Author: djgourdoux

Kids These Days

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Last night, my wife and I attended Choral Fest, the annual concert given by all the student choirs in the Kenosha Unified School District.  Each choir performed separately, and there were several numbers where the combined choirs, under the direction of a guest conductor, joined and sang as one combined choir.  It was, as it has been every year I’ve attended, an impressive and stirring concert.  There’s something incredibly beautiful about the sound of human voices singing live.

My wife and I were there to watch our daughter, a senior in high school, perform as a part of her school choir.   My daughter is the youngest of our three children, and it occurred to me, as the concert went on, that we are nearly done, my wife and I, that we are rapidly approaching the end of a long line of events we’ve been attending for the past twenty four years or so.  From preschool Christmas programs to youth sports leagues to award ceremonies to graduations, we’ve sat in auditoriums or sidelines more times than I can count.   Soon that will be over, and we won’t have to suffer through crowded amphitheatres and uncomfortable bleacher seating and the inconvenience of the inevitability of the event falling on the same evening something else was planned.

One constant that I’ve heard adults complain about over the years, starting with my parents, is “kids these days.”   I’ve been guilty of using this phrase myself.   Amongst the crimes “kids these days” have been accused of over the years are:

–  Having no respect

–   Not understanding the value of a dollar

–   Being lazy

These have always been, of course, legitimate complaints.   Kids have always disrespected their elders, they’ve never understood the true value of a dollar, and, if not pushed, have always been lazy.  These are and have always been among the fringe benefits of being a kid and things like respect and a work ethic are things that have to be learned.  The part that the complaints get wrong is the “these days” part, as if these are sudden attributes that have only become evident with the latest generation.

As I watched the concert last night, it occurred to me that kids these days are really no different than kids ever were.  Sure, they may be better at video games and understand technology better, and they might not have to work as hard as kids say, 100 years ago, but these are environmental and cultural shifts.  At their core, where it matters, they are the same as they ever were.   They are still kids.  Scanning the assembled choirs last night, I noticed that they still come in all sizes and shapes, they still, when it’s not their turn to sing, have trouble sitting still, and they still have best friends that they whisper things to that make them laugh.  I recognized, in some of the boys, the same longing glances at pretty girls that they have secret crushes on that I used to hope nobody noticed, and I remembered the mysterious combination of fears and dreams the world was when I was in 9th grade.  It was easy to spot kids who were popular and kids who were not, kids mature beyond their years and kids who were struggling to contain their immaturity.  These are the things that have always made being a kid both wonderful and painful, both simple and complex.   These are the things that kids need parents for.

As my wife and I drove home from the concert, I thought about all of this, and I thought, our time is over.  There will continue to be school concerts, softball and basketball games, graduation ceremonies, but we won’t be part of them.  Kids will still be kids, and parents will still be parents, but whatever role my wife and I played in this cycle is just about complete, and at some point our children will become parents, and it will be their time.

This morning, I ran to the grocery store to pick up a few items, when I ran into the mother of one of the children I used to coach in recreation league softball.   It was the first time I had seen her in years.   Her husband, who used to occasionally help me out with coaching duties, died unexpectedly a few years ago.    Their son Jimmy was one of my all time favorite kids, sweet and funny, a good player, always respectful and courteous and well mannered, always with a beaming smile on his face.  When I talked to her in the super market aisle this morning, I expressed my condolences about the loss of her husband, and asked her how long it had been.   She said it was in 2006, nearly six years already, and I couldn’t believe it had been that long.  I asked how Jimmy was doing, and she said great, although she wished he could find a job.   She then asked me about my son, and I replied he’s doing well in college, that he is in his second senior year, to which she replied, he always was such a smart boy, and I said, just like a Father, if he was so damned smart he’d be out of school by now.

We said goodbye, and I continued on to the check-out and then drove home, thinking about her and her son and her late husband.   He was such a good guy, and his wife and son are such good people.    I can’t comprehend the depths of their loss, and I can’t comprehend what it would mean to be taken so soon.

Then I thought about the conclusion I had come to after the concert last night that our time is over, and I realized how wrong I was.   My wife and I will always be parents to our children; it’s just that the role changes, that’s all.   Children will always be children, and parents will always be parents, and if nothing else, as we go on, my job will be to make sure that this is understood.

Valentine Dream

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I am lost and alone in the grey dark, the wind blowing cold and hard.  The woods are deep and endless and unrecognizable.  Naked trees twist and turn.   Dead leaves cover the worn path.    The whole world is icy and frozen, and I can’t find my way home.

My doubts and fears walk beside me.  I can hear their voices.  I am weak, they say, I am a weak and pathetic fake.  I am not who I say I am.  I am a failure and a fraud.

But then in the impenetrable blackness I feel you against me, breathing in my arms.  I cannot see you, it is too dark, but my arms remember, they remember the soft smooth warmth of your skin, my fingers remember tracing your lips, my chest remembers the way your back fits against it like interlocking pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that rise and fall together to the rhythm of your sleeping breaths.  And the icy dream world dissolves and the voices go silent, because they know, whatever else I might or might not be, I am yours, and nothing else makes any sense or matters.

Him and Her

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(My thanks to Robin Rhodes, who hosted a wonderful workshop in tonight’s Kenosha Writer’s Guild meeting that gave me the prompt for the following little tidbit)

Even when we’re not lost, she wants to get the frigging map out.   Have I ever gotten us lost?  We’ve been married for over thirty years; you’d think she’d understand by now that my internal compass is pretty damned good.

He never stops to ask for directions, and he gets pissed off when I get the map out.  He always tells me that in over thirty years, he’s never gotten us lost, and that’s true.  But how can I tell him that he’s slipping, he’s not as sharp as he used to be?  Just the other day, he couldn’t remember Zach’s name, and all those years he was over here with Nick, all those years he coached their softball and basketball teams, it’s not like him to forget anything, let alone a name like that.

I try to be patient with her.   I know she’s been through a lot.  But come on – a map?  When we’re still on the interstate?   What is she afraid of?  What’s the worst that can happen?  We take a wrong turn?   We end up in a bad neighborhood?   We’re a couple of minutes late?   That didn’t seem to bother her when she had to have her coffee this morning.  I always try to tell her, leave room for contingency, it’s better to get there a few minutes early than late.  But nothing can break up her morning routine.   The world might be on fire, but it’ll have to wait until she’s had her morning coffee.

He’s so damn fragile.   I get tired of having to tiptoe around his feelings all the time.  I know that he’s in a rough spot.  He doesn’t want to admit he’s deteriorating.    He tries to hide it.  But I see it all the time.  Usually I don’t say anything, but it’s there.  It’s in the way he walks, the way he’s always crashing into walls and the look on his face when he hopes nobody notices.   It’s in his voice, and in the times I have to ask him to repeat himself.   It’s in the stuttering, the stammering, it’s in the soft and unintelligible syllables.

She knows how I hate being late.

We’ve been together for over thirty years now.   He still makes me laugh.   It hurts me to see what is happening to him.   But he is still a good man.  I still believe in him.  

Sometimes I suspect she is writing me off.  Like when I say something and it comes out garbled, and she’ll nod her head as if she heard me, as if she could understand me, because she gets tired of asking me to repeat myself.  And most of the time, when I get the nod, I’ll silently accept it, even though as a response a nod has no connection with what I was trying to say, and I’ll just let it go, because I know how frustrated she gets having to ask me to repeat myself.

We’ve built a world together, and it’s comfortable, it’s home. 

I guess it’s inevitable that she would look for signs of my decline.  Hell, I look for them, too.  But I think she’s looking a little bit too close.    If I trip over the shoes our daughter left in the middle of the living room, in her mind, I’ve lost my balance, and she accepts it as further evidence of my slide.

He can’t ask directions, he gets pissed off when I get the map out, because he doesn’t want to admit that he’s lost.  And he doesn’t want to admit he’s lost because he’s never been lost before, and he’s afraid of what that means, of what else he might have to admit.  But we’re all going downhill – after all, he is 53 years old. 

I look at her, and I see the same eyes, the same face that I’ve known, that I’ve loved, for more than 30 years now.   I look in the mirror and I see a bald guy with a big gut staring back.  But that bald guy in the mirror is still me, and I still have the same internal compass that all those years ago led me to her.

I don’t want to dwell on things.  He knows that no matter how bad things get, I’ll always be by his side.  I shouldn’t have to tell him this – the past thirty years speak for themselves.  

I guess when you get right down to it, the truth is, the real reason we haven’t gotten lost in all these years is that we’ve navigated the road together.   When we started out, neither one of us had any idea where this journey would take us.   But here we are, after all the twists and turns, the bumps and detours, still riding together, and as we coast down the darkening highways to our uncharted destination, if she thinks a map will help, who am I to question?

The Magic Football Helmet

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(To mark the occasion of the Super Bowl and to celebrate Aarron Rodgers being named NFL MVP,  I’m posting a piece I wrote couple of years ago during one of my sleep deprived nights)

In September, 2008, my fellow Wisconsinites and I were nervously facing the end of an era and the beginning of a great unknown:  after 16 seasons, Brett Favre would not be quarterbacking our beloved Green Bay Packers. The amount of angst and consternation caused by this simple fact cannot be overestimated – for example, my son Nick, the college journalist who was three years old the last time someone else took the field as starting quarterback for the Packers, wrote a column about how a close friend of his, upon hearing the news of Favre’s “final” “retirement” earlier that spring, had actually collapsed involuntarily to the ground.  This is utterly believable.  The connection between our state and the Packers is so strong it has an aura of religiosity around it.   People from other states, especially from more urban areas, see the cheese headed fanatics and their tail gates and beer and just don’t understand.  To Wisconsinites, the Packers are Wisconsin, or rather, what they wish Wisconsin is, or was – small town, simple, unsophisticated working class, genuine and true, somehow surviving and even prospering in the harsh reality of the modern urban world.   The Packers of Green Bay are the only small town franchise in all of major sports to still exist, and this exception in the day of modern superstar athletes and unimaginable salaries and media outlets is truly remarkable. 

Forty years earlier, in September of 1968, Packer fans were facing uncertainty with the departure of another icon.  Their great coach, Vince Lombardi, who had just  lead the team to their third consecutive league championship and fifth in seven years, as well as victory in the first two Super Bowls, had retired from coaching.  Although there was great concern in Packer country, no one at the time could know that this event would mark the beginning of a 29 year championship drought, filled with mediocrity and incompetence that would challenge the loyalties of even the most devoted Packer fans. 

In September of 1968, I was two months shy of my 10th birthday, but as young as I was, nobody who knew me would deny that I was already among the most devoted of the most devoted Packer fans.  I had caught the fever a year earlier, in that magical 1967 season that would be Lombardi’s last as coach in Green Bay and would culminate in my hero, Bart Starr, crossing the goal line with 13 seconds left in the greatest game ever played, the Ice Bowl, giving the Packers their still unmatched 3rd consecutive NFL championship. 

I’ve had a tendency over the years, once developing an interest in something, to throw myself completely and obsessively into it until I have established an indisputable level of expertise in it.  Prior to the Packers and football, when I was about seven, my first obsession was animals.  I loved going to the zoo and at some point determined I would know as much about as many animals as humanly possible.  I remember getting a book entitled “The Mammals”, put together by Desmond Morris (more famously the author of the book The Naked Ape).  It was a very thick book, and quite scholastic – it was in fact merely a catalog listing of every mammal known to man, with a black and white picture of the animal (usually some drab photo taken in a zoo somewhere) and a couple paragraphs describing where it was found, diet, habitat, etc.  I committed to memory virtually every animal in the book, from all the different apes and monkeys to the various Yaks of Asia. I could tell you the difference between even and odd toed ungulates, and that rabbits and hares were not rodents but rather lagomorphs.  Precocious? You bet I was.   What can be more obnoxious than a seven year old who is an expert at anything?  I remember one time we were at the Milwaukee Zoo, and as we approached a savannah display, a nearby Mother sweetly said to her toddler, “Oh, look at the deer!”   Mr.  Expert here laughed derisively out loud. 

“What’s so funny?” my Mom asked me. 

“That’s not a deer”, I said, barely able to contain myself, “that’s a kudu.”

“Oh, a kudu”, my Mom replied, as we turned the corner to the sign that said “Greater Upland Kudu.”  My Mom had never heard of a kudu before.

So it was in the same manner in 1967 that I threw myself into football, learning and watching and reading everything I could about the subject matter (baseball would follow the next summer).  I was a little kid, younger than all but one in my grade in school and thus smaller than most, so I wasn’t much at playing football.  But as a fan, I went from at the beginning of the season not even knowing what was going on on a punt (I thought they were trying to kick the ball thru the goalpost) to by the end of the season knowing the different pass defense schemes run by most of the NFL teams (Don Shula’s Baltimore Colts, for example, played primarily a zone defense, where the St.Louis Cardinals blitzed more than almost any other team, especially safety blitzes from their  great safety, Larry Wilson, while the Packers, with what I still think is the greatest secondary in the history of the game, played mostly simple man to man and rarely blitzed).  I watched every Packer game and any other NFL game that was televised (I despised the American Football League as a weak imposter and refused to watch its games).  My brother Mike had an APBA professional football game that he never let me play, but it did inspire me to ask for and receive on my ninth birthday the great board game, “Fran Tarkenton’s Pro Football”, which I played and played for hours at a time.  And best of all, for Christmas that year, I got a Green Bay Packers helmet.

If you’ve never believed in the mystical powers of magic, you never put that helmet on.  That helmet was imbued with Arabian genie-like powers.  You’ve heard the myth that when you put a sea shell to your ear, you can hear the roar of the ocean?  The first time and every time afterwards I put that loose fitting helmet on my small head, inside I would hear the roar of 50,000 fans  in Lambeau field.  I would wear that helmet all the time, and for a while, even take it to bed with me, to put back on first thing in the morning (although I never was able to figure out how to eat breakfast thru the face guard).

My roommate was my brother Don, almost five years older than me.  Don recognized early on the power of my imagination, and, as he is one of the most gifted story tellers I have ever known, was able to turn that imagination against me and plant mind numbingly horrifying visions in my head, visions of the dead woman in our closet, Madeline from “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Don had read Poe’s story and retold it to me, adding additional plot twists  and turns and a level of detail that would have made even good old Edgar Allan himself sleep with the lights on), sasquatches, dead Indians, escaped black panthers and rabid German shepherds on the prowl.  But when he wasn’t scaring the snot out of me, he was a pretty good older brother, and would let me follow him around everywhere, which I did just about every day.   He always included me when his friends were over, although being a little guy, there were usually special rules for me.  For example, our big thing would be playing war (Combat was our favorite television show at the time) with our toy rifles and grenades, and if you got the drop on someone and shot them (by making a shooting sound, like rat-a-tat-tat!), they’d have to feign getting hit and die a dramatic death right there in the yard, and stay down until one side or the other was completely vanquished –unless, of course, they were shot by me.  I was too little, and thus “didn’t count.”  I don’t know how many times when we were lining up to play I’d hear those dreaded words, “Dave’s on our team – but he doesn’t count.”  There was always a depressingly existential ring to those words that I’m only now beginning to understand.

My following Don around more often than not lead to great adventure and fun, but there were times I paid a cost.  One time a large group of us was playing army in Krause’s woods.  There was a part of the woods that was populated by a thick stand of young maple trees that provided a low ceiling of green leaves, allowing only splotches of sunlight to hit the mossy ground underneath.  I crept thru the brush and came upon Don in the middle of this patch.  Suddenly he let out a scream, his body writhing, his toy rifle extended in his arms up above his head.  “Good lord!” I thought, “My brother’s been hit!”   I did what any heroic little brother would do – I ran in, my toy rifle blazing, while at the same time Don ran out of the woods.  What I didn’t know but soon discovered was that it wasn’t an imaginary enemy machine gun nest Don had chanced upon – rather it was an all-too real hornet’s nest he had stepped in.  Don quickly ran out and away from the nest, leaving its entire aroused and angry population swarming in clouds that the heroic younger brother ran into just as their angry frenzy reached its fevered peak.  I think Don ended up with about nine stings; I on the other hand had in excess of thirty, my Mother putting lotion and gauze on each one.

In September of 1968, Don was just beginning high school, and I was entering fifth grade.  Don was now a big kid, and there would be no more war games, and soon he’d be meeting new friends, going to high school football games, spending more time away from the house.  But when he was home, he still let me follow him around, and he still made time for me – still scaring the crap out of me with his horror stories (which I of course secretly loved), but also taking the time to engage in my interests and obsessions. 

As the 1968 football season approached, I had brought the annual version of Street and Smith’s Pro Football yearbook, reading all of the predictions and memorizing all the starting lineups and statistics.  Then there was one magical page that had the entire 1968 NFL schedule printed on it.  I would read it and re-read it, charting out who I thought would win each game and keeping track of what the standings would be, often times while wearing my treasured Packers helmet.  And I remember one bright Saturday morning in early September Don and I heading out to our backyard, me with my helmet on my head and my Street and Smith’s 1968 yearbook in my hand, with the purpose of playing the entire 1968 NFL schedule.  How exactly do two kids play an entire NFL schedule?   Well, I’d call a play, Don would pitch me the ball, and I’d run with it, and he’d tackle me and announce how many yards I gained, and what the down and yardage was.  He’d adjust the quality of the tackling based upon which runner I was portraying – for example, if I was the big fullback Bill Brown of the Minnesota Vikings running up the middle, he’d let me run over him for a few extra yards, and if I was Gayle Sayers of the Bears, he might let me get around him on the outside for a big gainer.  On pass plays, Don was the quarterback, and I was the receiver.  We’d work patterns and developed pretty good timing – Don had a strong and accurate arm, and we spent enough hours together in the back yard that I perfected sharp cuts and fakes on my patterns, and as soon as I made my cut and looked back, a perfect spiral would be in the air for me to haul in.  I dare say I also developed pretty good hands, too.

We simulated entire games (though we never got through the entire schedule, of course), and they were as real as anything on CBS or NBC on Sundays.  I’d tell him the strengths and weaknesses of each player, and Don would make dramatic tackles and relay descriptive accounts of what happened on each play.  There under the warm blue September sky, falling to the soft grass with a football in my hands in the tackling arms of my brother and with the roar of the stadium echoing inside that Packer helmet, nothing else existed, nothing else mattered, but the sheer bliss and joy of a living, waking dream, a dream that was realized thanks to the heart and mind of who at times like this was the greatest older brother any goofy, undersized, helmet wearing little brother could ever possibly hope for.

That was more than 40 years ago.  In the past ten years or so, for reasons too complex I think for either of us to fully understand, our relationship has disintegrated.  But however great the space is between us now, and however unlikely it seems that it will ever be bridged, nothing can or ever will happen to change the fact that once upon a time, when I was small, my brother’s generosity and imagination provided fuel to my dreams, fuel I continue to draw upon to this day.  For that, I owe him my sincere thanks and best wishes.

Time and distance are incredibly corrosive forces, dimming and distorting the half light we view memories in.   Each of us twists and manipulates events until they are consistent with and support our current view of the world.  We all do it – it is part of how we make sense of things, how we rationalize the universe to fit who we have become, or more accurately, who we want to believe we have become.   But in the process we lose track of who we were, and we can never really understand who we have become without the knowledge of who we used to be. Whatever I am or to be, I know that when I was small, I was the little kid with the football helmet who followed his brother around all the time.

 

Snow Day

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It had started snowing late the night before, and it continued through the Saturday morning, ending just about noon.   All told we got about three inches of the stuff.   I was 23 years old, and we were living in the upstairs apartment on 18th Avenue at the time, and we had nothing to do and nowhere to go for the rest of the weekend.

Shortly after noon, after it stopped snowing, I put on the old army fatigue jacket that Jack Anderson had given me about three years earlier, a stocking cap, a pair of gloves and my rubber boots.  On the back landing, just outside of the entrance to our apartment, I grabbed the little metal snow shovel and began clearing off the steps of the stairway.   It was cold but not too cold, probably in the low twenties.  It felt warmer when the clouds moved out and were replaced by the bright January sun.  The snow was light and powdery, and I felt good as I moved to the bottom of the steps.

Next, I cleared the little gravel driveway we shared with the woman who rented the downstairs apartment.  Once I had finished that, I started on the sidewalk in front of the house.  Compared to the rutted gravel of the driveway, the sidewalk was a breeze, and I was able to quickly get to the end of the property line.  The house the apartment was in bordered a vacant lot that was the corner of 18th Avenue and 45th street.   I had been outside only a few minutes and had cleared the back steps, the driveway and the sidewalk in front of our house.  I felt good and had nothing else to do, so I figured, what the Hell, I may as well keep going.

I cleared the sidewalk to 45th street, then, heading east, I cleared the 45th  street side of the corner lot.  When that was done, I found myself in front of another old, two story house, with sidewalks and a driveway hadn’t been cleared yet.  I felt good, and I didn’t want to stop, so I kept going, and started on the sidewalk in front of the house.  About halfway thru, the front door opened.  An old, frail man I had never seen before  stood in the doorway.

“Thank you”, he said.

“Don’t mention it”, I replied.

“Would you mind doing my driveway, too?”

“Sure, no problem”, I said, quickly surveying the short, cement two care driveway.  With the snow this powdery and light, I figured I could knock it off in a few minutes.

“Thank you so much”, he said, and went back inside.

I quickly finished the sidewalk in front of his house, and it didn’t take me long to do his driveway.  Every now and then I’d glance to the window, and each time he was standing there, stooped over, watching me

I finished the driveway and turned my attention to the short cement walkway that ran from the sidewalk to his front porch.  I made quick work of it and just as I was finishing up, the front door opened again. My guess was that he was going to offer me a few bucks for my work.

“Thank you again,” he said.  “When you finish up, why don’t you come inside for a few minutes”

I nodded my head and he closed the door.  It was only a couple of more minutes when I finished.  Standing on the steps to the front door, I was just about to knock when it opened.

“Come on in, come on in.”  I stepped in, and he took my coat and I took off my boots.  He motioned for me to sit in a chair in his living room. Then he went to the kitchen.  He came back with two glasses filled with a golden brown liquid. 

“Cold out there, huh?”, he said, handing me a glass.

“Not too bad”, I said.

“Well, drink some of this, this’ll warm you up.”  He sat in a chair across from me.  It was warm and very good.  I was able to recognize it as brandy. 

We sat there in the warmth of his living room, surrounded by framed photos of what I assumed to be children and grand children and great grand children.  The room looked like it belonged to a bygone era.  We talked about the cold, we talked about his health – there was something wrong with his lungs that made breathing cold air difficult – but mostly he talked about brandy and how whatever kind it was that we were drinking was top of the line stuff.  When the first glass was finished, he bought me a second glass, this one of a different, more famous make of brandy, and he explained to me why the second one was inferior to the first.  I didn’t know anything about any of that; I just knew they were both warm and good. 

We sat and drank brandy and talked for about a half an hour.  After I had finished the second glass, he offered me a third, which I politely declined, saying if I drank any more I might not be able to find my way around the corner to home.  I got up and put my boots and coat on, and as he thanked me again, I took one last look at his living room.  It was so warm and comfortable.  There has always been something sacred, something even holy, about people’s living rooms, especially the ones belonging to strangers who invite you in.

It was about 3:00 when I left and started back for home, feeling a little bit of a buzz from the brandy and a contented ache in my bones from the work and the cold air.  The sun was still out but lowering in the west.  I grabbed my shovel and walked back home.  I was 23 years old, and the future lay out before me like an undisturbed coat of fresh snow on an endless city sidewalk, waiting to be uncovered.

Parkinson’s and Grief vs. Self Pity

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“Grief is a process where nothing remains the same, even the big stuff, and none of it, sadly, fits back inside that old, comfortable box.”   – Peg Rousar-Thompson

 A few years ago, fearing that I may be suffering from the depression that is common with Parkinson’s disease, I went to a therapist for a brief time.   This was about the same time I had started to write, as a way to fill the hours I suddenly found myself awake for in the middle of the night.  After a few sessions, the therapist and I agreed that I wasn’t depressed.  If anything, I may have been suffering a slight case of anxiety, and by writing I was probably already engaged in the most effective therapy.

Our time together was extremely helpful anyway, if only for a very revealing exchange early in the first session.  I was trying to explain what I was going thru, when I said “I don’t want to sound like I’m feeling sorry for myself, but …”

She stopped me in mid-sentence.  “Why don’t you want to feel sorry for yourself?”

I stuttered and stammered, when she said, “Why wouldn’t you feel sorry for yourself?  You’ve got Parkinson’s disease.”

I was stunned.   It’s not that I hadn’t felt sorry for myself before; I had, plenty of times.   After all, I was only in my mid 40s when I received my sentence, my diagnosis.  It’s just that it hadn’t occurred to me it was okay to feel sorry for myself.   I think this was when I started to understand the difference between grief and self-pity.

They say then that one of the first things people go through after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s is a period of grieving, or mourning.  I think this is common for the diagnosis of any chronic disease.  Suddenly you are flawed, and the image you held of your future self is dead.  With a sentence of Parkinson’s comes the awareness that things are going to be different now, and that the days still left will be days of diminishment and loss.  It’s only natural to grieve for these losses.

There are also the expectations of how one is supposed to behave under these circumstances.  To understand these, one only needs to stand in the line at the supermarket and read the headlines of the National Enquirer.

One of the stories the Enquirer has been most successful with over the years has been the famous celebrity stricken with a terminal disease.  The story always follows a similar arch – how tragedy strikes when least expected, often times just as the celebrity has finally found some peace in their life, then on to the courageous and inspirational struggle, complete with some short-lived triumphs, followed by the shocking photos of how the once-beautiful icon we all remember has decayed once that struggle goes south, through to the brave final days, followed by death and memorial.  These stories are as sadly predictable as they are inevitably true –whether it’s Patrick Swayze, Christopher Reeve or all the way back to John Wayne.

The reason these stories sell so well is the meaning we derive from them.  It’s the same story that we see played out amongst those we’ve loved and lost.  Whenever someone close to us is sentenced to a prognosis of a terminal or incurable disease, we react the same way the Enquirer acts – we rail against the senselessness of it all and then take inspiration from their “brave” fight or their “positive attitude”.   It’s all a part of our attempts to find some meaning, to make some sense out of what appears to be evidence of the chaotic randomness and fundamental meanness of existence.  It’s the same reaction to the awareness of our own mortality that drives us to the belief in an afterlife and the creation of personalized images of Heaven.

Then comes the time when this “senseless” and “tragic” fate becomes our own life sentence.  Having seen this story play itself out countless times before, it informs the expectations we have of ourselves, and also the expectations of those around us. It doesn’t take long to realize what a burden these expectations add.  And, if we stop and think about it honestly, we’re surprised to admit how much importance we place on how we are perceived by others.

In the first days after being diagnosed, I promised myself I’d approach my newly defined fate with courage and dignity, resist the urge to ask myself “why me”, maintain a good attitude, and make the best of my remaining good time.  This sounds great, but in reality, I was a wreck, completely overwhelmed by and obsessed with my condition.  I anguished and brooded over the appearance of every slight symptom, such as the subtle and constant presence of a small amount of saliva inside my right cheek, attaching levels of importance to them that now seem laughable.   But the zenith of my self-absorption was reached when I realized how impatient I had become to having to listen to the seemingly insignificant problems of friends and co-workers.  As I half listened to them, I found myself thinking so you’re going through a divorce – it could be worse, you could have Parkinson’s – so you have advanced Rheumatoid Arthritis – at least you don’t have Parkinson’s like me.  I finally listened objectively to myself and realized what a pathetic self pitying ass I had become.  First, it was so early in my diagnosis that the disease was little more than a minor annoyance, and second, I realized that just because of my so-called personal “tragedy” that the rest of the world didn’t stop, and there were still real people out there with real problems, living real lives.  This may sound painfully obvious, but it came to me as a major epiphany, and jolted me at least partially out of my dark clouds of self-absorption.  Unfortunately, I landed in the even darker and more dangerous clouds of denial. 

This denial was manifested in my approach to work.  I found myself in charge of a large project that wasn’t going well, and, in fact, needed to be halted and re-evaluated.  But I was going to be damned if I let that happen, and, despite having an hour long commute at the time, I was the first of my team in the office in the morning and the last to leave at night.  I invested so much of my time and energy that when things didn’t go well, which they most frequently didn’t, I’d find myself awake at 2:00 AM on my laptop working until 4:00 A.M.   This was at the same time I was early in my diagnosis and my neurologist was attempting to determine the right mix of medications. The primary drug in the early stages is any one of a variety of dopamine agonists, drugs that are intended to trick the brain’s dopamine receptors into thinking they are still receiving signals even though Parkinson’s has destroyed the transmission.  These drugs can have significant side effects, and only through trial and error can the right dosage of the right medication be determined.  Chief among the many potential side effects of dopamine agonists are sudden and frequent attacks of daytime drowsiness, and feelings of dizziness and nausea.  I remember on several occasions, shortly after taking my morning dosage of Mirapex, the first dopamine agonist subscribed for me, shutting the door to my office and putting my head down on my desk and closing my eyes, waiting for the room to stop spinning.   This plus the daytime drowsiness that was already evident by short nights of sleep and an hour long commute made for a bad time to be in denial.  

Then came the inevitable moment that the project, despite my best efforts, reached what in hindsight was the only logical conclusion it could have reached:  it was cancelled.  My reaction was devastation and depression, and, after a couple of weeks when I was finally able to put some distance between the project and myself, I realized was about more than just the project’s cancellation.  I realized that all the work, all the stress, all the obsessive attention I paid to it were ways of not thinking about Parkinson’s, and I realized that not only was I in danger of working myself to an exhaustion that had no possible good ending, I was also spending months of valuable time obsessing over something I had no control of – as a means of not obsessing over something else I had no control over, that being Parkinson’s.

So if self pity was turning me into an unfeeling and insensitive ass, and denial was threatening to kill me, some kind of balance needed to be reached.  This is where the therapist helped me, and when I think I started to understand the difference between self pity and grief.

Grief, I think, is a natural and healthy response to loss.  It is the questioning of how and why, and even when the answers that come may not be satisfying, maybe aren’t what we want to hear, it is a necessary component of finding the truths buried within our losses.

Pain is a byproduct of loss, and self pity is a natural response to temporarily dull the anguish it causes.   But wallowing too long in self pity is to treat the symptom but not the disease.

When I started writing, I understood none of this.  I was just trying to find my way through the darkness of those sleep deprived nights.  I still don’t understand much about pain and loss and grief and self pity except, I think, that each are naturally occurring phenomenon and need to be dealt with.  I now understand that writing was and is, for better or worse, my way of dealing with these things, and, it turns out, of dealing with just about everything else.  I now find myself compelled to write, usually without understanding why or what the Hell I am trying to accomplish.

Writing has at least provided me with a mechanism for framing some of the questions – whether I eventually stumble upon any answers remains to be seen.  I make no claims about the quality of my writing and have no illusions about uncovering any profound truths – heck, half the time I am challenged to put even one coherent sentence together – all I know is that, for now, at least, this is what I do.

Happy Deep Brain Day

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Getting nothing but static/Getting nothing but static/Static in my attic                                                                       – The B-52s                                          

This past Saturday marked the two year anniversary of the most surreal event I have ever experienced – the implementation of electrodes in my brain in part one of the procedure known as Deep Brain Stimulation, to treat many of the symptoms of my instance of Parkinson’s Disease.

Two years later, I have a better understanding of what DBS has and hasn’t done for me.  First and foremost, it has been a wonderful blessing, smoothing out many of the peaks and valleys that were, prior to the surgery, becoming more and more debilitating.   I sleep better and longer at night.

There have been some side effects from the procedure, and some symptoms of the disease that it is apparently unable to address.  The side effects include impacts to my speech and my handwriting.  Frequent and severe and sudden episodes of daytime fatigue still hit me, and I have to be careful if I am driving. Stress exacerbates other symptoms, including tremors that make working a computer keyboard or mouse temporarily impossible.  Because of these symptoms, primarily the fatigue (and repeated episodes of falling asleep in my office and behind the wheel on the drive home), I no longer work.

But make no mistake about it – the DBS has been a success, and I would recommend it to anyone in a similar state.  If it wasn’t for the improvements DBS gave me, I would have stopped working well over a year before I did, and I’d be unable to do the things that give me great joy now, especially writing.

So to mark the occasion, I went back and looked through journal entries and notes I have written over the past two years about my DBS experience.   Here are some excerpts:

Thursday, January 14, 2010:  I wake up and I am half sitting up in my hospital bed in a large room.  The heavy metallic frame that was screwed into my head earlier in the morning has been attached and locked into some larger metal base that I can’t see.    I can hear the usual blips and beeps of hospital equipment, plus a low hum of static.  It’s chilly in here, and there are people in scrubs milling about.  One of them notices I am awake, and the next thing I know my neurosurgeon, Dr. R., is in front of me, and he tells me the static I hear is in fact my brain talking, the impulses it creates converted to audio, and that they’ll be listening to it and talking to me as they prepare to install the first set of electrodes..  The fact that my brain waves sound like static is somehow not surprising to me.

 …   I wonder, as they are poking around in my brain, if they see anything that surprises them.  I have had dreams where they open my brain to find, undetected by the MRI and CAT scans, discolored sections that are rotting and stinking with gangrene, or that large populations of maggots or insect larvae are happily thriving up there, having eaten away a good chunk of my grey matter.   The thought of scientists poking around in my brain and finding the secrets locked inside is intimidating enough – what if, behind that curtain, they have a television screen that is hooked up to my sub conscious to display what is stored there?  What if they could see all the women I had secretly lusted for over the years, or those dark secrets I had hidden from the world, like the time when I was a kid and ate the last of the package of Oreo cookies, only to blame it on my little sister?   What if they poked around up there and realized that this brain, substandard and inadequate, isn’t worth the effort?

 …  Every Parkinson’s patient is familiar with the concept of “on” and “off” periods.   “On” periods are the times when the medications are working and symptoms are minimized, “off” periods are the times when the medications have either worn off or haven’t kicked in yet, periods of time when the symptoms are most exacerbated.  The primary medication for PD patients is some form of Sinemet, or a combination of carbidopa and levodopa.  For me, at the time of the DBS surgery, I was taking a 200 milligram dosage of Stalevo (a dosage of 50 milligrams of carbidopa  and 200 milligrams of levodopa  and 200 milligrams of entacapone) every three hours, with the “off period” beginning about 45 minutes before I’d  take it and lasting until about 45 minutes after, meaning that for every three hours, close to an hour and a half, or 50% of the day, was spent in varying degrees of being “off”.  These periods would usually announce their beginning with a very slight tingling in my toes, followed by the rigidity that would slowly spread until it inhabited every inch of my body.  By the time of the surgery, at the peak of these off periods, on the worst days, the resulting discomfort would become unbearable.   Even at its peak, my rigidity isn’t the sharp and agonizing pain that people with Rheumatoid Arthritis, for example, feel; rather it’s an all encompassing discomfort from which there is no escape.  It feels like what I imagine rigor mortis would feel like, like you are turning to stone, like you are being converted to a living statue of yourself.  The natural reaction to this discomfort is to seek a position that will ease it, by either sitting or lying down or shifting your weight one way or another but you soon realize these attempts are futile, and all you can do is take your pills and wait for them to kick in.  For me, it got to a point at work where, at the time of the surgery, I’d wander from my downstairs office upstairs to the nurse’s station and lay down on her bed in the back, not because it made me more comfortable but because I was out of view of the public there and could shuffle and squirm in privacy until the pills started to kick in.  At the time of the surgery, I was hitting the nurse’s station two or three times a week.

…   During these rigid off periods, when walking, my gait would become a slow and unbalanced shuffle.   During my on periods, I walked pretty normally.  I wondered with some amusement what those workers in other departments, who didn’t know me or my condition, would wonder when I would shuffle past and then, an hour or two later, walk by normally.  “He must be hitting the bottle again”, I imagined them saying to each other. 

 …   November was spent making sure everything healed from the salivary gland surgery, and in December I started testing so the DBS could proceed in January.   I had consults with my neurosurgeon, the extremely likable Dr. R.  He has a great sense of humor and comes across as a regular guy, someone I’d enjoy having a beer with at some neighborhood tavern.  Of course, the guys I usually have a beer with are the last guys I would want operating on my brain.  He is a transplanted New Yorker and an avid sports fan.   The morning of my surgery, he came in my room and visited me, and Sports Center was on the television.  With the impending procedure just a couple of hours away, we briefly talked football and baseball, about the (football) Giants and the Yankees, just like we did the night before when he stopped in my room and checked on me.  I remember thinking, this guy is just like me; we have a lot in common, and on some level found this to be disturbing.  My preconception of a brain surgeon was some genius scientist whose own brain was filled with too much brilliance and eccentricity to have time for such trivial pursuits as sports.  I know the limited capacity of my brain is overflowing with stats and figures and opinions related to batting averages, earned run averages and completion percentages to the degree that I can’t remember to take the garbage out, let alone differentiate between the basal ganglia and the substantia nigra.  The night before the surgery, as he left my room, I suggested that he spend the night in a Holiday Inn Express.  He laughed, which I found disappointing, meaning he was familiar with the television commercials I was referencing.  Truth be told, he’s a good guy, and I felt comfortable and at ease with the idea of him poking around my brain.

 … The night before, after Dr R left, I took the last of my allowed dosage of meds at 9:00 and quickly fell asleep.  As usual, my meds wore off after about three hours and I woke up around midnight.  This was the time I’d normally take my nighttime Sinemet tablets, dissolvable and quick acting, and eventually fall back asleep.  However, for the surgery, it was required for my system to be clean of meds, so there would be no nighttime tablets.  I was unable to fall back to sleep and spent a very rough night awake and uncomfortable with nothing to do but watch television and twist and turn in my hospital bed for six and a half hours, and wonder and worry about the next day’s proceedings.   Prior to the salivary gland operation, the only operation I had ever had was minor surgery for a torn meniscus on my right knee.  I remembered that before they put me out, someone took a black sharpie and marked a big “X” on my right knee, so they didn’t operate on the wrong one.  I wondered if, in preparation for to the DBS surgery, they would put a big “X” on the top of my skull, as over the years the precise location of my brain has been an object of frequent speculation, with some convinced it was located somewhere on my backside, and others certain that I did most of my thinking with another, more private part of my anatomy.

 The big day began promptly and on schedule at 6:30 A.M. this morning.  The first step was to have Dr R.’s team of residents admit me and shave the parts of my head that were not already bald in preparation for the surgery (suffice to say at this point in time they were ahead of schedule).   Next was the installation of the metal frame, which I had understood to be like mounting a large vice grip to my head.   They brought the device out and it looked exactly like I expected it to look, and they plopped it on my head, with one of the residents leveling it, and another marking spots in my forehead and in the back of my head to clamp it on.  It is at this point we must pause to reflect on how far modern medicine has advanced, and the many miracles that have been achieved by technological and scientific advances, making most procedures as painless and sensitive to the patient’s experience as possible.   This procedure unfortunately is not to be included in that category, as the device and the technique to install the frame apparently remains unchanged from when first introduced by the either the Marquis de Sade or the grand inquisitor.  It begins with them prepping the areas with a shot of Novocain – and, just like when you go to the dentist, you are left wondering if the shots of Novocain are actually more painful than the resulting procedure would be, as it involved a resident sticking a needle into four points in my skull and shooting the Novocain in.  Then they put the frame back on (which was heavier than I had anticipated) and it was time to clamp the device to the head.  Just like a vice grip, as one resident held the frame in place, another began screwing the clamps in until they were to meet the points where the Novocain had been injected.  It didn’t take me long to realize that these weren’t the type of clamps I used in my workshop when doing wood working projects, what the resident was screwing in were actually spikes that would penetrate skin and skull – I know this because not only could I feel them penetrating my cranium, I could also hear the sound of skin tearing and skull breaking – and as the first one was installed, I hunkered down thinking, only three more to go, by the time they get to the other spots, the Novocain will surely have kicked in more – take comfort in the fact that the brain is capable of these rationalizations, just don’t expect them to be true – each of the four spikes was in fact more painful than the others. 

Then they wheeled me down the hall for one last CAT scan, where they lifted me off of my bed onto another bed that had more metal attached to it.  They positioned my head so that the metal frame latched in with the frame on the other bed (it loudly clicked and locked into place), then wheeled me back to a waiting room, where, with the frame now firmly attached, I was allowed to visit with my wife and the anesthesiologist, who explained to me how they would be putting me out and bringing me back during the day’s events, which would likely last until 3:30 or 4:30 PM  (it was just after 7:00 now).   While I was having these conversations, Dr. R. and his team were looking at results of the CAT scan and a brain MRI that had been taken five days earlier and planning out the procedure, figuring out where to open my head up and install the electrodes that would act as receptors for the neurotransmitters that would be installed later.  Then they were ready and began rolling me to the operating room, asking me to count backwards from 100 or say the alphabet backwards or recite the Gettysburg Address backwards or whatever they asked, I don’t recall, as I was already out. 

Next thing I know I’m awake in the operating room, listening to the static my brain is broadcasting as Dr R. and his guest star neurosurgeon complete the task of installing and testing the electrode and associated leads in the right side of my brain.  This goes on for a couple of hours, and as I sit there awake and the anesthesia gradually wears off, I become aware of the pain in my head, which is becoming more and more unbearable.   At some point I actually start moaning.  “Almost done, bear with us”, Dr. R. promises several times, and when he finally tells me that he is done with the first side and they start putting me under again, I am happier than ever before.  

Then I am awake again.  They are ready to do the other side.  Now I know what I’m in for, and the novelty of being awake while someone is poking around in my brain has worn off.  I’m thinking there is no way I can go through this again.   The pain is there almost from the start.  Fortunately, and to the pleasant surprise of even Dr. R., they are able to very quickly isolate and find the second spot and implement the electrode, and when they put me out for the last time, it’s 1:30 in the afternoon.   I’m about two hours ahead of schedule.

I wake up a couple of hours later in ICU, where my wife is waiting for me.   I proceed to spend a long night in ICU drifting in and out, but by Friday morning I have most of my wits about me.  Aside from the incredible pain in my head, I feel pretty good.  My head is bandaged up so that I look like, as Dr. R. describes, a “human q-tip”.  By Friday afternoon the pain in my head quickly subsides to the point that I stop taking pain medication.  Late Friday I’m moved out of ICU back to my regular room.        

Saturday morning they remove my bandages.  I’m startled by the size of the scars and the number of staples in my head.  By 1:00 I’m free to go, resting comfortably in the front seat of my Prius as my wife navigates the hour and a half trip to our home in Pleasant Praire, Wisconsin.

DBS Part one is complete, and I now have two electrodes implanted in my head.  Two weeks from now, in DBS II, the sequel (“just when you thought it was safe enough to go back in your brain”), they will run the wires under the skin down to a point in my chest, where they will install the neurotransmitter that will eventually send the signals to my brain that will drown out the noise created by Parkinson’s Disease and minimize if not eliminate my symptoms for some period to come.  I am sore, but I am optimistic and eager to reap the benefits of this surrealistic experience.

List O Mania: Movies of the 1950s

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The 1950s were a conflicted and confused time in our history.  Having vanquished evil at its most powerful in World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s greatest military and economic super power.    While most of the world was rebuilding, we were flourishing, producing goods for the world and fueling the long awaited post depression prosperity that for the better part of 20 years had been longed for.  Great value was placed on the “modern” material conveniences that we couldn’t afford in the depression and war years.

We may have been experiencing peace and prosperity, but underneath it all was the uneasiness of the cold war and living in the atomic age.   Mass culture at the time emphasized conformity and blandness, and was supported by the paranoia evidenced by the McCarthy hearings and the term, “un-American.” (which , if you really think about it, is in itself just about the most “un-American” term).  The threats of communism and the cold war resonated with the public, who had grown up in times of sacrifice and belt tightening, and naturally felt uneasy with the new found prosperity.  The result was a mass culture that comforted and reassured people, with music by the likes of Perry Como and Mitch Miller being popular.

The emphasis on blandness and conformity, of course, lead to rebellion in nearly all of the arts.  It’s no accident that rock and roll, which has always had at its core themes of rebellion and sex, became immensely popular.  In literature, Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs were leading the “beat generation” to places American literature hadn’t gone before, while novelists like Norman Mailer and James Jones were churning out gritty and authentic accounts of their experiences in World War Two and its aftermath.  In theatre, playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were producing their greatest works, and the Lee Strasberg Actor’s Studio revolutionized the art of stage and film acting.

Hollywood, still under strict control of the production code, was especially impacted by McCarthyism, with Joe McCarthy’s famous list of supposed communist sympathizers leading to the House Un American Activities Commission subpoenas and black-listings.   As a result, the output from Hollywood was more cautious and conservative than ever before, and more bland and boring.   Hollywood instead focused on technological advances such as Cinema Scope and VistaVIsion and advances in Technicolor as reasons to put people in the seats.  Big budget Bible pictures (The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, The Robe) with their casts of thousands and wide panoramas were presented as showcases for these new technologies, and they were politically safe.  The western remained the most popular genre.

New fears  about the atomic bomb and threats from the cold war lead to an abundance of bad, low-budget science fiction films – these films were cheaply and quickly made and prayed upon the public’s fears of radiation, with mutant monsters like The Blob and The Thing and The Creature of the Black Lagoon becoming immensely popular.   A few of them, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, tapped into the underlying paranoia of the times.

Rock and roll fueled teenage rebellion, which fueled fears of gangs of teenagers run amok, which fueled a new teenage rebellion sub-genre, with films like The Wild One (with a great Marlon Brando performance)and The Blackboard Jungle scaring the snot out of parents everywhere.  There were also attempts to sympathetically portray the teenage rebel as a misunderstood victim of the stagnating culture, such as Nicholas Ray’s expressionistic Rebel Without  a Cause, with the great James Dean, in which the adults were portrayed as so physically and morally weak that they were worthy only of contempt.

As the 50s went on, it seemed that popular culture was about to pass Hollywood by.   Things were moving fast in music and literature, and Hollywood, bogged down by the production code, its investments in technology, the studio system and its inherent conservatism, seemed unable to keep up with the times and often times came across as anachronistic.  Where rock and roll, for example, was dealing directly and bluntly with sexuality, Hollywood was forced to use the same euphemistic language it had been using for the past thirty years.  Even the greatest of Hollywood’s directors had to play these games – for example, Orson Welles could only get the brilliant Touch of Evil made by agreeing to cast Charlton Heston (!) in the lead role of a Hispanic detective.  John Ford’s western masterpiece The Searchers attempts to deal with serious issues of racism and frontier justice, yet he is only able to imply and insinuate many of the specifics.  Alfred Hitchcock made some of his most personal films dealing with his own confused sexuality (Rear Window and Vertigo), but had to rely upon heavy handed symbols to represent his own obsessions.

It’s no accident then that some of the best movies of the decade were made overseas.  While Hollywood was struggling to keep up, European cinema was experiencing a renaissance, with Bergman and Fellini at the peak of their powers, and the French new wave auteur movement introducing such giants as Godard and Truffaut.

Here then is my list of favorite films of the 1950s:

14.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegel

13.   Bad Day at Black Rock (1955),  J. Sturges

12.  Shane (1953), Stevens

11.  Night of the Hunter (1955), Laughton

10.  Sunset Boulevard (1950), Wilder

9.  Touch of Evil (1958), Welles

8.  Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock

7.   An Outcast of the Islands (1952), Reed

6.  The Quiet Man (1951), Ford

5.  The 400 Blows (1959), Truffaut

4.  The Searchers (1956), Ford

3.  A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Kazan

2.  The Seventh Seal  (1957), Bergman

1.  La Strada (1954), Fellini

Lonely are the Free *

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(* – Note:  The title is taken from a great Steve Earle song I just discovered – somehow it seems to fit)

Six years is a big difference when you’re only seven years old.  It’s an eternity, it’s a lifetime, it’s the world lived and experienced and known.

I remember the time my second grade teacher, Miss B., at the end of her rope, was disciplining me, had me out in the hallway, holding me firmly by my shoulders and pushing me up against the lockers, yelling something at me, when I saw, at the end of the hallway, you and your eighth grade class heading out to somewhere.  I couldn’t conceal my glee at seeing you, my big brother, which only added to Miss B.’s frustration.

Then it’s four years later, a warm spring night.  The front door opens and you walk in, dressed in a suit and tie, with a pretty girl in a pretty dress.  You introduce her to us, she is the preacher’s daughter, and she laughs, and you laugh at some stupid thing I say, but your laugh and your smile are so warm and real, and I know you are responding not just to what I said but rather the accumulation and the entirety of our time as big brother and little brother.  You are still six years older than me, and with girls and proms and suits and ties you are running interference for me, leading the way down life’s long and winding trail.

Nights later that summer you and your friends are in the basement.  From the living room upstairs I can hear the thumping bass of the music, usually the Doors, and I can hear pool balls crashing into each other and the deep laughter of you and your friends in voices that no longer belong to boys.  And I long to be down there, to be welcomed in the company of men, and I creep down the stairs, and you in your anger that was always so imposing bluntly make it clear I am not welcome, that I am not ready for this part of the journey yet.

Then a couple of years later you are in the army, home on leave after basic training, your hair razor short.  We pick you up at the airport, where you flew in from Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, which to me feels like it is on the other side of the world.  Then a couple of weeks later, Mom and Dad take you back to the airport, where you’ll head out first to Fort Dix, New Jersey, then on to Germany, which really is on the other side of the world.  By the time you get out, I am almost 16, but you are still six years older than me.  Still the big brother, you still lead the way, the trail now taking you across oceans.

Then you are home again, and we share a room.  At first it is great, I tease you and we joke around constantly, we wrestle, and you make me laugh like I haven’t laughed before, and I make you laugh.   You teach me about music and books and movies.  But eventually things change, and we start to fight.  I am 17, 18 years old now, and you are still six years older than me, but I don’t understand you anymore, and I no longer recognize the path you are taking as one that I want to follow.

I remember one night in our shared room, when we weren’t getting along very well.  I came to bed late, and you were already lying in your bed, and the light came through the window, and I saw that you were still awake.  It was only for a moment, but in your eyes I saw something I had never seen before.  I saw vulnerability and maybe a trace of despair.  For a few minutes before I fell asleep, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe you didn’t know any more about getting along in this big and frightening world than I did, and that we shared not just the same blood but maybe the same doubts.  But that spark of recognition was quickly put out by my own cold and damp inaction.

Flash forward about twenty years and you are living in the small house on the dirt road in Northern Wisconsin.  It’s a warm and overcast summer day.  You and I are sitting at the picnic table outside your house, and we are talking about the Packers and baseball and philosophy.  You are explaining string theory or chaos theory to me, and I am trying hard to keep up.  I ask questions and you answer very patiently, and you let me know when I’ve asked a good question, when I’m getting it, and I feel so proud that I am almost keeping up with you.   After a while, I have to leave, return to my wife and children, who are waiting for me to take them swimming.

It’d be a few years later, on a Friday afternoon, when I’d get the news that you are gone.  There was and is so much I felt and so much I didn’t and never will understand.   But tonight it occurs to me that you are still out there and still my big brother, and it occurs to me that I’m still following the trail that you were always blazing for me.  The only thing is that now I realize how lonely it had to be for you at the front of that trail, and I cannot comprehend the emptiness you found at its end.  For all those years, for all the light you shone on my path, I remained blind to your darkness and pain.

I continue my journey, the trail marked by dark stains from tears of regret.   I can only hope that someday, when I catch up to you, I can thank you for all you gave me, and shine enough light to make you see what a beautiful soul you have always been.

 

List O Mania: Movies (Part Two)

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In my last list of favorite movies, I claimed to be quite the film buff, and that I’ve made a whole bunch of lists related to movies.  In case you didn’t believe me, here is further evidence of my movie geekiness.   I have, for some strange reason, made lists of my favorite films by decade. Today I present my lists for the 1930s and 1940s.  The number of movies listed is arbitrary – there are 13 in the 1930s for example because these are movies I love and that seem important enough to mention.

So here goes:

My Favorite Movies – 1930s

13.  The Wizard of Oz (1939), directed by Victor Fleming   

12.  Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Whale

11.  King Kong (1933), Cooper

10.  Wuthering Heights (1938), Wyler

9.  Freaks (1933), Browning

8.  Stagecoach (1936), Ford

7.  A Night at the Opera (1936), Wood

6.  Bringing Up Baby (1936), Hawks

5.  All Quiet on the Western Front (1931), Milestone

4.  Modern Times (1936), Chaplin

3.  M (1931), Lang

2.  The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Ford

1.  Duck Soup (1933), McCarey

Before there was the rating system (G, PG, R, X, etc), there was the Production Code.  Established in 1930, it began to be enforced in 1934, and imposed a strict set of rules and morality that Hollywood had to obey.  These rules had a profound impact on films for the next 30 years, forcing directors and screenwriters to address sexuality and violence in largely symbolic terms.   It wasn’t just sex, it was general morality – the language that was allowed to be spoken, and images that suggested crime did pay or cast the government in a bad light were censored.  This plus the fact that the country was in the throes of the great depression lead to an abundance of escapist films, with an abundance of extravagant musicals (which I could never get into) and “screwball” comedies (which I grew to love) – fast paced and silly movies (examples – Bringing up Baby, His Girl Friday) often involving upper crust members of high society being silly and stupid.   Crowds also escaped the hard times through great fantasy films like The Wizard of Oz and King Kong  It was also a popular time for horror movies, with the introduction of Dracula and Frankenstein and The Wolfman.  Romance was also big, with Wuthering Heights and the biggest film of the decade Gone With the Wind.

It wasn’t all escapism – many films dealt directly with issues of the time.  Frank Capra made a series of films that dealt directly (and sentimentally) with the depression and the plight of the American everyman (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).  With fascism on the rise, the German director Fritz Lang made the classic exploration of mob rule and vigilantism, M, while John Ford’s beautiful adaptation of Steinbeck’s great American novel The Grapes of Wrath told the story of disenfranchised and exploited migrant workers.  Finally, my favorite film of the decade, the Marx Brothers triumph Duck Soup, captures the surrealistic insanity of a world gone mad.   A broad comedy that is funny from first frame to end, to me it is comparable to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove in its ability to make us laugh at the impending apocalyse.

 

My Favorite Movies – 1940s

19.  The Philadelphia Story (1940), directed by George Cukor

18.  The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Wyler

17.  Sullivan’s Travels (1941), P. Sturges

16.  The Shop around the Corner (1940), Lubitsch

15.  The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), P. Sturges

14.  Dead of Night (1945), Cavalcanti and Chricton

13.  Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchock

12.  Black Narcissus (1947), Powell and Pressburger

11.  The Ox Bow Incident (1948), Wyler

10.  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949), Huston

9.   Odd Man Out (1947), Reed

8.   My Darling Clementine (1946), Ford

7.   The Magnificent Ambersons (1946), Welles

6.   Citizen Kane (1941), Welles

5.   Casablanca (1943), Curtiz

4.   The Third Man (1949), Reed

3.   The Maltese Falcon (1941), Huston

2.   Bicycle Thieves (1948), De Sica

1.   How Green Was My Valley (1941), Ford

A decade of profound pain and change and ultimately triumph, the 1940s saw cinema become a vital part of the global modern culture.  What emerges from the decade are many of the greatest films ever made.

Many of the greatest directors (including Ford, Hawks and Huston) were recruited by the government to make documentaries supporting the war effort.   When not churning out propagand, with films like William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Live and Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, Hollywood tried to address serious cultural issues – despite the heavy handedness of the approach; they were often effective, especially in the heart wrenching performances of Dana Andrews and Harold Russell as vets returning home in The Best Years of Our Lives.

The 40s are the decade in which a number of the true masters of the art form (Ford, Welles, Huston, Reed, De Sica) were at the peak of their abilities, using the studio system to produce a number of intensely personal films.   In Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, Joel McRae plays a Hollywood director of popular comedies (not unlike Sturges himself) determined to make a “serious” film that speaks to the painful real lives being lived by his audiences.   Welles’ Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons were stylistically unlike anything to come before them, Reed’s Odd Man Out and The Third Man gave us unsentimental and very real glimpses into dangerous worlds (from James Mason’s IRA agent in Odd Man Out to the post war ruins and black markets of Vienna in The Third Man) that are typically neglected by Hollywood .  Huston turned introspective with his examinations of human greed in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon, while William Wyler examined mob rule in The Ox Bow Incident.  Meanwhile, John Ford made his two most personal and poetic films, My Darling Clementine and How Green Was My Valley.

Next time:  Hollywood struggles to overcome the blandness of the 50s, and films that are core to the cultural revolution of the 60s.