I’VE BEEN THINKING

Last Christmas, our older grandson Jesse was home midway through his second year of college on the east coast. In a conversation during a seasonal family get-together, he and I were talking about books. It’s a common subject for us. Since his mother was a freshman in high school, I’ve read the books assigned to her, our two sons, and now our two grandsons for their English literature classes. Our granddaughter is in her first weeks of high school, and I’m already pestering her for titles.

There are eight of us now in our immediate family: our son Brendan and his daughter Iris, who is fourteen years old; our daughter Shannon, her husband Chris, and their two sons, twenty-one-year-old Jesse and Joe, who is eighteen; and Becky and I (ages available upon request). We recently returned from our annual summer week in a rented beach house on Balboa Island, a southern California enclave in Newport Harbor. Lots of reading, 500-piece puzzles, paddle boards on the bay, surfing in the ocean, eating without discipline, and the best part: enough time for long conversations, whether one-on-one or around the large dining room table.

I was in my mid-thirties when my father died at sixty-nine. He had dropped out of Lowell, Massachusetts high school in the early 1920s, when he was seventeen, to enlist in the Navy, then left the service to work at odd job available to working class drop-outs. When the Great Depression hit, he couldn’t find work, so he hitchhiked to Hollywood where his brother owned a newsstand and had offered him a part-time job. He eventually bought the stand at Hollywood Boulevard and Whitley Avenue, sold newspapers and comic books, and secretly booked horse races for his street pals. He never made more than a subsistence living, and by his late sixties he was worn out. He finally died in 1975 when his kidneys failed him. At that time, I was healthy and married, had three children and a full career, and I somehow knew even then that my life was easier than his had been, and that I would likely outlive him by several years.

Bob is a friend since college, now a retired but intellectually and politically active scholar in a university town in the east. For decades, his fitness routine has been to walk each of several generations of golden retrievers twice a day, often prompting conversations with fellow dog-walkers. In recent months, he kept joining mid-stroll with Dennis, a fellow retired scholar. As they walked, they talked about kids and grandkids and whatever esoteric tome each of them was currently plowing through. It was a frequent delight that warmed even the chill of winter afternoons.

Mel died in January.

We met as new students at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1963 when he and Martha moved into a rural cottage down the street from ours. Soon we were walking down the dirt road to one another’s homes for drinks and dinner and the conversations Marty and Becky called a halt to when we started talking about eschatology and apocalyptic themes in the New Testament book of Revelation. They both had jobs while we studied most of the day, but on weekends Becky and Marty would shop together, share stories about the anguish of being married to men who worked for God, and knitted themselves into being best friends.

Becky and I went to a church gathering on Saturday night. There were perhaps two hundred and fifty people there who are members of our congregation. It was a fundraiser for our ministry to the homeless in Pasadena, and we were there because Becky is deeply involved in that work. She spends half of every Monday distributing clothes and food and helping to supervise breakfast, showers, and haircuts. This was a dress-up celebration; the meal was good. I knew perhaps ten percent of the people in the room, and Becky knew everybody there.

In the first pages of Allen Levi’s novel Theo of Golden, Theo, an 86-year-old man moves alone into the small Georgia town of Golden. For dozens of brief early chapters we find him engaged with every level of the small town’s citizenry: an injured and hospitalized little girl and her widowed father; a homeless women who roams the pages on her bicycle and insists on bringing it with her, even into church for a memorial service; a wealthy, worldly business consultant from whom Theo rents a lavish apartment; an ambitious cello student and a famous painter; an impoverished and self-pitying book seller and a young couple who’ve opened the coffee shop around which many of the stories revolve.

Even though I read Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences when it was published in 1983, I’d never actually done a survey of myself across his nine categories. The process has been very illuminating. I see myself now in particular ways, not just as an undifferentiated self who is smart (or not). It’s a relief to acknowledge where I’m not very smart - it’s a form of self-knowledge I’ve been reluctant to own because I didn’t want to look too closely at my limitations. It’s been equally satisfying to acknowledge the categories of intelligence where I am strong and claim them as gifts I can share.

In 1983, Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of education, published Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which I read at the time. Gardner challenges the notion that intelligence can be adequately measured by our skills in language and math, which is what we test for in the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and a host of other standardized tests.

The longer I live – and I’m now almost halfway through my ninth decade – the more I see the wisdom in the first of the four great truths of Buddhism: The Truth of Suffering. For me, this does not mean that life is all, or even mostly, darkness and pain; it is rather an honest recognition of how hard life can be.

For about a minute at the breakfast table on Sunday, January 4th, I had trouble catching my breath. The problem recurred whenever I climbed the stairs, and more often on Monday. I should have called my doctor but didn’t. By Tuesday it reached the point that I got worried that something was wrong and should have dialed 911, but convinced myself that I could deal with it, hoping it would just disappear. By Wednesday afternoon I couldn’t breathe, thought I was going to die, and finally got to my doctor’s office; the first thing he did was call 911. I wound up in the emergency room of our local hospital with a severe case of Pulmonary Embolism, blood clots in both of my lungs. Once I got home from the hospital, I wrote in detail about the four days of increasing danger and my foolishness in not getting help.