WAITING FOR THE LIGHT

On a drive down to the lakeside road early Saturday morning, I was waiting for the village traffic light to change when I saw a boy on his way from the train station to the junior high school, also waiting for the light to change.

He was standing there alone in his world, as we all do at such times. Wearing his sports uniform, apparently on his way to practice, he began to do incipient teenagey things: wriggle one shoulder, then the other, making his uniform fit his new body more perfectly, then flicking his head this way and that to fling his hair into the just-right random position, then fingering his forelock to casual perfection, tweaking his posture, fiddling with all those things I remember fiddling with back at that age, not possibly decades ago.

Leaving the uneasy edge of certain childhood and entering the bewildering dawn of the outer self-- what a journey that was: standing this tall for hours in front of mirrors, pursuing the unattainable form in the ideal shirt, perfect pants of precise fit, these shoes and no others, all of a style that would last forever, every waking moment the focus of a new-life look at this historic and invaluable instant: gleaming shoes, hair combed per minute, rat-tail comb in pegged pants back pocket, as I recall in flashes...

Then three junior high girls from the train came up quietly behind the boy and stood there at a discreet distance, remaining silent lest he turn and behold them and then what, and began doing the female version of the same choreography of hair care and mini-twerks, not one of the four wondering, any more than anyone does at that age (and beyond), "What is causing this odd behavior? Why am I doing these things?" These are not questions we get to ask, or even conceive of-- until perhaps decades later, while maybe waiting for the light...

Cultures are formed around these cosmos-driven, reflexy things. If we were placed in full charge of them we would never have evolved this far, let alone have developed the simple, cogitative, aggregative sapience that evolution has permitted us, assuaging some living need in us to deal - if only in a limited way - with such fundamental concepts as sex, subsistence and society, all of which we're still having global problems with. We are new to this, after all; as a species, we're not even out of beta yet, really...

Those tweaking, flicking, twerking kids are doing big work.

ANGELS ALL OVER THE PLACE

When as grownups we fall and rise again, hopefully each time closer to the angels, it is to us a matter of integrity, of struggle and betterment, of progress and growth, the rooted aims of a living life...

And then later down the snows of time on an Asian mountainside, when of a blue winter morning at a certain age we observe our young descendants fall backward into the whiteness and make wings of their arms, laughing and unable to rise because it is so wondrous to lie there, warm and cradled in the soft cold, gazing up at the highest of sky from this perfect point of view, it is heartening to us elders beholding, in the simplest of ways, that true living is, at its heart, a matter of light...

As is so often the case I had different plans for today, but this time it snowed during the night, to my amazement and baffled surprise, this being late January-- or nowadays, early Spring. Until yesterday I had been under the strong impression that the balmy zephyrs would continue until the glaciers melted, inundating coastlines and shifting sea currents, unbalancing the earth and sending us whirling off toward maybe Mars, but some things never turn out the way you think they might.

So the trio and I spent the day not following Work Plan A, but rather shoveling off the deck and sledding for a while, I then leaning on the deck rail watching while the twins made angels in the snow below until there were angels all over the place, with angel faces in between, and we couldn't walk anywhere around the firewood without stepping on an angel.

Never had a better reason for calling it a day.

THE CLARITY OF DISGRUNTLEMENT

Last night on Japan tv I saw one of those health programs, there seem to be a lot of them these days, there were no such programs back when I was younger in the West and there was only one channel (and when "health faddist" store clerks dressed like doctors and nurses!). These are programs on which some hip-hyper expert shovels out heaps of information that is soon proven to be more or less inaccurate - who really knows until the last pitch - but this claim was pretty convincing; what's more, it was right up my alley (that's an elder idiom from a time when alleys were a big part of life).

This claim was convincing because I could tell it was true. In fact, I'll bet it is true. I sure hope it's true. Be good if it was. It declared that elders who are "grumpy" (i.e., emotionally discerning), "cranky" (sensitive), "opinionated" (knowledgeable), "fussy" (tasteful), "disgruntled" (perceptive), or as we used to say, "testy" (not many truly testy folks around anymore), are less likely to become senile or develop Alzheimer's, there being some significant iota of laboratory correlation between discontent and mental acuity; I can certainly see why that would be the case.

The fact is, that if you continue to actually grow with age, you naturally grow more discerning, and by the time you reach the early levels of the life summit you have had so much experience, acquired so much concise and incontrovertible judgmental ability - overall awareness on so many fronts - that you can easily tell, for example, the difference between wisdom and its absence.

For this and other reasons, it would be a massive loss to humankind and its evolutionary potential if there were not always sufficient elders to nurture the Big Germination. It would be disastrous if disgruntlement, the surest sign that one knows what is right, was not viewed as a good and necessary, even laudable quality, as good for the world as for the individual, like all the other laudable qualities mentioned above.

Indeed, the older I become the more apparent is the urgency for those at the summit to point out the facts of these matters with a forcible forefinger, providing detailed explication to these wisdom-starved whippersnappers! Why, we elders haven't even touched the surface of staying sharp in today's world; I'll get on with my part as soon as I find my glasses.

NOGGINFOGGIN It happens to the best of us, and that includes you and me. It's the same as the weather: you get fog (which I love, by the way, it's beautiful at this altitude) because there's so much going on up there that the rarefied air of mentation gets saturated with the cold/hot flux of fruition and so generates the clouds of creativity that vitalize germination... Naturally, the older, wiser and more mentally active you get, the more often this happens-- so much more interesting than the arid atmospheres of youth... After being young for so long, it's a blessing, and newly exciting, to be involved in so much mental weather activity all the time! Even moreso with the occasional and enlightening "confusion": this delightful path, that stimulating choice or one of these enthralling options? Some envious people, generally ones without much germinativity going on in the cranial domain, describe this phenomenon with derivative names, using cobblewords like forgetfulness, absentmindedness, or even that outmoded daguerroterm, "dotage." Poor rutstickers... Life can do that to you, though, if you're not so busy in the belfry... Basically, all this belfry action is a delightful problem among creative elders with so much going on... I playfully call it nogginfoggin, and love standing there centering a headscape of light, filling a mind in its own universe, being where it leads... Absentminded, my ass.

THINNER THAN A MINUTE - from the archives

Kaya has the same 24-hour day as everybody else, but at two years of age she hasn't yet got enough experience to waste it properly as a youth, flaunt it as an adolescent, market it as an adult or treasure it as an elder. Minute- by-minute, she's engaged in the lifelong process of learning to do all that, and like all of us, must begin at the beginning and take it as it comes.

So at the moment there are great differences between Kaya and me in the way we navigate the day. To her, the world is an effortlessly open book, a ready playground, an all-day carnival, an endless private banquet, every day a birthday. I have to make a bit of a metaphysical effort to stay in that world with her for the hours we are together, but she makes it easy for me.

The difference might seem to reside in the six decades that separate us, but I as with just about everything in the universe I've ever run into, I suspect there's more to it than that. Kaya paints green stripes on her legs and spends long minutes hopping back and forth across the living room with glee in her heart and eyes. She does it spontaneously, without a second thought, with complete naturalness and no embarrassment. I can't recall the last time I did anything of the sort. Maybe at a frat party. Even now that glee evades me. Being alone with Kaya for hours at a stretch gives me new perspectives like that on just about everything, even the calligraphic powers of wet rice on an oak floor.

Historically, when I was two years old I probably spent my time pretty much the same way Kaya does now: practicing faces, being completely in places, posing all the poses, making all the noises in my untried repertoire, observing the effects of my menu of screams on the large, slow servants that surrounded and sought to control me yet catered to my infant whims, came at my call-- though I discontinued all that kind of thing at some point after college. Or maybe later.

We aren't really aware of, let alone keeping track of, all the minds we phase through in the hills and valleys of our years. Then one day later in life-- if we are so fortunate, after all that, to have a later - and then have the luck to spend sunny afternoon hours with someone like Kaya, the fun part of our past comes flooding back to a wiser perspective, from a place that isn't so far away after all.

The distance between childhood and elderhood turns out to be thinner than a minute.

TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like language does - things are no longer square or groovy and we all remember no internet - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood in the stone age. That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was impressively current with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, trolley cars, typewriters and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with four- or even five-digit numbers, with all the young men in fedoras, the grandpas in derbys, women in odd hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school desktop inkwells, there were stenographers and mimeographs, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk and ice, there was no tv, no everywhere plastic, and the old styles and language (don't say ain't), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere everyone smoking, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I heard in a documentary film (Scorsese's No Direction Home-- Recommended) an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives (he may well have interviewed young Churchill), there in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, full of beans, off-the-wall-out-in-left-field Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question that meandered along a familiar old path wound with vines and blossoms framing a white picket fence before a little cottage with maybe a portrait of Disraeli above the mantel, the kind of question that even back in the 60s was so shakespeareanly orotund　and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan oddly became so sympathetic as to not get his usual sassy, and as I listened to the question unwind I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism attempting to speak as though the past fit perfectly into the right-nowness of that moment, assuming that he could pinpoint this young musical upstart in the Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback telegraph spittoon way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. In his long professional life he himself had no doubt at last become his ideal of an Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant future. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since the 1940s have been more radical than any before in history (I was　born before the atomic bomb!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well　have been "Mr. Jones." Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat or　a new pair of spats to get one through a life, but this acceleration is new to us cutting-edge elders; we have to adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever did. How does one adjust to extreme changes at this speed of life?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made, especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for speed of adaptation is becoming exponential, so presents a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs with ashtrays beside them and read newspapers while listening to the radio in the evening; rather they dive headfirst, over and over, into the global infosea. There's　no end to news now; we are living headlines. A most exciting time to be of advanced years.

THE BIG FAT MATTRESS OF NORMALCY

Well, things have plunged somewhat back toward normalcy now that the grandies have left for their home in the north, it's getting steadily quieter around here I notice, the ambiance is less dynamic following the abrupt decline in spontaneous creativity flying around and bouncing off the walls which is good in some ways, especially for my back, since the girls are bigger each year yet still want to shimmy all the way to the top of the big timbers in the living room with a full body length boost from me and then to be spun around like living tops on the hard oak floor before being dragged around the big room like kidsnakes, then there's always This is the Way the Gentlemen Ride etc., and Ride along to Boston etc., then outside digging potatoes and raking together a big and bigger and biggest pile of leaves there ever was to roast the tubers in while the wild native girls run around the towering flames chanting in some kind of ancient granddaughter ritual as with my rake I try to keep everything from catching fire until we eat, and now it's time to take a nap.

WHERE IS MY MIND?

I love it when, like last night after a long day in the office, on the train home I'm sitting among all the staid salarymen of mostly older years who live outside the city, and after listening to an elderhoodly interesting podcast on history or science I suddenly have a craving for some mindscouring tunerush so I dive into for example the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, one of my dozens of top 10 albums ever, with Bone Machine for starters, get down, and Where Is My Mind not long after, whoa, I crank it UP, let's wail, and all at once the nearer heads turn to see what that odd new tiny pounding and screaming noise is, and wonder why those little drumsounds and microriffs are squealing out of my silverhaired head as factoids of puzzlement begin crawling all over their faces: what is this casually dressed, ponytailed elder with two gold earrings listening to?

Other earphoners my age are mellowing out to classical music perhaps, or maybe golden oldies from the Heian era, some koto tunes, catchy J-pop items of the 1930s or kabuki music, who knows, I can't hear it, but you can bet your last guitar pick they ain't listening to anything like the Pixies, who rule this particular train.

"Where is my mind, where is my mind, wheeeeere is my mind...
Waaaaay out on the water, see it swimming..."

Total.

***

In which connection, a GenX take on this reality:
Why Our Parents Were Cooler Than We Are Now
When They Were Our Age

FOGEYHOOD IN A FOREIGN LAND

Long ago, during my formative years on the other side of the world, I was chased off of who but god could know how many lawns by how many cane-wielding fogeys, out of how many vegetable gardens and melon patches by how many shotgun-wielding fogeys, and down out of how many fruit trees by how many pruning-shear-wielding fogeys, across the length and breadth of my beloved hometown and even in other towns and states as time led me on through the fogic realms, and in every instance a major aspect of fleeing said pursuit was the complete incomprehensibility to me regarding the fogic rationale, the sheer, blind fogicity of a person that would chase someone who was having so much football fun on a lawn off that lawn, in that garden out of that garden, or in that tree out of that tree, where the vegetables and fruits were far better, not to mention cheaper and healthier, than anything you could get in any market, and taste right off the tree forget it!

Why would anyone deprive another, especially an innocent young kid, of such all-too-brief bites of Eden? The fact was, as I now understand, that as an inexperienced youngster I lacked perception of the more complex elements of fogification that are now as clear as buckshot. And all this in a foreign land! It all came together for me this very morning, here on this far side of the world, as I was eyeing some kids who were too near someone’s garden down in the village, when I suddenly realized I was doing something I never in my wildest dreams expected I would do ever in my life: I was fogifying! Albeit vicariously.

I can’t tell you what a shock this was: me, the Billy the Kid of apple trees, the Jesse James of watermelons, the Babyface Nelson of honeydews, had somehow unknowingly entered full-blown fogeyhood! The funny thing is that I hadn’t known fogification was an organic process, a stage in one’s growth, a fully natural state into which one evolves, if one has a garden. When, as a grass-stained child, tomatoes or apples in hands or melons in arms I’d fled those Eden-destroying fogeys, I never thought the fogic state would one day be mine. Nor had I known how much fun it is to fogify, the fun now being covertly expressed, since it is patently counterproductive to chase kids away with a smile on your face.

In my fresh and steadily deepening understanding of these arcane matters, I feel that am now fully qualified on all counts, fogifically speaking, mainly on the basis of age and a general commensurate irritability regarding my growing perception of the fruitless foistiness, ruthless raucousness and wayward wastefulness of marauding youth. In other words, by virtue of some cosmic evolutionary intention, I am now capable of professional level fogification. But can I expect true fogific fulfillment here in Japan, where the children are so polite and considerate, and would never think of steal— enjoying another person’s garden produce?

If I do develop a lush orchard and garden, will Japanese kids come and run rampantly enough for me to chase them away in the grand fogey tradition? More likely I’d have to hire them. Better them than the monkeys I have now, who know nothing of the property rights that are essential to fogeydom. Perhaps fogeydom is more of a Western thing. Still, it might be worth a try; it is my turn, after all.

So now, in addition to fun-minded kids, all I need is a lushly productive garden and a good variety of heavily bearing fruit trees. Are you listening, god?

LOOKING BACK

Sometimes when I'm up in the loft and I turn to look at the Lake lying silver blue in the brown of the mountains' cradle, its far face hazed by a silent wind not yet arrived here, its near face clear as the blue air - the mask of drama removed - I am reminded of the many faces I have seen and places I have been, and it seems as though life is but a storing up of visitations for enjoyment in the elder years, even more than the events themselves were enjoyed at the time, for full enjoyment is a matter of distance, and of depths, that one does not have in youth; for the elder years are when joy is at last in its prime, when youth is at last enjoyed and fulfilled. How sad it is then, if one has done little, and so finds little to look back on. As I turn and look back on the Lake, it is like a looking glass into the past, where sleep all the things that ever were, as though I need only reach out and stir to hide all, or fall to stillness to see all revealed, which is what happens as you grow still with years, and learn that time takes nothing away.

THE NEW 40

They used to say it was 40, back when things were darker and less open, but 60 is where life begins now, life that's at last on the path of your own, as last it was when you were a child, before school and becoming, career and family filled it all up to the brim with hopefully happy and fulfilling goodness.

But now, if you've been paying attention and truly living, you've done it right: that part is complete, the perforce part is finished and it's all receiving now, when life reaches its most personal culmination and things get so much better in so many ways than they ever did at any age transition gone before. The dread is past, like the fear of a first date. Because now, if you've been living, you've earned what's ahead.

Even if you retire early (I "retired" (I despise that dismissive word, use it only when I must refer to the artificial concept) at the age of 30, stayed retired for 10 years of wanderment, then started a family and unretired, taking up a job that during my travels I'd learned that I like. It was all on my terms. Still is. The only terms there should be for a true life. Fact is, I guess I've stayed "retired.")... Like an unlived life, where did the rest of that sentence go?

For me 60 was an easy transition, no different in essence from 0 to 10, 20 to 30, 30 to 40 or 40 to 50. Only now is more focused, with less distraction, for the road ahead is at last my own.

I remember reading some reporters saying that boomers were carrying into their old age some risky behaviors from when they were young - don't Bogart that joint, my friend - and that many of the boomers now have problems that earlier generations didn't bring to old age. Hogwash, as my Gramps used to say, back when it was common to wash hogs. Anybody seen my bong?

I'd say that a greater percentage of boomers are reaching the high promontory of age with a better view of the big pixels than has ever happened before in human history. If anything, that means changes for the good, in my book. A few didn't make it because for them aging didn't bring wisdom. But that's not unique to the boomers. Let's get real here, as most boomers have been doing all along.

And as I said, anybody seen my bong? Metaphorically speaking.

ON THE MIND'S BACK PORCH


Some evenings, when the time and the weather are right, I love to go out on the deck, have a glass or two of wine and sit on my mind's back porch (it's a fine porch, by the time you reach my age) watch the broad sky unfold its right-now tapestries and let memories play on that high blue screen...

It's always surprising, what's showing there in spontaneity, the many things in my past that I bookmarked subconsciously in their moments – faces and events, places and emotions that turned out to be more important or magical than they then seemed - aspects I hadn't thought I noticed or remembered, even thought much of, at the time; but now that I relive them, how impressive, surprising and refreshing they are-- and how unknowingly observant I was being, even in the darkest times.

It's as though in the swift currents of the early heart I hadn't the experience to perceive all that those feelings and moments meant to me, but in some place older than myself I knew what they would mean one day, and stored them away. And now that I have time's gift, as well as the leisure in which to ponder and treasure - and sometimes regret - these distillations of a life and times, I am nourished as much by my failures as by my successes.

I suppose that is one of the many functions of the past, after all: to brighten the skies with the treasures of a lifetime, some far evenings on the mind's back porch.

ARTIFICIAL DOLDRUMS

So often these days I hear, even from men a decade or more younger than myself, who are looking forward to retirement, "Oh no, I don't want to have (for example) a woodburning stove; I'll be getting old and it will be too much for me."

What an conditioned attitude, to give up on the strength of a half-thought, to avoid what may be too much for old age decades before they even reach old age-- they destine themselves never to learn that such things as woodstoves, and the necessary related activities, interest and physical exercise they require, will strengthen their bones, keep them young and strong beyond their years!

Whatever happened to that inborn attitude that says "I'll just go ahead and find out how and what, and alter my path as necessary!" The very attitude by which we learn to walk, play a piano, dance, sing, string out formulas, make cabinets, whatever we take pride in. And here that spirit is dying by the day, right before the eyes it was meant to nourish!!

No discoverer ever had such an attitude. No one who ever advanced on behalf of humanity ever had such a negative conviction. Pioneering is inborn in us all, then carefully taught away...

The genuine reward of practical physical labor such people seek to avoid in their old age (thereby ensuring the old age they anticipate), such as extensive gardening, firewooding or general maintenance, comprises not just the harvest or the firewood or the improved living conditions, so much as the genuine sense of fully and worthily occupying your time, as compared to, say, treading a treadmill in a city gym for an hour or two three times a week.

The former exercise is free, it is done outdoors, it is natural (as opposed to artificial 'scheduled' exercise), it is balanced and universal (all muscles in the body, not just pecs or delts or abs, all fastwork fastterms), it is dictated by the requirements of the world out there, with which one must therefore synchronize, and it is utilitarian.

Collectively, these qualities combine to lift the spirit to its natural elevation and broad perspective, where problems take on their true tiny proportions in the big picture. Not synthetic uplift, as from a drug, some habitual pleasure or one more checkmark on the workout schedule, but the natural stimulus of your heart pumping your blood through your body as you perform your own tasks, whose progress is a measure of your own achievement, your own involvement with the genuine details of your life and therefore of life itself.

Nothing will lift your spirits from artificial doldrums like a long walk through forest along a mountainside, followed by a couple hours of chopping firewood and tilling the garden, fostering appetites that yearn to be.

ELDERHOOD

All this folderol about youth being the peak and elderhood being the pits; I mean, even Yeats, that dissimulating fogey ("But oh that I were young again...."; "a tattered coat upon a stick...") he wrote his best stuff when he was near eighty. I say it's a lot of youth-media-generated horsefeathers. I've been young and I'm becoming elder, and I'll take elder any day of the maturely ejaculating week.

Like all else that grows, life gets where it's going in stages, so youth is not yet life, since the youth has never been any older. Elderhood, by contrast, is very definitely life, for the elder has indeed been young, and what's more has survived and grown thence, and is cored with the experience. Only the span of both ages in one individual comprises what can truly be called a life.

So when the young say 'get a life,' this is what they really mean, despite themselves: they mean get like the elders; they mean GET ENTIRE. They don't know this of course, for in youth nowadays it seems the gardens of the spirit often yield little more than a few stunted facts amid a weedy tangle of ideas randomly received from sources only the inexperienced would patronize, such as age-segregated schools, Hollywood, television, video games and other kids. So forget it if you're looking for major revelations in that quarter.

I'm not talking book smarts or street smarts or any of those five-and-dime kind of smarts anybody can get if they can breathe long enough; I'm talking SMARTS, all gilded bold caps, as conferred only by time deeply spent. And I don't mean in meditation. I mean in ACTIVE QUEST. That too is gilded bold caps, but this time generously embellished with precious stones, mainly emeralds and rubies, because diamonds are way overrated, as any multifaceted elder knows.

Anyway, that's why genuine elders aren't enticed by the culture of youth: because they see right through it, how short-lived and time-blind it necessarily is. They know the portals one must pass through to get beyond that stage of life and, if one is truly alive and not asleep or otherwise spiritually sightless or habituated, the lessons that await and must be learned at each stage. That, in its totality, is life; it is not life if one somnambulates through the whole thing, or tries to stay young forever, or mature quickly. A life thus true is all the more a life the closer it approaches its entirety.

And in contrast, as there is the closed and therefore dead youth, who has learned nothing at all from his few years trapped within the senses, so there is the closed and therefore dead elder, who has sprung unchanged from said youth. The latter, though, is the greater tragedy, for the point of life is that toward which we age: toward becoming a living cornucopia of worthy experiences, toward becoming wise at the cost and the pace that wisdom requires, toward acquiring, gestating and dispensing that wisdom, at its pace and in its place, to the experientially challenged young, who, were it not for the wisdom of those in full elderhood, would rush pell-mell here and there doing even more to kill the time they have in excess and make days play dead so they don't have to live them exactly, more like zombie through them in a stylish pattern that can tend to remain for the rest of the life, until one day they wake up in maybe the suburbs or maybe a shooting gallery and wonder how they got to a place where there's nowhere else, and now are too old for youth and too unlived for elderhood; and when youth is not young and old is not elder, that is the end of the world.

And to hell with Swift, who said: "Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old." I for one can't wait to start using a cane. Somebody has to get the world going the way it should; who better than the experientially advantaged?