{"id":30792,"date":"2024-12-08T13:04:41","date_gmt":"2024-12-08T21:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3rdactmagazine.com\/?p=30792"},"modified":"2024-12-08T13:04:41","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T21:04:41","slug":"a-new-friend-for-the-long-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3rdactmagazine.com\/a-new-friend-for-the-long-journey\/current-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Friend for The Long Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

I met Sharon two years ago. She was bent over Virginia Woolf\u2019s <\/span>The Waves. <\/span><\/i>We were waiting in the yard of a residential building in lower Manhattan for our tai chi class to begin. My brain froze with every instructed movement shift. Her bad knee gimped heroically in an effort to keep pace. I never went back.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We spoke a bit afterwards. We discovered we both wrote poetry. She mentioned the magic name, Frank O\u2019 Hara, and I felt a door open. She mentioned, when we met again, that she was the recipient of a disability check because of mental illness. Her unashamed revelation made the door open even wider.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At 85, my friends tend to range from their late 60s to their late 80s. We share a generational common room younger folks would rather avoid. While hardly an end game crawl space (most of my friends remain working writers and artists), our conversations often touch upon medical conditions, losses, fears of decline. Sharon, at 58, is intimate with all of it, yet also distant from it.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s strange. Part of me still feels like a young girl, not a woman growing old.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Long separated from normal routines of work, family, most social obligations, she is content to simply watch the world move, so long as it doesn\u2019t move brusquely or unexpectedly loudly, which frighten her. She is quiet the way retired older people are quiet. When a life is no longer seen to mean much, there is a tendency not to say much. Often it\u2019s as if she\u2019s waiting for me to press a button to get her started.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My new friend is a Quaker. She practices Gandhi\u2019s <\/span>ahimsa. <\/span><\/i>She doesn\u2019t eat meat. (\u201cI am a junk food vegetarian.\u201d) She\u2019ll gently attend to stray souls. She hovers over her sleeping rescue cat, Lilli, like a 21st century Magi adoring the baby Jesus.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The shadow side of her mind doesn\u2019t practice <\/span>ahimsa. <\/span><\/i>It is a marauder. It catapulted her into mental hospitals. It robbed her of the work she loved\u2014high school teacher, college counselor.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sharon grew up in Los Angeles and Chicago. She thinks of herself mainly as a Californian. I think of her as a Midwesterner, possibly because of her stories about her maternal Baptist grandfather from Indiana\u2014both her parents are from Indiana\u2014who founded five churches and who played Chicago Cubs games so loudly on his radio you could hear them down the block.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents were devoted to me. I was an only child. They went out of their way to make me feel special. My father would drive me to the meetings of the Baker Street Irregulars in Los Angeles. (She was an avid Sherlock Holmes reader.) My mother sent me cab money for me to get to my teaching job in Brooklyn when I was too depressed to take the subway. They were not the problem. <\/span>The problem is me!\u201d <\/span><\/i>she says with a laugh.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She will periodically anesthetize herself against life by dying to it in deep sleep that can last, on and off, for days. Depression happens and she sleeps. I call and I worry. I experience the emotional heavy lifting of a father. Twenty-seven years younger than myself, Sharon is the exact age of daughters wondering how much longer they will have to worry about fathers falling, forgetting, mistaking one day for another, as my friend sometimes does, her panic a passing storm in my ear.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I try to guide her back the center of the road like a gentle traffic cop. My old life\u2019s new vocation.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the end of her interminable sleep cycles, Sharon will always call. \u201cHow are you?\u201d she\u2019ll ask brightly.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHuh!\u201d It throws me every time. \u201cWhat do you mean, how am <\/span>I?\u201d<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She\u2019ll just laugh. I guess she means, \u2018let\u2019s start afresh, no analysis please.\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\u201cLet\u2019s meet at Tompkins Square Park for a little sunlight and air,\u201d I\u2019ll say.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With her supersized container of coffee, we sit beneath one of the park\u2019s remaining elms and do what friends do everywhere\u2014observe and comment on the passing show. Tompkins Square Park, in the 1980s a hotbed of urban revolution, has always been a magnet for lost looking youths. They shamble past us, sometimes in pairs, sometimes with pets, everything about them tentative, children of our increasingly unstable world of climate disasters and endless wars, with the promise of worse to come.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I ask Sharon how she became a Quaker.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe last time I got out of the hospital,\u201d she said, \u201cit was important to me to find a spiritual community. The Quakers were open to the things that were necessary to me. They worshipped in silence, believed in nonviolence, and welcomed me. No one put pressure on me. They let me be and I was thankful for that.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After talking, she returns to watching. A probing silence guides her watching. The silence of one wanting to know things about others, perhaps the very things they want to know about themselves.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She and an associate run a phone support group for people with emotional difficulties, providing a safe place to be heard and supported, to feel connected.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI won\u2019t miss a session, if I can help it,\u201d Sharon says. \u201cWe have to be there for people. We can\u2019t let people down.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A dachshund will pass us. My friend will say, \u2018Look how low to the ground they are. Their backs have to do all the work because their legs are so small. Dachshunds are known to have bad backs.\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I give her hand a big squeeze. Her illness can close around her at any moment like a fist, yet she remains open to others. I am tempted to ask for her benediction for when the clustered infirmities of old age begin to close around me and a lame dachshund crosses my path. Will my heart open to its infirmity? I see Sharon at such moments as an elder in her ability to transcend her suffering for the sake of others who sufferer.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She may not write much poetry these days, as the meds have undercut her creativity, but when I read what she has written in the past, I have hopes for a second harvest in the future:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Upstate Memory<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>An overnight<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 of goodwill<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 pilling,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/span>fingernails firelit,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0comfort buffed<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0to expectation<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/i>I script myself paternally beside her in some redeemed future, comforted.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Robert Hirschfield<\/span><\/i><\/b>\u202f<\/span>is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled,<\/span><\/i>\u202fThe Road to Canaan<\/span>. His work has appeared in<\/span><\/i>\u202fParabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth\u202f<\/span>(Ireland),<\/span><\/i>\u202fTears in The Fence\u202f<\/span>(UK) and other publications.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n