Orange You Thrilled?

Many years ago, I worked in an office with a woman named Doris. Doris had been an affluent Marin County housewife whose doctor husband abandoned her for a younger woman -- which is why, at the age of 45, Doris found herself bitterly typing, in her hunt and peck manner, documents in a landscape architect's office. I suppose it goes without saying that she'd supported him through medical school.

This was back in the days when people still smoked in the workplace, and Doris smoked a lot. Our boss expressed concern for the company's new word processing system, imploring Doris to smoke outside because the particulates in cigaret smoke would certainly clog the equipment's processors. Doris would barely look up during these lectures, but when he left her to enter his large inner office she'd very purposefully blow a lungful of smoke straight into her computer's innards.

One day someone made the mistake of commenting to Doris about the sudden winning streak of a local sports team. Doris took a huge toke on her cigaret and blew a plume into the man's face. "I wouldn't give a rat's ass about it if they played it pantsless in Jello," she replied.

I felt a bit like Doris during the recent World Series, which saw the San Francisco Giants winning for the first time in 56 years. City Hall and Coit Tower were bathed in orange light in tribute to the team's jersey color, homemade fireworks twisted into the sky above the Mission, and the entire city erupted into a cacophony of blaring sirens, honking horns, and hooting fans. A million people attended the parade that pushed its way through downtown. And yet I cared not a particle for this achievement, and had no desire to be a part of this celebration. Why? I simply can't relate, or imagine what it would feel like to care.

I only have to hear that familiar tone of the announcer describing the action on the field, overlayed with the drone of the crowd, to be yanked back to those childhood days when my father would monopolize the living room -- and our one TV at the time -- to watch endless baseball games. I cared about them then as much as I do now.

I know that times are grim, and people will seize any opportunity to express joy and communal happiness. But all through the excitement I kept thinking that if all that energy had been expended toward something that really mattered -- Global Warming, say, or the slaying of horrifying politcal dragons like gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, or even heartfelt causes that I oppose -- it would have to be more satisfying and worthwhile.

Last weekend I asked my 86-year-old father if he had followed the World Series on television. Dementia is rapidly closing in on him -- "they tell me I saw a bob cat," he said, as though the sighting happened to someone else -- and he sadly said he didn't think so. Days later, I can still see the orange-lit dome of City Hall glowering like a sunburned nose in the middle of the city's face. But the carbon levels are still rising, civil liberties are still disappearing into the ether, and the homeless are still pushing their carts through the Civic Center in its rosy glow.

Time Marches On

There are many films I've seen many dozens of times: Hitchcock's The Birds and Notorious, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and so many, many others. An interesting thing that happens after so many viewings is that your perspective starts to drift and change in relationship to where you are in your life and what's currently happening to you. Watch To Kill A Mockingbird when you're eight and you're drawn into a spooky Southern gothic world of children's games and looming dangers; see it at 50 and you wonder how Atticus manages to pay for a housekeeper in the throes of the Great Depression.

Recently, I caught Harold and Maude on television, and was no less delighted by it than I had been when my college friends and I would all get high and see it again and again at some retro house in Harvard Square. I'd forgotten how many Cat Stevens songs there are in it -- not just the ones that come easily to mind, but others that show his talent and provide a musical backdrop for the story -- but now it's hard not to also be aware of the performer's conversion to Islam, and how that somehow makes us view him differently than we did then. I think I also now relate more to Harold's imperious mother, setting up a string of pathetic dates for Harold with one fortune-hunting loony after another. You can see how she finds Harold so annoying; can't he just enjoy being wealthy like everyone else? But the one takeaway I didn't quite expect was this: I used to be Harold, with a full life of possibilities ahead of me. Now I'm Maude, with a far more limited array of serious choices to make about my remaining time on earth.

I bring all this up because, like many middle-aged men, I'm currently facing the realities of having really elderly parents. In fact, it sort of amazes me that at 52 I still have parents. For several years now, my many siblings and I (six children in a Roman Catholic family) have been noticing the slow decline of my father, always a healthy and vigorous and generally pretty gregarious man, one who used to blow smoke rings and pull the tablecloth out from under eight place settings without disturbing a glass. Now nearly 86, he's become silent and forgetful, displaying alarming lapses such as claiming to never have visited a restaurant he and my mother have frequented every week for two decades, or wiping the dishes but putting them away in bedrooms and far-flung corners of the house. My mother is a strong-willed woman but never bothered to learn to drive or manage finances, and now she finds herself stepping up to fill the gaps -- watching for turnpike exits, accompanying him to the supermarket because he returns with strange odds and ends not on her carefully crafted list. Having seen some of the signs, I gave her the opportunity, two summers ago, when the entire family gathered back East to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary, to talk about what was happening. She wasn't ready at that point, but a year later, when the situation had worsened, it all spilled out to my sister, who shoulders the burden of dealing with their many needs because she lives so near them. Dad's muddled confusion, his uncharacteristic anger and surliness, his refusal to take a shower before bed the way he had every night for 50 years, his silence in mixed company or when alone with my mother, all added up to an undeniable fact that finally needed to be addressed. My brother who lives here in California and my sister have joined forces with me to get him the help he needs, setting up an evaluation for dementia, googling possible treatments, and prepping my mother in setting the stage for whatever comes next. Years ago it seemed wasteful when Ruth Gordon's character took poison tablets at the onset of her 80th birthday; at my age I relate to that decision more with each passing day.