Maria’s being around. And we aren’t going anywhere.

That feels a bit lonely, yet also quite beautiful and we love our farm and the idea of a quiet day together seems right. We often project the Norman Rockwell image of Christmas – the family gathered together for the feast. But I was reading Salman Rushdie’s powerful memoir, “Joseph Anton” ( that was the name he used in hiding for more than a decade) and he wrote that the Rockwell image is a myth, mostly. Family is often the dark chaos that runs beneath the surface of our lives, the pain and anguish that boils inside of us. I think there is something to that, as so many people seem to suffer through the holidays.

You can take the animal thing too far (at various points in my life, I have) and animals are not a substitute for humans for me – I often say the dogs are great, Maria is better – but even though I will miss my daughter,  I look forward to this Christmas. Red, Lenore and Frieda mean a lot to us, so do the donkeys. We are even coming to love our industrious chickens, who do no harm and work hard. It seems right we spend the day with them in our new home. We will walk dogs, commune with donkeys. If Christmas is about birth, it is also about rebirth, and the farm is a symbol of rebirth for us, of our lives together. I am excited about it. I will research some great Christmas meal to cook and think of some other simple ways to mark our own journey, the start of something powerful and new.