Rebelling Against Aging

The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By altering the genes of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans, one can slow their aging. The result is that the worms live much longer and they remain youthful and healthy longer. The current record for enhancing C. elegans longevity is an astonishing tenfold increase in lifespan.

Dr. David Gems

I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.

I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”


The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.

So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.

Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”

No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about

Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.

Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.

Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.

Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.

And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.

One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.

Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?

So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.

Waiting In Line

We hate to wait, and we especially hate to wait in checkout lines, especially in grocery store checkout lines. We are all allotted one and a half billion heartbeats, and we are loathe to expend more than a couple of them in checkout lines. No matter how long we have shambled through aisles and departments; no matter how long we have lingered before shelves and displays; no matter that the average wait is under 5 minutes, according to a 2007 study, and that we overestimate the wait by as much as 50%; no matter whether or not we have anything better to do, or anything at all to do; if we do not move, with gazelle-like speed, through the checkout line, the thudding kick-drum of impatience thumps within us. And, can anything be more abysmal, more an affront to all that is holy and just, than to choose a line only to see the one we ignored move faster? One need not be an evolutionary biologist to know, with the certainty of an evangelical holding four aces, that the human genome, somewhere in its tangled grammar, contains a gene whose expression is waiting irritation.

Undoubtedly, I am missing that gene, for I don’t mind waiting in checkout lines; in fact, I actually enjoy it. Whitman declared, “I witness and wait.” I witness as I wait.

I find product placement—that cynical “Oh, yeah” in response to classical economics theory of utility-maximizing, rational-choice consumerism—quite educational, a multi-course feast for the enquiring mind. From the various magazines and tabloids I learn that Elvis was abducted by aliens, Clint Eastwood is being hassled by the FBI, Nostradamus has predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, the 100 prophecies that will come true before Christmas, and a potential epidemic from a new form of influenza—the snake flu. I learn the latest intelligence about Mel and Oksana or Brad and Angelina or Ashton and Demi or Jennifer and Justin or Kim and Kris or George Clooney and whoever. I learn the latest escapades, mostly tawdry, sometimes tragic, periodically inspiring, of celebrities, near-celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and wannabe celebrities—the infidelities, the spats, the boorish behavior, the unmake-upped moments. I learn how to make a perfect pie crust, hard-boil an egg in a microwave, and keep shoelaces from unraveling. I learn the 26 ways to use vinegar, the 7 best pick-up lines, the 10 things never to say on a first date, the 3 magic moves to flatten your belly, an amazingly easy way to remove counter stains, and the 5 secrets to reducing your spouse to drooling desire. I learn about fashion and technology and home décor and fine cuisine and budget dining and medical advances. The checkout line is encyclopedic, a Harvard for the unlegacied.

And there is moral improvement to be had while waiting to check out. I look right at, I mean really regard, and then, in a burst of smug self-satisfaction, resist the farrago of sugared seductions, the candied temptations, that surround me. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, get thee behind me; Hershey’s Kisses, I will not give thee a foothold; Tootsie Roll Pops, I spurn thy allurements and cast thee aside. Who can doubt that free will exists, that resolute singleness of purpose can restrain the churning force of desire. In the humble checkout line, I find proof positive.

Perhaps most puzzling, certainly to my wife Kathy, is that, while I tend to be socially reticent, in checkout lines I become suddenly and strangely chatty. Once, to a woman behind me with a large, shockingly pink purse resting in the child’s seat of her shopping cart, I said, “That’s certainly a striking purse.” “Oh, thanks,” she said; “I bought it when I was in Memphis.” “I hope you got a chance to visit Graceland while you were there,” I replied. She smiled, and tuned the purse around. Emblazoned in rhinestones on its front was “Elvis.” “I bought it there,” she said. For the next five minutes we parsed Elvis as if he were a compound-complex sentence: his best songs, his best movies, his shopping for a pink and black suit at Bernard Lansky’s Beale Street store, his fondness for peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches, his picture with Richard Nixon, the fake FBI badge Nixon gave him in response to his request to be made an FBI agent, his incorporation of martial arts moves in the Jailhouse Rock dance sequence. We agreed that his creativity was in adapting songs, and that, in bringing black music into the mainstream, he played a small part in racial integration.

On another occasion, seeing Pop Weaver microwave popcorn among the items of the customer in front of me, I began a conversation that escalated into a friendly debate on the relative merits of microwave popcorn in general. He preferred Pop Weaver because the company’s founder, the Reverend Ira Weaver, was dedicated to providing the healthiest and best-tasting popcorn at the cheapest price. “They don’t advertise,” he said, “and they use plain brown bags. That helps keep the cost down.” I allowed that Pop Weaver was good but held out for the superior taste of Orville Redenbacher; besides, as Orville claimed in his iconic TV ads, every kernel popped. “That’s where the value comes in,” I noted; “minimal waste.” The debate ended in a draw, but we did agree that in the archipelago of satisfyingly salty-crunchy munchables, popcorn was an island of sensible snacking.

From a young checkout cashier, I discovered that she had just learned she was pregnant, that her lineman husband was home for a several-week stay, that she had pork slow-cooking at home in a crock pot, and that dinner that night would consist of shredded pork sandwiches and her favorite food, tater tots. I wanted to say I was a vegetarian and that tater tots contained enough saturated fat to clog a water main. But I didn’t. She was happy. Instead, I told her what was also true: “You know, when I was a kid, I loved tater tots. My dad said I’d turn into a tater tot. I had a nightmare about that.” She laughed. I laughed. We shared a laugh.

Individually, or even taken together, these waiting line conversations did not amount to much, and yet, they amounted to a lot. They took us out beyond the trip-wired, self-defensive perimeters behind which we tend to hunker, took us, if only momentarily, into that often unrealized common life in which we all participate. Too often, we wait impatiently, waiting for the oven timer to chime, for a leaf to fall and a flower to appear, for a meteor to rift the heavens, for our name to be called, our number to come up; waiting for what’s lying in wait to make itself known; waiting for the rapture, the quickening, the gathering of the righteous, for kingdom come that never seems to come; waiting, fist to cheek, elbow on the window sill, for something to pass by worthy of our regard before darkness falls. We wait, feeling that time has stood still, feeling suspended in it, yet all the while it tick-tocks on, as do we, always in transit, always finalizing, heart beating, blood circulating, breath pulsing in and out, growing each moment just a little bit older, time passed time past, an entropic echo, as we wait to check out. In those waiting line conversations, maybe, just maybe, the dense gravity of our minute-and-secondhandedness momentarily lightens and, as the poet Amy Clampett says, we “fall upward.”

Quoting and Paraphrasing

We quote to reproduce a source exactly and to provide the tonal core of the source’s voice or the impact of its expressive power. We paraphrase to restate that voice, that expression, in our own words, avoiding thereby the distracting iteration of quotations or the charge that we have done little more than create a string of prose beaded by someone else’s words. Most composition textbooks emphasize paraphrase and advise writers to quote sparingly. The original, the direct, is erased, to be replaced by the writer’s restatement of the original.

There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.

I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.

My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.

I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.

If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.

Two Visitors

Each year my home hosts two visitors. They arrive separately, each at the same time, year in and year out, without fail. They are anticipated, and, while not particularly welcome, for I issued no invitation, they are not unwelcome, either. I suppose you could say that they invade my home on an annual basis, but because, practically speaking, there is nothing I can do to stop their arrival, I have learned to accept their advent, even to anticipate it, and use it to do what I like to do best: observe and learn.

* * * * *

The beginning of August, usually within the first three or four days, marks the appearance of what I call the “storm window spider.” From some deep, sub-windowsilled lair, it emerges into the 1/8-inch space between the storm window and screen of the very window before which I sit to eat breakfast and lunch, and, often, to read. Obeying a biological directive not to be denied, my storm-window spider opens the spinnerets at the base of its abdomen and filaments the lower six inches of the screen, from one edge to the other, with an undulant, gauzy trap for miniature forms of life that learn, too late and much to their sorrow, what, exactly, they have gotten themselves into.

Most striking to me is the spider’s immobility. Like some Araneae Zen master, it sits, rinsed of second and minute-hand consciousness, occupying the same spot on the screen no matter when or how often I look. I have seen it move only once, when, jerking abruptly into motion, it traced a zig-zaggy square around its resting place before resuming it. Perhaps that motion was a bit of exercise, an arachnid constitutional to stretch its eight segmented legs and pump some fresh, pale blue blood through its single-chambered heart.

I could easily enough remove the web, and, in fact, did so the first time the spider appeared. By the next morning, however, it had once again “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” And so, I’ve come to view that persistently expressed gossamered tapestry as a form of art, the procreant urge of the spider self unreeled and externalized, its inside made outside and filigreed across the latticed canvas of the screen. Besides, it may be that the spider trains in eight eyes on me as intently as my two eyes monitor it. Perhaps it thinks me a diminished thing, six eyes and six legs short of normal development. Perhaps it watches me sit mostly immobile, in the same place, at the same time, every day, doing the same things, and wonders, bemused, about such a strangely routinized creature. It’s best, I’ve concluded, to let the web remain, removing it only when, toward mid-September, the spider abandons it and retreats deep below the sill to await the next beckoning call of August.

* * * * *

Not long after the storm-window spider has withdrawn, on or about October 7, the wasps arrive. Never in the summer. Only with the serious onset of Fall. Coming home for lunch, I’ll find anywhere from 6 to 10 elegantly slender, narrow-waisted, resonantly buzzing bodies congregated on the living room piano window. I surmise they construct a nest inside the house wall, tucked up near the front-porch soffit, and despite my past attempts to caulk possible ports of entry, I am, finally, unable to discover the crack or crevice by which they get there. I suspect that, roused from their night-chilled torpor by the warming day, they make their determined way down the wall and enter the house through the large double-hung front-room window. My efforts to seal it, though, have proven as unavailing as my outside efforts. They always find a way in. They will not be denied entrance.

I open the piano window to let them find their way back outside. The loiterers I scoop up in a glass or jar, cover it with a piece of paper, then release them outside. My wife Kathy watches, bemused at the futility of my gestures. “They’ll only wind up coming back inside,” she tells me, and I know she’s right. Still, I cannot find it in me to kill them. While I cannot, like Thoreau, feel “complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter,” I can agree with him that they have “never molested me seriously.” They have stung no one but me, and that was once, as I reached under a lampshade to turn on the light, only to dispossess a wasp at its ease on the switch.

No, I cannot kill them, even if they do raise and perplex Robert Frost’s question of what gets walled in, and what, out. They harbor no malevolence, feel no need to beleaguer, have no aforethoughted intent to inflict a stinging wound. They are catalyzed by a cell-deep imperative. They only want out, out to do their pollinating work, out to scavenge, driven by a need for sweets and carbohydrates—a final feast before the coming winter that will mark their end—out, and then back again to nest and colony, back home, a home my home provides.

* * * * *

We are doubly housed, it seems to me. One house, framed with studs, sheathed in a dermis of Tyvek and clapboard, sets a boundary between inside and outside and protects us from the outside by keeping the outside out. And yet, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, given that we are only partially removed from nature, we bring the inside partially out. While we are wonderfully endowed prefrontally cortexed creatures, we yet remain enfleshed biological beings as well. We stand above that in which we are also firmly emplaced. And so, we build decks and front porches and terraces and sun rooms and porticoes and verandas, furnish them with chairs and tables and hammocks and coolers and portable ovens, and use them to eat and snooze and sip iced tea or lemonade or a cold beer and read and write and people-watch and creature-watch and world-go-by watch and, sometimes, maybe often times, just sit and ruminate. Who knows; perhaps some ancestral tug, some savannahed impulse, compels us to return to that from which we originally emerged, but mediated by the indoor we bring outdoor—a hybrid space, a third home. Who knows; perhaps at some level, some profoundly deep level where blood memory lies ineradicably embedded, we feel orphaned, taken by evolution from our original ground of being, and therefore, seeking as much of a reintegration as our new condition allows, we let the wild things in.

* * * * *

But we inhabit another house, bone-studded and skin-sheathed, a SmartHouse, really, powered by the thrumming energy of heart and mind, the churn of consciousness, and to avoid the echo chambering din of our self-reflexive selves, we need to let ourselves out, others in. Nathaniel Hawthorne warns us that “the saddest of all prisons is a [person’s] own heart.” David Foster Wallace warned the 1995 graduates of Kenyon College of the seductive tendency to think themselves “alone at the center of all creation,” lords of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But the outreaching gesture of sympathy can be rebuffed, our words can be misconstrued, our intuition can be mistaken, our understanding can falter, the gaze of others, always judgmental, can be withering. Safer, we conclude, to hunker down, dig in, pile up sandbags to thwart threats to our private conceptions of ourselves. And, so, our house has windows to see out, but no door to let in. We monitor our thoughts, our feelings, but find ourselves reluctant to share them. We want to be secure; we want to bond and understand. We linger at the windows, wistful, waiting, yearning to send forth a sticky thread in hopes of making an anchoring contact, but somehow, someway, it falls short. We buzz at the windows, wanting out, wanting out, but never venturing forth beyond the defensive perimeter to engage the could be, the is-there-more, and maybe, just maybe, leave our shackling too-muchness behind.

Leave-Takings

My backyard trees are autumn-adorned, brocaded in deep scarlet, reddish gold, honeyed amber, and sassy yellow—tongues speaking in hued accents a chromatic carnival of color, a retinal assault of beauty so rich, so dense, that, had it mass, its weight on my shoulders would bend my back. I wish it would last, but, of course, I know it won’t. I know it is conjured only to be eclipsed—a requiem, really. I know that its very transience gives it its allure, that we treasure that which is soon to be lost. And even as I gaze, leaves leap from branches, “leaf subsides to leaf,” and I know the rasp and pang of a difficult truth: the change of seasons has pulsed to life biological forces not to be denied, forces that transmit hormones that create abscission cells that cluster at the nexus of stem and branch, gradually unmooring each leaf until a breeze completes the separation. The trees are unleaving. The leaves are leaving, they are leaf-letting-go. The leaves are leave-taking. To gaze, directly and attentively, at something is to become entangled with it. So it is with me as I regard the leaving leaves, watch their fluttering, pinwheeling plummet. I think of leave-takings of my own.

I think of my graduation from college, English majored, degree and teaching license in hand, and my wondering, Have I chosen well? Is teaching meant for me? And I found that I had, that it was. I think of the morning of the day I was getting married, and Mom joining me in the kitchen for coffee and telling me she dreamed that she walked into the family room and saw that the goldfish had disappeared from its bowl. And I said, “Mom, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know you’re experiencing a version of empty-nest syndrome. I guess we’ll have to call it empty-bowl syndrome. And besides, be glad you didn’t find the fish belly-up. I am.” And she laughed that laugh she had. And I thought of how, many years later, she was carried away into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, where I was just a face without a name, before she finally, mercifully, got her wish and was carried away into a deeper darkness. And I think of Dad’s gradual decline after a punishing fall that left him lying on the hallway floor for more than a day before he was discovered, and the death certificate that gave as cause “Failure to thrive,” and my thinking that whoever wrote that stark sentence did not know my Dad. And I think of my looming retirement, of the colleagues from whom I will take my leave, colleagues who have cared for and inspired me and never, not once, hid their light under a bushel; and students who have gladdened and saddened and maddened me and always, always pushed me, as I pushed them, to know more, to be better.

We are always leave-taking, it seems, always, in ways large and small, saying farewell, goodbye. It’s the way of things, and it’s best not to deny the inevitable. We live through, but we cannot dwell in, or on, a moment, a day, a season. We cannot give ourselves over to pieces of time. We are in them, but not of them. Each moment arrives unfreighted and quickly departs, cargoed perhaps with yearning or joy or penance or rupture or hope. We need to be beside ourselves, to view those shards of time from the outside, to step aside and back and out from them if their relation is to appear. We are on the move, in motion, churning, always churning. We cast a backward look, for that anchors us, but we move onward, for that completes us. We unfold. We go on going on. We make ourselves cohere. We gather the events and experiences and contingencies and set them to a plot, make them into a narrative, continuous and durable, whose revelatory theme is the who that we are.

Mom Liked Elvis; Dad Liked Perry Como

Mom bought every Elvis 45 available at the local record shop. Dad rarely bought records, but, when he did, he purchased Perry Como exclusively. I think Mom liked the raucous energy of Elvis’s straight-up rock ‘n roll, and the sentimental sadness or the fervent affirmations of the ballads. I think she liked Elvis’s gyrating hips, those howitzer blasts against the fortress of 1950s conformity. I’m pretty sure she liked that Elvis bought a pink (mom’s favorite color) Cadillac for his mother, and that he wasn’t shy about his affection for her. I’d guess she liked that he was “nice boy,” born into poverty and obscurity and an ethos of Southern prejudice, and became wealthy, famous, and, by bringing black music into the mainstream, a force for racial integration. I’d conjecture she liked playing Elvis records while she went about her daily homemaking tasks.

I’m forced to qualify all these statements. Mom never explained her Elvis affinity. Dad was different. He liked Perry Como, and he gave reasons, and, later, when I quite loitering in the foyer of maturity and actually passed through its main room door, I saw reasons beneath the reasons.

Dad liked Perry Como because he projected an unruffled personality, and his music was soothing—“he’s smooooth,” Dad said. Dad liked smooth. Perry Como’s hips did not gyrate. Dad liked that Perry Como was Italian—“you know, his real first name is Pierno,” Dad informed me--; was born poor of immigrant parents from Italy—as Dad had been--;worked as a barber and later ran his own barbershop; gained local recognition performing at wedding receptions and the like—as Dad’s dad, a shoemaker by trade, had--; and went on to become the most popular and successful singer of his generation. Dad liked success stories, especially ones that in some way mirrored his own rise from scrawny Depression-era kid to secure middle class status. Dad knew that Perry Como’s imperturbable, cardigan-sweatered cool masked a competitive nature, and Dad liked competition. Dad also liked romantic ballads, though he would never admit it. He was a stealth romantic.

Dad did not like Elvis—too androgynous, too much grease in his hair, too unconventional—and could not understand why Mom did. “What’s the fascination with that Presley guy,” Dad once asked her. “I like him,” Mom said. Dad wanted a reason, though: “Well, yeah, but why?” “Because he’s Elvis,” Mom said, and that was that. Dad never asked again. Unlike Dad, a systems analyst, Mom felt no compulsion to provide reasons for something she considered blindingly obvious . She thought or believed or felt something, and accepted it as perfectly legitimate, an experience that did not require explanation but that was nonetheless adequate to any query.

I came home from school one day to find the living room furniture rearranged. “Why’d you change the furniture,” I asked. “Oh, I just thought it was time,” she said. “But why,” I persisted. “It needed to be rearranged,” she replied, in a how-can-you-be-so-dense tone. Once, after a particularly lengthy and intense session of pestering of my younger brother Dennis, Mom intervened and told me in no uncertain terms to stop. “Why should I,” I smartalecked. I expected she’d say “because I’ll give you a smack if you don’t,” or “because if you don’t stop you won’t be allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club,” or “because if you don’t I’ll tell your father.” Instead, she said, “Because he’s your brother.” And she emphasized that last word.

It was only later, much later, that I understood what she meant, understood the sheer power of that word, its complexities, understood that its meaning lay in its connotations and implications, that it contained within it a self-evident sovereignty of meaning, that it carried a blood-deep, biology-deep cargo of empathy, of sympathetic imagination, of simple kindness, of the best of all rules, the Golden Rule. For Mom such things needed no logical analysis, no dictionaried explanation. Mom liked Elvis because he was Elvis; she rearranged furniture because it needed it; my brother deserved attentive care and kindness because he was my brother. For her that was enough. Sometimes things, or the idea of things, capture us, and we need to accept being taken. That was her lesson for me. Mom’s replies demanded imagination, and I learned never to mistake a deficiency of imagination on my part with a lack of meaning in her way of knowing.

Dad’s lesson was the necessity of strong claims supported by reasons, a lesson forged over two millennia ago in the Greek agorae, those public assembly places where citizens debated issues of community significance, a lesson that today goes by the name of public discourse, of truth-seeking, reasoned disputation, a lesson that today we seem to have forgotten. “Always give reasons, Jerry,” Dad told me more than once; “people will respect you. They’ll consider you a person who can be trusted.” He was right, of course, and there have been many occasions when I have put his counsel to good use, though I often find myself given more to Mom’s lesson. There is an uncurtained honesty in a simple statement of this-is-what-it-is-to-me that carries its own credibility, as much, perhaps, as a statement of this-is why-it-is-to-me.

Once, I eavesdropped on a conversation between Dad and his brother Carmen about a mutual acquaintance. “He’s an asshole,” Dad declared. “How come,” Carmen asked. “He just is,” Dad said. I smiled. Dad, it would seem, was no more immune to Mom’s lesson than I was. Though, like his Perry Como-ed romanticism, he’d never admit it.

The Call

The last time I was in a Catholic church was for my Dad’s funeral mass last October. The last time before that was for my Mom’s funeral mass the November prior to Dad’s. The last time before that was a friend’s wedding six months before Mom’s passing. The last time I attended Sunday mass was when I visited my folks. They did not insist, did not even ask. They had accepted that I was fallen away, had been since I was twenty-one, but I went because I knew it would please them. Lately, though, I have felt a call to reintroduce myself to a faith I left more than forty years ago.

“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.

Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.

It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.

Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.