Installment # 8

After all these years, I know the difference between when Sandy is just being polite and when she is really amused.  So, in terms of a successful marriage, you don’t need to be clever or funny; you just need to find someone who thinks you are clever or funny. About half of what I come up with is original with me and the rest comes from things I have heard or read.  I’m good about not taking credit for something I am just repeating, but I am also fond of indicating when something was an original thought.  The kids used to say that I could recycle the same material every few years and it would sound new to Sandy – like something she had never heard before.  That is true to some extent. 

Sometimes I will say something funny that I’ve had in the back of my mind since childhood, and she will swear she has never heard that before.  She will laugh and ask, “Where did you get that?” and I will say, “We used to say that as kids.  You never heard me say that before?”  All three of the kids at one time or another have pleaded with Sandy not to laugh at something I just said: “It will only encourage him.  Don’t encourage him,” they will say.  Yet all three of them at one time or another have found themselves laughing at something and cry, “Oh, no.  I think I have inherited Dad’s sense of humor!” 

Evidently there is a phenomenon similar to déjà vu that I have seen referred to as “marked days.”  It refers to instances in your personal past that you have never forgotten and that you periodically almost “relive,” in a sense.  I compare it to déjà vu because it seems to be that common among people, although many may not realize that it is so common or that there is a name for it.  I actually prefer to call them “marked moments,” since the instances certainly do not occupy a whole day.  I am not going to go into mine, mainly because they would take a lot of explaining, and in the end would not be that useful or interesting.  The interesting thing is that we all have them and that they do not seem to be of any particular importance.  They are not associated with trauma or life-changing events, or anything, and do not seem to have any common thread or theme.

Well, I will mention one.  It often comes to mind that at around age ten or eleven I felt that every living creature deserved life.  If I stepped on a bug or killed a fly I experienced the sharp pain of regret and sorrow.  It is interesting because I outgrew that and really have no qualms about such things at all.  In fact, when I squash a bug or something I am aware that I have no qualms about it, but that there was a time when I did.  Sometime during mid-career I worked with a man from India, which I guess means he was a Hindu, though I never asked and he never said.  Anyway, one time we had an ant problem in the office, and I watched him very carefully sweep the ants off a surface onto a piece of paper, and then transport them, unharmed, to the outdoors.  I didn’t say anything, but guessed that respect for all living creatures was part of his religious belief system. 

It also made me wonder whether my early attitude was natural and valid, and that I had perhaps mentally moved myself away from the moral center of things somehow.  There are no doubt many things that we do not know about the spiritual side of life, the nature of the universe, and how/if all living things are connected.  However, I don’t spend a lot of time wondering about things I cannot know the answer to.  It may be fun to speculate, but I would caution against basing one’s life on any set of proposed answers.

I do, however, have a very high regard for human life.  I need to shut my mind out from the daily news reports of murders and accidental deaths.  They are so common and so tragic that I would be in a perpetual state of mourning if I couldn’t protect myself from reality in that regard.  Similarly, my attitude toward capital punishment is different from most conservatives, who in general are supporters of capital punishment.  First of all, if we are going to give “the state” the power to put someone to death, that power MUST, MUST, MUST be applied fairly and uniformly.  It cannot be the case that defendants who can afford the best attorneys have a better chance of avoiding the death penalty than those who cannot.  It cannot be the case that white defendants have a better chance than black defendants.  To not administer such a serious punishment evenhandedly is to me a horror. 

Secondly, with the advent a number of years ago of DNA testing, we know for sure that some defendants were put to death who had not committed murder.  In most cases they may have been the type of person who could have done it…but they didn’t do it.  Taking another person’s life is so serious in my mind that we should never give the state such a right unless we have a process that would make it virtually impossible for the state to kill someone who is not guilty of murder and by the same token make the uneven application of capital punishment virtually impossible.

There is some discussion as to whether the death penalty is a deterrent to the crime of murder.  Probably for some it is and for some it isn’t.  But wouldn’t life imprisonment without the possibility of parole be a sufficient deterrent, if it was accompanied by hard work and harsh treatment? Probably, again, for some it would be and for some it wouldn’t be, but it accomplishes the same critical thing: society is safe from that person.  It is recognized that there is no possibility of rehabilitation.  The hard work and harsh treatment should include lack of any ability to communicate with the outside world to ensure that society continues to be safe from the convicted murderer. 

The living conditions should be as far away as possible from the “country club” setting: no entertainment, minimal health care, minimal interaction with other inmates, plain meals, no tobacco products and, of course, no drugs or alcohol.  This may be beside the point, but I’ve read that obtaining and executing the death penalty costs society a lot more money than life in prison costs.  That seems counterintuitive, but I guess the legal fees and court costs involved in the lengthy appeals process exceed the cost of long-term incarceration.

Getting old is an endless source of humor.  I have enjoyed many of the gags, and have passed on many.  But I even think things like this are funny: For most of our married life, I preferred to slice an orange with a knife into about eight pieces and eat the fruit off of the rind using my front teeth.  For some reason, Sandy always preferred to peel the orange with her fingers, discard the rind and then eat the pieces.  But now her fingers are too crippled with arthritis, so she has to slice the orange with a knife; and my false front teeth now have great difficulty eating the fruit off of the rind.  I need to peel the orange with my fingers these days and eat it that way.  Of course I will peel an orange for her if she wants me to, but she seems content to slice it with the knife now.  As mentioned, my natural inclination is to see what is funny about situations, rather than what is perhaps wrong or sad about them.

I have enjoyed doing skits with my grandchildren.  One that Michelle and I used to do, which she enjoyed, but the grandkids don’t seem to get much out of, is the cowboy sauntering into town, where this tough-looking local guy stops him and, after they exchange some “Howdys” says, “Stranger in this town, ain’t ya?” to which the cowboy says, “Yup. They call me Tex.”  The tough guy asks, “What part of Texas you from?” and the stranger says, “I ain’t.  I’m from Louisiana.”  Predictably, the next question is, “Well then, how come they call you Tex?” and the answer is…wait for it…wait for it…”What they s’posed to call me, Louise?”  Michelle and I thought that was hilarious.  Maybe the kids these days don’t see the cowboy shows on TV that would help them related to such a scene.

I have also found that, instead of saying that I am telling a joke, I say that I have a story to tell.  I then embellish the joke with settings and details that are not central to the joke, but make it more interesting.  When Michelle’s kids were under 10 or so, and we would only see them 2 or 3 times per year, they would ask me to retell some of my stories.  As they got older they didn’t find them so amusing; or they could tell them better than I could.  My challenge is to identify more age-appropriate stories as they get older, without getting too far ahead of them.  Of course, I may tell something to Ryan that I would not tell to Alex or Justin yet. 

As a grandmother, Sandy just naturally strives to feed, clothe and discipline the kids while I just naturally strive to amuse them and enjoy them.  I was reading one time that one of the signs of good mental health (or something) is the ability to enter readily into the world of children.  I shared that with Sandy, exclaiming that I had that ability; the problem was that I couldn’t get out!  Sandy marvels at the patience I seem to have for playing with the kids, but I really enjoy it.

Brianna gave me a handmade birthday card for my 70^th in which she reminded me of how she and I used to play school.  I had kind of forgotten about it, but it obviously meant a lot to her, and she said so.  She normally wanted to be the teacher, because she could role play based on her recent experiences.  I would be the student named Tommy.  Sometimes Tommy would be praised for doing his work and getting the right answers, but sometimes Tommy would need to be warned that if certain behavior continued he would either be sent to the principal’s office, or a note would be sent home to his parents, or both.  That was usually an effective deterrent to crime.  Sometimes I would start out as the teacher, but Brianna would usually take over fairly quickly as I went off on tangents that did not reflect her school experience.  I actually thought I could make it more interesting and informative, but I guess I was not sticking close enough to the script in her mind.