THE WHEELS KEEP TURNING
Some more thoughts on the passage of time
As we head towards sundown on this first night of Passover 2023, things are weird. I realized that some time following my 64th birthday on December 30, 2022, I no longer felt invincible. It’s a combination of things really. I am still lawyering, teaching spin (indoor cycle) classes, still on my town’s Board of Education, still full of energy and fully engaged in life, but the day after my birthday I received in the mail that magical postcard reminding me that sometime before September 30, 2023, I have to register for Medicare. How can that possibly be? I mean just yesterday I was 17. It is not that it is all a blur since then, it is more a feeling of when did all this happen. This hit home as I walked in our town’s St. Patrick’s Day parade a few weeks back. Someone stopped me and thanked me for my 16 years of service on the Board of Education, and it touched me deeply. However, they then commented on how the public has watched my hair turn grey over the years. I had not thought of that. Aging and greying in the public eye. I still feel like me inside, but I guess others see a different and changing version of me.
I think the bigger reason for the weirdness, and a bit of melancholy, is that my mother is not involved in the making of her traditional brisket this year and is not otherwise engaged in any seder preparations. She is still with us. As cognitively vibrant just 21 days short of her 93rd birthday as she ever was, but her body is now failing. In the last few weeks she gave up driving and this person, who has been fiercely independent since my father passed in 1997, is now having some difficulty walking, and has to let other people (my brother and I usually) shop for her and do for her. This I thought I would never see. I guess I was wrong, but I just could not imagine it. I guess I really cannot imagine a day without her in my life.
You see, although never divorced, my parents were separated a number of times. I loved my father, and he was certainly always around and available emotionally and financially, but my mother was always there, 24/7. From her, and my father-in-law, I learned about being there. I learned that assuming there is a roof, clothing, warmth and food (which you cannot always assume), the two most important things you can give to your family are your love and your time. Real time, not bullshit time sitting near each other watching T.V. or twiddling on your cell phone, but actually engaging with your kid(s), listening to them, helping them to figure out who they are and what their passions are.
My mother was always all in 100%. For example, there was the time in the late 1970’s when I hitched with a friend in the dead of winter from Stony Brook University on Long Island where we were undergraduates up to Brockport, New York (near Buffalo) where my girlfriend (now wife) was attending college. It took 14 hours and 16 rides to get there. On the way back, late on a Sunday afternoon, our luck did not hold. We made it as far south as Poughkeepsie. We had no money. We tried to get a room in a Holiday Inn. I made what I thought was a reasonable offer. I told the manager at the desk that I would get my mother on the phone and she would agree to come up in the morning with money. I further offered to give the manager our clothes (except our underwear) and our backpacks as security. I thought it was a fair offer. He did not see it that way. The upshot, my mother drove up one hour in the middle of the night to get us. I am not saying she was thrilled, but she was there.
Another time I went back to Stony Brook and forgot a notebook at home. I needed the notebook to study for as mid-term. You guessed it, Mom drove the notebook out to me.
I never took advantage of my Mom but I knew she was there, and that gave me confidence and strength in the event I got into a bind that I could not otherwise work my way out of. I knew I had the full support of one powerful woman.
I have always worked out and been an avid athlete. About 30 years ago I said, “Mom, if you want to keep swimming in the ocean, and do all the other stuff you love, you need to start hitting the gym”. The first week she hated it, but then she became a gym rat. She religiously went to the gym, and worked hard, up until the pandemic a couple of years ago. She then got a recumbent exercise bike and weights in her home and continued to work out, but her main social activity was the gym, and this was gone. The doctors did not want her exposed.
My mother, who is a tall woman, walked very fast with short choppy steps. She loves the cold weather and would visit a park near her home a couple of times a week, especially in the cold, to power walk two or more miles. Some of my childhood friends bumped into her there a couple of years back. They tried keeping up with her. They called me later that day and said, “never again”.
Mom is an abstract artist and has always been a free thinker not locked into any decade in the past. We brought her to see The Rolling Stones and Three Dog Night. She was fun to be with, and to explore the world with. After my father passed away, she traveled the world alone, even meeting Queen Elizabeth (which was no surprise to any of us). Her motto famously was, “I’m not lonely because I’m always with myself”.
Now, she hates the fact that my brother and I do her shopping, even though we tell her that we want to be there for her in whatever way she needs us to be. We each live about 12 minutes from the home in which we grew up, which is where she still lives, so it is no trouble. But she hates being reliant and a burden. She hates being afraid to walk outside. She hates the fact that she has decided not to travel to her grandson’s wedding in California in May, 2023. She misses being who she was for all these years. The person who, at 90 years of age, brought my wife and I food when we had COVID in March, 2020 and could not go out.
So, this Passover is weird. Mom is here and not here at the same time. She is consumed with the physical changes that she is encountering, and it is kind of frightening to watch because if it can happen to her, it can happen to me.
I wish everyone a happy Passover, Easter, Ramadan and/or whatever it is that you celebrate. May you be surrounded by family and friends. The wheels will keep turning. So do not waste a second of it. Tell the people close to you how you feel. Do not let stupid issues come between you and them. Give your family and friends, and especially your kids, your time. Listen to them, be there for them. Wring out every drop of marrow from your quick sprint from cradle to grave. In the end, love is the answer. One World/One Love. Peace.
