by Dorien Grey
MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER
ME AND J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
Reflections on Aging
Every day I find myself, to my horror, becoming J. Alfred Prufrock. Last night I had a pork chop for dinner. Today I had a pork chop for dinner. The same pork chop! Half of it yesterday, half of it today. Good Lord, just thinking about that is enough to make me want to weep.
I used to eat four pork chops at a sitting without batting an eye, plus a small mountain of mashed potatoes and a cup and a half of gravy. No more. No more. Do I dare to eat a peach? I’d love to, but I can’t open my mouth wide enough for a respectable bite, and I probably wouldn’t eat the whole thing even if I could open up.
I do not believe in aging gracefully, and the eyes of strangers and reflective surfaces make it eminently clear that I am not. Poor Navy-days or college-days Roger would be utterly horrified were we to somehow bump into one another. I’m here, now, and I’m horrified. How could who I have always been (and still am within my own mind) have become this Nosferatu-like creature…this ironically pseudonymed picture of Dorian Gray?
Please believe me when I say that I’m not being maudlin (not intentionally, anyway) or taking a high dive into the bottomless Pity Pool. I’m merely observing. I am hurtling down the steep slope of time with no brakes and little steering control and I am frozen like a deer in the headlights unable to do a thing to save myself. It’s a ride we all must take, if we’re lucky enough to live long enough, but the thing is that it happens to us as individuals, and very few of us are prepared for it.
When Eliot says, of J. Alfred, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” I can relate. We each tend to concentrate so strongly on the little details of each day that we seldom take the time to realize just how much there is going on around us that we either are totally unaware of or simply choose to ignore. I know that for myself I am so busy writing about my life that I miss many opportunities to live it.
J. Alfred says, “I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.” I always wondered what that meant until I realized that whereas I used to be 5’10 ½” tall, I am now probably somewhere around 5’9”, though I’ve not measured lately. Something to do with spinal compression or some such thing, I imagine, and I do not wear my trousers rolled. But I am aware that I am shorter than I was. (Not being able to stand with one’s head held high is a definite contributing factor.)
My favorite line in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.” As a gay man living on the edge of Chicago’s gay heart, I have paraphrased that to, “I hear the mermen singing, each to each. I know they do not sing to me.” And it hurts. I realize how silly that is to say. After all, I was doing wonderful things long before the beautiful young men who surround me on the streets were conceived—or conceived of. I have had more than my share of romances and loves and parties and partners. But much as I do realize how ungrateful I sound for setting the past aside as though it didn’t matter, the fact is that it did matter so very much, and I am greedy.
Yes, I had it all once. But I want it all NOW.
Well, perhaps on my next turn on the Merry-Go-Round….
* * *
CHANGE AND ENDINGS
The recent awareness that my cat, Crickett, who is between 16-18 years old, is failing rapidly and has very little time left to her set me off on a little philosophical jaunt about endings and change. I was a little surprised to realize that there can be change without endings, but never endings without change.
But change is absolutely necessary for any forward movement, and it is not so much change that I object to as it is endings, which are generally an integral part of change. Change involves the opening of doors to our future, and often, especially on an individual-human-being level, closing doors to the past which can never be reopened. Death is the ultimate door closer, and the source of our greatest pain.
Man is a greedy creature. Once blessed with love, he is reluctant to give it up. He may pay lip service to the fact that love is not a gift but a loan. Yet we refuse to see what we do not wish to acknowledge: that time is a collection agency, and it will be paid. The response to losing someone or something one truly loves is sadness, grief, and an indescribable resentment for its having been taken away. It is not enough to merely be grateful for having had the love at all; we despair over its loss and, like a little child, want it back. “If I had it once, why can’t it be mine forever?”
Which brings me back to Crickett. She has been with me for many years, but her time, as is time for every living thing, is running out. I am trying, rather belatedly, I fear, to give her the attention she has always demanded but I have been too busy with my own interests to give her. I want her to know she is loved and that I appreciate her sharing her life with me. She is still alive, so I still have some time to make up for all the past years of benevolent neglect. The door is still open, but I know it will soon close, and Crickett will pass from the tangible now to intangible memory.
But Crickett is not human. She is a cat. My love and concern for her cannot possibly be compared to the love of one human for another. My mother, my father, my aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck, my remaining cousins, my close friends to all of whom I owe so much and upon whom I depend so strongly…how can I dare equate love for them to love for a cat?
Easily. Love doesn’t come with set values or limitations: it is neither quantitative nor qualitative; it simply is. Had I to make a choice between Crickett or my mother, there would be no question, of course. But I do not have to make such a choice. Love is love.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go pet Crickett. While I can.
* * *
A SPOT IN TIME
Some people collect stamps. Others collect butterflies. I collect what Wordsworth and, I think, William Blake before him, referred to as “spots of time.” I catch them in three forms: memory, words, and photographs.
They are, to me, a perfect example of spots of time captured forever. The people in them are alive, caught forever…or for as long as the photo exists…in the process of inhaling or exhaling, their minds filled with thoughts and hopes and memories of their own. The split second captured is now, and it will be now forever…or for as long as the photo exists. I cherish a photo taken in the late 1940s of a small family gathering at my parents’ home. My cousin Cork and his wife, Nornie, their eldest daughter Judi, my mom, Grandpa Fearn, Aunt Thyra, Uncle Buck—my dad was taking the picture—and me. Of the nine people involved in the photo, only I and my cousin Judi are still here.
This particular photo is especially dear to me for a couple of reasons. I don’t think I have another picture of my mom, Grandpa Fearn, Aunt Thyra, and Uncle Buck together. And this one photo (including the photographer) includes the most important people in my life. I cannot look at it without an overwhelming sense of love and loss.
The passage of the years affords a perspective of and appreciation for the immediacy of these spots of time. It’s largely a matter of not being able to see the forest for the trees: when we’re in the moment, we can’t fully appreciate it. The mirror of time is increasingly unkind, and I find my reflection therein more and more a stranger.
I wish you could have known the people in this photo as I knew them. They were…they are…quite simply the most important people in my life. Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck were my second set of parents, since I spent a great deal of my childhood with them. Dad’s job kept us moving a lot, and every time we would move from one place to another, my folks would ship me off to them until they got settled in and could come get me. Grandpa Fearn was a special person in his own right, and I devoted a blog entry to him some time ago. I am very lucky to have Judi, and the other children of my cousins still part of my life.
I am sure…at least I hope…that you have people in your life who mean as much to you as the ones in this photo do to me, and if you are lucky enough to still have them wi
th you, you make the very most of every minute you have with them.
As for me, I look at…no, I am…the teenaged kid sitting on the floor, looking at his dad holding the camera, and I envy that kid more than words could ever convey. I only wish I had known at the time what I know now about love and family and loss.
All each of us have is the now. It’s what we do with it that will matter to our tomorrows.
* * *
MIND AND BODY
We’re inseparable, our mind and our body, yet each operates largely independent of the other. And while it is possible for the body to function without the mind (people in irreversible comas and considered “brain dead,” for example), the mind cannot function without the body. Once the heart stops pumping, the mind of even the most brilliant of us must also cease.
I too often bewail the gradual but irreversible deterioration of my body, and for many, the natural thing is to blame the body and rail against it. But I’m not angry at my body: it is doing, as it has from the moment of my birth, the best it can, and it has served me very well.
Physical changes are generally gradual, and creep up on us unawares; an ache here, a minor pain there, the awareness that things are somehow different from the way they have always been. But for some, like me, the change is more abrupt and therefore more disconcerting and even shattering. Were it not for my bout with cancer, which did such terrible—in my own eyes— things to my body, I may have continued to simply take my body for granted. (The act of swallowing, turning or lifting my head, or even whistling are things I simply took for granted: I’d done them all my life, and they were simply a part of me. It was only when, in the course of less than a year, I became unable to do these elementary things that I really began to appreciate just what a wonder the body is and how very well it serves the mind dwelling within it. I am infinitely grateful for my body, and feel true sorrow for what it has gone through on my mind’s behalf.)
The health-conscious—those who consciously do everything they can to take care of their body and avoid going to the extremes of steroid and drug enhancement—may be able to somewhat forestall the effects of time, but can neither stop nor reverse it. It must be particularly hard for them to slowly change from what they were, just as it is for a vainly beautiful person to lose their beauty.
Which once again brings me back to why I am compelled to write—and specifically so much about myself: because words are like hand prints in the concrete of time, leaving some small mark of the maker’s existence long after both the mind and the body of the maker are gone.
* * *
POOR LOSER
Loss is a part of life. We all experience it…some more than others…and we each must learn to deal with it in our own way. I have never handled loss well, and even though I always manage to get on with my life after one, its ghost joins the many others walking the halls of my mind. I have developed the ability to largely ignore them, but if I’m not careful….
I was scanning photos of my last house in Los Angeles for inclusion in Dorien Grey: A Life in Photos blog (http://www.doriengreyphotolife.com). It was without question the nicest house I have ever owned.
That these ghosts grab me is one thing…what really hurts is their whispered tauntings: “You had this once. Remember? Look. You’re almost there again. Just reach out, and…” and then the humorless laughter before they continue: “It’s gone, and you will never have it again. You will never sit at the breakfast room table, or look out at the hill behind the house, or spend time with the friends and conquests who came and went with comforting frequency. You can look at these photos, but you cannot have what you had there. Never again.”
While I am given to melodrama, as you may have noticed, I am being sincere when I say that those rare occasions when I allow myself to dwell on the whispers are not only mentally excruciating but actually cause a definite physical tightening of my chest. I had it. I want it! I want to see and talk to and touch all those people who were so much a part of my life. I miss them terribly. I miss the then-me terribly.
I know, too, that this dwelling on the past makes me—wrongly, I can assure you—seem ungrateful for the present and all the good things and people around me today, and I apologize for that, but it is simply the way I am, and I can’t change it.
Since I was a very small child, I have been aware that each passing minute brings me closer to the time when I will no longer be here, and that thought is terrifying. And as a perverse result, many of the good times of my life have been tainted by the fact that, even as I am enjoying them, I know they must pass and become more ghosts to wander my mind.
As I’ve mentioned often before, I spend the majority of my time alive storing up bits and pieces of myself for the time when I will be dead. The irony of that fact certainly does not escape me. I consider myself something of a squirrel, gathering up the nuts of my life for the long winter of eternity. My books, my letters, my blogs, all small parts of who this Roger/Dorien person was and is with luck will live on after I am physically gone. Even as I write this, I am bitterly resentful of the fact that my physical body, already far from its best, will at some point simply cease to exist. It’s been a good body, and it has served me very well, and I feel sorrow that it cannot always do so. I still have it, but I deeply miss it already.
Have I perchance happened to mention that I do not like reality? My body is forced to live in it, but my mind refuses to.
Also, as I write these little exercises in self indulgence, I wonder exactly why I expect you, who have your own life, your own losses, to have any interest at all in mine…and the answer is, as always, that I trust you may see in me parts of yourself, and realize that we are not quite as…I started to say “unique,” but prefer to substitute “alone”…as we sometimes feel.
* * *
THE SPELUNKER’S ROPE
Cave explorers often tie themselves to a rope affixed near the entrance to keep themselves from becoming lost or disoriented as they move deeper into the unknown. I’ve always done essentially the same thing, except that my rope is a string of belongings which anchor me to the past and keep me from feeling too alone or afraid of the dark. Each one has its own story, and all I have to do is look at the item, close my eyes, and hear (and see) the story told again.
Aside from large framed photos of my grandmother, grandfather, Uncle Buck, and a painting of my mom I had done in Naples (that one’s a double-link: to my mom and to my Navy days), there is a large framed picture of Mom when she was around 2 years old. The glass was broken when I moved to Chicago, but I still keep the picture behind the sofa, planning to have the glass replaced one day. I have no wall space to hang it, but….
In my living room I have a comfortable chair which my mom bought when she moved to California in 1970, plus two wooden end tables she got at the same time. They came as an unfinished kit, so she varnished them and put them together herself.
In my bedroom is a dresser Norm and I bought at Goodwill and refinished shortly after we moved in together in 1958. On the wall directly beside me as I write is a copy of a large Etruscan fresco I bought around the same time.
I have pocket watches belonging to my grandmother and grandfather, a cocoa set belonging to my grandmother, a 100-plus-year-old fruit bowl belonging to my step grandmother, my mom’s set of Fostoria crystal goblets, a set of cordial glasses she bought in the 1930s, a small carved wooden head Dad bought for Mom while we were in Hawaii in 1960; two carved wooden Buddhas I bought for Dad in Gibraltar; a beautiful fired clay head made by a hustler friend of my dear friend “Uncle Bob” from Los Angeles…. I have a pair of sweat pants with “Margason” stenciled across the rear end from my NavCad days, and a monogrammed vermouth glass I stole from the Istanbul Hilton hotel. And near my bed are two small Chinese figurines I hand painted while I was in high school, and stuffed animals from my days with Ray. (Hmmm.…does the word “obsessive” ring a bell?)
I’m sure many people view all this as foolish. T
hat’s their right. My right is to ignore them. Everything I have has a history and a story which tie me to it and therefore to the past, and I find great comfort in that.
I know there are entire philosophies which believe putting too much importance on “things” is unhealthy, not to mention extremely cumbersome and confining. I suppose they have a valid point.
My dear Uncle Bob, in his later years, held to this philosophy that having nothing is the key to true freedom—which is one of the reasons he gave me the sculpted head mentioned above. I always stood in something akin to awe of Uncle Bob, but while I could respect his belief, and others who share it, it is totally incomprehensible to me. He often would say “Well, Roggie, when you’re dead it won’t matter, will it?” And he had an indisputable point. But I ain’t dead yet.
Oh, look: there’s that fossilized snail shell I found while walking along a railroad track in Chatsworth, California. I was working with Keith and Iris at the porn mill at the time, and I just decided to go out for a while during lunch. And…
Sigh.
* * *
THINGS
God, how I hate endings! I can’t help it, but every ending reminds me that my time on earth is not infinite, and endings, like the ticking of a clock, are a constant reminder of that fact.
Every day I have the same “lunch”…an 8 oz can of liquid nutritional supplement (350 calories), half cup of milk (60 calories?), and a small container of Benecalorie nutritional supplement (320 calories, but containing the only essential vitamin not found in the other liquid supplement). It never varies. I don’t have other things for lunch partly because I’m too lazy to try to think of what else I might have, and partly because I probably wouldn’t eat much of it if I did have it. I’m in it for the calories, and I know how many my standard provides.
But this morning at the store, I bought some yogurt, with which I planned to vary my routine by adding it to the other ingredients and whipping it up in the blender. Which brings us to the subject of this blog.
