7 March

Every Day, The Crowd At My Window

by Jon Katz
Donkeys At My Window
Donkeys At My Window

Every day, around 2 p.m., there is a crowd outside of my window. Animals figure me out quickly, and they know if they stand and stare out my window, I will eventually come out with some cookies or carrots or apples and give them to them. So they just stand and stare at me. Cows have figured this out, dogs, even chickens (not sheep, although they are tagging along.) In many ways, we are one with the animals, they are a part of us, we are part of the same system. I love the crowd outside my window, although it can be distracting when I am working.

7 March

Mother And Me

by Jon Katz
A Memory
A Memory

Reading Florence Walrath’s journals, I am struck by how different every life is. She talks so lovingly of her mother and father, of her grandparents and cousins. I wonder at it.

I have no photos from my childhood, few memories. I just don’t recall much of it. My sister doesn’t either. I did not see my mother in the years before she  was found dead on the floor of her bathroom in an assisted care facility.  I was in a bad place, and didn’t even know where she was living. That seems incomprehensible to me now, but it is the truth.

My mother loved me very much and I loved her very much, but it was just not possible for me to be around her at the end of her life, I wish it were not so. I am sorry we did not get to say goodbye to one another, she more than any other person or thing inspired me and encouraged me to tell my stories and she always told me how good they were.

My mother was a creative, from decorating our house with little money to managing an art gallery to the last job of her life – hostess at a vegetarian restaurant. She was funny, charismatic, stylish fiercely individualistic and proud. People told me she was the hippest old lady in the world. She suffered much from anxiety and loneliness. She could never quite muster the strength so many women have today to break away from controlling and suffocating men and live the life she wanted. She blamed everyone for her failure to live the life she was meant to live, that she wanted to live. It made her angry and hurtful and crazy.

Some years after she died, and after I got divorced, my ex-wife generously sent a letter explaining she had found a scrapbook my mother had kept in the basement of our home. I don’t know how it came to be there. Someone probably sent it to me after she died, but I never opened it. It came to me up here, at Bedlam Farm. I was surprised and deeply affected to find an album of old photos, clips from stories I had written, and many stories written about me as I began writing books. I had never opened it, but I opened it now and my eye immediately came to rest on this photograph. It was of her and me, the only photograph I have of me with anyone in my family.

I hang the photo on my office wall, in memory of my mother and also in memory of me. I see a happy boy, a genuine smile. I think it was the time before our troubles, it must have been, because no unhappy kid could fake a smile like that, nor could my mother. Both of us look so genuinely happy, and this is the memory I have chosen to be of my childhood. Just leave it right there. I love that kid, I want to pick him up and take him out to a movie and get some popcorn. I want so badly to tell him to hang in there, it turned out fine. I got the girl.

I think of my mother whenever I look at this photo, and it is a gift. I think of her humor and her great will, her ferocious and twisted love. I see that she gave me two wonderful gifts, at least: the confidence in myself as a creative person who could tell his stories to the world, and a fierce determination to not permit anyone to keep me from living a meaningful life. I see as I look at this photos, and remember my mother’s painful struggles – I think she loved me more than anything in the world – that she infused in me the awful meaning of a hollow life, a life of regrets. Don’t let anyone do that to you, she told me again and again.

How curious is the way in which love works. Love can knock us down or lift us up, inspire us or cripple us. Looking at this photo, I see nothing but love, in me, in her, for each other. That’s a wonderful place to leave it. I heard you, mom, I heard you. I didn’t let what happened to you happen to me. If the spirits running the universe are good and kind, that message will find it’s way to you.

7 March

Where Am I Now?

by Jon Katz
The Questions We Ask?
The Questions We Ask?

Most of the people I know, most of the people I meet, are asking the same questions. How much money do I have? How much health insurance? How much savings for the future, how much money in my death and dying accounts? In my reserve fund for emergencies?  When will the economy recover, the real estate market revive? I have often asked myself the same questions – our national struggles seem to be over paying bills.  I am glad Henry David Thoreau didn’t ask these questions, he would never have gone near Walden Pond.

As Joseph Campbell foresaw, America is turning from a mythically drive country – the pursuit of freedom and happiness and opportunity – to a security conscious one – how much money do I have? What label can I put on myself, on others? How much money will I have? How can I have enough money to challenge fate and live forever?

Everyone has the right to ask their own questions, and I have retired from judging the choices of other people, and also retired from letting other people judge mine. My life is, in fact, not an argument for others. Nor do I choose to see our common life as an argument, a choice between two  suffocatingly narrow ways of thinking.

Some time I ago, I began asking myself this question: Where Am I Now? Where am I in my life? I have been asking it for decades.

Am I happy? Productive? Doing what I love? Permitting love to enter my life? Am I being honest? Authentic? Facing up to myself and my life? Getting the help I need? Facing the truths I need to face? Doing the hard work of self-determination, self-awareness. Do I have a spiritual life? Am I open to new experience, or as I age, am I closing up to it, wallowing in nostalgia, regret and resignation. Can I change, or will I fear and resist change? There are things that I need to accept, things that I will never accept.

Where am I now? My idea of security is this. There is nothing for me that is more important than a meaningful life. There is no risk too great to take in pursuit of one. There is, for me, no worse life than one in bondage or slavery, and there is nothing in any way secure about such a life. I happily choose a shorter life than one purchased in thrall to other people’s profit.

Where am I now? I am embracing creative change, evolving, working to remain relevant in a different world. For me, aging is n not about downsizing my life and expectations, it is having the freedom and some wisdom to open my life up.

Where am I now? I am on the road, on the path. I know there is no end to it, no final destination. I work at it every day. Someone wrote the other day that she gets that I had problems in my childhood, and she is tired of hearing about it. Sounds like whining to her, she said. I thought of my father coming into my room when I wet my bed: get over it, he said, move on. You’re just being a sissy. There are always people out there to diminish and trivialize, the Greek chorus of cynicism. I know, I have often been one of them. A reminder to move forward, to keep going. My father did not have it right.

As much as anything, I have learned to acknowledge my fear, but never surrender to it. A few years ago – a few months ago – I could not have said that. Where am I know? Better than before, in every way. And planning to be better still.

Someone I used to know quite well wrote recently that it takes a million dollars to be secure in one’s old age in America. I can’t imagine a more dangerous way to live than that.

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