As cherries age . . . so must I

As cherries age . . . so must I.

Organic cherries. From Washington State. My American home.

So lusciously, deliciously looking . . . stems helter-skeltered, a twisted rectangular reflection of some over-head fluorescent light sparkling from each of their little exposed rotunded surfaces. Conveniently packaged in 2 pound cello bags, with little air-holes for ventilation.

And the price? Well, they were cherries, they were organic, they were from Washington, they were from home.

I looked. Debated. Decided I just didn’t need them. Life would somehow proceed to another day without my having lusciously, deliciously, succulently enticing cherries.

When you don’t really have a battle plan for the grocery store . . . the aimlessness of life can prevail.

And so I found myself again, wandering near that table display of organic cherries from my American home, twinkling with delicious anticipation from some reflected overhead fluorescent light.

My memory tells me that I bought some. Two cello bags with little holes for ventilation. Honestly, I do like cherries.

My Trader Joe’s store uses heavy duty paper bags, and since you can’t take the shopping carts out to your car in the parking lot, I restrict my shopping to what I can actually carry from the store-front to my car in two hands with a single trip. A necessity of living alone . . . no partner to watch the basket while you fetch the car. And so, there were four Trader Joe’s heavy duty paper shopping bags in my hands . . . my living alone, aging, bag limit.

My little kitchen has very little storage space . . . and so bags of canned goods just stay on the floor in one corner of the kitchen. I sort of know what is there . . . and know to look there for certain things.

And so, later in the week, I found myself hankering for cherries. On more than one occasion I looked into all of the cubby holes in my refrigerator of where I might have placed cello bags of organic cherries with little holes for ventilation.

But there were simply none to be found.

Oh, the confusion of aging. Did I, or did I not do some routine little task. How could I know? How could I not know?

Obviously, I did not buy cherries. Because there were none to be found in my fridge.

And all things cherry were forgotten.

Subsequent trips to Trader Joe’s confirmed that organic cherries from Washington were still available. But by now . . . cherries, for me at least, were simply a moot point of a hapless history.

But last night I was hungry. Living alone, and aging, the urge of hunger may or may not be a desirable thing. Being hungry that is. For the reasons for hunger are complicated and conflicted with the aging that are living alone.

But tonight, I found some yogurt. Some organic strawberry yogurt in my fridge. When you are alone you just eat out of the container. And so I did.

I looked for something else. Something easy. Something canned. No fuss. Eatable directly. And there was a can of sweet green peas. When you are alone . . . why waste etiquette on yourself. I drank the liqueur directly from the can. Savored the sweet peas at the ambient temperature of a summer-hot kitchen.

Yet, I was still hungry. And somehow, when you are alone and hungry, the breakfast food of comfort is a utility food of bedtime. I knew there was a box of Golden Grahams in one of those Trader Joe’s heavy duty bags. A treat. I seldom buy convenience cereals . . . old fashioned rolled oats are far better. And those wonderful cereals from Canada . . . Sunny Boy, and Red River! But I wanted a comfort food . . . a treat. And the nutty sweet flavor of those clickin’ graham wafers was a psychological fix of which I was acutely craving.

And so I started to look.

Found it.

And picked up the bag.

But the bottom of the bag fell out. Soaked. The floor was wet, stained. I picked up another bag. Worse. Then another bag . . . a sticky mess of dark red liqueur with the barest perception of essence of fruity ethanol. My two bags of organic cherries from my home state of Washington . . . illegally making permit-less homemade cherry wine.

And I felt so old.

So out of it.

So frustrated.

Not that I wasted some precious fruit. Not that I had a mell of a hess to clean up.

But frustrated with the realization that I know that I am changing . . . in predictable and inevitable ways . . . and my nature is to fight that . . . but my heart tells me to accept it.

Organic cherries, from my home state of Washington, changed in ways beyond their control . . . and I change too.

As cherries age . . . so must I.

The Refectory Manager

It is not unusual for a child to cry on its birthday.

It is not unusual for a child to cry on its birthday.

Somehow, for any number of reasons, the ego-centric child is stressed. The tension breaks. The child cries . . . in frustration . . . in despair . . . in anger . . . in unfulfilled expectations.

And in the grand epics of civilized peoples . . . America, the “We the People” America . . . we are still but a child.

We cry this day, on our birthday.

Our gift is broken.

Our expectations are shattered.

It would seem to a casual observer, that we now need to call this day the “Memorial of Independence Day” holiday.

There have been birthdays in the past, were the crying was uncontrollable sobbing. The fractious war between the states . . . the darkest moments of the repression of the unwanted . . .

And we cry again. And we wonder why. On our birthday. We can’t help but cry. Again.

There were statesmen once, to dry the tears of the crying.

Magnanimous people.

People with a sense of reasoned judgment that seemed to surpass the norms of humanity.

People who saw from a perspective of through the Course of Human Events. People who recognized foundational Truths that went even beyond being self-evident . . . went to defining the very essence of what an American Child could be.

Statesmen, surrogate for “We the People,” who crafted an identity of equality, of unalienable rights . . . the charge to accept life . . . to claim liberty . . . to pursue happiness.

Statesmen, surrogate for “We the People,” to form the construct of a more perfect Union, for the establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common Defense, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity.

Statesmen, surrogate for “We the People,” that formed the precious treasure of our unique constitutional form of self-government.

But today, we cry, on our birthday.

And there are now no statesmen to dry the tears.

The statesmen have gone to partisan hacks.

The partisan hacks have gone to the demagogues of power.

The demagogues of power have rutted the essence of the more prefect Union. Justice is now politics. Domestic Tranquility is a simmering reddish-blue hate. The common defense is a unilateral crusade on the world’s minions. The general Welfare is for the fascist elite. The blessings of Liberty is the privilege to hold three jobs. Our Posterity is relegated into a bankrupt poverty.

And we cry, today, on our birthday.

We discover our birthday present is not what we dreamed it would be.

It has evolved, in some unintelligently designed grotesqueness, to an uncontrollable monster that makes a mockery of “We the People.” An imperial, presidential mockery, of “We the People.” A force unanswerable but to an imperial president’s “higher father.”

And we cry, today, on our birthday.

We cry that the demagogues of power, somehow, be harnessed, by the Consent of the Governed.

We cry that the partisan hacks be neutered in their destructive Ends.

We cry for statesmen to once again raise Justice above the politics, to ameliorate hate, to defend Defense, to foster Welfare, to enable Liberty, to value Posterity.

We cry, on this our birthday, because we are fraught with tension. We have expectations that are being dashed. We are frightened of the wake of the havoc headed for our Posterity.

But.

Yet.

It is not unusual for a child to laugh on its birthday.

Somehow, for any number of reasons, the ego-centric child can be truly happy. There is a sense of tension that stimulates. The child giggles. . . in joy . . . in delight . . . in play . . . in the fulfilling of expectations.

And in the grand epics of civilized peoples . . . America, the “We the People” America . . . we are still but a child.

And through our tears . . . we try to laugh. We can laugh. We will laugh. We do laugh.

And we WILL yet see another birthday.

The Refectory Manager

A Responsible Act of Aging

A responsible aspect of aging is the “letting go.”

I am not responsible.

But I do offer the tips of my knurled fingers to the researchers of 3M . . . for they will find an adhesive, one painfully insoluble adhesive, clutching to the precious “treasures” of my past.

I live in a world of angst . . . angst that my daughter will invade my house, and separate my precious treasures from me, and whimsically send them on their destiny to the Happy Dump. For she has threatened . . . or promised . . . I’m not quite sure which.

My daughter yells! “You’ve just GOT to get rid of that stuff! It’s . . . just . . . stuff!” For she has read my last will and testament, and knows she will have to do what I can’t . . . let go of my “stuff.”

But reality has a way of hitting responsibility on the side of the head.

My name might by James, but it isn’t King James, authorized or not. And I don’t hold my present vocation in life by the tenure of Divine Right. My final day will be August 31. The severance package will hold me until October 5. Of course I have posted for vacant positions both internal and external to my company. But what happens. Will happen.

But I sense that Old Man Moses, seeing some imperceptible movement in that cloud in the sky, has hollered out, “Dude, start packin’ your tent. We’re movin’ on out!”

A responsible aspect of aging is to “travel lite.”

And I am now forced into that responsibility.

This morning, in painful resignation, the first of the uncountable sweeps of my tent . . . the winnowing of my precious stuff . . . the trips to the dump.

Only in my county, we have decency. We don’t actually go to “The Dump.” We go to a “Transfer Station,” where, things can just be slid, like a burial at sea, over a steel shelf, and they just disappear from view, yet with a sickening clank and thunk, into some containerized truck that will, in the secrecy and privacy and the solitude of the night, “go to the dump.” The undertaker for precious stuff.

I knew this day had to come.

And I fought it. I hated myself for fighting it. And I am ashamed to admit that I did.

But I simply could not make myself start this process.

I knew where it was that I had to start.

For as soon as I could deal with that chair, I could deal with all the rest.

It was a pine wood captain’s chair. Part of the colonial-like trestle table dining set we purchased in the early winter months of 1973, when we moved into a brand new little townhouse. My daughter was born a month later.

I sat in that chair. Held my daughter in that chair. Cuddled her in that chair. Cooed with her in that chair. Laughed at her and with her in that chair. And sat in the others of the set as well. My son, perched on the booster seat in that chair, would pontificate on the requirements of his life.

A couple of months ago, I sat again in that chair. And it teetered . . . slowly . . . almost imperceptibly . . . to the side. I could hear a sort of noise that was ominous, but not recognizable. I had to grab myself to keep from falling. Osteoporosis of chair leg joint. Finally, with a jagged edge of tenacity, it simply failed. The wood just too fragile to attempt a repair.

I moved over to its mate. Another chair with an identical repertoire of preciousness. I sat. It teetered. Osteoporosis of chair leg joint. And there was no perceptible difference in the standard deviation of the life-span in those two articles of precious stuff.

And so I knew I simply had to do it.

I carefully laid the first of the two broken chairs, with their detached spindle legs, on that steel shelf to oblivion.

I let go.

I sobbed uncontrollably.

I let go.

And a responsible act of aging is to learn that the “precious stuff” is not “the memories.”

The Refectory Manager