Robert

I’m in my fourth year at the Ojai Valley Athletic Club where I pay a monthly fee to use the facilities and, as a bonus, ogle the attractive women who make the visit much more enjoyable.

I joined the club after Ila died and have been a faithful member through the pandemic. Some Covid-mindful people thought I was foolishly risking my health by sharing the club’s air with others who were also deemed crazy. They were probably right.

Until I moved from the Upper Ojai in 2019, I’d get in my car at 6am, five days a week and drive eight twisting miles from the house on the hill to the club on Fox Street. Since becoming an urban Townie, I often walk a mile to the club in about twenty minutes.

Early on, Jackie told me I should get a personal trainer, someone who could show me how to improve my physical condition without doing permanent damage to my 80-year-old body.

And so, I met Robert.

A slender, physically fit specimen that I hoped to emulate one day, Robert trained the unfit, conducted yoga classes, led hikes, and spent lots of time schmoozing with everyone at the club. He knew their names, their kids’ names, and their dogs’ names. Everyone waved at Robert, and he took the time to wave back. My thirty-minute, twice weekly sessions shrank to twenty because of his constant socializing. He often was late, and I was often irritated. But he was a star, and I basked in it.

We started our training (I’m not sure why it’s called training…maybe because it’s like taking your dog to obedience class). Robert inventoried my body parts, found them all in their proper places, and measured my stamina. He entered the information on an official looking form and promised that we would periodically re-evaluate my condition to determine the level of my improvement or lack thereof. He said he would record the new data and compare it to the old data. I never saw the form again in our nearly three-year relationship.

I tried to focus on the physical stuff during our sessions but was often drawn into conversations with Robert about the news, books, and our past lives. I shared personal stuff with him, including dreams that your analyst would find interesting. And that, I finally realized, was as much a part of his standard routine as was the proper use of the club’s equipment.

We were comfortable in our deepening rut. But then he began to talk about his own health. His annual physical had shown some troubling signs. He didn’t complain; over the weeks it was more like a slow-motion description of progressive decline. 

His liver had been invaded; he was referred to UCLA, a place where you should only go when you have a condition that defies medical science.

Treatments began. Reports given by him during our sessions were promising. The bad guys were on the run.

Or so it seemed. The invaders had migrated to his head, wreaking new havoc.

Robert was a lot younger than me. These things, I thought, were supposed to afflict guys my age, not his.

And then, the unthinkable. He gave up his position at the club to devote full time to his illness. Selfishly, I wondered what I would do without a trainer.

Robert suggested I try someone else. So, I worked with a new guy for a few months, and then he left. I thought I’d try it without a trainer. I figured I’d just follow the last routine I learned from the new guy. But I found myself taking short cuts. I went to the club less frequently. I was sure I was slowly getting out of shape. I was bored.

Yesterday, Jackie suggested that I try a third trainer. I listened, like I always do, but said nothing, packed up my stuff and went to the club. I did my usual routine but found little pleasure in it. I showered and wandered by the front desk on my way out. I had decided to take one of the other trainers’ business cards that adorn the counter. But I hesitated, feeling like a deserter. I figured I’d get one next time.

I went home, made some oatmeal, and sat down at the computer. I thought about Robert and realized I hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks. We often text and occasionally speak on the phone. I sent a text…You’ve been quiet. What’s happening, bro?

Waiting for a return text, I roused my paranoia to its full height. I wondered if he’d had a relapse, a reoccurrence, a new invasion by the bad guys. I figured he’d respond when he could. Meanwhile, I’d worry.

And then, five minutes later, the phone rang. A voice much stronger than I remembered said, “I’m going for a haircut. I plan to start working part-time in April. Let’s get together next week and talk about training.”

I’ll have to remember to build in some time for his schmoozing.

The Great Un-masking

I’ve gone through several generations of face masks during the on-again, off-again Covid pandemic. The first was a skimpy little thing that I’m sure any microbe could have breached.

Realizing my risk of exposure, and the prospect of an early death, I graduated to a much sturdier mask that survived the Thomas Fire of 2018. Although robust, it plugged my nostrils and put a permanent fog on my eyeglasses. It was so tight that I felt like that alien character in Men in Black whose head shrunk six sizes when Will Smith blasted him with his laser gun.

Like all new emergencies, proper masks were in short supply. A cottage industry sprang up overnight offering homemade face coverings constructed of leftover bedsheets and old tee shirts. Despite Jackie’s penchant of tossing away anything that isn’t nailed down, I still have a few of those masks that had interesting designs but offered little protection from the clever Covid-19 virus that morphed as needed.

Fortunately, the behemoths of the medical supply industry leaped into the breach when they quickly realized that the prospect of falling down dead was a reasonable incentive that forced even the most resistant crazies to wear masks.

Soon we could find any style and color face mask on the Amazon website. I regularly stared at the offerings and wondered which ones would do a good job of repelling the little nasties, while letting me get through the day without the pain inflicted by the over-tight ear straps.

I became a face mask junkie. My favorite color was black; I thought I looked sexy and mysterious. I tried white and maroon, but they didn’t seem to do anything for my macho image. 

Masks that were labeled Amazon’s Choice or Best Seller often were losers. Like I thought someday my head would get smaller, or my ears would develop armor plating, I refused to junk the useless masks. I stowed them in a kitchen drawer; of course, Jackie found them and deposited them in E.J. Harrison’s green trash bin.

Masks found their way into my car and never left. The container on the driver-side door overflowed with them. It was as though I expected to live in the car and was afraid that I might run out of them. Occasionally, Jackie would say, “Do you really need all those masks? You already have two hanging from your steering wheel.” Embarrassed for a nanosecond, I would take a few to their final resting place in the Harrison bin.

I sneered at people who wore thin, useless bandanas. Usually, these were ill-fitting handkerchiefs that had never been washed. I’m sure it was the users’ way of turning up their noses at the whole idea of a mask. I’m sure they snickered under the snotty face covering, fully aware that the rest of us wanted to rip it off their face, to show our disdain for their disdain.

After two years, I thought I had the mask thing figured out. Right color, comfortable fit, and good protection. And then the Omicron variant arrived with the speed of light. Dr. Fauci and his foxy sidekick, Dr. Walensky, after watching related episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and General Hospital, quickly concluded that sturdier masks were needed. Enter the N95 and KN95 mask, which had been languishing in dark places.

Back in front of the Amazon screen, I searched for the new holy grail. The selection of N95’s was limited…no maroon. I bought twenty black ones and they arrived the next day. They comfortably cupped my face like my mother did…for a while. Then they didn’t. Particularly offensive was the elastic strap pulled taut around my right ear. Like a tight shoe, I removed the mask when no one was watching. I tried wearing the mask with only the left ear strap, not a good idea. I googled “painful ear straps” and got several references to the Spanish Inquisition.

The Omicron variant seemed happy infecting people while leaving them relatively unscathed. Even the unvaccinated stopped dying in droves. Drs. Fauci and Walensky had enough. They began making noises about junking masks even though Mississippi, and other 19^th century mask-burning states, were still filling up hospital beds. Governor Newsom, reluctant to bring another recall election down on his head, decided to loosen up.

We are now into the third day of the great un-masking. Signs that used to say Masks Required for Entry are being replaced with signs saying Masks Required for the Unvaccinated. This afternoon I walked past the new normal and into the bank. Tellers were masked, I was not. I felt weird showing my bare face, and I almost put the mask back on.

I’m much sexier that way.

Patience

Jackie and I are enrolled in a Mussar class. It’s a Jewish spiritual practice that focuses on living a meaningful life.

Human traits like humility and patience are studied to see how we stack up. We get tools that include readings, meditation, journaling, and instruction, all designed to challenge and improve ourselves. Or at least understand what might be standing in our way. Accompanying humility and patience in this parade of traits are the usual ones, gratitude, silence, and generosity. Others are a bit more obtuse, like order and equanimity.

Mussar was developed in Lithuania as a group enterprise in the 1800’s. Many of the writings included come from the pens of Rabbis living then and earlier. Adopting Mussar means a lifetime of study leading to awareness, wisdom, and transformation.

In my case, I’ll be lucky to get through the next six weeks.

Our Mussar classmates number 10, nearly all are members of our temple. We meet via Zoom every two weeks and spend two hours discussing this week’s trait. The alternate weeks are devoted to private study and meetings with our team partner. My teammate is Jackie.

It can be administratively complex, and I spend way too much time trying to keep my traits straight. For example, we could be knee-deep in humility while prepping for patience. Or was it the other way around?

In one of the exercises, I pick a point on a scale that identifies how I rate myself on a given trait. For example, regarding humility, am I humble or more like Vladimir Putin? But am I so humble that I’m apathetic, or do I hog the limelight like Donald Trump?

Patience has two faces. It can mean how long you’ll wait for a bus on an ice-cold morning on a Chicago street corner before throwing yourself into oncoming traffic. Or it can mean how well you accept an irreversible outcome without liking it, like the trip to the hospital after you’ve been hit by that silent Tesla.

I’ve always thought of myself as a patient person. At least on the outside. I sit in library foundation board meetings, hoping for the end of time. I remain respectful but occasionally find myself muttering silently while others happily contribute their thoughts to the festivities. Age probably has something to do with it. Like my irreversibly thinning skin that belies my 82 years, my tolerance has its limits.

My eyes scan the room and I often wonder what others are thinking; are they as impatient as I am? Why doesn’t some colleague say, “Ok, that’s enough. We shouldn’t even be discussing this trivial item, much less interfering with my TV schedule. Let’s move on.” And then I think, why am I not saying this? Is it an overabundance of patience? Am I alone in my reverie? Or am I just a wuss?

I watch the meeting room wall clock move so slowly that I think an evil deity has made it run backwards. I calculate the time remaining before the meeting’s scheduled conclusion and worry that there is too much to cover in the remaining minutes. As we get closer to closure, I begin to congratulate myself for lasting this long without saying anything disruptive. I maintain my composure…and then, having reached my biblical limit, I react by saying something that I will regret immediately after I’ve said it.

One of Mussar’s tactics in dealing with a lack of patience, and the spewing of regretful thoughts, is to widen the space between anticipating your upcoming impatience and the actual act itself. This time-out provides a theoretical buffer zone in which one can reconsider doing something stupid. This tactic, however, also requires patience. It can lead to years of rabbinic study in a quest to solve this conundrum. The product of that study then leads to more study and consequentially an increase in required rabbinic patience.

But we are not all Rabbis. I demonstrated this fact last Sunday as Jackie and I worked on our taxes. Until our marriage, Jackie used a local bookkeeping service to record her monthly transactions and complete her tax returns. I had originally thought, “How much work can that be? My stuff surely is more voluminous and certainly more complex.”

I was wrong on both counts. Multiple employers, renting her house, and singlehandedly raising the GNP with the purchase of a myriad of personal care products and services, proved challenging.

I had lots of questions. I began to feel the pressure of meeting the IRS filing deadline. I used my new Mussar patience tactic and widened the space between anticipation and action. I silently analyzed my situation and quietly began with, “Sweetheart, I hate to interrupt your cell phone conversation about your girlfriend’s marital woes, but could you please tell me what this charge is for? I would be ever so grateful.”

As the call droned on and the unanswered questions mounted, my patience buffer zone grew smaller. Like the library clock on the wall, I had reached my allotted patience time. And I said, “If you would only stop yakking with your neurotic girlfriend, I could finish this inquisition and get back to playing my ukulele. I’ve got a life too, ya know.”

Wrong. Definitely not in the Mussar playbook. Like the speed of light, I instantly regretted what I had said. Especially the “ya know.”

So, I did the only thing I could do.

I humbled myself. A lot.

Dream away…

… in my dreams I imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake…Rene Descartes 

I’m a big dreamer. It happens every night, usually a few hours before I wake for the last time.

I say last time because I fall asleep easily, enjoy five hours of bliss, and wake around 3am. I make a trip to the bathroom and return to bed feeling like I can go right back to sleep. Wishful thinking.

The next three hours of relative sleeplessness include meditative breathing. I take a few deep breaths, then return to normal while focusing on my breath. It often works and I fall back to sleep, except it doesn’t last. But I’ll take what I can get.

Thinking about an enjoyable experience often does the trick. I’m on a fly-fishing trip with my son David. I’m wearing waders and casting a surface fly. I see the flow of the water in the stream, the weightless fly resting on the surface, and the over-sized trout grabbing it. I see the line peel from the reel as the fish runs. He stops and gives up. I see the fish in the net and David cradling it. I see him remove the microscopic fly from the trout’s mouth. I see the fish swim away. I smile. It works, sometimes.

I like sleeping on my right side. Second place goes to my left. I hardly ever fall asleep on my back although I occasionally find myself there when I wake. It feels good as I lay on my side, but the comfort doesn’t last as I feel the mattress inevitably resist. I shift my position and hope I can sleep before I need to do it again.

Time seems to move quickly in the dark. I stare at the overbright clock by the bedside. It’s 3am and then, in what seems like a few minutes, it’s 4am. I think it’s because I don’t realize that I really am asleep. Not a deep sleep. More of a muddled sleep. One where I think about things. Things that trouble me. Things that seem more troubling than they will be when I fully wake. Stupid things about which I will scold myself and promise never to do it again. But, of course, I do.

It’s in those few hours before dawn that my dreams happen. Dreams that have people who are unknown to me, and others that are too well known. People who are kind, and some who are not.

Dreams that are happy and sometimes sexy. Others that cause me to wake in a sweat, toss the covers from my overheated body, breathe hard, and be glad that it was just a dream.

Dreams that I can only vaguely recall, and others that stay with me most of the day.

Dreams that others have too. I didn’t study for the test. Can’t find my way home.

Dreams I can’t decipher. Others that are far too meaningful.

Jackie says most of my unpleasant dreams display my anxiety. In the extreme, feelings of fear, dread, and uneasiness. Anxiety caused by repeating the past, or uncertainty about the future.

A single night can bring two dreams without a commercial break.

No two dreams are precisely the same, but many share the same message.

Rare ones, doled out miserly over the years, have me flying about twenty feet off the ground, admiring the landscape. It is so real that when I wake, I wonder if it was. Or maybe I was Tinkerbell.

It’s the bad ones that make me wish I was more like Ila, who claimed she never had dreams. As M.C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist, said, “I don’t use drugs. My dreams are frightening enough.”

We dream several times every night; it’s a normal part of healthy sleep. It’s shown to be connected to better cognitive function and emotional health. It’s also reputed to produce more effective thinking and better memory retention. Sometimes, dreams make a lot of sense while others do not.

Last night I was a voyeur. It was like watching a movie at the Century 10 in Ventura; the only thing missing was popcorn. There was a grassy field with a hole in the ground, maybe an abandoned well. A man was stuck about twenty feet from the surface. His arms were at his side, and he could not move them. People stood around the hole and yelled encouragement. As though on cue, I joined the scene entering from from stage-left. I suggested we drill another hole next to the first one. Someone could descend to the same level as the stuck man, dig horizontally and pull the unlucky man into the new hole. And then my dream ended.

I did not feel rested, nor did my cognitive functions improve.

But I did wonder if the man ever made it out of the hole.