ONCE THERE WERE DRAGONS

As I was passing through a lakeside village yesterday morning on my way south, I saw a young fellow in a traditional men's kimono, calling into the doorway of a house. He caught my eye not only because of the kimono in everyday public on a daily street, but also because he was wearing a non-traditional backpack that was red and shiny - like some of the newer ones are these days - but oddly shaped, from what I could see.

Then he turned and began dancing, right there on the otherwise empty sidewalk, on the empty street of the Saturday morning village, his hands waving about in the prescribed manner of Japanese folk dance, and as he turned and turned I could see that the red part of the ‘backpack’ was in fact the stylized head of a red dragon; the lower part was a soft, truncated representation of the scaly dragon body. Then a drum and flute sounded, as his two accompanists - a minimal crew, also in kimono - emerged from behind the tall hedge and the trio began to perform.

Apparently they were going through the village in the new fashion, stopping only at households that opened to them and exorcising the demons there, of the kind to be found in every household in the world, if truth be told - and in many countries there are just the dragons needed to resolve the matter - but local public interest in demon rousting appears to be reaching new lows; just enough is budgeted now to satisfy the few elder residents who remember the old days, and still demand dragons.

This was the remnant of what once was a feisty village festival, in which a full-bodied, multi-citizened, demon-snapping dragon went whirling through the crowded streets from house to house of open doors, purifying each home with snapping jaws and writhing dance to many drums and flutes, creating strong memories of confidence in the little kids and reinforcing family solidarity against the demons that ever abide...

Now it is but a vestige, like the dragon's tail... like the dragon himself, who may soon be gone; there have been signs of dragon deficiency...

Where will time take us, when the dragons are no more?

IRON AND FLINT

She was already on the morning train when I got on at the country station, was sitting in the seat opposite the one I happened to take, and so from under my baseball hat I got to look at her while she gazed at the way to Kyoto.

First at her eyes that had fire in them as a little spark, with the iron and flint that made it, then at her small strong hands with all the character worn in, hands that had fellowed the world, its water and soil, the worn-nailed fingers clenched around the black velvet strings of a soft purply glittery purse of the kind young women used to carry back in the sepia days, when she was a young woman and young women wore kimono...

It was an old purse and the hands were old hands, a farm woman's hands, toughened like walnuts by work and weather, she wore baggy tweed pants, strong as iron but with a touch of non-work-clothes refinement suitable for a farm grandma's rare trip to the city, the pants in the fashion of monpei but distinctly not monpei, a fashion statement in its own way - she clearly had opinions about things - and her mauve jacket, brand new but decades old, they don't make them like that any more, she must have gotten it in one of those little village stores you pass by on drives through the countryside, that have the old wooden walls with little ancient windows where you see just hanging there for what appears to have been a very long time (forget about display these are just clothes after all, buy or pass by,) the taupe and mauve and beige and brown and gray goods in the windows: cardigans, jackets and pants you can't imagine who will buy because you don't live anywhere near that time...

But then all of a sudden in the midst of these hurriedly commuting and generally waning modern up-to-date lives there she is, in brusque just-sitting-there-stone-healthy-at-85 contrast to all this office paleness, this borrowed sophistication and fashionably impending transaction sweat: one beautiful old farmer woman in lovely old-new stodgy eternal clothes from a far away place of mind and time, fashion from way back when there was no fashion except a change from kimono and monpei...

This was rad back then, and that's what she still wears now, elderly rad, this mauve rough weave jacket with the just barely perceptible red threaded through, blossoms in the pattern somewhere, no doubt she knows what blossoms they are, and with shiny purple silver-speckled buttons, a pale violet scarf and one of those taupe sweaters from the window of such a store too, just a little silver in her black hair, her face brown-wrinkled, topographic with life, eyes that reflect all that can be known to the bone about garden and birth, time and death and what the hell are salaries...

She is like a rock in the midst of these fluxy tides and fickle currents, she is the secret rock of this country, of all countries, of all of us who have gotten this far, of whatever constancy humanity can lay claim to... sons and daughters know it is the mothers who carry it all, and if it all falls it is the mothers who remain to get on with the getting on...

I gazed at her secretly until I dozed off, and when I awoke she was gone.

AT THE CLINIC

In the village just one stop up the line, right near the train station, you know, across the street from the side of the store where they have that big sign on top you can see from the train, is the clinic where I get my leg galvanized.

I say galvanized because it reminds me of Galvani's experiment with the dead frog, the way it jumped around, proving as I recall that dead frogs can run on batteries. The doctor sticks a bunch of electric needles in my thigh and hooks them to a close-encounters-of-the-third-kind kind of machine that beeps and boops and wawas, then he turns it up and my leg does Afternoon of a Faun for 15 or 20 minutes all on its own, while I lay there not lifting a finger.

It's very entertaining in a bizarre way, dancing without dancing, gives me a new view on pain, that pain doesn't actually hurt, it's only an abstraction generated by a nerve that's trying to make you think the pain is real, so as long as you don't believe the nerve it doesn't hurt, which does wonders as long as it isn't something that really hurts.

Like this leg. Which came to require galvanization as a result of my tossing about full-length roofbeams as though I were still of roofbeam-tossing age and hadn't recently spent two decades tossing no roofbeams at all in an office chair, birthplace of the other-directed spinal disc. This isn't really relevant to what I'm trying to get at here except in that it points out the age-related stuff that awaits us all as we approach the nether gate with the gaudy wreaths and the portrait photograph we didn't like in life.

But before I get there, it's quite a revelation to find out that my own body, the very body with which only 30 years ago I laughed blithely among other ignorant youths at the idea of getting old, is now showing me in painstaking detail that I didn't know jack, and why grandpa walked the way he did, and how a cane can make a lot of sense. And I realize grandpa's patience in not moaning all the time, the way I do.

Anyway what I'm trying to get at here, if I can just get a word in edgewise, is that when I arrive at the clinic early on a Wednesday or Saturday, my regular galvanizing days, the waiting room is packed and I, at age 55, am far the youngest one there. The average age is maybe 80, both men and women, though mostly women, since men tend to burn out faster, having lifestyles more generally like mine; but this group is fun to be around. What energy! Much more purely i.e., cosmically focused energy than a bunch of 50 year-olds.

Two sweet, cute elderly country ladies sitting there, feet primly together, probably approaching ninety, been tots together at the dawn of the century, grew up together in what was then a remote little fishing village way across the mountains from big city Kyoto, shared eight decades and more, now sitting there talking and laughing and carrying on and in comes another lady, one of their classmates, they used to hang around together on whatever was the equivalent of streetcorners in 1910 or so, and she comes and sits down and picks up the conversation right where it left off, they know EVERYTHING about each other, no need even to say hello, really, though they do, out of habit, then point to elbows and shoulders and knees and hips and backs, flexing and poking and talking about sleep and telling how it is since yesterday, and another day another lady in her 80's, a hearty laugh, cute as a netsuke and bright as a blossom, sat there hunched over in the waiting room squinting closeup at a video of the cataract surgical procedure she'd be going through in a day or two, nearby an elderly man she probably remembers as a dashing young eligible bachelor also watching saying you going to have surgery and she laughs says yes, I'll be able to see! Laughs, what a laugh, laughs again, from the gut after eight decades, what power, the size of her future has nothing to do with her joy, much more positive a feeling to me here in a roomful of physical complaints than dropping in at the local high school, where future is measured in centuries.

One farmer lady, must be close to 80, strong white real-teeth smile, black hair, skin like a baby, beautiful, what a knockout she must have been in the knockout days, that was the real strength of this country I guess all countries, these women and all they have wrought, of families and homes, childbearing and caring and gentle strength, yet despite it all so unsung now, even seen as a burden and put apart, unheeded by the new and flaccid young, who seem to want only each other.

Another couple, the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas of the waiting room, Gertrude big and deep-voiced with natty tweed suitcoat, Alice slight with a man's haircut, vest and pants; they must be in their 70's, a lot of waiting roomers know them, especially the laughing old man, who says something funny at every breath I wish I could follow the 70-years-ago dialect he talks so fast, as the humorous do, and with all those antique curls and twangs and run-togethers no one around here talks like that now except those his age, so I miss the jokes but anyway get the laughter.

Bent of back and still smiling, what power they all have, and the all that they have seen, and what good fortune for their families to have them, for they've clearly come here from home, have them to give advice on the kids and how to make pickles and how it really was and how to do things the way time has taught, how to make it into the future and keep on laughing the way they've always done and why, and how sad for those who have no such elders around to wrap them in the arms of the past, give roots to the children, and one day it hit me why every time I went to the clinic I was feeling this rush, and I realized I had never maybe in my life been so much among so many elders at once, and that it seems they only hang around with each other anymore, and it's not fair that I and all of us have been deprived all these years of what these elders are meant to do and be for us, regardless of language; I have not been AMONG elders in so long, I hadn't known what a charge it would be, hadn't known what it meant, what was missing from my life; and these elders not even at their best but at the doctor's, probably actually an important part of the social circuit for folks their age; and as they get fewer, the happier they are to see each other.

They know what life means at last, and you've got to live it to find out. I've been so long among folks my own age, who don't know anything about the years that are coming, and these elders have already been there and gone, and are still smiling and laughing and having a grand time, and it's good to know that it can be done, even if I don't make it to the clinic in 2020.

[PLM Archives, July 2002]

THE BRADY WORKSPACE

I Sing the Body Eclectic
as posted earlier on Where Elders Blog

ILLUSIONS OF DEMENTIA, VIRTUAL GRANDMOTHERS, CENTENARIAN RECIDIVISTS, ELDERPUNKS

In re my earlier rant about Japan driving and licenses, due to time, space and wannadoo restraints I never got around to saying that during the boring lecture the bored lecturer said one unboring thing that made me perk up in my seat: henceforth, all drivers 70 years or older must be tested on a simulated driving device.

Looking around, he added that, given this young audience, the requirement clearly wouldn't be a problem for us for a while, which was flattering, since I'm 67 and look weeks younger, but the law knows nothing of flattery, I've tried it on arresting officers any number of times.

The fact is, in three years I shall be required to stand in line at the police station with the other newly doubtful folk waiting to take an electronic drive like at the game arcade, though in this case to test our reaction skills they'll presumably toss virtual grandmothers, dogs and schoolchildren out in front of the virtual car and check how quickly we hit the brakes or, if worst comes to worst, the gas. I'll be virtually ready to wheelie my way out of trouble, lay some virtual rubber on the virtual road.

On the other hand, both hands on the wheel, I read yesterday about a 100-year-old recidivist cruiser in Japan who was arrested for the second time for driving without a license - after it had been revoked following a hit-and-run accident a few months previously - when the car he was driving struck the umbrella of a schoolkid standing on the side of the road. The elderpunk's excuse was that "Driving helps me from going senile because it keeps me alert." He was clearly suffering from illusions of dementia. Alarmingly, however, the article also stated that "Starting in 2009, drivers over age 75 in Japan will be required to get checkups for dementia when they renew their licenses."

For my part, all I can say is good thing they're not checking earlier...

AT THE CLINIC

In the village just one stop up the line, right near the train station, you know, across the street from the side of the store where they have that big sign on top you can see from the train, is the clinic where I get my leg galvanized.

I say galvanized because it reminds me of Galvani's experiment with the dead frog, the way it jumped around, proving as I recall that dead frogs can run on batteries. The doctor sticks a bunch of electric needles in my thigh and hooks them to a close-encounters-of-the-third-kind kind of machine that beeps and boops and wawas, then he turns it up and my leg does Afternoon of a Faun for fifteen or twenty minutes all on its own while I lay there not lifting a finger.

It's very entertaining in a bizarre way, dancing without dancing, gives me a new view on pain, that pain doesn't actually hurt, it's only an abstraction generated by a nerve that's trying to make you think the pain is real, so as long as you don't believe the nerve it doesn't hurt, which does wonders as long as it isn't something that really hurts.

Like this leg. Which came to require galvanization as a result of my tossing about full-length roofbeams as though I were still of roofbeam-tossing age and hadn't recently spent two decades tossing no roofbeams at all in an office chair, birthplace of the other-directed spinal disc. This isn't really relevant to what I'm trying to get at here except in that it points out the age-related stuff that awaits us all as we approach the nether gate with the gaudy wreaths and the portrait photograph we didn't like in life.

But before I get there, it's quite a revelation to find out that my own body, the very body with which only thirty years ago I laughed blithely among other ignorant youths at the idea of getting old, is now showing me in painstaking detail that I didn't know jack, and why grandpa walked the way he did, and how a cane can make a lot of sense. And I realize grandpa's patience in not moaning all the time, the way I do.

Anyway what I'm trying to get at here, if I can just get a word in edgewise, is that when I arrive at the clinic early on a Wednesday or Saturday, my regular galvanizing days, the waiting room is packed and I, at age 55, am far the youngest one there. The average age is maybe 80, both men and women, though mostly women, since men tend to burn out faster, having lifestyles more generally like mine; but this group is fun to be around. What energy! Much more purely i.e. cosmically focused energy than a bunch of 50 year-olds.

Two sweet, cute elderly country ladies sitting there, feet primly together, probably approaching ninety, been tots together at the dawn of the century, grew up together in what was then a remote little fishing village way across the mountains from big city Kyoto, shared 8 decades and more, now sitting there talking and laughing and carrying on and in comes another lady, one of their classmates, they used to hang around together on whatever was the equivalent of streetcorners in 1910 or so, and she comes and sits down and picks up the conversation right where it left off, they know EVERYTHING about each other, no need even to say hello, really, though they do, out of habit, then point to elbows and shoulders and knees and hips and backs, flexing and poking and talking about sleep and telling how it is since yesterday, and another day another lady in her 80's, a hearty laugh, cute as a netsuke and bright as a blossom, sat there hunched over in the waiting room squinting closeup at a video of the cataract surgical procedure she'd be going through in a day or two, nearby an elderly man she probably remembers as a dashing young eligible bachelor also watching saying you going to have surgery and she laughs says yes, I'll be able to see, laughs, what a laugh, laughs again, from the gut after 8 decades, what power, the size of her future has nothing to do with her joy, much more positive a feeling to me here in a roomful of physical complaints than dropping in at the local high school, where future is measured in centuries.

One farmer lady, must be close to 80, strong white real-teeth smile, black hair, skin like a baby, beautiful, what a knockout she must have been in the knockout days, that was the real strength of this country I guess all countries, these women and all they have wrought, of families and homes, childbearing and caring and gentle strength, yet despite it all so unsung now, even seen as a burden and put apart, unheeded by the new and flaccid young, who seem to want only each other.

Another couple, the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas of the waiting room, Gertrude big and deep-voiced with natty tweed suitcoat, Alice slight with a man's haircut, vest and pants; they must be in their 70's, a lot of waiting roomers know them, especially the laughing old man, who says something funny at every breath I wish I could follow the 70-years-ago dialect he talks so fast, as the humorous do, and with all those antique curls and twangs and run-togethers no one around here talks like that now except those his age, so I miss the jokes but anyway get the laughter.

Bent of back and still smiling, what power they all have, and the all that they have seen, and what good fortune for their families to have them, for they've clearly come here from home, have them to give advice on the kids and how to make pickles and how it really was and how to do things the way time has taught, how to make it into the future and keep on laughing the way they've always done and why, and how sad for those who have no such elders around to wrap them in the arms of the past, give roots to the children, and one day it hit me why every time I went to the clinic I was feeling this rush, and I realized I had never maybe in my life been so much among so many elders at once, and that it seems they only hang around with each other anymore, and it's not fair that I and all of us have been deprived all these years of what these elders are meant to do and be for us, regardless of language; I have not been AMONG elders in so long, I hadn't known what a charge it would be, hadn't known what it meant, what was missing from my life; and these elders not even at their best but at the doctor's, probably actually an important part of the social circuit for folks their age; and as they get fewer, the happier they are to see each other.

They know what life means at last, and you've got to live it to find out. I've been so long among folks my own age, who don't know anything about the years that are coming, and these elders have already been there and gone, and are still smiling and laughing and having a grand time, and it's good to know that it can be done, even if I don't make it to the clinic in 2020.