Dave (4)

I can furnish certain exact phrases, even sentences, from what Dr. Tenley said, because for weeks afterward, at times chose my no logic I could ever figure out, odd bits would play back. Finally I wrote down what I was hearing, and they ceased coming.

“David is afflicted with a tumor about the size of a pea, located on the pineal gland [sketching rapidly on the chalkboard], which is …”

“The paralysis and vision-blurring he experienced were due to the pressure exerted on the brain by the growing tumor, pus fluid which has been building up in the area. We have drained the fluid and removed the pressure for the moment …”

“… whether there is a high degree of malignancy. Quite possibly it may prove to be benign. However …”

“… inserted a tube which will ease the pressure by allowing the fluid to drain. This is, however, only a staying process.”

“Due to the position of the tumor, it is inoperable [inoperable, inoperable, inoperable] and must eventually prove terminal.” (Memory says that this statement was followed by a long blank silence, but I don’t think it was, really.)

“It could be two days, or two years, or possibly longer, but the tumor must eventually grow to the point that it will fatally affect the operation of the brain …”

“The tube which we have inserted to drain the fluid and thus to relieve the pressure on the brain will give David some time. He will probably walk out of the hospital in two or three weeks. But I must caution you against any sort of optimism. There is no hope of ultimate recovery….”

And that was that. The efficient, impersonal doctor (so he seemed to me) said, “I am very sorry,” the first and only crack in the professional façade that we were allowed to see. Mrs. Schlachter was crying, silent devastated tears. The rest of us were stony-faced. Dennis met my eyes once and then we each looked somewhere else. I realized that my teeth were clenched. David was going to die? Like hell he was!

 

Somebody would have to tell the house, and Dennis didn’t want to be the one. I decided it might as well be me. I thought I could get through it okay. But I was supposed to go to work at four, and it was already nearly 3:30. I called the house and told one of the brothers that I was calling a special house meeting in half an hour and asked him to post a notice on the bulletin board and otherwise pass the word.  I called Mr. Berkeley, the store manager, and told him I’d be an hour late to work and I’d tell him why when I got there. Then we left the hospital, and I wondered if  the Schlachters were sorry or relieved to be by themselves awhile. I could feel the pain it gave them, seeing ordinary life going on around them.

Ordinary life going on. Walking down G Street, we found ourselves in the middle of crowds of students changing classes. It was hard to realize that for them it had been just a normal Monday. It was still considerably less than 24 hours since we had returned from the Jersey shore.

Ordinarily I would have no business calling a house meeting, not being one of the officers, but the brothers knew it had to concern Dave’s operation. When I walked into the house, .it looked like a real house meeting, only quieter. Every seat was taken, and several brothers were sitting on the floor or leaning on the wall around the entryway.

I thought it would be easy, and at first it was. I used my tough-guy, man-of-the-world voice, my great stone face.  I told them I’d make it short.

“You know they operated on Dave today. It was a success in one sense: They removed the pressure and that removed the paralysis. But he has a tumor, a damned little thing the size of a green pea, they say, and it’s in a place they can’t get at. So, they can’t take it out.”

The brothers were silent.

“The doctor said it could start growing again at any time, and when it does” (I paused to steady my voice) “he’s dead. A couple of days, a couple of months, a couple of years. And there isn’t anything anybody can do about it.” Sudden tears, unexpected, blinding me. I walked out of the room, ashamed to let them see me cry.

 

Fortunately, we all had immediate problems to tend to. The Schlachters needed to rent a place nearer the hospital, and Dale and Bill offered to help them find it. Dennis and I would concentrate on getting Dave graduated. He’d take three of Dave’s professors and I would take the other two, professors I had had classes with.

The guys, on living the present

Monday, March 18, 2024

8 a.m. You boys seem to enjoy putting the cat among the pigeons, and every time you do, it seems some people profit by it. So, anything on your minds today? How about continuing from where we left off?

Perhaps it is worth saying on your behalf that we do not experience your questions or comments as stemming from discouragement or desperation, but from curiosity and often perplexity.

I have often said as much to various friends but for some reason it seems to come across as an emotion I am not feeling – much like when people sometimes experience you as chastising me when we are only joking or when it is an even, straight, exchange. But given the limitations on using words, I don’t know what can be done about it. Nothing, I imagine, and so what?

Well, there is a line to be walked. OT1H you don’t want to give up on the idea of conveying a sense of atmosphere; OTOH, just realize that precision is not to be had outside of telepathic contact, and even there the “flavor” of the minds  involved will flavor the soup.

I’m not worried about it if you aren’t. It just seemed something to be mentioned.

A mention, yes, not a full-length disquisition, unless for some reason that becomes warranted.

So – more on why we’re still here, or on vertical community?

Let us return – continually return – to the practical. Any theory or even any description of the way things are that we may engage in is always aimed at practical use. We don’t want you (plural) building castles in the air unless, like Thoreau, you intend to put the foundations under them. So everything we have given you in 25 years has been intended to help orient you to the way things are, so that you may better live your potential. Not so you may admire an abstract scheme, but so that you may use the scaffolding to get a bird’s-eye view, the better to work from.

If you are not in 3D to live, what are you there for? But of course, the question is, what does “live” mean for you, in this moment?

I hear you saying, All paths are good: scholar, adventurer, soldier, idler, whatever. The externals of our life aren’t what you are concentrating on.

No. you will each shape your life by a combination of the existing possibilities (predestination) and what you do with them (free will). But from our point of view, your internal life is what is real.

That didn’t come out right, did it?

It was hastily put, let’s put it that way. Your internal life and your external life are, of course, part of one life. Either may be considered in the absence of the other, but it is only a partial view.

Bullets?

Perhaps. Let’s see.

  • The internal world is your life as experienced intuitively.
  • The external, as experienced via the physical senses.
  • In effect, right-brain internal, left-brain external, and they are designed to complement each other.
  • Thus (this will be obvious to some, and we have said it many times), inner and outer worlds are not different, nor disconnected, much less one real and the other not. They are one reality, experienced in alternative ways.
  • This identity being so, which way of looking at life should be considered more profound? You will have a preference; the answer may seem obvious. But in fact, it is dealer’s choice and depends upon your psychic composition.
  • We, based in non-3D, naturally see the intuitive, gestalt, non-sensory perception as realer, more reliable, than the sensory, detail-oriented, sequential view that is channeled through physical senses.
  • But again, it isn’t that simple. (You could print that out and hang it on the wall: “It isn’t that simple.” It never is. Anything can always be explored more deeply.) Your view of the external world is inextricably mixed with your thoughts, emotions, complexes, etc. Your experience of the inner world is highly variable depending upon your physical circumstances such as fatigue, disorientation, etc.

That seemed to go well.

Yes, good suggestion. Now, the question remains for you, for anybody: What are you doing with your life right now? What you did yesterday, what you might do tomorrow, may be interesting, but they are not centered in the way anything is centered that deals with here, now, because that is what is real in terms of –

Yes, I was wondering how you were going to finish that sentence.

Well, it’s the usual problem with words, less “How do I say it so as to be understood” than “How do it say it so as to lessen the chances of being mis-understood?” That’s why we’re always circling around a subject, to sketch enough context to hopefully orient the reader to look in the right direction.

Bullets again?

Maybe not. Let’s put it this way: Your entire life, past, present, and future, is theoretically available and interacting with you at any moment. This is true, if counter-intuitive. But it is also true that your only moment of application is in whatever “now” you find yourself. You can choose now, no time else. The confusing thing is that every moment is experienced as now when you are in it; still, your awareness is in one “now” no matter how wide a net you cast.

Yes, I have been aware for some time that we need some bridging concept to make clear to us how it can always be “now” and yet each other moment of our lives have its own “now.”

We doubt if it can be contained within 3D awareness. You can grok it, perhaps. We doubt you can establish it as a law of nature. (However, we could be wrong.)

Hold this in mind. Different angles of vision from the same place produce different vistas. That is a function of vision and perspective, not of some contradiction in reality or some flaw of observation.

So, looking one way, we say every moment of time is as if separate, just as you in each of those moments are as if different from what you are in other moments. Looking another way, we say nothing passes, least of all time. There is only the one living moment, so therefore you – we – live only in that one living “now.”

Put the two seemingly contradictory views together (you can intuit its truth, even if you can’t build a logical structure of it). You will see that’s your life. You in the present can learn to range backward and forward, but the only time you feel fully alive is when you are consciously in the living “now.” We said consciously in the living now, notice. You are always there (as there is nowhere else to be) but if you are distracted by daydreams and old tapes and robotic repetitions, you may not be living in the present in effect.

The present is life. Awareness is life. Choice, delight, pain, all the experiences of the 3D, are life. A greater non-3D awareness while you are still in the body is life.

What does any of this have to do with the externals of your life? Viktor Frankl had a hard life while in the concentration camp, but you can see by what he brought out of it that he lived. Can any of you say that your life is harder than his? And, if it were, would that necessarily be a bad thing? Maybe it would be life more intensely.

Interesting thought.

Hold this: The practical thing to do is always to live as awarely as you can. All the details will vary from one person’s life to the next, but the common factor will be, “You are living this life. Live it as you please, but live it.” And if you can live it in calm joy, so much the better.

Our thanks for all this, as always.

 

Dave (3)

We were tired before the waiting even began. We had gotten up at 7 a.m. Sunday, had driven five hours to arrive at 11 p.m.,  and hadn’t gotten out of the hospital till after 1 a.m. Monday. It was close to 2 a.m. before I escaped into sleep, and it was only a little after 7 a.m. when my alarm woke me up. And Dale had spent the night sleeping in his clothes on one of the couches in the living room.

We got up, washed our faces, had a tense, silent breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee at the People’s Drug Store counter, and were reassembled in the fourth floor waiting room – still outside of visiting hours – by 7:30. Dannis was there when we arrived. The Schlachters were in with David.

Three orderlies came by with a bed on wheels. They came back with Dave lying on it. I got the merest glimpse of him. They had shaved his head.

The Schlachters came out to the waiting room, because another patient was being admitted to Dave’s semi-private room. Now the little waiting room held six of us, two in their sixties, four in their twenties. And now we really began to wait.

Silence wasn’t very comfortable. Neither was speech. Long spells in which nobody said anything, then someone would make a comment and someone would seize on it, and someone would extend it, and extract a reply. When it could no longer be maintained, the painful silence would resume as if it had never been interrupted, as in fact it hadn’t.

At nine, we asked the nurse at the desk if the operation had started. She didn’t know and said she couldn’t find out.

It didn’t take long for the chairs to become very uncomfortable. “Of course you couldn’t expect the chairs to be comfortable,” Dale said, getting up to stretch. “This is a waiting room, nobody could have expected that people might have to wait in them.” It earned him some feeble smiles, which is pretty much what all our attempts at gallows humor met that day.

Was it ten-thirty? Possibly later. No word.

“The décor isn’t much,” Toutant said, “but you have to admit, at least we don’t have to pretend to be awake while somebody is lecturing.”

Eleven. I started to pace, then thought it might annoy the others. Stopped. Started again, unconsciously. Stopped. Made myself sit down.

“You boys are missing a lot of class.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Isn’t it great?”

Andrews said this was the closest thing to a legitimate excuse for cutting classes we had ever had.

I suddenly realized that I was scheduled to work at the Safeway Jr. from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. I wondered how I would manage to stay awake.

Eleven thirty. Dennis stretched, and looked at his watch for the thousandth time.

Noon. Mr. Schlachter straightened out of his chair and announced that he and “the boys” were going to have lunch across the street.

Breakfast at People’s. Lunch at People’s. a monumentally joyless lunch. We stretched it out as long as we could, and still we were back in 40 minutes. No word.

Mrs. Schlachter said she was going to get something to eat downstairs. She was back in 15 minutes. She smiled wanly and said she’d found she wasn’t very hungry.

More waiting. By now I hated the walls, the chairs, the public-address system.

One-thirty. Dennis got up abruptly, left the room. He was back a moment later. “I know that nurse,” he said. “She’s in one of my classes. I asked her to find out how long now.”

Andrews snorted. “That figures. The amazing thing, when you come to think of it, is that it has taken this long for Crabb to find a woman here he knows.”

We all grinned at that, tired, half-hearted grins.

Dennis got up again when he saw her coming, and went out to meet her. He returned looking a little less tense. “She’s an O.R. nurse,” he said, “so she could go on in. She said they’re finishing up now. ” Mrs. Schlachter redoubled her attack on her handkerchief, but I thought, maybe this was good news. Hadn’t they said it was life or death? And he wasn’t dead. And they had been working on him for a long time, long enough to find the problem and get rid of it.

More waiting.

Finally at 2:30, Dr. Tenley entered the room and asked to see the Schlachters in the consultation room. When we all rose to accompany them, he said this was for family members only. Mr. Schlachter said, “After last night and today, they’re family,” and Dr. Tenley gave in, and we all filed into the little consultation room with its blackboard, and its grey walls, four incongruous red plastic chairs. Bill and I stood against the wall as the doctor explained. It wasn’t good news.

TGU on Why am I still here?

Sunday, March 17, 2024

10:50 a.m. Hard to figure out how to begin. Wondering why I’m still here, how much longer, if there’s anything to accomplish, etc., nothing new there. Beyond that, no interest in doing anything, even leaving the house. Is this going anywhere? I am of course in mind of Rita asking herself why she was still there. Now I am in the same position. Reading doesn’t seem to be much of a life, and I’m pretty well finished with writing, I guess.

Guys?

You are still the only “you” around. When you are no longer in a given 3D moment, who can look out on the world from your point of view?

Nobody and so what?

Yes, in a way “so what” and of course every life comes to an end. But what if your observation is required (or anyway desired) for a specific series of events?

But, is it?

This is a tangled subject.

Tell me about it! How about untangling it some?

You never had a clear view of your life going forward. In general, people don’t. Too much clarity would actually restrict your effective range of maneuver.

So why change now, is that it?

Don’t slip into an assumption of being acted upon rather than also acting. You are not guinea pigs, you are explorers: What you explore is partly a matter of your context, partly a matter of your decisions and their consequences.

But we usually know when we’re on the beam, don’t we?

Do you? Think how many times you sleepwalked into your future, when clearer insight might have made you less certain, or let’s say less able to follow non-rational but critical paths.

Okay, granted. I never claimed to know what I was doing, or why I was impelled to do it. But let’s talk specifically about this end of my life, when I presumably am playing out the clock rather than preparing for some new adventure.

If you wish to define it that way.

Meaning, we never know. Well, it is highly irritating. It is one thing to live in faith, as I think I do. It is something else to live in deliberately produced obscurity [that is, lack of clarity; opacity], as it sometimes seems I am doing.

Do you remember when you hungered and thirsted to know the future?

A good part of my youth.

Would it have helped or hindered?

How can I know? It didn’t happen.

Au contraire. It did happen but not in a way you have recognized until just this moment.

That’s very interesting. I knew I would run for Congress in 1974. Knew it years before, though it made no sense. That was knowing the future but it felt like waiting for the time to roll around until I could do it.

Was that predestination or free will?

I see your point, it wasn’t either, in a way. It was being drawn to an outcome.

How you ran, whether you ran (for you might have looked at the odds and said no) were up to you. But the running itself was as if set in stone, not because it was predestined (though it could look like that) but because it was a major rock in the stream that was your life. If it were not to be encountered, it would have to be avoided, but it could not be ignored.

I’m not sure I have the sense of it. How is something that must be dealt with different from predestination?

So long as you look at this through 3D logic – past, then present, then future, created sequentially – it will tangle. Look at it as we do, that all the potentialities of your life, of everyone’s life sharing your time, are inherent from the creation. Seen that way, it becomes a matter of current and steering and storms and drift and propulsive power. A canoeist exercises his free will in going down the river, but freewill cannot move the canoe outside the river or to another time. Life does provide portages, it is true, but fewer than you might think.

So, a salient point in Rita’s life was her questioning of you in 2001-2002, unbeknown to herself ahead of time?

Yes, but don’t think external tasks are necessarily the important thing. How do you know but that something you will assimilate, something you will put together mentally and never mention, may be an important thing in your life?

I feel like at this point I am to sigh and say, “Living in faith, okay I can do that.”

Suppose you didn’t. where would be the advantage of frustration or anger or worry or indignation or any reaction other than living in faith that all is well? Wouldn’t it be the equivalent of pretending to affect world affairs by your reaction to the latest news?

Point taken. I get the feeling there is more to be said, but I’m finished for the moment. Our thanks as always.

1 p.m. Typing this up, I am aware that this barely scratches the surface. Perhaps others will have comments or questions that will lead to something.

 

Dave (2)

As soon as the elevator doors closed and I had had time to count to 30, I walked over to the nurses. “My name is Frank Schlachter, and this is my cousin Bill Toutant. My brother David is in 406. Our parents are flying in from Iowa and should have landed at National just about now. The doctor said it would be all right for us to wait until they get here.”

I don’t know if they believed me, but they didn’t make us leave. Maybe we looked shocked enough, strained enough, that they thought I might be telling the truth. So we began to wait.

Dennis and Mr. and Mrs. Schlachter got to the hospital about 40 minutes later. They were both shorter than Dave. Mr. Schlachter looked very tired, very old. Dave’s mother’s face was very set and determined, rigidly composed.

“Frank DeMarco and Bill Toutant,” Dennis said, introducing us.

“Hello, boys,” Mr. Schlachter said, making an effort to smile and shake hands. “It is very good of you to be here.”

“David has talked to us about you,” Mrs. Schlachter said as I shook her hand. But she didn’t seme able to say anything else. The formalities accomplished, we stood there. It was awkward. “The doctor is on the way up,” Dennis said. “Mr. Schlachter had him notified when we arrived. I have to go move the damned car again.” He left.

I was avoiding the nurses who had just heard me introduced to my “parents.” They suggested to the Schlachters that we wait in the waiting room, tastefully decorated with a few hard red molded-plastic chairs and a table and some magazines of no interest. We sat. Mr. Schlachter tried to make conversation. Mrs. Schlachter did too, glancing at us and at the corners of the room and at the ceiling, and all the while twisting a handkerchief in her hands. Every time we heard a noise that might be an elevator or the door from the stairs, we all looked up.

Mr. Schlachter roused himself. “But where did Dennis go?”

“He had to move the car,” I said. “He didn’t want to get it towed.”

“Why didn’t he just put it in a lot?” He started to reach for his wallet, I think..” It can’t be so much.” I told him Dennis would park the car behind the fraternity house and wouldn’t notice the few blocks he would have to walk back to the hospital. “Well, the next time, he can put it in the lot here. All that walking it isn’t necessary.” I realize now that he was grasping for something  practical to occupy his mind. After a few minutes: “This close to exams, you shouldn’t be studying?”

“Oh, I’ve gotten through four years this way,” I said. “Too late to change now.”

“But this is important for your future. And you, Bill Toutant, the music maker. David says you are going to be our new Beethoven. You shouldn’t be studying?”

“I’m all right,” Bill said, uncharacteristically serious. “Music isn’t something you can cram for. You know it or you don’t.”

“Still, I hope you boys aren’t using up time here that you should be using to study.”

Silence again. Bill asked about their flight, and Mr. Schlachter outlined their route in detail. Neither Bill nor I nor Mrs. Schlachter nor he himself, really, absorbed a word he said.

The doctor arrived. He didn’t say Bill and I had to leave, so we stayed. He and David’s parents went off toward David’s room.

“We got up at seven in Avalon,” I said, “and here we are.” Bill nodded unhappily. Dennis arrived, and we told him that the doctor was in with Dave’s parents. Andrews arrived, all the way form their apartment on a D.C. Transit bus in the middle of the night. We filled him in on the little we knew, and we waited, and waited some more.

The doctor came out of Dave’s room with Dave’s parents, said a final few words, and disappeared into the elevator again. We introduced the Schlachters to Dale.

Nobody sat down. “Boys,” Mr. Schlachter said without preamble, “it is time you should get to bed. Dr. Tenley is planning to do exploratory surgery tomorrow morning.” Absently, almost off-handedly, he said, “He thinks there is some kind of growth pressing on David’s brain. He said the operation could not possibly be more critical.”

“He said it is life or death,” Mrs. Schlachter said, almost choking it out.

Dennis said he would go get the car, and would be sure to get them back to the hospital by eight.

“Seven thirty,” Mrs. Schlachter said.

“Tell you what,” Andrews said, thinking quickly. “I’ll stay at the fraternity house. That way, you’ll have two beds at the apartment. Dennis, just remember to bring me a change of clothes and my toothbrush, will you?”

Sure,” Dennis said softly. We were uncommonly thoughtful and kind to each other that week.

The guys on vertical and horizontal communities

Saturday, March 16, 2024

9:10 a.m. I figure it’s time for a chat with the guys. Nice to have enough energy again. So, boys, what’s on your mind?

Let’s briefly discuss Memory Lane, its uses and possibilities.

Discuss away.

Your poking into your past memories via journals and – especially – fictionalized recounting set into print long ago – offers you a time machine. Not only do you get an automatic correction of dates and sequence, you get vivid reminders of what you felt then, and you get vivid comparisons between what you concluded whenever you wrote what you now read and what strikes you from this vantage point so many years – decades – later.

And what was that? This: You are not the same person. (We should hope it is clear that this must apply to any and all, but it never hurts to make it plain.) In that sense, it is not a time capsule alone; it is also a time capsule opened by a different person than originally sealed it. We know you know on some level that you are not –

Well, maybe we’ve never said this explicitly.

I don’t think you did, no, at least not what I’m hearing so far. Proceed.

Horizontally (so to speak) you now know that you are not one but many, or, if you have done the work, are one made from many, although the many retain their separate existence.

But look at yourself vertically – that is, as you proceed through time during your years of life. You will see that here too you are not one but many. And it can be harder to make one out of the many than it is to make one out of the many strands.

We need a better focus on this. Horizontally, strands. Vertically, –?

The naming will somewhat define your understanding, so we will proceed carefully. If we were to say one version of you for every moment of awareness (or rather, for every moment lived, regardless how aware your 3D self was or was not), you might see that as a clear statement, but when you came to try to use it, what could you do with it? Let us say you are different at 3:35 p.m. one day than you are at 3:36. How can you really imagine in any useful way a life made up of hundreds of thousands of slightly different versions of yourself? Not everything that is true is also useful.

So how make the distinctions still true but also useful, useable?

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

There is really no alternative. The saying is, “The map is not the territory.” Of course not, it is a simplified representation. It is in the simplification that its usefulness inheres. Simplifying relationships makes plainer their relative positions. If one over-simplifies, one distorts beyond the value of usefulness, but until that point, the simplifying process is a clarificatory one.

Not sur about “clarificatory,” but I get your gist. Only, everybody is going to have a different dividing point between useful and oversimplified.

Certainly, but that’s true of everything. Individual judgments always differ. That’s one of the advantages your non-3D component derives from having 3D representatives.

Parallax.

Essentially. Now, to return to what we may call vertical community. What would be an acceptable level of simplification?

I suppose, most grossly, childhood, youth, young adult, middle age, old age, something like that.

Yes that is one way one could begin to learn one’s vertical components. So, a conference table or campfire or whatever, populated by the child you were, the youth etc., and – personalizing these abstractions – see what you can be learning from one another. This is one way, and we may say a very basic way. Basic, as in, easy to do, but limited in possibility.

I get that maybe we could set up (find?) representatives of who we were before and after certain turning points. Not sure how practical that would be, though.

“Practical” implies “for a certain end.” What end would you foresee?

Oh, I don’t know. Self-awareness, I suppose, what else can we call it?

Consider what you did in posting your articles on “Dave.”

They haven’t appeared yet, but okay.

You are a long way beyond that 23-year-old whose life was so brutally punctuated. By rereading old words you in effect brought together the “you” in the immediate event, the “you” who later wrote about it, and the “you” who has had a long lifetime ‘s experiences beyond that.

Now, this is difficult to say because it has so many elements.

Bullets, maybe?

  • The strands active at any of those times.
  • Interaction among them, outside of time.
  • Emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, unconscious resonance from each player involved, that is, from each moment of time.
  • Judgments and their interactions. What a 25-year-old sees, feels, decides will not necessarily mesh with a 50- or 75-year-old.
  • Ongoing conclusions, not quite the same thing as judgments. “What’s the lesson in this? Where do I go from here?”
  • Pass-forwards and pass-backs: In effect, telepathy among different moments of time. Unexpected insights; emotional flashbacks; seemingly disconnected memories and themes.
  • All of this, remember, also going on among all your strands, each of which has its own life.

All these elements in play, all the time, mostly (necessarily) beneath your level of consciousness, if only because of the sheer volume of input it would  represent. So when you revisit your past, you stir the pot.

Unless.

Oh, I hear it. And this is going to tie up a couple of loose ends, isn’t it?

Tie one, create two more. But yes. The “unless” is – unless in revisiting your past you insist on seeing it always the same way. You play the same tapes, you’d say. And this, as you immediately intuited, ties in with Life More Abundantly. Tell why in your understanding.

Life playing old tapes is in a rut. It is stuck. It clings to the sides of the sliding board, determined that, no matter what happens in the future, at least the past isn’t going to change. And good luck to that.

Life More Abundantly is all about increasing your room to maneuver, broadening the amount of your life that is under your control. Or, no, not “under your control,” that gives the wrong idea. Let ‘s say, it broadens the scope for you to shape your life, past, present and future.

It is so clear to me, though still mostly beyond words. We are meant to widen our scope, not in pursuit of self-aggrandizement, but to function well as part of the larger organism of which we are a part. When I read Colin’s Mind Parasites fable, it resonated because he was saying what I hadn’t known I knew: Our lives are not essentially trivial, accidental, meaningless. Our possibilities are real but not obvious. But even as I put this into writing, it loses its noumenal quality and becomes mere words. Doesn’t matter, it’s still true.

Vertical communities, as well as horizontal. Thanks, guys.

 

Dave (1)

Dave

It was Sunday nigh, late.t May, 1969, the final month of my college career at George Washington. I was standing in the empty living room of the fraternity house when Dennis came in. “Yo, Crabb,” I said. “What happened to you guys?” He and Dave Schlachter had been expected to join us – Dale, my roommate Bill, me, my fiancé, and my brother Paul and sister Margaret – for a weekend at my uncle’s place on the Jersey shore. But they hadn’t come.

I expected a casual apology, or sincere regrets, or a good-natured insult, any or all.  Instead, he came to a dead halt and chilled me with a sober question. “Nobody told you?”

“We just got in three minutes ago,” I said. “I haven’t seen anybody. We dropped Dale off at the apartment. We were going to tell Dave and you what you’d missed, but you weren’t there.” I could hear the words rattling out, and I made myself stop. “Dennis, what’s wrong?”

He was looking at me steadily, almost without blinking. “Dave is in the hospital. I just came over here to get his car. I have to pick up his parents at National, their flight comes in at 11:25.”

Flying in from Iowa? “What the hell happened?”

“He started seeing double.”

I said, “I suppose that explains the headaches, but what’s he doing in the hospital? Why not the eye doctor?”

“Frank, when people start seeing double, doctors think brain tumors.” He started down the hall toward the back door. “I took us to the hospital in Dave’s car, but I had to leave it here or I would have had to move it every couple of hours.”

Apparently Dave had gone to bed without supper on Friday night, plagued by another of the monster headaches that had haunted him all semester. Saturday morning, he had awakened seeing double, and had had Dennis dial the phone so he could talk to his parents, who of course had told him to get seen right away. Dennis had helped him get trousers and a sweater over his pajamas, and had put socks and loafers on his feet, and had driven him to the emergency room at GW Hospital, a mile or two from their apartment, though only a few blocks from campus. After an endless wait in the emergency room, the doctors had admitted Dave “for observation.”

I said, “So why are his parents coming? Why aren’t they waiting for something definite?”

His mouth was a harsh expressionless line. “Because I called them and told them that now Dave can’t even move.”

“Jesus.” That was all I seemed able to say. Dennis got into Dave’s car. “You want company?”

He hesitated. “Yeah, I guess I do, but it would be nice to have somebody at the hospital until I get his parents there.”

“You mean Dave’s alone? Where are all our beloved brothers? Do they even know?”

He turned the key in the ignition. “Of c—. I don’t know. It seems like I told somebody, but I couldn’t absolutely swear to it.”

“Okay, I’ll get the word out, and I’ll get over to the hospital. Got to tell Bill and Dale, for sure.”

“I left Andrews a voice-mail message. He’s probably on his way.” He started to back the car.

“Hey Dennis, what room? And will they even let me in, do you think?”

“They might, if you think up a good enough story. Room 406.”

“406, okay. Dennis –” It embarrassed me, but I said it anyway. “Be careful, okay? We don’t need any more complications.”

“Yeah,” he said, and he was gone.

Visiting hours were long over, of course, so when Bill and I walked into the lobby, we went right for the stairs instead of standing waiting for the elevator. If anybody noticed us, they didn’t say anything.  We stepped out onto the fourth floor hallway, entirely too close to the nurses’ station. There were two nurses sitting there, one writing, one filing. We walked off in the other direction. I concentrated on trying to make my footsteps sound authoritative and confident.

Fortunately, 406 was just two doors down, its door half open. It could just as easily have been  on the far side of the nurses’ station. Carefully, quietly, we entered the darkened room. A figure standing beside the near bed looked up.. a doctor. Sharply: “Yes?”

“Th- that’s my brother,” I said. Well, he was, wasn’t he?

“Wait outside, please,” the doctor said firmly. When he came out, he was looking tired. “Now then, how did you boys get in here?”

“Doctor, that’s my brother in there,” I said again. “His – our parents live in Iowa. They’re are on the way in, but I don’t want him to have to wait for them alone. We won’t make any noise, and we won’t disturb him.”

He looked at me from the height of 40 or 50 years. “His brother?”

“Yessir. I’m visiting him this week.”

One side of his mouth turned up, just a bit, skeptically. “And I suppose this is another brother?”

“Cousin, sir,” Bill said promptly, all sincerity and humility.

“No doubt. Well, boys, listen to me. Your – ah – relative is very sick. He is much too sick to have visitors at the moment. He needs all his strength. Your seeing him can’t do him any good and might easily do harm. Do your understand? Your wanting to be here with him does you credit, very commendable – but you cannot see him. I suggest you go home.”

He had been walking toward the nurses station, us following. I said, “Thank you, doctor,” for the nurses benefit. “We understand.”

“Yes, well, nurse, just so there is no question about it, the patient in 406 is not to receive visitors. Good night, boys.” He stabbed the elevator’s “down” button and did not insist that we accompany him. Later, thinking about it, I took that to be an extraordinarily kind gesture, but maybe he wasn’t going to the ground floor, or maybe he figured it wasn’t his business to act as policeman, so long as we stayed out of Dave’s room.