Body Parts

Pithy: Some Lessons I Have Learned About Myself

Much to the surprise of some persons who know me, I have learned something about myself in the past 67 years. Think of these traits as tendencies, as in, "I tend to ...". In no particular order:

I accept new acquaintances at face value.

I believe what persons tell me about themselves.

I think the best of people.

I am not cynical.

As a consequence of the above traits, I often lack common sense in gaging or understanding the behavior and attitudes of other persons. My wife says that these qualities verge on a character flaw.

I am optimistic.

I am sentimental.

I like to work.

I am not an actor. I have been in front of movie and television cameras and I couldn't convey my personality. I have been on radio, where I was more effective.

I am uncomfortable with long telephone conversations. I prefer text as the medium for my messages.

I am not a debater. I would not make a good trial attorney.

I am not an administrator and do not like administration. My wife defined an administrator's job  as making other persons' problems go away. That's not how I wanted to spend my life--or spend the rest of it.

I like pleasing people with learning, stories, insight, and food. I loved classroom teaching.

I am a brilliant intellect at a conceptual level. At the practical level, I don't always get the connections between things. I am not fascinated by mechanical devices. I never took apart a clock or radio or car. I realize that this inexperience was a weakness in my instruction in the history of technology.

It is possible that my lack of common sense about people extends to objects.

I am an artistic personality. My main motivation in work and play is cultivation and expression of my own creativity.

I am intense. I have focus and concentration when I am working on a project. My intensity is powered by my passion. I have often worked in four hours stints without interruption and often forgot to eat.

There is a downside to my intensity. It puts off most people, who don't quite know what to do with it. Also, it pushes me to cross boundaries, as in conversation about what I am working on, so I inadvertently invade personal space. Consequently, I am attracted to strong people who can deal with my intensity.

I care about honesty, excellence, originality, creativity, integrity, and authenticity to a degree more than most persons, including academics and professionals I have met, do. Though I am honest, I am not perfect. I have lied and deceived. For most of the occasions on which I lied or deceived I have no guilt; but for a few I do. I do not lie well. My wife says she can easily catch me in a lie or deception.

I prize individuality. I prize my individuality.

I am delighted by exotic people and immensely enjoy the diversity of American life. Sometimes persons whom I enjoy have misunderstood my delight, thinking it to be a form of ridicule, but that is not so. Diversity is not, for me, a somber matter, but a source of celebration.

I have never stolen or been violent or otherwise been a criminal. I have never used illegal drugs. I have never smoked marijuana. I have never been tempted.

I enjoy alcohol, but I am a light drinker. I don't like getting drunk. For this gift I am grateful. My father was an alcoholic. His father was an alcoholic. The alcoholism gene must have passed me by; thank you, God.

I don't manipulate people, perhaps because I was inept at it on the few occasions I tried.

I love being a husband and father. I love being in my home. I am quite domestic. I thought of myself as "Mr. Mom" long before it was a movie.

I enjoy falling in love. Being enthralled by a woman is for me one of the greatest pleasures possible. Intelligent conversation about ideas attracts my interest in a woman as much as her sexual appeal and probably constitutes much of her sexual appeal for me. For this reason, I was always drawn to artistic and bookish women.

I do not generally care for movies that require a lot of thought. Movies are just entertainment for me. In one eye, out the other, so to speak. Movies have been described as the great artistic form of the twentieth century, as opera was of the nineteenth century; but the artistic qualities of movies by and large don't interest me.

I love music and song, but I have always been hard of hearing, as a child and adult because of allergies that ruined my inner ear and as a old man simply because of age. Not until I knew a musician, who explained the aural complexity of music, say, of a Brahms' violin concerto, did I realize I wasn't hearing much of it. Nonetheless, except for rock and roll, which never touched me, I love most forms of music.

I have occasionally wondered what kind of soldier I would have been in Vietnam. I was in Air Force ROTC for two years in college, but did not continue into the service. I was drafted later, but being 4-F, because of childhood illnesses, I did not have to serve. I know I am loyal to persons and institutions, sometimes beyond justification--a flaw, I suppose, derived from thinking the best of people. I know that I would have followed orders; but with what success? I have talked with Vietnam combat veterans about this question. They said, to a person, you don't know. You don't know until combat how good you are, or whether you are brave, or what you will do when you're on your own. I became convinced, however, given my lack of practical common sense, that I would have gotten myself killed in combat. This conviction has prevented me from regret that I did not serve and been a welcome barrier to romanticism about war.

As a personality, I have come to understand that I am too much. This has been said of me by more than a few persons. I believe them.

Revised. June 8, 2010.

What Is Love?

From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs; thusly:

For men, sex is love. For women, security is love. For children, money is love. For God, is love love?

Vanity Goes Last

You get old. You resign yourself to elderhood, saying, the alternative is worse. But not all of you follows this wisdom. Your vanity doesn't. Vanity hangs on. Your skin sags, spots, and discolors. Your hair falls out. Your hearing diminishes. Your vision softens. You redouble your efforts at exercise. Much pain, little gain. Sometime after you turned sixty, you realized that you were no longer at the top of your game. Now you don't remember what the game was. You pay attention to what you eat. You've abandoned the conceit that you have a cast-iron stomach. In truth, you abused your digestive tract all  your life and now it's paying you back. You read the obituaries and daily discover colleagues, friends, acquaintances, passing the scene. You compare the causes of their deaths to yourself. Day by day, body part by body part, you relinguish the struggle against aging. Except for your vanity. Vanity, which has long monopolized foolishness, now seizes all your remaining strength to resist the inevitable. Vanity is a hardened castle of delusion. As this muscle or that weakens, as organs function less efficiently, vanity retreats to fight at another redoubt. You say, this side of my face doesn't look so bad. If I comb my hair this way... I think I lost a pound. My legs still look strong. Maybe if I eat more yoghurt. Or wear sunscreen. Or long-sleeved shirts. Then your housekeeper brings her five year old son with her to work. She introduces you. Instructing her son in courtesy, she says to the boy, call him grandpapa. Where does vanity go now?

Holding, Being Held, and the Social Life of A Man's Body

My back blew out nearly two weeks ago. I went horse-back riding the previous day, a two-hour long trail ride. I hadn't ridden horses for twenty years. My back let me know it was not pleased with the experience. I spent four days in bed on my back, trying not to move. My Pilates teacher, concerned about my injury, arranged for me to have an appointment with an osteopathic physician, whom she brought regularly to her studio to work with several of her clients who needed medically knowledgeable attention. I have not had any osteopathic or chiropractic therapy since I was a young child, so I did not know what to expect and took the appointment only because I trusted the advice of my Pilates instructor, who was a professional dancer and is a brilliant teacher. Though I did not realize I needed medical attention--my back has gone out regularly since a major blow-out eighteen years ago--, she could tell, from my posture and Pilates workout, that I did.

The hour-long osteopathic therapy was a revelation to me. The physician, another brilliant woman who had been a professional dancer herself (The Joffrey Ballet), diagnosed my problems, which involved a weakened left side due to an inguinal hernia surgery last Winter, misaligned pubic symphysis, sheared sacrum, and twisted lower vertebrae. For an hour, she manipulated bones and muscles, realigning my lower body. Bones audibly popped into correct position. Muscles recovered extension and range of motion they hadn't had for days. The relief I felt was instantaneous, as was my gratitude. I had had no notion of the destructive contortion of my body or of the benefits of medical manipulation.  At the conclusion of the session, the physician gave me a hug. She was pleased that I had been so obviously improved. I don't think she intended the embrace as part of the therapy, only as a gesture, but for me, with a history about which she did not know, it was.

I have always enjoyed, and more, longed, to be embraced. I have envied women's sociability, which involves frequent hugging. Women have a range of embrace, from the casual hug which involves one woman putting her hands on another's shoulders, leaning forward, without body contact, though perhaps a brief kiss, to the intimately supportive embrace, in which one woman holds another who has collapsed against her and is being held up. Such demonstration of emotion is largely denied to men.

There is a history to my need. I was epileptic when a child, a brain malady that I outgrew only in the mid teen years. I had both petit mal and grand mal seizures. I have written about this condition previously, but here I can mention the need it generated in me for embracing. Grand mal seizures are exhausting. While I didn't directly experience the seizures, because I was of course unconscious, I knew upon regaining consciousness that I had undergone a seizure. I would feel weak, confused, maybe (but not usually) frightened, and vulnerable. Sometimes the seizures were quite extended. I would wake for a few minutes and then fall back into seizure. When a seizure took place at school (the seventh grade), my mother, upon being called by the school, called her brother, who had an ambulance service, to retrieve me, while she summoned the family physician. I remember waking briefly from the seizure to realize my uncle was picking me up, and later, waking again, he was carrying me slung across his shoulder like a sack of corn. On other occasions, it was my mother's other brother who held me. In each occasion, being held was greatly comforting to me. What was distressing was to be separated, to be, for instance, confined to bed rest, away from people, and not embraced. My mother, being out of my room while I recovered, created anxiety in me.

As a consequence of these profound experiences, I grew up longing for the physical comfort and security of being held. I loved my uncles and their protective embrace was a deep part of my psychology. I transferred this emotion to my childrearing. I loved to embrace my daughter and son, hold them in my arms, rock them to sleep as infants or comfort them when they hurt from scrapes and illnesses as young children. As I grew up, I transferred my love for my mother and my need for my mother's comforting hug at these moments of personal crisis to the women I loved.

It was disconcerting and confusing to me, as an adult, knowing as I did my own needs for physical affection through embracing, that I married women who did not easily or often give such affection. A woman friend who knew my first wife described her as "one up-tight chick". My wife now is similarly unable to express her love for me through casual affection. Some grotesque episodes in her childhood injured her in such a way that prevents her from easily giving or receiving casual touching and embracing. Her capacity and enthusiasm for the emotions and mechanics of physical love were, happily for us both, undamped by her past; our love life has been gratifying and exciting.

I don't have psychoanalytical insight as to why or how I chose, or allowed myself to be chosen by, women who did not share my need or capacity for sharing physical comfort through hugging. Not simply my wife, but also women I dated had this quality. One girl friend, whom I dated between my marriages, said in despairing confidence, that her brain wanted to express this affection, but her body wouldn't let her.

The needs unsatisfied in me, because of the asymmetry of my emotional relationships with the major women in my life, have been reinforced by the prohibition in our society again casual embrace of men and women. Even men who are close friends should not hug one another. This rule is so notable, that exceptions, as when a Marine in Iraq loses a buddy in combat and is, in his grief, consoled in an embrace by another Marine, make the national television news.

The social rule is surely harmful. An illustrative episode was provided when we took in my nephew, who was an addict and delinquent at fifteen. The boy's behavior alienated his father against him, which greatly added to his problems. In our home, I tried to treat him as I would my own son. We genuinely cared for him. I tried to express affection to him, to embrace him, to let him know that his difficulties did not set him aside from us. This affection frightened him. I took him to psychological counseling weekly, sharing some of the session, with a gifted counselor, with him. In one session, he expressed his great discomfort with being hugged by me, because he thought I was making homosexual advances toward him. It took a lot of talk and reassurance from the counselor and me to get him to understand that I was not and that physical expression of affection between a father and son through embracing was a healthy part of a loving relationship, which this boy desperately needed. Part of the discussion involved my medical history of epilepsy and its consequences.

The rule against men and women embracing who are not married to each other is so inviolate, so rigid, as to make our society look like Orthodox Judaism or Islam, which prohibit contact between unmarried men and women. As a result of these taboos, I seldom get hugs of any kind. Sometimes in my life, I have felt isolated like a leper, shunned and outcast as undesirable.

The feeling of isolation can be so powerful as to induce paranoia. Is there something wrong with me? This sense probably originated with my childhood epilepsy. There actually was something wrong with me. In my home village, everybody knew my condition. Its expression was completely public. It's acknowledgment undoubtedly recognized in the privacy of kitchen and dining rooms. Many of my childhood acquaintances did shun me. In sports, no one wanted me on a team; it probably was not even safe for me to engage in most sports. When I was a teenager and tried to date, few girls would have anything to do with me. Epilepsy set up a psychological-social dynamic that reinforced itself and was not easily discarded as I entered adulthood and outgrew the epilepsy. No doubt, men who have suffered other diseases, such as severe psoriasis or congenital disfigurement, have experienced similar social estrangement and physical isolation.

Whatever the cause or reason, isolation as severe as leprosy in ancient times intensifies the need for contact. The longing for physical social contact, for comfort, for acceptance, never extinguishes. The prohibition against casual affection between men and women who are only acquaintances never seems less than rude and abrasive. When an embrace comes, spontaneously, as following my session with the osteopathic physician, it's value rises to grace.

Testosterone

When a man is young, testosterone is the eternal now. When he is older, testosterone is memory, the eternal then.

A Pastor's Thoughts on Oregon's Physician Assisted Suicide Law

Donald Sensing, who writes the always insightful blog, One Hand Clapping, has posted an essay he wrote while in seminary regarding the Oregon law (at the time, proposed), |here|. The essay is well written as an fictional interview between Larry King and the author, brief, and clearly lays out central issues involving the law (which the pastor opposes). I recommend it highly. (PDF format.)

Obesity (2) The West Virginia Case

In a previous discussion of obesity in West Virginia, I expressed my frustration at being unable to pinpoint the source of the state's obvious general obesity problem. The West Virginians did not seems to be doing much different from any other state in the nation, but they certainly were eating themselves into overweight more frequently than nearly all other states. Was it all the fried food? (My wife was served a deep-fat fried dinner roll at one West Virginia restaurant; we were both astounded.) But why?

Reading an article in today's Riverside Press-Enterprise, "Keeping weight down a lifetime job, study shows," I glimpsed one kind of answer to the question. The question is not, why are increasing numbers of Americans or West Virginians becoming overweight and obese. The question is, why are West Virginians apparently becoming obese at a rate greater than the nation as a whole. To this latter question, the answer seems to, they are only apparently becoming overweight and obese at a greater rate.

Briefly put, rates of overweight and obesity for all Americans increase by age group. Younger Americans are less likely to be overweight and obese than older Americans. This is the point of the Press-Enterprise article.

As it turns out, because West Virginia is a poor state, with no large cities, few robust industries, and few economic opportunities for young people, young people leave the state to find livelihoods elsewhere. That population drain leaves the demographics of the state skewed. The percentage of  people who are ages 20-29 is less than the national average. The percentage of people over 60 is higher than the national average. Since everyone gains weight as they age, and older people have higher rates of obesity, overweight and obese people are over-represented in the overall population profile of West Virginia as compared to the nation as a whole.

The demographic skewing means that when you visit a general public setting in West Virginia, and observe more overweight and obese persons than expected (from a national impression), it is because you see fewer young persons (of whom fewer are overweight and obese) and more older persons (who are more likely to be overweight and obese).

So West Virginia only appears to be more overweight and obese than the nation; if one did a more  careful study, it would likely be shown that the state is simply at the national overweight and obese rates, adjusted for demographic representation.

This analysis does not explain why people today are becoming more overweight and obese, compared to a half-century or a century ago; but it does lift the opprobrium from West Virginia of being a special case. Overweight and obesity are national problems, not especially West Virginia problems.

Here are the comparative statistics from the 2000 US Census. [For the nation, read (e.g.) 14.12% of all males in the nation in all age groups. For West Virginia, read (e.g.) 13.38% of all males in West Virginia in all age groups.]

MALES

AGES 20-29 NATION: 14.12% of all males; WEST VIRGINIA: 13.38% of all males

AGES 30-59 NATION: 41.85% of all males; WEST VIRGINIA: 42.58% of all males

AGES 60+    NATION: 14.16% of all males; WEST VIRGINIA: 17.48% of all males

FEMALES

AGES 20-29 NATION: 13.15% of all females; WEST VIRGINIA: 12.49% of all females

AGES 30-59 NATION: 41.17% of all females; WEST VIRGINIA: 41.20% of all females

AGES 60+    NATION: 18.31% of all females; WEST VIRGINIA: 22.51% of all females

Note 1: For persons unaccustomed to reading population statistical analysis, the differences between the national and West Virginia statistics might seem small or insignificant; however, they are significant, and for the older groups, large.

Note 2: The natural followup to this analysis would be to examine the West Virginia rates of overweight and obesity by age groups, and compare them to the national rates within age groups. 

It would also be interesting to know whether the rates of out-migration are less for over-weight and obese West Virginians than for West Virginians who are not overweight or obese. The reasoning behind this query is that presumably overweight and obese persons might have less success in obtaining livelihoods in competition with not overweight persons elsewhere, thereby giving them less incentive to emigrate. This disincentive to migrate would increase the representation of overweight and obese persons within the younger age groups in West Virginia. This non-emigration of overweight persons in West Virginia (if true) would give a second skewing to the demographics of overweight and obesity in the state.

Obesity

Shortly before we came to West Virginia for a vacation, I read a newspaper article that stated that the state has the third highest rate of obesity. 27.6% of the state's adults are considered obese, and 63.1% are considered obese or overweight. These are startling percentages; but they are abstract. They did not prepare me for the reality of seeing so many adults fat to the point of being disabled. At a restaurant, a group of women walk down the aisle to take a table. They are so broad they have to walk slightly sideways to pass between the tables. Waiting in Kroger's supermarket parking lot for my wife to return from shopping, I watch women with children leave their cars and walk to the store entrance. Young children, early teens, and teens are fat, puffed out as if they were balloons blown up all out of shape. Nearly every man out of his teens carries a huge pot belly. These adults waddle, rather than walk. They heave themselves forward, as if they had to plow through the air.

I am not a medical sociologist. I do not know the conditions that have convinced such a huge percentage of adults recklessly to abandon good health. I am not a physician. I do not know what medical advice their health providers have given them or how strenuously they have been lectured to improve their physical health. Visiting this beautiful state only briefly, I can see how the obesity is enabled by a omnipresent abundance of fattening foods. Food is everywhere. "All You Can Eat" is a common sign. Many restaurants have all you can eat food buffets. Returning from a trip, we ate late in the evening at a restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Groups of families lounged in the booths, each person sprawled along a cushion. Each person was fat. Their tables were covered with dishes. They returned again and again to the buffet to fill new clean plates with foods from the seventy-five items offered. What purpose could they have had in over-eating? Surely, it was not pleasure. It surely was not necessity. They treated "all you can eat" as a command.

The quality of diet obviously contributes to the overweight. Most restaurants carry menus extensively of fried foods. Few restaurant menus list more than one or two salads. Few salads have more than greens and tomatoes. Some chain restaurants have salad bars, but most patrons select fried dinners from the menus rather than building salads at the salad bars. Supermarket fresh produce departments carry only a few fresh vegetables, such as iceberg lettuce and tomatoes, and fruits, such as apples and bananas. I have to believe that their customers would be shocked by the abundance and variety of local and imported vegetables and fruits in California or New York City supermarkets.

The obesity seems in odd contrast to the tidiness and self-control so obvious everywhere in the state. West Virginians dress casual and sometimes poor; but everyone wears clean clothes. We have driven hundreds of miles in towns and countryside and seen almost no litter or graffiti. There are no glass and plastic bottles tossed  on road sides, or gang graffiti sprayed on buildings and bridges, or paper bags and paper cups from fast food restaurants blowing in the dirt. Even obviously poor homes are neat. Only several times did we see messy squalor, as when we explored dirt roads ending in isolated hollows, where ramshackle houses squatted on cleared dirt beside creeks. People are not obese for lack of personal habit.

It is too easy to assign the obesity problem to sociological factors, such as poverty and ignorance about diet. Persons who are sufficiently well off to drive recent model cars and trucks are not driven by poverty to cheap fatty foods. People who are able to patch together a living in West Virginia's modest economy by combining jobs and small enterprise are smart enough to figure out what diet is healthy.

It is a truism that people become overweight because they do not expend sufficient calories in physical activity. But how do we translate that truism to meaninful analysis? We visited the Coal Mine Museum in Beckley. We viewed dozens of historical photographs of mine workers.  They posed in the sunlight outside the mines for company cameras in 1900 or 1910 or 1930 or 1942. In the hundreds of men so depicted, in their blackened mining clothes, not one appeared fat. Undoubtedly their strenous labor required 3000 or 4000 calories a day and they consumed sufficient food for this purpose. Why would their descendents continue to eat so voraciously, when the necessity for it has disappeared?

West Virginians are not overweight as a result of trying to mask psychological insecurity about their looks. They are an attractive people. We see more naturally beautiful women than at a beach in Southern California, showing clear, clean skin without excessive makeup, bright blue or green eyes alive with interest in the world, animation in conversation. As we walked the streets of towns and malls, we did not see a single teen with acne. Many men are handsome and, even carrying a prominent pot belly, show considerable upper body strength from manual labor and outdoor activities. There is a general aura of physical assurance that belies the pop psychology wisdom that being fat springs from depression, or lack of self-assurance, or shyness, or any psycho-social malady.

Nor are West Virginians driven to poor diet and unhealthy eating habits from a lack of self-respect and spirit. Everywhere we have consistently met a charming, pleasant, helpful, open, considerate people. We have not encountered a single instance of abruptness or discourtesy or meanness from anyone; not from sales people, or restaurant servers, or people at houses where we ask for directions; not from tour guides; not from shoppers at malls; not from manual laborers or office workers; not from adults or from youth. Such decency of spirit speaks to a largeness of character. It is not smallness of character than makes West Virginians obese. I am at a complete loss to explain the phenomenon.

Listening to the Knees

My daughter has returned from England. She walked the entire length of the isle, from John O'Groats in north Scotland to Land's End in southwest Britain. From mid-July to October 21, she walked 1100 miles, carrying a 48lb pack, often wearing rain garb. She said she came to love walking in the rain. She followed paths using ordinance maps loaned by a ramblers' club. She stayed at night in B&Bs or little inns, catching up on E-mail if they had the Internet and public computers. Usually she hiked alone, but often had new or old friends for a few miles. She was the lead story in a weekly rural newspaper. She took a week off to visit Glasgow, a few days to visit friends outside Edinburgh, then the long slog over the dales, down the western counties across innumerable farms. She stopped at Tintern Abby, sent a postcard, and reminded me that I love Wordsworth's poem. After arriving at Land's End, she threw away her tattered hiking boots; she didn't want to be tempted to take off spontaneously for a little 15 miles jaunt. She had someone take a photo to document the event. After a day at Land's End Hotel, where we called to congratulate her, and registration at the End-to-End Museum, she went to London to stay with friends. Then a day getting her feet massaged. Then off to Paris and Barcelona. I'm exhausted just reciting the itinerary.

She wrote an E-mail journal, which her family and friends loved. I asked if she took many photographs.  She said, not many; maybe a hundred. How come, I asked. Dad, she said, they would have all been the same: a top swarth of gray or blue; a lower swarth of green; with white clumps (sheep) in the middle distance. I get the picture!

She was pleased that I am walking, even now with our new black Lab, who requires an extra trip of me. I said that my right knee aches sometimes. She said, reassuringly, it's probably not arthritis; you probably haven't been stretching it properly. I think she has earned her credentials on this matter; so I let her teach me several exercises to stretch muscles before and behind my knee. They help, actually, I must admit.

She is an extraordinary athlete, brave and strong. Ten years ago, she bicycled across the U.S. in a terribly stormy summer, when the Midwest was flooded. She would phone the weather services for flood warnings and the U.S. Army for routes over levees. She and her brother were both at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Survived, shaken. The night before she arrived home a few days ago, I had a nightmare of a passenger airplane crashing into a huge radio broadcast tower - the movie logo of the old RKO Republic pictures. I'm relieved she is safe and home. I wonder - thrilled, proud, afraid - what her next adventure will be.

Brain Death

I am well educated. I have an inquisitive mind. I am widely and well read. I have travelled and lived abroad. I have met brilliant people. I have a strong and retentive memory for scenes and remember detailed facts. I had a lively mind. I could carry on a conversation about nearly any subject and hold the interest of an accomplished person about her own achievements. Then I went brain dead. I became the primary parent for my children.

For twenty years, I devoted myself to raising my daughter and son. I held a professional career, but somehow I managed to make it secondary, packing it around the interspersed demands of my children. Within twenty minutes of taking this commitment, I was exhausted. I was reduced to four hours of interrupted sleep a night. The exhaustion never went away. Both of my children were not night trained until they were five years old. As young children, their bedtime was 9 PM. After they fell asleep, I perked a pot of coffee and went to work in my home study, researching and writing. I got them up twice, sometimes thrice, a night, putting them on the toilet at sometime about between 11 PM and 2 AM, and then after 4 AM. I went to bed after the midnight potty. Then I arose before dawn, put them on the potty again, and went back to work for a hour or so. Depending upon their ages, I had a woman come to the house for a few hours to help look after them while I went back to work in the study, or spent a few hours at work or at my office; or I took them to day care for the a morning; or I walked them to school. When they were old enough, they walked to school by themselves; but, unknown to them, for years I followed about 100 feet behind them, to make certain they didn't get into to trouble crossing streets and arrived at school safely. I picked them up at school, or was home when they arrived after school.

For years, I baked bread, so there would be fresh bread for them when they got home at midafternoon. My daughter brought a gang of her girl friends with her every day, to share the feast of bread. We called them "the carbohydrate kids". Then I did the afternoon chores, shopping, ferrying the children to friends and back, preparing dinner.

My wife was then a litigation attorney (now a superior court judge). She had no time for childrearing. She could not tell a client, oh, I can't be at your trial today, my kid is sick, or I have a school play rehearsal to attend. She was out of the house by 7 AM in the morning, and didn't get back home until 6:30 or 7 PM. When she arrived home, she was usually so fried from the stress of her work - litigation is combat - that she did not have the energy to do much except sit at the table to eat, then collapse in the bedroom.

To add to these demands on our lives, we took in three teenagers, troubled youths, in the 1990s for varying periods of time. One boy lived with us for 9 months, one boy for over a year, one girl for 3 months. They required a great deal of attention. The boy who lived with us for 9 months was, by age fifteen, an alcoholic and a drug addict. We got him into AA and a social work counsellor, with several appointments a week. Of course, I took him to these, otherwise he wouldn't have gone. I went into some of the counselling sessions with him, to work out what to do with him with the therapist. These were the same years that our son's mental illness showed itself, which raised a world of problems for everybody. Eventually everybody worked out okay. We kept the teenagers off the streets, out of jail, and eventually off booze and drugs. My son's illness moderated itself and he was, after six years, able to go off medicine; he is doing terrific today. So our efforts were helpful.

As a result of these extraordinary demands, I was exhausted. I existed in a fog of exhaustion. I was so tired most of the time that I was numb. To fulfill my family responsibility, I had to cut back on my responsibilities to my professional career. I did this mainly by giving up professional travel and by not doing the reading that I needed to do. For my career, I would otherwise have read four to six hours a day in professional literature. I gave that up. I also gave up all recreational reading. I gave up an art avocation to which I had previously devoted much time. I stopped listening to music, even as background. I packed my extensive library of 33RPM records into storage boxes. I ceased to read newspapers, except for quick, cursory glances at the local pages. I didn't watch television. I remember almost nothing of President Reagan's two terms. The fall of the Soviet Union - a world shaking event - and Russia's years of tumultous struggle toward freedom were but the distant forgettable patter of rain. My world contracted to my house, my family, the supermarket, Kaiser Permanente's pediatric clinics, my children's schools, and their school friends and activities.

My knowledge and interests contracted. I was, though, largely unaware of my withdrawal from the larger world. My conversations were brief and sporadic, about disposable diaper brands, school costumes, why certain foods and meals were disasters at the table, and helping with homework and tutors. My ordinary professional work suffered to a degree, but I had started from a high enough platform that I was able to perform competently, or appear to do so, throughout these two decades.

Eventually my children grew up and went to college. My home responsibilites were vastly reduced. My wife and I planned little excursions into the world. We subscribed to opera at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. We loved the opera. We had seats, serendipitously, near the section reserved for major donors and visiting stars and guests. At one opera, I met David Hockney, who designed the sets for a Britten opera. In the lobby at intermission, he was standing alone, other guests avoiding his celebrity. I had long admired his painting and his interesting vision of Southern California. I went over to talk with him. We began to talk about his upcoming work at a summer festival in Britain. I was enjoying the conversation. Then I found I had nothing to say. I had once had many conversations with people of David's level of achievement; I remembered that I did. But now I had no questions to ask to get David to talk about his art or his summer work. I had no contributions or observations. My brain was dead. I was stupid.