Apothegms and Stuff for late July

Sayings of a Would-Be Ancestor

1.     Some animals learn to crawl and fly before they reproduce.  Only their children benefit and, then, after many generations, they forget these skills.  Then the children start to teach their parents how to crawl and fly.  A new generation grows up without the memory of who they are and where they must go.  Many people are the same.

2.     In another world, I would be learning how to write, but before I could send myself any important messages, I will have passed away.  Thus in this life it is not always wise to imagine something better.  In another world, perhaps someone might imagine what I could have done and write about it.

3.     Whenever someone tells me their personal troubles, I wish it were possible to help them out.  In spite of sympathy, however, I have no understanding of their plight.  If were to try, it would make things worse.  It is better therefore to keep quiet and nod one’s head wisely.

4.     Every day the newspapers become more and more incomprehensible.  Words no longer mean what they once did.  Syntax falls apart, pronouns fumble for antecedents, apostrophes dangle in the wind.  Events are reported that have neither date nor place, and others occur without contexts.  If I could only figure out what happened, I would write a letter to the editor to complain.

5.     Jorge Luis Borges says that everyone has some piece of memory—a scene, an event, a person—that will disappear into oblivion after we are gone: a tree in a park, a fire in a shop, a great man no longer remembered.  For me it is parents and neighbours, houses on the street, games played with friends.  When I am gone, they will all be gone, and no one will know or care.

6.     Costume dramas in film and on television are more accurate than ever.  The clothing, the furniture, the architecture, and even the landscape.  But they make no sense in terms of dialogue or atmosphere or morality: all are anachronisms.  Once we would have said that the artistic past was a metaphor for the present.  Now it is not even that.  So I watch these productions backwards, focusing on the details of colour and texture and away from the people and their emotions. 

7.     While I was born in 1940, most of the people in my life were products of the nineteenth century.  I must have seemed very strange to them, as I do again with those to whom the twentieth century is an impossible olden time.  That which remains real and comfortable are old movies from the 1930s and 1940s, where even the trees, the mountains and the skies are as they ought to be.

8.     I used to sit in the corner, a kind of little alcove, where a closet pinched the room up against a window.  There was an old lumpy chair where I curled up.  Out of the window, the best of times, was winter, late in the afternoon, twilight slowly changing to dark, snow beginning to fall, a circle of light under the lamp across the street.  Everything was quiet, except an occasional car scrunching through the snow.  In that cone of yellow light happened many mysteries, such as arguments, murders, kissing strangers, mad women searching for their dogs, old men trying to light a pipe.  In front of me, the closet, against which I put my feet, leaned a book on my lap, and read the books my father bought for me, various long, tedious Alcxandre Dumas novels, that required me to look up words in a dictionary, terms for horses’ caparisons, knights’ armour, castles’ architecture and armaments.  I made long lists and tried to learn vocabulary.  No one ever said to pay attention to the plot or the characters or the style.  Every evening a few pages out of which I remembered nothing except random words.  My thinking was about the vile deeds out on the street, the grotesque players in a cheap melodrama played in the yellow cone of light. And in the closet what was found?  A pile of old browned newspapers.  To touch them was to see them crumble into dust but one could look at then headlines from the late 1880s: such as Brooklyn Bridge Opens.  That was only a little over fifty years earlier and yet seemed like a completely different era of history.  Then before anyone knew what had happened, I grew up, and hardly spent any time in my corner den, and eventually forgot all the adventures, mysteries and murders that had taken place.

9.     Saturdays, Shabbat, were not religious, except in the sense of rituals, games and group activities.  I would go to Charlie the Barber’s down the street, at the corner of 13^th Avenue.  This was a time to read comic books and get a haircut.  Then we would all go to the movies, usually the New Garden on 46th Street.  It had three features, a dozen or so shorts, , various newsreels dating back four or five years, a lot of cartoons, and old serials which were out of order and incomplete.  Naturally it all took five or six hours, during which we ate sandwiches brought in brown paper bags, bottles of juice, and a few bars of candy.  When it was all done, the journey home in itself was an adventure, involving re-enactments of the main scenes, arguments about what had actually happened in one or the other of the films, and promises to try the Normandy Theatre next week because they had Robin Hood movies and a different range of cartoons. Thus ended our day of rest.

10.  Bad things in the long dark quiet of the night.  Once, an impossibly time ago, someone phones with a nervous cryptic message.  We turn on the radio and hear the end of the second plane crashing into the second Tower in Lower Manhattan, with incoherent comments on other airliners, crashes, and dying people.  We flip on the television. The images make no sense for many minutes.  Then it becomes comprehensible and I recall that my wife has flown to see family in America two nights before.  The phones won’t make connections.

11.  On another day, more recently, I email a friend in France to ask his opinion of the Bastille Day attacks in Nice.  He has just woken up after a lovely summer night.  He will contact me again soon, he says.  It takes hours.  Then he sends a brief message to say his daughters have been on a biking holiday and he needs to find out where they are.  I am still waiting for the next message. 

12.  Then another message from an old friend to tell me her son went to Syria to fight with the Kurds against ISIS. He was killed by a landmine. He is a hero.  But he was a troubled youth, and his mother is devastated.  I am reminded painfully of another woman, a student in Israel, to tell me her son was blown apart by a roadside bomb.  Another hero.  She found it hard to accept, even as she knew he died as he would have wished, defending his nation, his people, his fellow soldiers.  We all want to howl with rage against the injustice and cruelty of the world. 

13.  Late in the afternoon a little hedgehog crawled to the edge of our garden and shivered with pain.  We set out some warm milk and soft bread.  He sipped as though he had not had any liquid for days.  Then he slowly crawled a few metres into the yard.  By then the night covered everything with darkness. In the morning, the body was curled up.  I prodded it.  The creature was dead.  With a garden spade I lifted him and buried him lightly in a corner, under the bushes.  Later the sparrows came and finished the milk and bread.  Life is like that.

14.  The tui sits in the tree at the front of the house.  It has been there for years.  He sings all day.  He imitates our doorbell, the sound of the car door opening and shutting, and the washing machine beeping the completion of its cycle.  I whistle some tunes for the tui but he only answers in these mechanical sounds.  Probably he knows better than I do what is important.

15.  Why do they say school is boring?  For me it was infinitely interesting.  Everyday new games to play, new facts to learn, new arguments with my friends and teachers. 

16.  The more I grew, the more I changed.  Time went very slowly, but every new day was anticipated.  The seasons changed.  Rain, snow, wind, sizzling suns.  Only one thing  never changed.  My parents.  Now they are gone.

17.  Though the seasons changed as I knew they would, in the summer I forgot about the spring that had passed, and in the autumn about the summer games and journeys into the hills. When winter arrived, it pushed away the memory of fall.  Then spring came and it had no surprises.  I thought it would last forever, as it always did.

18.  No need for smart phones and aps.  No one ever calls, except the company to tell me it is time to top up my account.  Even as a boy, when the world was young and fresh, I never called anyone and no one phoned me.  Sometimes, I was told to say hello to a relative at the other end.  Often it was someone I knew, but I couldn’t identify their voice, or understand what they were trying to tell me.  Now all grown up and old, when strangers call I can hang up on them with no remorse.

19.  Surely there were as many generations between the beginning and myself as for anyone else.  But looking back, very soon the memories fade, the names are not attached to stories, and then there is nothing.  How soon will that nothing catch up with me?

20.   The old men at the clinic were sharing anecdotes about bypasses, hernias and prostate operations.  I could not join in their lively conversation, even though from what they said I knew I was older than them all.