Saturday Musings

Ellen Terhune

The ride  to NY to visit my mother and brother was pleasant. The connections were fast, the planes roomy, the stewards on the plane friendly and even guardedly conversational, and the limousine ride to RVC uneventfully and gratifyingly bland with a chauffeur who had no interest in making small talk. Merely in collecting his fare which, incidentally, was higher than he quoted on the phone.   He earned his tip though, by his personification, up there in the front seat, of perfect silent non-existence. In contrast  to last trip, of which I wrote a critical blog of Southwest, this one went well.  I slept most of this trip--its strange how a plane induces sleep.

Why so easy to sleep on planes? Maybe because there is not much else to do, nothing to read except flight  magazines hawking expensive, extravagantly upper class technology and gadgets of the Hammacher Schlemmer type. Or is it the comforting pressure of a seat strap and hum of the engines. 

A pretty  woman sat next to me on the longest flight and I maintained a non-invasive Tutankhamen like posture with both arms folded, though somewhat lower on my chest than the Pharoanic lad .  Best to avoid the petty, banal, or meaningless conversation--the kind of exhaustively polite and ritualistic talk one makes with strangers in a public place and which are really words thrown into the void. The enjoyment of privacy and enforced rest  on flights is truly a delicacy. It; an acquired taste.

 Incidentally, after reading my blog a few months ago, Southwest sent me an encouraging note and 100 dollars as a sort of compensation for my pain of  various inconveniences, But, even without the bribe, today's trip would have been pleasant.  Being high above clouds can't  help but induce a sort of philosophical mood. And seeing a landscape unfold as one descends to land also forces a strange  perspective.  The houses grow identifiable. The sheer massiveness of the world becomes plain. The tiny-ness of our lives when compared with that of the sum of  the multitudinous lives and  dramas that in the expansive landscape below intimidate.

 In every house  below--in the tracks of identical working class homes there, in the what must be wealthy homes  overlooking wate thataway, in the office buildings,even the small buildings on the docks, are  a million separate dramas. No, billions of dramas, billions upon billions of fights, romances, plots, job stresses, children being born. Trillions upon trillions of repeating episodes of joy, grieving, television watching, whatever, each participant imagining  they are the center of the world's drama. Despite our sense of independent identity we are, alas, pretty much part of a larger whole, governed by the same rules. What seems singularly poignant in our own lives is being re-enacted a hundred times over somewhere else. 

And when further descending we can discern people that looks like ants--wait, they are ants. We already have landed.

Jokes aside, I am glad the trip was joke less.  Regarding Southwest, they may have eliminated the rule to make the safety instructions at the beginning of the flight funny. Now, one doesn't have to listen to would be comedians, or serious aircraft personnell coerced by policy into forcing jokes against their natural  propensity. Humor is pretty subjective, so best not to foist funniness on people.  I don't know, maybe I would enjoy flight instructions by F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sigmund Freud--a dry description of air masks or flotation devices with accompanying commentary. 

Anyway, at my mothers home,  I sleep tonight in the room that was my father's old office. I am inhabiting the same space that my father inhabited some 50 or 60 years ago. No doubt there are bits of his DNA still floating around. I am below a wooden cabinet   that many many years ago had a small bottle marked Ritalin, amongst other medications, in it. The shelf now is full of binders of family photographs--what was then an office is now a storage room-- and my bedroom.

Time is indeed a mystery.  In fact, Dad could appear in a mist by the side of the bed, some modern Hamlet, removing a wart from a similarly spectral patient's foot, or digging gravel out of my elbow, or laying out fresh white  paper from a massive role on the examining table. No wonder people believe in ghosts. Occasionally in the house I find animpromptu repair he made with white medical adhesive tape--parts of an electrical circuit, or a couple of wires,  held together by white stuff, seeming melted by the years into a sticky black lump.

What would I make of seeing his or other ghosts of the past in this house, if they were suddenly to reappear. Emma Terhune, part of Edmund Wilson's masterful work, Memoirs of Hecate County, has a house come to life with the past. How would I react to seeing grandparents or uncles gone to great reward reappear. What I would make of the odd clothing, the shoes and pants of 1970, or 1950, the rolling eyes at the crazy changing world of the 1960's.

It is odd how our memories do not record their absurdity. Oour memories do not make record of the out of style pants, the lack of computers, the fact that the carpet is outdated shag--only what we registered at the time when those oddities were not odd, when they were consistent with the present.The dramas of memory are really Hamlet in modern dress,.

On a thoughtful note, or, really, on another topic altogether, my rule for aging is, first, to simply keep moving forward despite whatever nuisances the body imposes--poorer sight, poorer hearing, disease, despite whatever accumulated emotional insults occur as first this then another relatives succumbs to age and dies, as this, then another trying event occurs, as this or that financial or family or auto mishap hits us like short jabs. Just keep moving on and not make too much of a fuss about things No one likes a complainer. And when older people complain about age, youth have no idea what they are talking about. Or they find it funny.

Being able to visit my family in the same home I grew up is indeed a treat--an interesting sense of continuity is provided, and there are multiple layers of memory from every era of my life. I am sitting below a chandelier my parents bought in New Orleans about 1948. f the walls could talk-- as time passes all the proverbs begin to make sense. And, if one is fortunate or better yet, unfortunate, in love, how all the rock and roll songs make sense. I am not alone.  Indeed, it is better to be unfortunate, in terms of learning.. To be fortunate teaches nothing--joy is a strangely uninformed emotion, and creates the fatuous belief that your success is somehow because you have done everything right. Failure, pain--that is where the insight comes.

From pain arises enormous insight, and introspection and sense of solidarity with others. Hearing today of the death of Sylvester Stallone's son, one can only imagine that this individual, from the heights of his Olympian wealth and fame and talent (even if one disputes the talent) experiences the same torment as every-man, reels from the same intense torture that the person on the street would feel.  The fame and money and achievement don't prevent him from the same tragedies, and, indeed, victories, that the rest of us suffer more privately.

Of course, it would be unhealthy to court pain simply to gain insight. Best is to have nice long periods of rest, enjoyment, satisfaction, praise, flattery, and success as background against which the painful episodes can supply their insight. And so, off to a local restaurant which supposedly has very good manicotti! And then Starbucks or the computer store.