Diminished Dad

Recent scientific research of great medical importance shows that during my adult life I have shrunk two inches.

“That’s not too bad,” the doctor’s medical assistant said, perhaps trying to reassure me.

I didn’t need reassuring, for it happens all over the place when spinal discs and vertebrae deteriorate.  It’s common enough so that via Google you can find more about height loss than you really need to know.

A couple of friends told me how much they’ve shrunk.  One’s loss was three inches, which brought him down to my former height, except I’ve shrunk below that height and the guy is still taller than me.

But I wonder where that two inches of microscopic bone decay went.  It could have spread out horizontally around my gut, which looks obvious, or maybe it just went poof into the atmosphere, from where it would become dust motes on the furniture.

There is, however, a larger issue at stake here.  Father’s Day is upon us, and my children will read this and learn that proof now exists that their father is not all he was made out to be.  He has been downsized, as measured clinically, and he is now a diminished dad (which sounds a little like a musical notation).

To that I must say:  Too bad.  I’ve got cold Oly nearby.  You guys will have to fend for yourselves.

***

After Life, Afterlife?

A year ago at this time I was in Yuba City being driven around by a man who was dying.  John was an air force buddy.  We had met 60 years earlier while the air force was training us to be navigators.  We had lost touch, but were back together for a few days last spring.

An infection and cancer had killed off most of John’s lungs.  He was on oxygen and could walk only three or four steps at a time before pausing to rest.  He could drive, however, and in his car we went to lunch and then cruised around chatting and reminiscing.

We both said that we never expected to live as long as we did.  He said he had no regrets and had had a good life.  I said I was satisfied with my life but that I did have one regret.

My only regret, I said, is that I won’t be able to send a letter back telling people what dying was like.  Every time I read about someone who’s had a near-death experience, they say that they saw a blinding white light and then came back to life.  I want to write back and say that’s a bunch of bull, that there is no blinding white light, not even a dim bulb.  Or maybe there really is.  I’d be honest about it.  Anyway, I’d like to report back.

I don’t know why I couldn’t.  I’ve got some Forever stamps from the post office, and Forever is the same as Eternity, the place I’m going.  But there might not be any postal service on the other side.  Then what?

I wouldn’t count on email.  Assuming that a perfect infrastructure of electronics could provide service back to this life, then when an email with a return address of Afterlife hits a live person’s inbox, chances are it’d go straight to the Spam folder.

I suppose I could fake it, write the letter now and have someone toss it in a mailbox after I’ve died.  But there’s so much that’s not known, so much I’d have to make up.

As a Catholic I’d be going through either Door Number One or Door Number Two.  (I’ll leave it to you to decide which door leads to where.)  But I’m not a good Catholic and am more of a skeptic, really.  So is there a special afterlife for skeptics?  A place where a clock chimes twelve times and an announcer says, “Twelve noon, maybe”?

And not all faiths go to the Catholic hereafter.  I’d miss my Jewish friends and relatives.  Valhalla might be fun, sitting around drinking mead with raucous Norsemen.  But Buddhists skip it altogether, being reincarnated as fast as they can so they can come back and try again.  And then there are the atheists and agnostics.  If you are faithless, does that mean you also have no afterlife?

Who all would be there?  Everyone I’ve ever met?  Everyone who ever lived?  Man, it’d be crowded, people standing on top of each other.

Would we have cars?  Facebook?  There’s an awful lot I’d have to make up to make it sound authentic.

I got off on this tangent because of a guy I know, not the air force buddy I mentioned earlier but another guy.  This other guy wrote a blog post in which he challenged readers to review their lives by answering deep, deep questions, such as:

“… did you stand in the face of evil and say no?  With a ferocity that surprised you?”

“… did you help somebody when you could and whisper ‘pay it forward’?  And then think to yourself that maybe you had just created a ripple?”

This other guy is our youngest son, Mark.  Mark offers a different approach to thinking about life than I do.  Mark thinks things through, is sensitive; I tend to live by blunder, a hopeless male, indoctrinated by the First Church of John Wayne.  I recommend reading Mark’s blog; it’s proof that intelligent life can still be found in the universe, and on the internet.

But back to where we started.  I visited my air force buddy several times last spring.  We would get hot dogs at Wienerschnitzel and go back to his house for coffee.  That was John’s special treat for himself—a relish dog and coffee.  He was a wealthy man who for himself lived simply and was generous toward others.

He went into hospice care about the time of my last visit and died peacefully at home.  He was a good man who deserves a good afterlife.

***

The (Lost?) Art of the Klatch

I wanted to write about coffee-klatches, but I have seen the second half of that combo spelled different ways, and I wanted to know which was correct.  In answer, it seems that the English-language klatch sprang from klatsch, a typical German word mucus-filled with seven letters, only one being a vowel.  Either spelling refers to an informal conversation.

Early in my air force years, I participated in a coffee-klatch with a bunch of other impoverished enlisted men.  At the mess hall, coffee was free, but the mess hall was not open all hours of the day and night.  Right across the street, however, was a cafeteria that was open round the clock and charged a nickel a cup.  Refills weren’t free, but at a nickel a cup we could get a lot of caffeine-fueled talk for just a few coins. 

 A nickel a cup!  Thoughts of the good old days come back to me every time I pony up two bucks or so at a place that employs a barista.  Does coffee cost so much because of an Italian word?  

We would gather, a half-dozen of us or so, at the cafeteria after dinner and sit there talking for hours, occasionally till past midnight.  We were in our early twenties, most of us aircraft mechanics.  There were four topics of conversation:  women, cars, airplanes, and how screwed up the air force was.  Early on we made a rule that we would not talk about religion or politics.  Why we decided this I don’t know, but no one complained about it, and we all abided by it.

There was a lot of give-and-take in the talk, a lot of good-natured kidding, and a lot of laughter.  The coffee-klatch was our entertainment. 

I was somewhat misplaced.  I knew nothing about women, and I didn’t own a car.  I knew enough about airplanes to know when to use a wrench and when a screwdriver, and I didn’t know whether the air force was screwed up or not because I had nothing to compare it with.  I am not a talkative person, so I generally sat there quietly having a good time.

One night Pat took me aside.  We knew each other by last names or parts of last names.  Pat was Patrick, a staff sergeant four-striper, and chief clerk in the orderly room.  He was our klatch’s unofficial but acknowledged leader.

“You know something, Pax,” he said.  “You hardly ever say anything, and you’re the smartest one of the bunch.”

That was the nicest compliment I have ever received.  It was totally unexpected.  And it was a surprise:  I had been considering myself to be a bump on a log, but now I realized that I could impress people just by keeping my mouth shut.

A lot of time and gallons of coffee have passed since then, and these days I envision my insides coated a slimy brown and my nerves cauterized by caffeine.  I also envision, and miss, a coffee-klatch like that first one back in the air force.

Something happens to men as we grow older, or at least something seems to have happened to the men I know.  Gone is much of the humor of youth; also gone is the willingness to listen, replaced by the urgent need to say something, anything.  ("Listen to me damn it!  I might die any minute!")

All too often the give and take of conversation is gone; in its place is the competitive serial monologue:  One man talks for a while about something, then another man talks, and so on.  It’s sort of like kindergartners’ show and tell, which among teachers is also known as lie and brag.

I also wonder if any old progressives are around.  The men I hear are all too often merely repeating something they heard from Rush or Sean or some other media mouthpiece who earns a living by preying on the fears of naïve Americans.

I don’t like my approach here because I’m only one voice.  For all I know there could be a jillion good coffee-klatches around, and I just haven’t found one.  That leaves me holding fast to what I learned because of Pat decades ago:  I try more and more to say less and less.

Finally, some of the men I listen to should keep in mind a remark often attributed to Mark Twain: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”

***