Indiana Oh Indiana

I remember that during childhood, the word “goodbye” had a most melancholy effect when it was used to leave the homes of my grandparents, especially during the Christmas holidays when I, my siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered for Christmas dinner followed by live music from fiddles, guitars, a violin, piano, and octet of vocals by my parents, aunts, uncles and family friends. The adults sometimes danced while we kids played board games and ate Christmas cookies.

Such memories are truly sensory and accumulated until I was in my mid-thirties. I still recall the music, the aromas of wonderful food, the sound of delightful laughter, most of which has since been silenced in the grave. Even several of my younger cousins are no longer with us, and the joyful cacophony of those years still comes back to me when I hear holiday carols or any Hawaiian guitar music that recalls our dear family friend, Bill Aronson, who always played it on his own instrument with my relatives singing along. Grandpa played the double bass, Dad played the guitar, and uncles played other instruments, including the piano. The other adults sang along as they all drifted quietly from Christmas carols to Hawaiian hula music, which made me think that Santa was somewhere frowning about that sacristy on the birthday of Baby Jesus.

Even now when I hear Hawaiian music, instead of thinking about  palm trees and hula dancers wearing grass skirts, I remember the very vivid sound of carols played on those sliding strings…and I can smell Grandma’s pineapple upside down cake, pumpkin pies, and hear the joyful voices of my extended family singing and chatting while icy winds blew outside, usually until the wee hours of the morning, when Dad, Mom, my brother David, I and my sister Connie ventured out to the car and pretended that our steamy breath was from cigarettes. We would all then sleep until noon the next day.

Now, almost everyone else has passed away, even cousins much younger than I. I wonder every year what memories others my age or younger have of their family yuletide gatherings. My recollections are all still quite vivid during the season, especially on Christmas Day, when it all comes back to me, like forgotten buried treasure.  JB

I no longer lose sleep over the consistently cruel and mean-spirited Donald Trump. He is now, to me, a simple, completely predictable cloddish cartoon without a speck of empathy, respect (except for Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Kim Jon Un) or concern for anybody or anything except his wavering bank account and how he can fleece  people naïve enough to fatten his bank balance by purchasing his rather embarrassing array of  expensive but cheaply made trinkets that undoubtedly make him smile at how stupid his worshipers  really are.

His vanity has no limit in his eliciting snide laughs through his insults at decent folks whom he abhors except for their blind financial devotion (and I don’t mean the funny ones that the comic Don Rickles used).

I often wonder how the rest of the “civilized” world sees us Americans when they see and hear the things about which Trump brags in his generally total lack of empathy, generosity, and kindness, which would seem only an embarrassment to him. It makes me wonder too about the terrifying undercurrent of disappointment and rage as they absorb Trump’s complete lack of respect for anyone who isn’t a multimillionaire (which based upon his level of extreme debt is certainly something about which he has nurtured endless lies over many years.

Add to all this seemingly total disrespect for women, all the middle class and impoverished Americans, and one finds in him, instead of the golden calf, a cheap and rusting statue representing the lowest form of useless and deceptive idol, one that is finally beginning to be revealed for what it really is, a phony whose days of being adored by so many is at last coming into focus, the defeated orange relic about whom everything is fakery and illusion.  JB

I am sometimes amazed by the rancor between “small” countries in Europe and also The British Isles. That kind of border control in the United States is not necessary here, as we are The UNITED States of America. There are no armed guards stationed at our state’s borders to check passport data of travelers from one state to another. Just imagine the complications and resulting rancor of Americans in such a scenario of fifty little nations isolated by border patrols with border searches against smuggling of illegal goods. The mere thought of such a system is disturbing but even more hilarious.

France is a nation that could fit inside Texas, but I’m trying to imagine the hilarious complexity of border patrols checking passports for every state. Thank goodness that the concept of walls around each of our fifty states is only a comic illusion like Donald Trump’s wall at the southern border, all be it in a world in which isolation and walls are too often considered necessary safety measures.  JB

There is no living person who is not aging (despite the occasional empty compliments we dispense to friends and loved ones). Every breath each of us takes adds seconds and minutes to our lives in journeys that vary greatly in terms of burdens, joys, and hopes. Our connections to other people keep many of us going to discover what life still has in store, despite the inevitable mix of happiness and sorrow that no one can actually predict from moment to moment, or day to day.

I sometimes become more conscious that I’m still breathing and that my life is ticking by like an old clock that still needs and enjoys a rewinding, with hope that golden chimes will continue their lovely and familiar music.

Our awareness in recollections of where we’ve been is as clear as a new windowpane, and we hold onto and appreciate immensely those for whom life’s goodbyes remind us still that we are allotted only so many heartbeats and that whatever lies ahead is part of whatever trek we’ve been making, since playing with rattles in our cribs.

Whatever awaits us after the cessation of those many heartbeats, may they somehow continue after the final winding of our worldly time pieces in a reunion with everyone we have loved.  JB

I’d like to say that I’m aging gracefully, but I’m not entirely sure what that means. The years continue to roll by faster than I recall them spinning by when I was a child. Birthdays seem to come and go now faster than I can blow out the candles from the year before (OK, I’m not THAT old).

I do try to see the comedy in obvious changes to my memory, the glitches of which I wish could be dollar bills in my bank account. Aging is an odd journey for many of us, who are growing older at speeds that seem to be testing rocket fuel for journeys to other galaxies. One of the comforting characteristics of growing older is that we don’t have to age alone. The anchors of sailing into old age give us pauses on the voyage as we contemplate with dear friends where we’ve been and perhaps even where’ we’re going.

I go to bed at night, occasionally imagining that I can feel myself wrinkling as I drop off to sleep, but my heartbeat reminds me that the vehicle I call “life” is still running and that I have friends who, on some level, share my journey.

Florida is a place where the elderly can share the journeys of growing older. That bond is a powerful one, and that sense of experiencing together with friends and acquaintances the passing of time and the inevitable, sometimes harsh, changes in our personal and collective views of the journey, render the passage of time less scary with the feeling that we’re all in this together. Toasting each other occasionally with Champagne or Jack Daniels helps too.  JB

I used to believe that mass hypnosis was an impossibility in the sense that not enough people would be “tuned in” at the same time with the same intensity, but my skepticism has morphed into a kind of terror regarding the enormous number of Americans who have been mesmerized by the angry, fear-inducing rhetoric of the aggressively, terrifyingly threatening former president, Donald Trump, whose principal gift of speech is to turn a huge portion of Americans into maniacs, hell-bent upon avenging the political setbacks of their Svengali-like idol, who has miraculously made them believe that they are victims of Democrats and the current regime in Washington.

Trump’s extraordinary egomania has somehow connected their rage with his own disappointment in not being re-elected, which he connects in some moronic way with God’s will being ignored. Trump’s acidic accusations and playground rhetoric on some miasmic level of unmerited disgust in the brains of his gullible and furious flock is turning many of them into mindless avengers as though through some kind of Svengali hypnosis.

Make no mistake, Trump’s lust for power and absolute dictatorial control are being channeled into the weary, unhappy minds of those who believe (amazingly) that the power of dictatorship is somehow on their side for their rights and comfort. He has made them believe that the democratic channels of voting and hearing all sides of the rhetoric is a trick to steal their voting rights.

It’s time that more Americans open their history books again to understand the serious current echoes of all the dictators and other power mongers of the past and their very possible rebirth in psychotic charlatans like Donald J. Trump. I fear that the future could otherwise ring with the too-late words “If only we had seen the danger of all those lies.”

God bless America.

JB

Politics in The United States is almost tribal in its reluctance, in many cases, to accommodate differing views. The distance between Democrats and Republicans can often be measured only in light years, because each side has its own view of the world that we all inhabit. The illusion that each side can protect its earthly claims to its way of governance and make it shine like a religious beacon is achieved by billions of dollars being spent upon tearing down the opposition through often massively tweaked claims of the other side taking a bigger slice of the pie than it merits.

Those rare instances of both parties joining forces for the good of the populace need to be expanded into a way of seeing all Americans as one huge family with differing needs but with equal rights that provide hope and substance under the same shared flag of a nation admired by many of the oppressed dictatorships in too many nations across the globe.

I often wonder what our founding fathers would think if they could visit us today and have access to all that goes on in politics. They would probably be pleased that we as a nation still exist with great importance upon the world stage, but the rancor (which also existed in the 18^th Century) has grown with the population and the greater variety of citizenry and the ways in which we can keep it together as one nation. Every country has its problems in and out of politics, but The United States of America is still growing into new sets of clothing for more groups and more needs than in 1776. Looking at troubled nations in other parts of the world, however, gives me hope that we as a multi-cultural nation will somehow be flexible and concerned enough about human needs of us all to continue with our long- term experiment in caring for one nation and its many people.  JB

The recent attempted assassination of Donald trump by a mentally disturbed young man presents an image of America’s love affair with guns and easy access to them. The tired illusion that guns make us safer is observed by many other nations as a foolish mania worthy of much criticism.

American citizens possess over 400 million guns that create the terrifying image of a country at war with itself or possibly with another planet. Part of the fantasy of imagined safety that guns seem to provide is a particular kind of comfortable illusion that an arsenal, even a small one, of a single weapon, fortifies the household against the physical dangers of sinister thieves intent on defiling, for profit, the sanctity of someone’s home.

It would be impossible to keep weapons from the hands of the lunatic fringe, but we all need to be aware that there is sometimes a self-righteous and frightening aura that can give gun owners the seeming right to shoot someone of whom they are even slightly suspicious of criminal intent.

There have always been criminals whose agendas have included everything from theft to murder. I’m not sure though if gun ownership for the rest of us will obliterate theft, burglary, assault, and murder. I’m not even certain that desperate criminals who need to feed their poor families will ever be without weapons of one kind or another that create the comfy illusion that danger is not really an issue.

The bottom line for me is that guns in private homes are with us to stay, even if just as an illusion that society itself is safer. The real battle is to address the fringe lunatics who own such weapons without realizing the danger if they are not kept out of the hands of children, teens and other family members who don’t realize the peril of loaded guns. JB

Picture, if you can, a condominium community of residents mostly between the ages of fifty and eight-five. Imagine the wafting aromas of garden flowers mixed with that of Ben Gay. Conjure the sounds of The Mamas and the Papas, blended uncomfortably with those of Igor Stravinsky and Elvis and the presence of Gladys Kravitz snooping along the cat walk, like a prostitute applying for unemployment benefits, the residence itself being a Stephen Spielberg film trapped in a tin can of blackmail fodder, which is why names here must be changed to protect the guilty, who make the college dorms of our youth look like seminars.  JB

The years manage to creep by, leaving a trail of memories, some of which are crystal clear (even from childhood) while others, like trying to recall the brief grocery list I neglected to jot down, zoom into outer space. Many incidents from childhood are still vivid in all their exhausting detail, while locating my cellphone can require using the housephone to track it down.

I sometimes imagine my mind to be a large collection of rooms in a massive house, where daily routines are still intact until less important surprises invade my comfort zone with issues that involve remembering where I laid my wristwatch or the glass of wine that I was drinking just minutes before. Friends my age say that these changes in our powers of recollection are quite common and simply require a routine which allows as few details as possible to create surprises.

Such military strictness seems too robotic for me to live like a mouse trying to master a maze. Routine is certainly essential on some level, providing some kind of comfort zone of familiarity, but if there’s a ray of hope in my memory having to face annoying little glitches, it’s that I’m not alone in forgetting some daily details, and that my old friends and I still recall the shared happiest days of our childhood and youth together without the roadmap sometimes needed to find a nailfile or toothbrush.

As usual, old friends who know our gaffes without smirking, are the bulwark of shared times and even hope for the future.  JB