The Diplomas on the Wall

I have a modicum of diplomas. Not a surfeit, you know, like those doctor offices where there are diplomates galore. But I have a few. College, magna cum laude thank you, though in all these years nobody has asked or noticed. Law School. Admission for New York. Admission for California, and the Central District too, Federal.
For years, they were in rather dreadful discount frames, even when I got my first real office where I have been working, now, hard to believe 25 years. I was not sure that the job was going to take, or that I could take the job, but even though it has been a rollercoaster ride the whole time, the challenge and the passion it engendered in me was hard to ignore. Seat belt fastened, I persevered. So, about five years ago and after many office moves within the institution, I decided it was time to give those diplomas expensive wood custom frames. Also, one of the certificates needed a safer container, as it was yellowing with age.
So off to Aaron Brothers and voila they were back, rich and warm reflections of my educational past. For the first time, more than 20 years into my licensure, I hung up beautful coordinated reminders of my hard hard work when I was still new, and ready to conquer the legal world.
Like most soldiers of the law I have gone in and out of battle and my emotional armor is worn. I have come to understand that ideals are often promulgated by the very people who circumvent them or act openly and proudly as if they do not apply to themselves. In my incredibly imperfect way, I have fought this ethics gap, I guess you would call it. But I am tired watching good people getting hurt in favor of the murmurings and successes of the self-entitled. I have always thought truth will prevail. I think it will but I am afraid it may only be in the eschaton, not on this earth. And I am impatient.
As the sun was beginning to go down, my work day ending, I found myself  looking at the wall upon which still hang those once new and shiny diplomas that heralded my young days' journey into the career world.  I realized that one day soon, they will be piled up in a closet, or in a garage. i have no wall space for them at home. And I was not sad. The old circle of life. I was thinking now of what is to come, and I don't think I am going to need any diplomas to validate the balance of my journey, however short or long it turns out to be from here.

Charity Begins At Home and Is Felt Worldwide

St. Victor

As is no doubt true with everyone, I get busy. And the busy-ness, while perhaps understandable, even required at times, distracts me from the Christian mission, Supernatural mandate, to help others. Fortunately, in that I do participate in a Catholic faith community, at least on Sundays, and Holy Days of Obligation, and have been with that community for many years, I am rescued from my distraction by caring individuals for whom charity is far more reflexive than it is for me.
  Twice, a priest has focused me in the last ten years. One was by the current pastor of the church pictured above, in being a small part of what is now (I am no longer involved) a transitional residence for homeless men, who are helped until they are mainstreamed into our midst. The other, by the former pastor, and that most recently.
After a natural disaster, he became aware of the drilling efforts being made by various organizations to bring clean water to drought prone and drought stricken areas, in particular, in East Africa, places like Kenya and the Sudan.  He contacted me, a long time parishioner and friend, to help him do some internet research on whether Catholic Relief Services was one of those entitites which was involved in any of these projects. I found that it was. I gave him the information. I forgot about the whole thing.
But the Monsignor, a most persuasive man, contacted me again. He wanted to engender parish and outside of parish interest in these water projects, literally a matter of life and death. And he wanted me to help him. I had and I have no expertise in this area of charity, but I knew to just follow his lead. He had a contact at CRS (see that logo above, that's them), a lovely man who had spent much of his life overseas in many different projects, in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Africa, and he put me in touch with him. Out of this has been borne the germ of a group, a little rag tag right now, but with hearts in the right place, beginning at my Church but not intended to be confined to it, which Monsignor put under the aegis of what he called "Our Lady of the Well of Nazareth".  I have since seen that there is a well, purportedly near where Mary, Joseph and Jesus lived in Nazareth. So apt then this connection to her.  After some initial contributions by several at the parish, today, our most earnest and sincere spokesperson from CRS came and spoke at all the Masses. The image of women, freed from walking miles to get water, often not clean enough to drink or wash in, breaking the earthen jars in celebration and thanksgiving when a well of safe water is dug, was, of itself, an enormous motivation to keep myself involved, however slowly we develop as a group, however many or few of us there are. The parishioners were touched, and energized, and there is a flowing of hope from us to people we have never seen and will never meet. As our speaker said, we in Hollywood were walking with people in the Sudan, all as Harry Stack Sullivan said, "more human than otherwise" and in fact, all created in His image for His love and protection.
A really good day!

The Developing Need to Disconnect

For a long time, I was one of those people who needed sound around me all the time. I don't recall how it began. But something was always going, the TV, stereo or at night talk radio. I can't say whether it was some form of using sound as a kind of emotional babysitter.
Of course, this was during a time, where the level of intrusion was inherently less, before big screen HD mini movie theatres, cell phones, blackberries, laptops, ipods, ipads and the endless variety of electronics to which we have become 21st century heirs. 
What has finally gotten to me is that I have two phones, one for work, with connection to office e-mail and one for myself, with the work version buzzing like, all the time, even at night, and in my car. If my purse is with me in the restroom--there too. I can be reached everywhere, unless I am the one who SHUTS it all down. I think that my desire to "disconnect" is in part the result of entering what, if I am lucky, is the last third of my life. And this soul in progress needs to be meditating, even praying, and that really can only be done in quiet. I am coming to realize that all the demands on my time and my mind will, ultimately, be rendered meaningless. Maybe more so given my chosen career, not one that has much credibility any longer, the law, where truth is so malleable it is finally unrecognizable.
So these days, I actually am able to take an entire drive in my car without turning on the radio. I can make my coffee on Saturday without turning a switch to the "on" position, except the java maker itself. As these summer months are upon us, I sit outside more, before dark, watching the birds whisk from tree, to wire, to tree and back again. I hear the sounds of multiple chimes, the movement even of the leaves and I close my eyes and am at peace. Until my phone rings inside the apartment.
I still have a way to go.

Keeping Up With My Mess

It's not like I have a large place. I like to call them my "rooms" because really, it is only about 750 or 800 feet of urban dwelling space. Not really mine, because I still rent, diehard New Yorker that I am, but then really, do we own anything?

I've been thinking tonight about our little apartment, and how in so little space, so much mess can be made, so easily. Have you noticed that, when you don't put just one thing back in its proper place, that suddenly everything you possess isn't in its proper place? And seems to multiply? Take the kitchen. All you are doing is making bacon and eggs. You get the frying pan. Then the eggs, then of course, the bacon, in this case, pre-cooked to be put in the microwave for a 30 second heat up which has to be just perfectly timed for the eggs to be over medium and then of course there is the English muffin. And the spices you used to flavor up the eggs, garlic powder, butter, pepper. Neat though you are, a little of this and that is getting onto the stove top and floor. It's ready, now the plate! Everything is in the sink to be rinsed. Or the bathroom, let's face it, hair everywhere on just one combing. And toothpaste leakage. Soap scum. Still haven't done the dishes from last night. Or the living room. The cats have been sleeping all over the place during the night. Cat hair, now, too. Oh and that hairball you almost stepped on. The magazines you were reading last night still strewen about. And now, late for work, you haven't got time to clean the dishes, tidy up the bathroom, lint brush the furniture, eradicate the hair ball, and straighten out the magazines.

It'll have to wait till tonight, but wait, dinner tonight with friends. Getting back late, kick off the old shoes in the middle of the living room and dive to the couch for a rest before bed and a quick toggle between CNN and Fox. By the end of a couple of days, let alone a whole week, one or two people leave the wreakage of an apparent hurricane. And this while hardly ever being at home! They tell me that there are people whose spaces are pristine all the time. They must have people following them with dustpans and Windex. As for me and mine, we are just doing the best we can keeping up with our messes.

Well, maybe it is time to splurge for a housekeeper.

From Life to Death to Life Again--All in My Mind

When I was young I was quite the hypochondriac. This was aside from the night terrors that had my father running into my bedroom as I awoke screaming. That my dears is a whole OTHER story. For one chunk of my young life, I had a fear of choking, and became obsessed with my swallowing reflex. You can imagine how crazy making that was, for me, and for my parents. Then, after my dad had his first heart attack at 51, I was convinced I was having heart palpitations and would soon expire. My hypochondria faded in favor of a year long depression, which in the Bronx, was treated in passing by my pediatrician. He thought it was just the stress of being a late high school student. In time, distractions of college, law school and moving out of New York helped the hypochondria, at least, to fade. But my black and white, either/or, life or death zitgeist has been with me to date.

And this from someone who, as a lawyer has been forced to face daily ambiguity.

And now in this past midpoint of my life health returns to the fore, and bids my attention. I have been fortunate to make it to my late fifties with no actual hospital stay and only one minor (except it was neck related and with all those nerves and arteries that was a bit of a scare) surgery in one of those pricey suites. I have borne my other aches and pains as the corollary to upper middle age and a sedentary lifestyle, but mostly because they pass so quickly, and even as a kid I had aches and pains I ignored. Of course, now, there is much potential danger in such avoidant behavior not present when I was young, and moderately supple.

So, having put off from a kind of phobic position, that lately urged upon us colonoscopy, which I should have had at least seven years ago, some, well, let's call it symptomology overcame my phobia and sent me running to a GI guy. (Not the military GI, but the doctor version, naturally). I was however sincerely convinced that doom of a natural kind was just a roto rooter experience away, and I was ending all my sentences about the future with "if I live." I asked for prayers of my prayerful friends. Out like a light, in another pricey suite, and an hour later, I was in fact alive, minus one pre-cancerous polyp in the transverse colon, and in its place an internal tattoo for the next go round. The world could have fallen around me for a week or more, and usually a pessimist personified, was gleefully saying, "I'm alive! I'm alive!"

And then. . .

On Thursday last week, I shared a most lovely dinner engagement with Len Speaks and our mutual birthday celebrating friend at Il Cielo, a 26 year standing Beverly Hills must go dining experience. I drank too much. I ate too much, a huge prawn, or was it two, in the shell. At 3 a.m. I could not decide what it was, but it was stomach churning indeed. I assumed that it was proper punishment for a pleasant but gluttonous evening. I promised I would not do it again, knowing that likely I would, as I had before, on occasions that flashed back in my mind. I knew I was in for a couple of days of discomfort for which only I was to blame, but I was ok.

And then. . .

Another symptom, one that I had been told is a sign of internal bleeding after a colonoscopy. I was convinced something had ruptured because of my bad food and drink consumption. It was only a month since the procedure. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking. Doom and gloom returned, and I was back to thinking about my post-earthly niche here and worrying about the one, well, the one I'd like to be resident of, in whatever supernatural haven. Not yet, Lord. Not yet. I know it's my own fault, but not yet. When I told the doctor my symptom right before the weekend, his "come right in" was both comforting (because it was nice he'd take me on no notice) and terrifying (because the symptom was one he doesn't mess with). Blood tests. A home test (you can guess) and a "come in on Monday first thing with the package and we'll know." And if it got worse he said, "go to the hospital". He was going out of town for the weekend for Father's Day, but his stand by would be on call. Oh, goodie.

I did not get worse. I slowly got better. I slowly felt better.

And then. . .

This morning, I brought in my painstakingly collected samples and he peered at them and said pronounced that it was normal and not what I had dreaded. What it apparently was, was something I ate. According to the net, a toxic shell fish can cause the very symptom. The doctor did not even charge me my co-pay. I was ALIVE again! At this stage of the game, who has time for hypochondria?

Old Randy and Young Princess Marley

It's funny what things make so strong an imprint on occasions where other significant things are happening. Maybe they are corollaries of the more signficant events. Or symbolize them.

What is she talking about might the reader ask?

Yesterday late afternoon through much of the evening, I met up with an out of state friend and her two children at the home where they had been staying on vacation during the last week. We had pre-dinner hors d'oevres and cocktails. I reacquainted myself with my friend's host, and was introduced to someone new. We sat inside and then outside in the large lush backyard snacking, photo taking (and sending) and chatting comfortably. Mingling with us were the two family dogs, one the 14 year old Randy; the other the several months old Marley. Randy you see is most definitely on his last legs. If that were me or you, we'd sure know that, that we were living on borrowed time. But not Randy. Randy was still trying to be the dog he probably always was. He positioned himself directly underfoot, unwieldy for being elderly, not hearing well, not seeing well, but still able to smell that cheese on the plate at which he angled his longish nose. Meanwhile Marley was flitting around Randy, and as Marley got her pets for being young and cute, Randy would insinuate himself into the space with sad expectant eyes for the overflow of the love of humans for their canine companions.

Marley, of course, had no sense of the contrast between her and Randy. Poor Randy tried to poop on the expansive grass area, and there would be Marley interrupting for play, circling and flopping about Randy. There was one moment, brief lovely moment, when Randy actually got up enough steam to nearly prance toward his human companions and visitors, but his back legs would not cooperate and the flash of a former youth was gone.

Our hostess told me that she had decided to get Marley now, rather than after the inevitable happens to Randy. The family loves having a dog; one has been about all the years, nearly of her children's lives they half still homebound and half on their way to full adulthood. So, she decided that with both of the dogs, one so ancient and fragile and the other so young, sturdy and energetic, the sharing of the time and space between them, would make the transition to come, where only one, Marley, would remain, less startling, perhaps less traumatic. Randy would have have a share in Marley's life and Marley in Randy's, a holistic perfection amid the imperfection of aging and death, new life, giving passing life, meaning.

I guess I am not talking about dogs anymore am I? Among the humans, there were generations, not quite as stark a contrast in ages, no one there was as ancient as Randy (who in human years is well over 80), but there were upper middle age folk, and middle age folk and teenagers fresh of face and of world view. The kids are at a beginning phase. We, happily unlike Randy, not at the last phase (God willing and the creek don't rise), but definitely at a much later one than the seventeen and eighteen year olds with their strong resilient bodies and astoundingly various options.

I thought Marley was precious, but you know what, when Randy edged his nose into our group, I could not take my eyes off him. There was enormous life still there. And what I have now, and hope I'll have when I am Randy's age (in human years, again!), is that determination not to be written off, no matter how young and cute are the others around me. And I will know full well I am living on borrowed time, but please, let me still going for the gusto!

You know what? I thought Randy was special. So there's hope for this not quite as old but lots older than 17 or 18 soull to be considered special even when she begins to slow down. You will find me, I hope, in the midst of it all, trying to get at the cheese. Well, something like that!

The European Gentleman Actor

I have a pass for the Turner Classic Movie Festival that is happening this weekend in Los Angeles. Part of the movie going includes discussions and interviews with those actors who remain with us from film days gone by, like Debbie Reynolds, or Mickey Rooney, or Leslie Caron, Hayley Mills. When Peter O'Toole was one of the later announced guests I knew that come hell or high water I was going to go to his discussion.

It almost came to that--hell or high water--when a previously scheduled business appointment I could not find a replacement for required me to miss O[Toole in Becket with Richard Burton and a discussion afterward with its surviving star. But I was out in half a day and ready to stand on line, first come first serve, even with a pass, to see him talk with Robert Osborne about his career.

I had seen him before, about 20 plus years ago, when I returned to New York for a visit and a kind friend got tickets for Pygmalion which he was doing on Broadway with the late John Mills and Amanda Plummer. He was, as always, a whirlwind in the part of the bachelor Henry Higgins. After the play my friend Andrew and I watched him as he signed autographs keeping what seemed like deliberate eye contact with the requestors. It was unnerving, and fascinating. He still had a little of the youthful handsomenss, despite the wild alcohol filled life he had led thus far. I thought it was the first, and the last, time. I cherished seeing a most favorite actor with a most interesting, if somewhat unconventional life.

The setting was the former Henry Fonda Theatre, now the Music Box, and it turned out that TCM was going to film the interview for presentation later in the year, telling the audience that they would be part of reaction shots to possibly be used as well. And there would be a break or two in the interview as cameras rolled and needed adjustment. So an emcee got participatory reactions to intersperse with the interview as needed and then the curtain opened and there was O'Toole. There was nary the spark of the youth of old, or the man I had seen all those years ago. He needed help walking to the chair he would sit in. He was probably even thinner than he looked, covered by a natty suit, handerchief in pocket. After the greeting, and his positioning in his chair, Robert Osborne continued the preparations with the technical guys. He spoke to the audience. A woman on my side complained that she could not see O'Toole's face because of the angle of where we were sitting. O'Toole looked at all of us on the side, his eyes big and staring, a slight smile of what I took to be bemusement on his face. The lady was told that that was the angle needed for the camera. Mr. OToole sat quietly as some audience members asked Osborne if he could elicit certain stories as O'Toole sat quietly, almost as if he were alone, occasionally wiping his mouth with a handkerchief and napkin alternately. He was long limbed in the chair and fragile. And then, the cameras were ready to roll. Osborne, a consumate interviewer asked one question and O'Toole was on a roll, funny, articulate, recounting the tales of Lawrence in the African desert and recreating Akabah in Spain, taming the brutish camels and riding at the head of an enormous crowd of following camels and stallions without a stuntman. His voice was as ever strong as the days he shouted at Richard the Lionheart, playing the father, Henry II or lamenting the loss of a friendship, again as Henry, as he called the name "Thomas!" across the beach in France. He spoke of Noel Coward, of David Lean, of Katherine Hepburn, (his daughter is named after her), even of enjoying Roslind Russell and Cary Grant on television a few days ago in His Girl Friday, and wishing he could have worked with Russell. He spoke of Sybill Thorndyke an actress of the good old days, and a teacher of his at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts). Osborne read my mind when he asked about destiny and this career. O'Toole recognized it quietly. When he spoke of acting as making the word into flesh, he managed to mention the bible without in any way being blasphemous, for he said the words are 99 percent of what the actor has to make the performance real.


He lives in London and in a home he owns with his daughter in Ireland. He loves America, clearly, but he described himself as thoroughly European. To be in a room with him again, even at a respectful distance, was thrilling, and sad, sad because he said that he can no longer do stage plays, it requires too much energy and a limber body he no longer has. Asked if, after many nominations and no wins, whether he would like to win an Academy Award, first he said, "Of course" and then, with that small smile, "I am not dead yet!"


If all I got to see in this Fesitval were him, the price was well paid. What a blessing indeed. I saw him as a child at the Surrey Theatre in the Bronx, playing Lawrence, blond, wild blue eyes conquering the desert, young, a man of only 29, when I was 8. And then twice, in life, the great actor, who has left an enduring legacy and touched this movie goer's heart forever.