Scenes From an Expiring Season of Decline

For several years now I have fancied that I could feel the tipping of the earth from summer into fall, some subtle change in the air even in the midst of an August heat wave. A middle-age guy’s fancy, maybe, reflecting the sense of his own declining. Or perhaps it is just the sublimated awareness of the routine signals of summer’s end—back-to-school sales and the like. After twelve years in these parts, I have come to love the fall—September through Christmas is my favorite time of year. On a recent morning at the lake with my dog, I could feel autumn approaching, even as the summer sun still beat on the rocks of the breakwater. And this is the year I officially declared that I no longer like summer. It might have been the July heat wave, during which on two separate occasions the power went out, but I think I am done with summer on general principles. Summer is not a season to be solitary—all those sun-scorched days make you feel over-exposed, and it’s a young person’s season anyway. In case you haven’t already guessed, I am not feeling young.

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I lost a great friend this summer. After outliving by a couple of years her doctors’ predictions, she succumbed at last in her late seventies to pulmonary fibrosis. The last year-and-a-half or so of her life she had a steady stream of visitors--friends, sons and daughters and grandchildren, paid and un-paid help. I would periodically buy lunch from Alladin’s and take it to her apartment, sit with her and talk. I feel fortunate for that time I had with this great lady, though I could have done more. At her memorial service, in a sweltering Methodist church, those of us who had been her regular visitors all agreed we’d gotten the better part of the bargain. The last time I went to visit her, about a month-and-a-half before her death, she was in a far better mood than I was though it was fairly certain she wouldn’t see the end of the year—a fact that she laughingly referred to as her “transitioning.” One of her best friends spoke at the service of how her gracious and cheerful acceptance of the help she needed allowed the community that gathered around her in her last year—bringing lunch, helping to clean the apartment, giving her backrubs, or just showing up to talk or watch a movie or a favorite television show—a glimpse of a true Christian community. Maybe. Flannery O’Connor wrote something to the effect that you spend your whole life learning how to die, and if that’s true our great friend must have lived well.

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"Everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it must not be the end.”   That’s the motto, or signature if you will, to the summer movie, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” and it suggests, when you carry its implications to their logical conclusion, a fairly optimistic view of death. This makes sense, because for modern types, as for the seven aging Brits who decide to outsource their elderly years to an “exotic” hotel for “the elderly and beautiful,” death is not the problem. The problem is growing old.

How to do it? (The new buzz-phrase about “sixty being the new fifty” or “fifty being the new forty”, by the way, strikes me as very bad business, the wrong way to do it. Much better, it seems to me, to face the music and just admit it—you are growing old.) “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is a sweet and thoughtful and occasionally funny movie that is about twenty minutes too long, has possibly one too many characters and one too many sub-plots, and suffers from an ending that is entirely too perfect. There are very fine acting performances by (of course) Judy Dench, Tom Wilkinson, and Bill Nighy. Dev Patel, of “Slumdog Millionaire” fame, is Sonny, the handsome and endearingly inept manager of the hotel, once grand but now dilapidated.

Guest: “My room doesn’t have a door! I won’t stay in a room without a door!”
Sonny: “You can have my room.”
Guest: “But does it have a door?”
Sonny: “Yes, a most effective one.”

The stories of the seven guests—including an especially well-wrought story of reunion, after decades apart, between Graham Dasherwood (“I’m gay, but these days mainly in theory”), and a now elderly Indian gent with whom he had been in love as a younger man—revolve around the quest for love or companionship as a buffer against aging.

Or is it the quest for sex? Norman is an aging playboy, whose good looks have left him and who arrives at the hotel looking mainly to get laid. I’d ax him from the script, but I suppose he serves as a useful counter-point: after scoring with a life-long English resident of India, he relates his experience, which he describes as “the mountain-top,” with Graham who has spent the entire night talking with his long-lost love.

I suppose there are people whose mountain-top experiences have been exclusively, or primarily sexual ones. Alas, I can’t claim to be one of them, although I freely admit that this may only indicate that I’ve been doing it wrong. (On the other hand, it was another fifty-year old friend of mine, with the experience to back up his words, who said that “sex is over-rated.”). The birth of my daughter, many countless experiences watching her grow up, a trip I took by myself across the country in my twenties, some subsequent travel as an adult to Europe and the middle East, some memorable instances of watching really inspired performers, musicians, and athletes doing what they do and doing it excellently—these are what I remember as the mountain-top. But who knows what will count in the end? “Life is lived forward but understood backward,” according to Kierkegaard, so it may be that what I will realize as crucial when my own flame is about to go out, was lunch from Alladin’s with an elderly dying lady.

Sex and love and companionship. Such are the preoccupations of a baby-boom generation that never thought it would age. Make no mistake, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is the tip of a trend. (“Hope Springs,” about an aging married couple that seeks out therapy to rekindle their love life, is already on its heels, in the theaters). Now the boomers are on the cusp of collecting Medicare and anxious about how they will navigate the “shipwreck”—as Charles DeGaulle characterized it—of growing old.

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Is it just me, or is the County Fair not what it used to be? The Cuyahoga County Fair, in Berea, to which I have gone almost every August I have lived here, seemed thin to me this year. Even the agricultural exhibits that are the backbone of a county or state fair struck me as a little tired. Certainly fairs are not what they were when we were kids. I didn’t go inside to see the “freak” shows in Berea—the “Human Pretzel”, etc—but I suspect these are a pale imitation of the freak shows of yesteryear. And no doubt that is probably for the best. (I still wonder if I am making up in my mind some of the stuff I thought I saw, or that my college chums said they saw, at the county fair in the mid-size Pennsylvania town where I went to college thirty years ago.) Still, the sense of the riotous abundance of American life—including a riotous abundance of weirdness—is what I look for in a fair.

Maybe I just went too early in the week. And now it’s over. The moveable feast that is a state or county fair is a staple of summer, and the end of it spells the end of the season, a winding down to a darkening period when whatever abundance we have been blessed with must carry us through to the next county fair.

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“That cat’s going to be at my funeral,” I used to say a lot, but I don’t anymore because the cat died this summer, breaking everyone’s heart. Patches was a beloved orange and white one who showed up at the house 11 or 12 years ago and lived the rest of his life outside, sheltering in the garage in the winter (and elsewhere in the neighborhood wherever he was welcome), sleeping on porches, catching birds and rodents (and chowing down on store-bought stuff we left out for him), and generally enjoying being a cat.
   Twelve Cleveland winters—he seemed to be indestructible—and in the end it was the summer heat that did him in. I think he caught an infection or something; he stopped eating and the last I saw him he was skin and bones. One of the contractors working on the roof of my daughter’s house expressed amazement that the cat showed up and stood under a shower of water when the guys were hosing down the roof—odd behavior and a sign that he was probably burning up.
   A few days later there was an ominous odor from under the house and Mom and a friend raked his body out from under the porch. Placed it in a blanket and buried Patches out back by the garage where he had spent so much of his life. My daughter and I were out of town and on the drive back her mother gave her the news. She cried copiously.

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In the sweltering church on a Saturday afternoon in July when my friend was eulogized, the pastor read a passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi.

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death —even death on a cross….Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling…”

And later….

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things…”

I think my faith now amounts to a thing of shreds and patches, but sometimes something wakes me up. Maybe it had something to do with perspiring in that sweltering church, guzzling bottles of water from the ushers, and listening to eulogies for a woman who had spent the last year and a half of her life confined to an apartment and an oxygen machine. Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling. If the Christian faith is the miracle its adherents say it is then it is miraculous because it exalts the human likeness, and has its feet planted on terra firma, in the here and now of human living, growing old and dying. There is a contemplative Christianity, to be sure, but even the contemplative lives in the teeth of the awesome and tremble-inducing facts of our brief livelihood, eventual decline and decay, and inevitable death. And it is in the teeth of those facts that we must work out our own salvation, find our own way to the mountaintop, drawing from the raw materials of our own human story, from the riotous abundance of our own unique freak show of a life. Here is contentious, argumentative, perfectionist Paul—whose life as a Pharisaic Jew was spent earnestly and self-punishingly trying to work out a formula for righteousness—telling his correspondents that alas, there is no formula.




Rainbow over Lakewood, Ohio. Photo by Jim O'Brien,
courtesy The Lakewood Observer

But what a relief to be free of the formulas of “Religion” and its metaphysical abstractions! And what an abundance there is of that which is right and admirable, excellent and praiseworthy!

"Watergate" by Thomas Mallon: Hopelessly Human

The scandal known as “Watergate” that ended thirty eight years ago today with the resignation of Richard Nixon has had enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how all Americans regard politicians, government, and the very calling of public service. Although it brought down a prominent figure of the right, and was regarded at the time as a victory of the liberal left, the scandal’s most lasting impact has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust in organs of American government. The seeds of the Tea Party’s bitter hatred of “Washington” can be found in Watergate.

Such are the ironies of history.

But the episode has “already” accumulated the dust of a distant episode most, or certainly many, Americans can only dimly recall, a quaint relic in the nation’s attic. To recall the names of the period is like coming upon an old middle school year book inscribed with wishes from long lost classmates to “have a great summer!” John Dean. John Ehrlichman. Bob Haldeman. Howard Hunt. Who remembers Tony Ulasewicz, the bagman who delivered wads of cash as “hush money” to Howard Hunt’s wife and talked like a Damon Runyon character when testifying before the Senate investigative committee?

It is a bittersweet relic for some of us who were just becoming politically aware when the scandal was making headlines.  I was fourteen when Nixon resigned, and I grew up outside of Washington in a family that talked politics at the dinner table. (And to add to the kitchiness of this recollection, the summer before I had a paper route delivering the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein were regularly taking the President to the cleaners.)  

Washington at the time had a lively party circuit, hosted by fashionable Georgetown matrons, that was chronicled in the Post’s “Style” section. But in many other ways it was still striving to outgrow John Kennedy’s description of the nation’s capital as a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.”  It was a profoundly segregated city and the ruins of riots six years prior to the President’s resignation still rendered vast stretches of real estate east of the Capitol a no-man’s land (at least for white people).

Thomas Mallon’s novel, “Watergate,” brings it all back to life, intelligently and clairvoyantly. They are all there—the burglars Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and the Cubans, Dean and Haldeman and Jeb Magruder and John and Martha Mitchell. Nixon and butt-kissing Henry Kissinger. The whole cast. 

His story is a comedy, or a tragi-comedy in which a vast national calamity grows out of a complex history of miscues, crossed signals and half-hearted intentions, a comedy haphazardly propelled by personal (rather than public) motives, misunderstandings and misconnections. It is a tale of humans in positions of power being hopelessly human, and so his hypothesis--although wildly imaginative--is entirely plausible.  John Mitchell, the attorney general, is hopelessly in love with and hopelessly distracted by his mentally ill and alcoholic wife Martha, and is depicted as fatally deferring on a decision about whether to fund the nit-witted Gordon Liddy and his confederates in their plans for subverting the election. Nixon himself is depicted as more of a fumbling neurotic than a paranoid calculator. “I listen to myself on the tapes and hear myself trying to sound like I know more than I really do,” he tells his wife tearfully, when the gig is up.

The central figure in the story is Fred LaRue, a barely recallable figure who nevertheless was at the heart of the scandal. A top fundraiser among southern conservatives that Nixon cultivated for their resentment over civil rights, Larue was the one who scoured up the dough to give to Ulasewicz to give to the burglars to keep them quiet. But LaRue—in Mallon’s telling—also carries a terrible secret from his childhood, one that will propel his duplicitous actions in the cover-up and that emerges as central to answering an enduring mystery about the scandal: Why did the burglars wiretap the Democratic National Committee to begin with, and what were they looking for?

An easy enough way to imagine yourself into Mallon’s understanding of history is to think back to the last time a relationship, a friendship, or a marriage dissolved. There is the story you tell your friends and relatives, the story you have sold to yourself. She likes Chinese, you like Italian. You just weren’t compatible. It’s true, or true enough. But there is another, more complicated story you know in your heart. There is (though you cringe to recall it) that lame, dumb thing you whispered to her on the pillow one night. You thought you were being funny and original and edgy, and in fact you thought she was asleep. But she wasn’t and ten days later, as the two of you were preparing to go to a party and she was in the middle of a bitch-fit about a run in her stocking, she threw the remark back in your face. A chilly silence descends over the two of you. At the party you avoid her and find yourself trapped in a conversation with an expert in Sanskrit who is desperate to go home with someone tonight.  The Sanskrit expert is not at all your type and a bore besides, and you’ve been avoiding your (wife, girlfriend, partner, friend) mainly because you are hot with embarrassment. But you’ve had a few drinks and you really need to get to the bathroom to take a piss and when you make a move to go, the Sanskrit expert simultaneously moves in the same direction causing the two of you to bump into each other in what looks like a kiss, or a hug, or something kind of, sort of affectionate.  Your partner of course assumes you were making a pass at the Sanskrit expert and after the party a vicious alcohol-fueled fight ensues over this “incident”. Five days later you are determined to set things right by surprising  her at home with flowers and a home-made dinner.  But on the night of the big surprise she is called to an emergency baby-sitting assignment  for her hard-pressed, single-mom sister whose kid has dyslexia and ADHD. On the phone you are crestfallen, and you actually really like and admire the single-mom sister, but the end is spelled when you absent-mindedly let slip the remark, “well, doesn’t that just fucking figure.”

Let’s face it, you can’t tell that story to the relatives, and they don't want to hear it anyway. What they want to hear is the story about how she likes Chinese, you like Italian and, well, you just weren’t compatible.

In just such a fashion does Mallon render the history of Watergate. This is history from the inside--history written by the random chaos of the human heart--and the proof of the intelligence of his story is the degree to which this tall tale is entirely believable. But this should not at any cost be confused with “conspiracy theory,” which is an effort not to understand random complexity but to reduce historical events to a child’s building blocks. The people who think that 9/11 was an inside job, for instance, aren’t interested in comprehending what happened on and before that terrible day; they are in full flight in the opposite direction, grasping at a fairy tale that will release them—and all of us—from the terrible randomness and uncertainty of history.

If I have a complaint—and this is a tepid one for a really good read—it is that this is history without culprits and correspondingly without consequences, beyond the fate of the vain and shallow characters who inhabit it. But in fact, there were culprits-- surely Richard Nixon and his carpet bombing madman Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were a most noxious couple of power-sick fellows  to be running the world’s most successful democracy. And there have most certainly been consequences, which are everywhere around us today to see.