Hurry Sundown

It's never too late to learn stuff. I'm 52 and I just figured out how to fold a shirt.

For the benefit of you feminists out there, no, I was not taught the proper way to fold a shirt by a woman. I figured it out myself. See, you buy enough shirts, and UN-fold them, sooner or later you're going to figure out that the proper way to fold a shirt is to do that backwards. It took me until I was 52 because I never considered it worth thinking about before. Take your shirts out of the laundry, stuff 'em in the drawer. But I have so many shirts now, T-shirts, polo shirts, dress shirts, whathaveyou, that I'm acquiring a storage problem. Neatly-folded shirts stack better, So now I have a drawerful of neatly-folded shirts. And I folded them myself. My wife stays out of my laundry and I stay out of hers.

I've been writing since I was 13. I think I'm just now starting to get the hang of it. I also think it was the Japanese painter Hokusai who said he never painted a thing worth looking at until he was at least 70. That's a long apprenticeship. But there are two ways of looking at it. One is that he wasted a lot of time painting stuff that wasn't so good. The other is to invoke the analogy of winemaking and figure that the longer the wine was aged, the better it got. Or to put it another way, quoting another source, remember Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove saying, "The older the violin, the sweeter the music?"

A couple of months ago I published a memoir, Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me. (Outskirts Press: $15.95, available at all major bookselling web sites.) No, this blog posting isn't a marketing effort for my book (buy it! buy it!) but there's a tie-in. One of the major threads to my narrative in that book is how I came, by chance or choice or fate or Kismet or Hand of God whatever you want to call it, to play the role of my father's primary caregiver during the last year of his
life. I won't spoil the story for you, but this much I'll share before you've clicked over to Amazon.com to get my book (go! go!): my father spent the last two years of his life slowly being sucked down into the quicksand of dementia, what we used to call "senility" before political correctness came along and decided that "manic-depressive" should become "bipolar," "handicapped" should become "physically challenged" and "bum" should become "homeless person." But of the attempt to make bad things disappear by changing their names another time.

I think one of the main reasons my father sank into that particular patch of quicksand (and my older sister, a nurse who specializes in geriatric care, agrees with me) was that the old man stubbornly and perversely persisted, after his retirement, in having no interests to speak of. Oh, he liked to go fishing, but that's not exactly an exercise in mental gymnastics, and anyway, he only went fishing every now and then. And he liked baseball, but as much as I love baseball myself, sports are, let's face it, a branch of the entertainment industry. And being entertained isn't mental gymnastics, either. You sit there and let yourself be acted upon. Nothing wrong with that, but surely if it were to have played a role in keeping my father alert, his participation in it should have been more participatory, like one of those people who go to ball games and, clipboard on lap, write their own box score. Or one of those obsessive but occasionally useful bores who memorizes every statistic in the record book and whips them out at parties.

My dad didn't do any of that. Maybe it was because of the generation he sprang from, or his cultural background, or both. My father was born in 1914, the same year as Joe DiMaggio. But he grew up poor in rural Massachusetts and never got much formal education. Whatever were the notions with which he was inculcated while he was growing up, I doubt very much if he questioned any of them. A couple of decades back, former NFL star Alex Karras, in an interview, told of how he had come to the realization that some of the macho attitudes of his older Greek-American male relatives weren't so healthy. He said something along the lines of, "They assumed that if you lived long enough, you retired and went down to Florida to breathe oxygen out of a bottle." Something like that. In any case, Karras decided not to follow suit and took a different path, a healthier one. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still out there somewhere, enjoying life, although I haven't seen him on TV in a long time, which should surprise no one as I don't watch TV.

No, my father, who had little enough to stimulate his brain in 30 years with the U.S. Immigration Service or in the handful of years that he worked at various jobs after retiring from INS, hung up his spurs in 1981 for good. And after that...after that...well, there were his grandchildren, of which the first came along the year he hung up his spurs. He was only too happy to play babysitter and shuttle driver for the next decade and a half until the kids no longer needed constant attention. He read voraciously, but intentionally avoided anything that might challenge his preconceived ideas or introduce him to new ones. Like my mother, he read solely for entertainment. Every week she would bring home books from the library for both of them to read, and it was always the same thing: the latest crop of light novels from the "new releases" shelf.

In fact my father's response to anything that smacked of the esoteric, like his response to anything else he found alien, strange or serving to remind him of his own lack of formal education, was usually hostile. One day when I was home visiting, I happened to have with me a copy of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. I was trying to get through it myself. But I made the mistake one morning of leaving it in the kitchen. My father picked it up and thumbed through it, immediately ascertained that he was looking at something that was probably "over his head," and then I listened from the next room as he bellowed at my mother that by-God if a thing like that were written today, nobody would read it! With that, he marched out the back door, confidence restored, like a dog that's just barked at a basketball.

My point here is that my dad not only didn't engage his mind very much, but he deliberately avoided engaging it. He would have nothing to do with hobbies. He regarded that sort of thing as frivolous, and anyway, had he indulged himself in something like philately or oil painting, it would have meant forfeiting his most cherished role, that of the self-inflicted sufferer who denies himself for the sake of those around him. In other words, seeking to make the family in general feel guilty for his own relentless unhappiness, my father perversely avoided indulging himself in nearly any way. He loved baseball, but there was no question of season tickets -- that would have smacked of self-indulgence. He stayed home and watched on TV. And getting back for a moment to the subject of books, the older he got, the narrower his reading got, until shortly before his mind leaked away to the point where he could no longer read at all, he was reading nothing but large-print pulp westerns with titles like Canyon Of the Gun and A Noose For The Marshal.

He liked gardening and did a good job taking care of the place. But again, this, and other favored activities like sweeping the driveway, were automatic exercises, the sorts of things a lot of people do to keep themselves from thinking. I don't mean to run down gardening; I have friends who assure me that it can be very therapeutic. But it's also kind of a zen activity, centered around things that stand still and not requiring much in the way of abstract thought.

So my dad ran down, over a period of a few years, like a clock that someone forgot to wind. I suppose it's a fate that awaits many of us, perhaps me. Phenomena like Stanley Kunitz, who wrote poetry until he was 100 years old, or George Burns, who made his last public appearance at 99, or Arthur Rubinstein, who was still playing the piano in his nineties, are more the exception than the rule.

But exception or not, they are object lessons, and there are many, many others. All three of these guys stayed clear until the end because they stayed engaged. Rubinstein didn't stop performing at the piano until his eyesight went. Burns continued to tell his wonderful stories to audiences even when he had to do it sitting down. Kunitz, well, Kunitz was a poet. Poetry is a calling that requires you to use your brain, and it doesn't leave you. T.S. Eliot gave up writing poetry after publishing his Four Quartets in 1948, but he had other things to occupy his mind by then, like criticizing other peoples' poetry. Rimbaud quit writing poetry, but he was emotionally unstable to begin with. Most poets, once they get the bug, don't lose it. And of course creative activity of any kind keeps the mind engaged.

I hope senility -- er, pardon me, dementia -- doesn't get me the way it did my dad. I watched him gradually turn back into a baby, and it was a painful thing to watch, despite the fact that he and I spent most of my life anyway mad at each other for a variety of reasons which, if you're curious about them, BUY MY BOOK! But now, at age 52, all I can offer as a hedge against my father's fate is that I intend to learn from the object lesson of his benighted life and, from here on out, stay with my interests. I buy books all the time, (to my wife's chagrin) and actually try to find time to read them. And I try to buy books on a wide variety of subjects, so that I'm not just reprocessing the same material over and over but picking up new things. And of course the act of writing is an engaged activity which, fortunately for me, you can do sitting down.

My father ended his days calling me "Bill." It's my profoundest hope that, should I live to be 91 as he did, on the last day of my life I'll remember that his name was Joe.