Mortal Thoughts

My cat is stretched out somewhere, taking a nap.  When I settle down to read this afternoon, she will join me on the arm of the chair and settle down... for a nap.  She is luxurious in her ability to stretch out and luxuriate.  What she has that I don't have is essential in its absence:  she lacks awareness of her mortality.  I admire that.  Whether she is chasing down a catnip mouse or berating me for being gone too long or snacking on her dry food, she is always in the moment.

Our curse is pretty much our awareness of our mortality.  Whether we make good or evil, use or waste it, it shadows us everywhere.

When Robin Williams died, it saddened me and everyone else but Rush Limbaugh, but as people were talking about the cause, it seemed that they missed the point.  We all treasured his sweetness and his insanity, but what we all remembered in his passing was brilliance long past.  From Mork to Good Morning, Vietnam, his energy was palpable.  In later years he had moments of brilliance in smaller roles, like in August Rush (2007).  As we all reminisced, though, we did not come up with anything of late that embodied the great Robin Williams.  It surely must have been hard to be him.

I imagine that both fueled and self-medicated in his younger days, the genius was far more spontaneous, after all he hadn't yet had to strive to outdo himself.  As he fought and won the battle against his addictions, I also imagine he had to learn to not be so spontaneous, to analyze and censor his impulses.  While we were all waiting for another flash of the insane improvisations of the young Robin Williams, he also must have expected no less of himself, and yet knew the older man just wasn't the same person.

When we remember and regret the loss of Robin Williams, we don't think of his role in The Crazy Ones, where he looked like he wanted more than anything to break out and be insane again.  We don't think of those later mediocre comedies where he played a disgruntled dad and recited lines.  We think of him bouncing off the wall with Jonathan Winters; we remember Johnny Carson seeming to have to try to get him off the ceiling so the show could go on, all the while wiping away tears of laughter.  We also remember that he could play someone quirky, odd, imperfect, one of us, only better.

And there we are.  Humanity, mortality, aren't we all trying to be us, only better?  Our goals may be confused, but when we fail it's because we are frustrated that we can't do better.  We do crazy things trying to reach that end, everyone from the evil head of ISIS to Robin Williams.  I am in there somewhere and so are you.  Because we are basically all in a race to what turns out to be mortality.

As I wrestle with my mortality and my awareness of same, I think of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who seems to be absolutely tickled to be a teensy tiny part of the amazing universe even for the smallest amount of time.  Then I think, yeah, but he's brilliant and famous and changing the world, and I'm not.  And then I think of my cat, and that maybe I don't have to be remembered when I'm gone.  That maybe I can sometimes just be alive and in the moment and that's good enough.

It's tricky, though.  Robin Williams couldn't do it any longer.  Maybe it will be easier for me because I am smaller.

Another Neil, Neil Diamond, wrote a song about it that was a compilation of famous names and ended,

And each one there

Has one thing shared:

They have sweated beneath the same sun,

Looked up in wonder at the same moon,

And wept when it was all done

For being done, too soon,

For being done too soon.

Robin Williams was born two days after me, on July 21, 1951.

 

The Perfect Relationship

It seems a lot of the reading I've been doing lately has had to do with mother-daughter relationships.  Not on purpose; it's just happened that way.  But it's true that I am also going through my own personal mother-daughter crisis, so I wonder just how incidental it really is.

For example, on top of one of my stacks of books was one called, "Please Excuse My Daughter," by Julie Klam.  It's been sitting in that stack, being moved up and down in it, for a number of years.  I own it because it was a book that I was forced to discard when I worked at the library because it had not circulated in awhile.  I didn't take every book I discarded, just the ones that I thought I might regret not reading when they were gone.  Lately I've been sick of political and serious reading and have been aiming for lighter fare, and of course there was the mother-daughter thing.

Julie Klam is very funny.  She began her reluctant working career as a David Letterman intern.  She is not at all like me, or my daughter; her mother is not at all like me, or my mother.  However, at one point her mother comments on Rod Stewart as being, "'nice-looking but no Rudolph Valentino.'"  About which Klam writes, "I remember feeling that fierce irritation only a daughter can feel for her mother."

Here's another book I read just last week:  Roz Chast's new graphic memoir is entitled, "Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT?"  The New York Times reviewer calls it, "by turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny."  Well, I'm here to tell you that I didn't laugh out loud that much.  My guess is that the reviewer was relating as the adult child, and not as the parent of an adult child.  The thing is, the child being annoyed at the parent thing comes across loud and clear.  Which, given my current personal crisis, was a little too close to home to want to laugh out loud.

Anyway, while I am trying not to overinterpret, I have to admit that I am becoming more aware through my reading that daughters are critical of their mothers.  Yes, it's unnecessary, and it's also cruel, but it seems that when I was a teen and young adult, as justified as I was, I did not invent the wheel.  And neither has my daughter.

As a psychologist and a new mother, I truly believed that love -- in psychobabble, "unconditional positive regard" -- would get a mother and daughter through all hurtles.  I did pretty much the opposite of everything my parents had done and I became one of those awful parents who think their children are the sun around which we move.  As it turns out, my kids are both pretty okay, so I was probably half right.  My daughter seems to have made it through the hurtles, but as far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out.  On the other hand, if you asked her, she might say that I ruined her for life.

While one of the few things I had been absolutely sure of was my parenting, I am now second-guessing pretty much everything I ever did or said to or for my kids.  And I wonder just how my mother dealt with those years in my twenties when I needed to prove to myself that I didn't need her.  I have to give it to her, though.  Without a degree in psychology, without the depth of reading that I have available, she was able to sum up the mother-daughter thing in one sentence:

"Someday your daughter will do to you what you've done to me."

Up until now I thought it had been a threat.  I now realize that she was merely stating a fact of life.

Beach Snob

You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that I hate crowds.  Always have.  And especially so at the beach.  I am the person that sits as far away from people as possible, and then minutes later is joined by a family with kids slinging mud and frisbies and has a very loud radio supplying the unwanted beat for the day.

My dream when I was in my teens was to own a house on the beach.  Of course, it would be a private beach.  I'm also the person who, after I've moved into an area, thinks there should be a ban on building.  I've thought about getting a "welcome" mat that says, "Leave Me Alone," but decided it would be reasonable to wait for someone to give me one as a gift.

When I was in my thirties, and had given up on owning a beach front home, I bought a couple of timeshare weeks, one at Gurney's Inn on Montauk Beach and the other at Peppertree, Atlantic Beach.  Timeshares have less resale value than cars, so when I moved south, I gave back my Long Island week to the management company, who appeared to be going bankrupt anyway.  I continued to use, or exchange, or rent out, my North Carolina week.  When I discovered I could occasionally find really affordable timeshare week rentals right on the beach I was in heaven.  I've learned to shop cautiously, and with the internet it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what you're signing up for.

I've been wanting to get back to the Gulf Coast of Florida for years.  Mostly it's unaffordable.  So when I saw a week for $600 I did my research, agonized for a couple of hours, and then went for it.  Had I thought a few minutes longer, I would have asked myself if I really wanted to go to Fort Myers Beach in August.

It's hot.  But it's a small resort, not too fancy but with anything I might need (except cell service), and it's right on the beach.  I'm told I have the best unit in the place, and I believe it.  It's a one-bedroom apartment apart from the main building, with a deck, that overlooks a beautiful and quiet piece of beach.  And the waters of the Gulf Coast are beautiful.  Perfect for a coward like me, no waves.  This time of year, the water is slightly cooler than the 90 degree air temp.  The sand is blindingly white and ground fine.  And it's always possible to find tiny, perfectly formed shells.

Yesterday, I took a ten-minute walk on the beach to the main part of town, where there is public beach access.  It was Labor Day, and people were pretty packed in.  I am not proud to say I was horrified.  But it did occur to me that the problem was too little beach for too many people.  The kids were having a blast.  Dogs had been pretty much kept away during regular beach hours.  And there was actually very little garbage strewn around.

The worst thing about people using beaches is what goes on in the water.  As in water "sports."  While it's quieter today, the day after Labor Day, I still watched in horrified amazement as a progression of a dozen or more of what I guess are called jet skis or waverunners raced across the water.  Larger boats speed past, oblivious to anyone's need for pleasure but their own.  Noise and fuel pollute air and water for an afternoon's cheap thrills.

I thought a bit about Carl Hiaasen over this Labor Day weekend, when this small beach town was overrun by tourists.  There is the overdevelopment.  Then there is the willingness to let anyone willing to pay for the pleasure out to tear up the waters and the birds and sea creatures trying to live peacefully within.  How far should we be allowed to go to have fun?  Apparently it is as far as we are willing to pay.

Today in front of my space it is relatively quiet.  I bitched about the smallish motorboat that had to park itself right in front of "my" private beach.  The parade of waverunner thingies was far more upsetting.  But I'm happy that the weekend is over and the summer is over and it's early yet for winter adventurers.  Right now it's just a handful of us older folk and a few couples with pre-school age children.  The mornings are wonderful.

I have been so thrilled to be able to walk into the water, and swim about without fear of being hit by a wave.  But then I went out to cool down a little and swim around, and felt these small slippery things swimming around with me.  Of course they were probably just a school of those tiny fish.  And I wasn't going to let my fears force me out of the water.

When I did go back to the chair I had sitting right at the water's edge I noticed a jellyfish.  And a few feet away, another jellyfish.  Hmm.  I don't plan on being scared out of the water, but as I watch from my apartment today, I will take note of anybody who runs screaming out of the water.  So far, the only noises are coming from the motorcraft.