The Poor Woman

  Donatello's Mary Magdalene in Florence, Italy

Like most people, I assume like most people, I struggle over whether to give money to those holding up signs saying they need food, shelter, or just money. There is a certain corner on La Cienega and San Vicente here in Los Angeles, where there appear to be shifts of individuals with signs. There is the man who says he is a veteran; there is the woman who puts her hands together as if in prayer; there is the young man about whom it is hard not to say to yourself, "Why can't he find some job?" for he looks fairly healthy and sturdy. I give a dollar here and there. I have given cards for help finding jobs and a place to live to some along with a dollar or two. But they are there almost every day. There was a recent article, and not the first I have seen, where someone who claimed to be in need packed up his things from a median or a side of the road and went back to his not ramshackle residence. These sorts of reports tend to harden one's heart, and these days, with so much skulduggery around in small and great places, it is difficult not to have one's heart get hard as a rock.

I have told myself, "Just give. It doesn't matter what they do with the money. That's between them and their consciences. You are doing what you believe you ought." But then I would be giving a dollar block to block because some days, that's what happens, it is one person after another at every store, every gas station, every eatery. I have bought food for some. Some have said no to the food and insisted on money. There goes my heart again, solidifying.

Today was a variation and my heart, well, it softened so that I was nearly weeping.

It was after the noon Mass at St. Victor. I was putting out the candles and cleaning up the vessels. My final act was to close the gates to the sanctuary, when a woman came to the altar rail. I couldn't believe how much she reminded me of the picture that heads this entry. She was about as thin. She wasn't wearing dress like rags--she was dressed in pants and a shirt and sweater over it. Her blondish hair, or maybe it was gray, was long and straggly, pretty much exactly like the picture. She kind of lisped, so I assumed she was missing some teeth, and her accent sounded vaguely Middle Western, maybe Oklahoma. She called to me. "Ma'am".  When I saw her, I assumed she would be asking for some money. Her face was so gaunt. But she asked only if there was a Bible in the Church she could read. There are books in the sacristy for prayers for various occasions, some formal books with readings for the day, but it isn't a religious library and it was unlikely there would be a Bible as such. Besides I couldn't give away a hard cover belonging to the parish even if I found one. I told her that I probably didn't have a Bible, but I'd look for something that I could let her look at (and if it came to that keep). She went to the very back row.

We usually have a softcover Magnificat, or the Daily Word lying about. These include readings for the day and meditations, and I find them really on point and deeply comforting. The one that I found was probably supposed to stay in the sacristy, but no one had written on it, "Do not remove" as so often they do. I made an executive spiritual decision. I went to the back and gave it to her. She was looking at the Missalette, but this would be much more substantial. She took it, I'd almost say, greedily, but in a good way. Then she asked me how far we were from the ocean. I said "quite a way but you can take the bus."  She said she didn't have money for the bus. But then she also didn't ask me for any. She said that she had been walking, needed a rest, but would walk to the ocean. "That's going to be a long walk." She said, "I just need to rest a little bit."

Something about her made me think of Jesus. She seemed out of time to me, and I could easily imagine her encountering Him, and He blessing her.

I ran into a few people on the way to my car, where I had a twenty and about five or six in singles--I was low on cash and needed an ATM run. I hoped she'd still be there. She was. And she was reading the Magnificat. I offered her the singles so she could get the bus to the ocean. She said, "No, I don't use money." She didn't say she doesn't take money. She said, "I walk."  "But how do you eat?" I pursued.

"I go through garbage cans. Sometimes people will buy me food. Sometimes I go to the food pantries."  I said, "Well, if we were at a restaurant, I would buy you some food, so just take the money."  She declined, quietly, but firmly.

Was her declination a part of her psychological fragility? Was it something more deep and philosophical?  I will probably never know.

But she seemed to me to be precisely what the Lord called the "poor in spirit."  Almost penitential like Mary Magdalene. I remember sitting across from the statue many many years ago, on my first trip to Europe. I was drawn to her. Today, I felt just about as drawn to the poor woman who visited St. Victor's.

"Doctors" - A Reverie by my Late Father

After another hiatus--there will be many of them, as recording Dad's many stories on this blog takes time, and energy--I present another of his tales. This one is an observation of his dealings with doctors. I don't know that it's one of his best written, but it is a commentary on our times, and so, to my mind, relevant for posterity. After I read it, it is also a painful reminder that my father's death in 2008, was the result of some of the failures he writes of here. He did not die of heart disease, or bladder cancer, which had been diagnosed, but rather of sepsis after an out patient procedure. He probably had the beginnings of the sepsis when he went for the procedure. I had been concerned about whether he could tolerate the procedure. The doctors, including his cardiologist, the one that my father liked, but whom I found to be a pompous. . . .well, you know. . . were casual and non-responsive to my father's and my, concerns. By the time I got him to the hospital, it was too late, and somehow they couldn't figure out what should have been obvious.  His own regular doctors avoided me while he was hospitalized for four days and never said a word to me after dad died. Dad was 90. Given his longevity, and the fact for me it would never be about money, I didn't sue. They knew I was an attorney. I did write them both a letter. Naturally, likely on the advice of counsel, they never replied. I note they continue to flourish. I wonder if the death of my father ever gave them pause.

And so, without further ado, my father observes:

It is only lately that I am more comfortable with doctors.  

I am at an age generously beyond the biblical allotment of three score and ten. My longevity is perhaps due to some of the ministrations of medical men over the course of perhaps forty surgeries and the consonant after-treatment.

I cannot say that being lanced, sutured, subject to importunate invasive tubes and implements, the mechanical invaders of bodily privacy, has given me great insight into the psyche of doctors. I do feel, however, that I have seen enough to justify my--disquietude--at some of the treatment I have received.  I am, though, fortunately still alive because of some superb thoracic reconstruction done to repair damage caused by the inaction of doctors who, in times gone by had no knowledge to forestall the trauma.

It was the lot of a skilled surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles to refurbish an area of the heart damaged in 1980 because of the then standard operating procedure. Those were the dark ages in terms of today's progress.

Then I spent six prone days in Intensive Care with little attention. Occasionally, a nurse applied a nitro glycerin paste to my chest.  I had one X-ray in the ICU with an immense camera lumbered into the room by a minuscule technician.

But today, I had a work-up by a young Cedars cardiologist who appears well instructed in the updated manual of the heart.  He is followup up on an elevated pulse that sent me to the Emergency Room the day after Thanksgiving.

So far we have done the standard tests, the four vials of blood, the electrocardiogram and, of course, an X-Ray.  The doctor's name is Joel (not his real name). He is genial, quick, the kind of a kid I would have played handball with in earlier days.  I like him. I like his appearance of humility, and his forthrightness.  I am more confident than usual.

"Boy," he exclaimed on viewing the cardiogram.  "Your heart too a big hit in 1980!"

"They might have saved me the damage had they given me an aspirin,"  I said.

"We've come a long way since then," he mused.

After the Northridge earthquake of 1994, my already anxious nature was honed to critical pitch.  I consulted another cardiologist for mental surcease.  I disliked him on sight--recognizing him as from the 'Elohist' school wherein doctors refer to themselves in the royal "we".  Here was a doctor who set himself apart from ordinary humanity, who thought himself immortal.

He stood too close for my taste as he probed the prescribed areas--chest, back, the left and the right carotids--uttering periodic "hmmmms" as if he were experiencing medical epiphanies.  He punctuated his exam with the usual questions, "Do you smoke?" among them, that philosophers' stone that explains for medicine all the ills they cannot solve.

"Did you smoke?" he persisted.  

"Four packs a day," I said.  This called for several remonstrative "hmmmms."

"Listen, Doc," I said, exasperated.  "I was born when your mentors were still bleeding their patients.  They all smoked.  Just a few years ago when I lay in peril from a heart attack your profession had not yet learned of the preventative value of an aspirin."

My own internist, a childhood friend, the doctor who sent me to the hospital in 1980, examined me, while smoking.  He was never without a cigarette in his mouth."

I guess my impression of doctors is colored by the longevity that has seen the great strides in medicine.  The consequent ill is that the image of Dr. Kildare diagnosing on sight a melanoma on Lionel Barrymore's arm is somewhat dimmed.  The doctor of today is being reshaped in the crucible of equipment and cost.  Medicare has imposed the stricture on hospital time with its limit on payment for hospital stays--hence the "outpatient" procedures which assume that you may be safely returned home within the time allotted determined by how much Medicare is willing to pay.  

I had a hernia operation and a tumor removed from my bladder, on such an outpatient basis.  Throughout the night I monitored the clear plastic catheter as it ran red. It was still red when the surgeon exclaimed, "It's clear you can go home."  

One seldom sees a doctor up close.  There is the consultation and then the office visits in which he plays a minor role.

You are led to the consulting room.  The technicians take over.  Someone takes your blood pressure and other vitals.  Another hands you a bottle or sets you in the prone for a test. I have one surgeon of whom I have only caught a glimpse just before the anesthetic takes over.  There is brief joy in his ebullient post operative visit, the deft removal of some prosthetic device, after which he says, "Take a deep breath."

When I was a child I knew a doctor, one whose human side exceeded by far his knowledge of medicine.  He was old, gray and gaunt.  He occupied a cluttered leathery office on Boston Road, in the Bronx, across from Morris High School.  He did house visits, always accompanied by his tired little black bag.

He guided me through measles, scarlet fever, contusions and minor breaks--for a dollar visit.  Sometimes he did not get the dollar.

There were no outpatient considerations.  He sentenced me to thirty days in bed for the measles and scarlet fever and forbade me meat.  I think of him as a doctor in the way Hippocrates phrased the requirements.  I like him even now, even though he caused the destruction of my model airplane collection to prevent infection of my siblings and the world.

This is not to disparage the modern physician.  He is the product of the times.  He is the human element of a mechanical robotic structure, subject to economic exigencies, his own limitations, human venality and politics--the hubris of little men who are just scratching the surface of the Infinite.  

Considerations on a Swim on a Summer Day

I just returned to my apartment after a late afternoon swim down there. Well, it was more a late afternoon float as I am not much of a swimmer. The sun was just brushing the shallow end of the pool when I got there, and though I went a couple of times to the deep end with a boogie board I got at the 99 Cent Store that I couldn't handle very well--I tried to sit on it and naturally it popped out from under me--I spent the largest part at the still slightly sunny end, allowing the water, and the sun to do what they do best, put me in an extreme state of relaxation. For some reason, not a lot of people in this building use the pool, me, a couple of times during a summer, the HOA President, and a couple of downstairs neighbors are about it out of a bit over 20 residents. That works for me, as there is something delightful about having the whole space to myself. And when it is as hot as it has been, so few people are going in and out that I feel as if the whole building is mine as I noodle in the water.

I think the pool is one of the favorite parts of my living in this location. The angle of the photo is the view I have when I am sitting on my terrace and I call it (to myself, and now to all of you) my "little lake".  All I have to do is go up a few steps after a swim and I'm home, out of the wet clothes and into the cozy dry. Now that's something I didn't have in the Bronx! I feel gratitude for this small amenity, more than I would have thought possible.

At one point, I simply sat submerged (except for my head) on one of the steps--you can see the rail there in the picture, where the steps are. I let my hands float free under the water. The water undulated around me gently. The sun was between two parts of the building and had that look you usually only see in drawings, the little triangular extensions of fire. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I noticed one of the local hummingbirds on a cactus by the wall watching me, and twittering. I closed my eyes again. And again when I opened them a minute or two later, the bird was still there. The sun, the weightlessness, the minute creature observing me--I was at complete peace.

Other than the twittering birds, the sounds were limited to the occasional bark of a dog and the mechanical hums of several air conditioners. As I sit tee shirted, shorts and bare footed on the terrace, another of my favorite parts of living in this location, I still hear the sounds of the occasionally barking dog, the twittering hummingbirds garnering the last of the day's nectar from my feeder, and the humming of the air conditioners, though the temperature has dropped significantly. And my old cat Bleu is taking a swig of water from my solar fountain.

Life is good.

"What If ?" Is Such a Waste

It's a very hot night in Los Angeles, at least indoors. The heat of the day isn't leaving my apartment so I have turned on the air conditioner. Oddly, though, it is cool enough (but humid for California) to sit outside in a soupcon breeze. I came out here to write. But then I found myself unable to begin. That happens often, but mostly because I cannot settle on a direction. Tonight, I have a direction, or a continuation of one that finds itself weaving through my blog, but one that seems to discomfit some of my friends who kindly read my words here. As to them it will come no surprise, I tend to write a lot about life and death. I think they (and others perhaps) assume that this focus comes from depression. Heck, I have been depressed more times than I can count, but my preoccupations in these pages isn't derived from sadness. It's just kind of not wanting to ignore what is plainly around me to be reckoned with, and in the reckoning, in an odd sense the hope that finally I will leave behind that fear and anxiety that has been too often an obstructive companion and kept me, to here, from many ordinary adventures. Hard to explain. We all deal with scary "what-ifs" in our lives, but I have carried my "what-iffing" to being a frozen figure on a plateau while others have courageously moved beyond me in what might even be considered basics, things like love, and family. They were willing, to paraphrase some line in one of my favorite movies, "Shadowlands" to take the pain with the joy. I often wasn't. Oh, I didn't avoid the pain. I just missed the joy.  I have noticed that Providence thus has placed certain things in my path, over I should tell you my vociferous objections, to get me out of speculative worry to face, to embrace, real life in all its facets. I have been so busy with the "what-ifs" that I ran before I engaged in far too much.




So what got me thinking about all this yet again? Well, two things, but I'll mention the first, and leave the second, a play I saw today, called "Constellations" to another entry. Maybe.

I was visiting my elderly friend as I do two to three times a week at a nursing home in Culver City. One of the Carmelite sisters was giving a presentation to a group of residents, and my friend was among them. I don't know that she recognized me immediately--I sense of late she doesn't always-- or maybe she didn't see me come in, but I didn't want to interrupt the proceedings, so I sat a short way off.  I noticed a new resident. She was clearly agitated, and trying to get up, though not steady on her feet, from her wheel chair. Sister managed to continue her presentation while attempting to soothe the woman by sympathetically caressing her back, but the woman's tears required a nurse to attend to her. She was taken to the nurses station which I could see from my vantage point, and she was no more calmed by their presence and ministrations. I could hear her asking to be taken to someone, I guessed a family member, who was not there. Probably, like so many of the residents, like my friend, she has dementia and is no longer able to care for herself and depending on its manifestations, neither is her family able any longer to take care of her. She shook all over as she cried to be rescued. from what is one of the possible inevitabilities of becoming ill. The staff tried to comfort her, to no avail. I felt for the nurses, as well as the woman.  Sometimes it just isn't all right, and nothing can make it so.

Each of us, if we don't die young, and quick, has to face the possibility that this might happen to us. I found it surprising that though it occurred to me that at some point in the not so distant future, I could be a new resident in a place like this, being led, as the Bible says to where I do not wish to go, I did not have an attack of the "what ifs".  I did book mark it in my head. I did also wonder that since I have been much of my life alone, and much of it, despite my often gregarious demeanor, a loner, whether I would seek rescue from an outside human source--even if I were compromised by dementia.

I am having a hard time with this entry. Not sure why. I think I am saying that I spent the first two thirds of my life worrying about things that might happen but were no where on the horizon. Now there are things most definitely on the horizon, and I am getting a preview, and somehow that jolt of reality is finally wrenching me from my old habit of "what-if", into more of a "What are you going to do now?" mode.  Maybe.

More than twenty years ago, someone I greatly respected. and trusted, exhausted himself in trying to get me away from my crippling "what-ifs" asked me that very phrase, "What are you going to do Djinna?" Before that, my father tried to logic me out of my cyclical thinking. They both hung in with me until, well, they died.  I spun my wheels. It's getting a little late in the day to keep spinning my wheels.

If spending time in a care home doesn't motivate me to deal with what is real, not potentialities I fear, then nothing will.

Long Ago Events that Give Us (Me) Pause

I was scrolling on Facebook the other day. Someone had posted a video of a French Canadian Priest, a Franciscan I think, giving a homily to a large crowd. It was some kind of convention. It was on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. He seemed robust. He was praising God, and His Son. He walked back and forth as he spoke, alert, alive. And then, he wasn't. He winced for a moment. Put his hand to the center of his chest, though he continued to speak of God without abatement. And then he fell down. And died.

I had the sense, though the Facebook post did not indicate so, that this was not a very recent event. In fact, it happened just over twenty five years ago, June 26, 1992. I wanted to know more about this priest, beyond the capture of his death on live television. I could find almost nothing other than he founded an order, and of course, that he was a speaker. But I could not even locate an obituary.

It's not like I don't know that people die all the time. I have been to enough funerals. I have been in a room just as someone (both my parents) died, or just after. It is no surprise that we can go from life to death in a fraction of a moment. But I have never seen it quite like this. Fr. Hurtubise wasn't (apparently) sick. When he died, he was doing his job. He died, literally, on the job, smack in the middle of daily life.

In some ways, it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with me. And then in a flash, I know that it does. It doesn't scare me, precisely (unless I happen to be in an airplane flying across country in which all I can think about is the descent of the plane and the inevitable result), but it makes me a little mad at myself. I have lived in perpetual anxiety. Since I was retired from my job, there are fewer triggers for that anxiety, but it still rears its ugly head, cyclical thought and doubt, resolve and doubt again about the least thing. And seeing this video somehow put my life long fears into the realm of the absurd, at the same time knowing that it is unlikely (at this age) I shall ever allow life to unfold without trying to control it with my defense mechanisms. They waste life. I have always known that. I have worked hard to temper these fears, but still I have not lived as I could have for their niggling at me.

Cliche's come to mind, like that old chestnut, "Live in the moment". Well, that's all very well if you have no responsibilities. We all have some responsibility, some more than others. And yet, in observing the small distance of the fall of the priest from homilist to deceased, the phrase rumbles as an exigency in my mind.

The Benedictines have a motto, "Keep death daily before your eyes." They don't mean worry about it, as worry, I have come to know as one who did it endlessly, kills joy.  But recognizing that there are things to do now, in this moment, which may not be available in the next. They, of course, are also talking about preparation for the eternal journey, which they, and I, believe in. Maybe that's why I wanted to read more about Fr. Hurtubise. I wanted to know about what had gone before in his preparation for that moment when he felt that twinge and left the world.

Wherefore July 4?

I just came home from the Fourth of July celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. There was a time when I would return from a lively fireworks display by the professionals and that would be it. Back to the routine. Back to relative quiet. But tonight, I notice, there seem to be an abundance, more than I can remember in the past, of such displays. The sounds, the explosions are all around me. No doubt the people are enjoying their displays as much as I enjoyed mine. But as I was sitting here on my terrace hearing the rattle and boom around me, to the left and to the right, it occurred to me that if this were 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the announcement of the unalienable rights of all human beings, the sounds I am hearing would be those of cannon and musket. What I would not hear, at least from this safe distance, would be the thud of bodies of boys dying for those rights.

I'd like to think that all the fireworks are a remembrance of those long dead boys, commanded by General Washington, and overseen by a group of flawed men who understood history and philosophy and theology and how they intermixed and gave us the Laws of Nature and Nature's God from whence human rights derive. But I fear not. Oh, yes, I saw on one of the memes that one station of another read the whole Declaration today, thus presumably proving that Americans "get it"--the essence of the document of our founding as a people, endowed by the Creator with those rights by which we pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness. But to me, these debates back and forth which focus on the accidents of the personalities of our politicians miss the real point, we are locked in a battle that will determine whether the United States makes it to its 300th year, or even, to its 250th a mere 9 years away.  Government here was created to serve the Natural Law and the rights of people under that Law, not to supersede the Natural Law and eradicate the Creator who endowed us with the rights under which this nation was founded.

When I hear that the Declaration and the Constitution, which is its critical complement, are fluid and rights are engineered not via the Natural Law but via human feeling enforced by the fiat of the powerful among us creatures, I find myself despairing.  This small oasis in the world, as close on earth to the Paradise we threw away in our first effort to grasp at being gods on our own terms, is on the edge of ruin.

Yes, many of the Founders had slaves, but they planted the seed of its destruction, the first nation to do so, less than 100 years down the road, in the very documents that constituted the country. I hear this objection to them as if the Ideas to which they strove become irrelevant when flawed human beings fail to live up to them. There is this narcissism today that we, sitting in front of our technological advancements are somehow more enlightened, better, than these White, Male, Europeans. I am trying to see how we are better. We are as vile to one another as ever was any citizen of any now long dead civilization. All truth is relative, so whether one person is living up to a good is a moving goal post, and dependent once again on the vagaries of whomever has the voice of authority and whoever trains the next generation.

We have saved ourselves from smoking (although I note young people smoking more and more for all the warnings, exhortations and bluster), but we have been killing our children for decades--a right not under the aegis of Nature's God, but the god of euphemism.

In a moment of despair, I might consider the booms of celebration I am still hearing at nearly eleven thirty, the death knell of America. But I have great faith in Nature's God, and that faith generates hope, and with Grace, hope will generate charity in the face of a world I no longer recognize.