Tuesday
I awakened to hear my wife
walking around the house at about eight in the morning. This is
extremely early for her and I mean EXTREMELY. I asked her what the
matter was and she said, as expected, that it was G., a very close
family member who is suffering from a serious mental illness. This
is someone who was always problematic, but has now gotten what his
doctors describe as a paranoid psychosis of the schizophrenic
variety. This is a matter of his suspecting that his food is
poisoned, that his meds are poisoned, that snipers are setting up
perches to kill him near his home, that cars filled with assassins
are circling him in his car. He is really, really sick.
God bless Big Pharma. They have drugs that could straighten him
out but he won’t take them, and the reason that my wife is up so
early is that she’s getting called by another family member about
how oddly G. is acting. Genuinely scary stuff. Threatening
stuff.
We made a flurry of calls to the doctors who attend G., but
while they are eager to help they can do nothing if G. never shows
up for his appointments. So, my wife and I are frantic.
I swam for a long time, then worked on some bills, then took my
wife out for lunch at our golf club, Morningside. There was only
one other person at lunch, a distinguished-looking older woman. She
shared with us that she had just lost her husband of forty years.
What a blow that is. How does a mate go on living after that? I
don’t even have any idea. It must be harrowing.
Back at home, I had a blizzard of texts from a dear friend in
New York who is having a wild fight with her husband, or maybe it’s
her ex-husband, about their children. She called for me to help her
get a hotel room in Manhattan so she could go there and cry all
night. This woman is in her late 30s and has no credit card. How is
that possible? Anyway, I arranged it, and off she went to cry.
Then more calls from a family member about G not showing up for
doctors’ appointments, and then time for a long nap in my guest
room, where I feel fairly protected. It’s the shadiest room in the
house and neat as a pin. I slept for two hours and then went
outside to say farewell to a crew who had been putting in a new,
incredibly pricey air conditioning unit in a wing of the house.
“Are you sure it works?” I asked them.
“Oh, yes, it works great,” they said and it seemed to be keeping
my bedroom cool. I lay down and in half an hour, the darned thing
simply stopped working altogether.
Many calls to the a/c man later, he showed up and said the
problem had been some small part and I never needed that whole unit
after all. Of course, he has to charge me for it anyway. Meanwhile,
the unit is still not working.
Then, a call from a lawyer in a case in which I am a plaintiff,
or The Plaintiff. We have a ruling against us on an issue so insane
that only a trial lawyer could have thought of it. I can easily
appeal, but I am sick of the whole thing. Litigation is a pure
nightmare.
I really feel sad for people who do it for a living.
Painful.
More texts about G., more texts from the friend in New York
whose husband or ex-husband is mistreating her, and new texts from
a woman whom I help to hide from her anxieties, and then a text
from a woman I met at an airport in Miami ten years ago who saw me
on TV and wants to marry me. She wants me to take her away from her
fears about money. Ha! Little does she know.
Alex and I took the dogs for a walk. Above us, jet planes
crossed the sky high above the oleander and the palm trees. “I wish
we could ride away on a contrail,” my wife said.
My life is filled with other people’s problems. Russ Ferguson
said that about me and it’s true.
I need yet another nap and I need to change my focus.
Fifty years ago this summer, my pal, Marvin Goldberg, put the
car radio in his little blue Triumph sports car on a local Virginia
station that played “folk songs.” The station was WAVA. “There’s
this really great singer they play a lot,” he said. “Name’s Bob
Dylan.”
As we sped through the Fairfax, Virginia night, on the then
empty Dulles Access Highway, sure enough, the next song to come up
was Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” an anti-love song that lit my
brains on fire.
Dylan’s raspy voice said that he was not going to be totally
devoted, that he was no one’s love slave, that he was his own man.
And he was angry that the question even came up.
From then on, he was my hero. It wasn’t because he was the voice
of my generation — anti-segregation, anti-war, questioning,
mocking. It was that for the first time I had ever heard, a popular
musician expressed the most basic of human emotions — anger,
poetically and unsparingly. His song about the wrongful death of a
poor black hotel worker, Hattie Carroll, because she was hit with a
cane by a wealthy landowner’s son at a Baltimore hotel society
gathering, has many of its facts wrong… but the emotions of outrage
he expresses at what whites could do to blacks in my home state of
Maryland fifty years ago were searingly on target.
He was not content to be a folk singer. He became an electric
guitarist and rock star with the best rock song of all time, “Like
a rolling stone.” I still don’t know what it means, but then I
don’t know what a sunset means either and I love them both.
For more than fifty years, Bob Dylan has been giving us songs of
genius that no one else even touches. This little boy from the
Mesabi Range in Minnesota has come to be — to many of us — the
greatest poet — by far — of the postwar era.
Now, he is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from
President Obama. He deserves it. No singer that I am aware of ever
hit the notes of what life really is, what humans really are,
better than Dylan. I have spent more hours listening to him than to
all other human beings on the planet put together and it will never
be enough. Well done, Mr. President. Well done, Bob. I have not
spoken to Marvin in forty years. I don’t know why.
By the way, Mr. President, I caught your speech about
Afghanistan tonight. It is EXACTLY the same as Nixon’s speeches
about Vietnamizing the Vietnam war some forty years ago. I suspect
it will work out about as well. Can Mr. Obama really be that
ignorant of history and reality? Yes, he can.
