Dr. Metablog

The year got off to an early start when Brad Gombas died on December 16. Brad was the brother of my late brother-in-law Allen Gombas. I knew him in the 1970s, when he was a young man; he lived most of his life in New Mexico where he established a career as a builder and craftsman. I wasn't in touch except through the extended family communication chain. On December 26, my friend since  1965 Ray Pike died at age 90. Ray was an accomplished journalist. Nancy Pike and AGP were the young mothers in a playgroup that included the infants NGP and Nina Pike — in an earlier life it now seems. We saw Ray and Nancy at least once a year for many decades. Then on the last day of the year Sue Palmer died (peacefully, I'm told), after many many years of illness and pain. She was a superbly talented artist and a friend, though not a close one, since 1969. In February, we lost Nancy Levitt. Not a close friend (wife of a colleague) but a long time acquaintance  — a regular at the Takacs, seated just in front of us these past 30 years. Sheldon "Spike" Cohen, later Alan Mills, a friend from the PS 217 schoolyard, died in March. Esophogeal cancer that had metastasized. A long drawn out death, with many months of hospice care. In May. Bill Wood died. He was a world-famous scientist and a friend. It must be 20 years now since his wife, Renate Wood, a poet, left us. Bill had been in a relationship with another old acquaintance, Marilyn Krysl, for these many years. Marilyn died a couple of months after Bill; she had been in "memory care" for several months. During the summer, we lost two former English colleagues. The first to go was congenial Chuck Squier, at the age of 91, who had moved to Boise, Idaho to be near his children; he was a friend and also a long time neighbor on the Hill; the second: nice guy Doug Burger. In August I discovered that Anatol Anton had died earlier in the year. I knew Anatol when he was a member of the CU Department of Philosophy in the 70s or 80s, but hadn't been in touch since he left Boulder to return to San Francisco. Anatol was a cheerful bear of a man, far to  the political left, who grew up in Greenwich Village with a semi-famous painter for a father. Fred Litto, classmate from P S 217 and Erasmus, died in Brazil, where he had lived for 50 years; we always planned to get together, but it never happened. Another PS 217 friend, Tony Sogluizzo, died in the spring but I didn't find out about it until much later. He was a genuinely decent and gentle man who had a good career as a librarian. Late in December, we attended the dignified funeral of Bill Belew, husband of Lynn's friend Sharon Belew.  And so the year came to an end.  

I'm aware that Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said that the most terrifying words in the English language are — "I would like to tell about you my dream."  But I'm going to report on last night's dream anyway, because it's so bizarre and interesting (at least to me).

I'm sitting at a table in a restaurant with my ladylove. Actually, it's not exactly a restaurant; it's more like a nightclub of the kind that's familiar to me only from 30s films, not from real life. Small tables in a very large room, patrons wearing fancy slick clothes — men in dark evening wear, women in shimmering white. Low chatter. Everything normal except that wandering among the tables is a giant African lion, male, with an intimidating mane and a long swishing tail. 

I say to my lady, "I don't like the looks of this. That lion could easily carry off a small child."  End of dream, or at least, end of what I remember.

Once again, it's clear that my nighttime self is far more imaginative than my pedestrian daytime self, who would never in a million years have thought to introduce a whopping big lion from the Serengeti into an ordinary restaurant. I'm not nearly so visionary. Does the dream have any meaning? An obvious interpretation is that even places safe for recreation can be dangerous.  Or, conversely, that dangers can be domesticated and made safe. Take your pick. 

I'm a terrible, terrible sleeper. It's a lifelong plight and a serious disability. Truth to tell, I'd have more success as a contestant in a tango contest, or as a heldentenor yodeling in front of thousands, or as a trapeze artist or as a sumo wrestler than I have as a sleeper.

Bad sleeping runs in my family. I suppose that I inherited the trait from my father. Growing up, we never knew where we'd find the old guy in the morning, because during the night he'd wander from room to room and from bed to chair and even onto that scratchy old green tufted sofa. For me, the hardest part of any day has always been the night — and, believe it or not, the problem has become more severe as I grapple with old age.

My usual routine is to fall asleep prematurely (and unwisely) at 10:00 pm. Then I wake at 12:30 am, usually in a fright from a ghastly nightmare, my brain alert, but my body yearning for oblivion. Then I'm up for a while, involuntarily reprising some atrocious embarrassment or shameful failure in some earlier part of my life. Unable to find the right situation for my ancient limbs, I twirl beneath the blankets like a rotisserie chicken. I don't want to disturb my peacefully-slumbering bedmate, so I wander the residence, finally to settle in an auxiliary bed. Then my wayward brain starts to ruminate on the state of the nation, especially on the prospect of a second term for the moronic demagogue. At this point, I reluctantly surrender to necessity and take a sleeping pill (the powerful hypnotic ambien). I read or watch a basketball game on the TV, but after about 45 minutes the drug takes hold and the muscles in my eyes slacken so much that I can no longer bring the separate images of right and left eye together. Eventually I fall into "airplane sleep" — the kind of shallow surface sleep that we all experience when we fly "economy" or "coach" (better called "steerage"). At about 6 in the morning, I wake out a second horrid dream, relieve myself, and try to snatch a couple of peaceful hours –  a hope which I regularly fail to accomplish. Eventually, "the darkness has passed/ And it's daylight at last."  I'm foggy-headed for a while but at last I regain my equilibrium until it's time for another nighttime bout with Morpheus. And that's how I pass one third of my life. 

On the cheerful side, although I'm a bad nighttime sleeper, I'm a fairly proficient daytime napper. The most wonderful and memorable sleeps of my life have been afternoon naps. When I was in my teens, back there in the Eisenhower era, it was my weekend custom to trot to the schoolyard in the morning and play three-on-three half-court basketball for a couple of hours (in those days I enjoyed an endless "second wind"). Then I'd come home for a mid-day dinner — perhaps if the parents were feeling flush it would be a roast beef or roast pork along with a bounty of potatoes (the most soporific of vegetables). Then I'd retreat to my room, tune the old wood-cased Philco to a Dodgers game, perhaps even to a double-header, and allow myself to be soothed by the rhythmic cadences of Red Barber and Connie Desmond. A deep, profound and most satisfying nap would then ensue — the kind of sleep where you're so far gone that you don't know if it's day or night, summer or winter when, hours later, you crack an exploratory eyelid.

Where are the sleeps of yesteryear?

In my maturity, sleep has been, as I've said, a combat zone. In these last years I've achieved weekend afternoon depth just two times. Alas and alack, it was the drugs, the sedatives for my two surgeries that did the trick. When you're anesthetized, at least as I experienced it, there's nothing — no sound, no dream, certainly no twirling — between the moment the anesthetic kicks in and moment it leaves. You're just not there. You're nowhere.

The ancient formula was somnus imago mortis. That is to say, sleep is the simulacrum of death. Sleep is designed to prepare us for death. There was a time that I would scoff at such a pious formula — but not any more. I think that if death is what I experienced during anesthetized sleep, why, then, there's nothing to fear. It will be peaceful and long and very boring, but not at all stressful.

I would like my tombstone to read, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

It's my newest acquisition, purchased on Ebay just a couple of days ago, but already a favorite. It's a bronze door plate, very beautiful and heavy in the hand. It's inscribed PULL. It bears no manufacturers or identifying marks but the style is mighty pure Victorian. I imagine it came from a demolished once-elegant downtown department store. What the heck do I plan to do with it?  Why, it will be attached, next summer, to the old iron gate that we mounted at the entrance to the "waterfall garden." It's whimsical, of course, because the gate helps to define the space, it guards absolutely nothing and is easily circumvented. 

If PUSH had been available I would have purchased it too. But PULL is sufficient. A plate saying NO SOLICITORS has also been proposed — but that addition might be just a little bit of overkill (and silliness).

This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered.

Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person and never revealed the least personal information about herself. I know nothing of her childhood and I am not even certain that she attended high school. I know that she was for many years employed in the surgical instrument field, where she advanced to a responsible management position and earned a reasonable salary (for those days). She retired early, perhaps in her fifties. She never married nor introduced me or anyone else in our family to a boyfriend, lover, or suitor, though in later life I learned that it had been her constant habit to visit a "Mr Isgin" every Wednesday. Who was Henry Isgin? I believe that he was a fellow worker at her place of employment and I know that when he died he willed Mollie his Long Island City house. That's all I know; I hope that her relationship with him was satisfying.

Mollie's curly black hair never grayed. Her eyes were so dark that there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil. My daughter, who knew her only in her last years, remembers her as small, squarish, and big-bosomed.

Mollie never "moved out"; during my childhood, she lived with her parents and later with Eta only in a small ground-floor apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. When Eta died in 1963, she moved across the river to a her own place at last, a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1985. She enjoyed the concerts and the theater and her independence. She was a solid New Yorker; like my father, she never learned to drive an automobile. Unlike my father, who was uncomfortable outside his familiar sphere and was averse to travel, Aunt Mollie was an adventurous sort. She traveled the world, usually solo. She was constantly on the move. I heard tell, for example, that she was a passenger on one of the first commercial flights to China (in the 1930s).

In 1952, she offered to take me on a trip to Washington DC. I jumped at the chance. It was my first time out of Brooklyn and quite the revelation: gosh, there were other cities, other neighborhoods in the universe! We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel (gosh, there were hotels!), ate in "restaurants" — another novelty — visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and even took a boat ride up the river to Mt. Vernon. We heard Harry Truman deliver a Fourth of July address from the base of the Washington Monument. It was exhilarating and inspiring — a first toe-in-the-water alternative to my very marked provinciality and to the exaggerated caution of my parents. I am sure that I would never "gone away" to college, or relocated to the Rocky Mountain west, or traveled to other continents if it hadn't been that Aunt Mollie introduced me to a bit of the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard world in my thirteenth year.

Mollie also helped me financially. She wasn't rich but as a single woman with a good income she accumulated enough cash to intervene, generously, at critical moments. In a sense, she was the family banker. She gave me a couple of thousand dollars for part of the down payment on the Hackett Hill property and later held, on favorable terms, the mortgage on my house on 10th Street. When she died, she bequeathed me the remainder of the principal.  Although these were not great sums, they were nevertheless very crucial to me and to my family's financial well-being.

Even more important: Mollie admired and, I believe, loved my wife — which was a very good thing because my own mother was not so positive.

I can't say that I ever had a real conversation with Mollie. She asked little and told less. She was not curious, or thoughtful, nor well-educated — not even a reader. She was always a little crude and could be critical and blunt (though not to me). To my brother, when he was going through a tough period in his financial life, she said, "Why don't you just get a real job." To a niece, she offered, "Why don't you just lose weight."  A true Victorian at heart, she regarded all illnesses as mental and moral weakness.

Mollie was proud of her extraordinary vigor and health. She once told me that she went 40 years without seeing a doctor. She was robust and middle-aged at 84, dead at 85 — every one of her organs having failed. Loss of mental acuity was the first sign of decay. In 1984, she called my father on the telephone and said, out of the blue, "Pop is here."  Dad said, "What do you mean Pop is here. Pop died in 1946." Mollie answered, "Yes, I know that. So why is he here."  After that shocking moment, the end came quickly.

I' have never visited my parents' graves, but I'm told that Mollie is buried on my father's right and that my mother is buried on my father's left. So Dad lies forever between the two women to whom he was closest in life. 

Last night I woke from a dream with this peculiar phrase repeating itself in my half-conscious brain: "it fills my onion heart with fear and trembling."  

I have a couple of questions to ask of my capricious dreamatorium, which although capable of creating passable iambic pentameter is rarely self-explanatory.  

a) What is "it?"  What is the nameless dread that precipitated this piece of blank verse, and b) what in the living heck is an "onion heart."  And why am I accused of having one?  Is an "onion heart" pungent and tasty, when eaten either raw or sauteed?  Or is it layered with a succession of scales and therefore mysterious and perhaps unknowable.  

Frankly, I don't have a good theory, except to say that I don't feel that to be described as having an "onion heart" is complimentary. If my dreamatorium wanted to say something nice about my heart, it had such relevant and easily available alternatives as "lionheart" or "braveheart." Or even "sweetheart," for goodness sake.

This will be a very short entry, because gambling is not a part of my life. I'm not averse, just uninterested. My brain lacks a gambling gene.

I don't bet on sports; I don't participate in office pools; I've never once been to the track. I don't bet on cards because I don't play cards, not even solitaire. I've never put so much as a nickel into a slot machine. I've never bought a single lottery ticket. 

My idea of gambling is to put a dollar into a Coke machine — sometimes you get the Coke, sometimes the machine fails. That's chance enough for me.