Hot Rocks

One day last week, I was feeling out of sorts. I was so tired that sitting up was a project and I was cold, deep in my belly and my bones cold. I went out on the front steps and lay down flat on my back with my face in the sun. The steps are Goshen stone, deep, wide, prehistoric slabs that were carted in from a nearby quarry out of the ancient earth long before Edith Wharton began entertaining her friends at The Mount around the corner. On an early summer day, the stone slabs generously absorb and transmit the heat of the sun. The experience of meeting up with them came to me out of context, unbidden. One moment, there was a sky that screamed, pay attention! This is blue, this is what we mean when we use the word blue. And out of the sky came the heat of the sun, and under me the hot rocks such as you would pay good money for at a designer spa.

Keep it simple. It’s testimony to the power of the consumerist message that I feel a certain concern that you won’t buy my humble posturing, rather meet it with a snicker of derision. What about days when the sky is in a foul mood, you say? How much fun is that? Today, for example, it was so dark and rainy that I went back to bed after lunch. I did some puzzles in the Times and then, feeling that my soul was withering, I read Joanna Macy. “Real learning is not something added, it is a reorganization of the system,” she writes. And that was enough to remind me of the wisdom of gray and rain and retreat. You have to retreat to reorganize.

My mother practiced the Victorian mannerism of taking to her bed in the middle of the day when she felt so inclined. As a child, it frightened me. Why wasn’t she bustling and bossing around as usual? Lately, I’m remembering how much time she also spent at the black rotary phone in the front hall talking to people about their ailments. She was the energetic center of a nexus of family and friends who, before email and social media, depended on her networking skills. She always knew who was in the hospital, what room they were in, who was waiting for test results, who had scored an appointment with the best specialist, “the top man in the field.” It never occurred to me that this was exhausting work, that she carried a lot of anxiety, other people’s and her own. I don’t think she would have thought of it that way or been conscious of the weight that suffering can exercise. She seemed to see herself as a glorified switchboard operator, Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing, or someone named Doris who never went out without a bottle of colorless nail polish in her handbag in the event of a run in her nylons. This was one of my mother’s several personalities. She could be imperious and self-important, but also completely intimate with the soap opera of her people. If one of my father’s ten siblings or their partners or their children were sick, calls were made, great journeys undertaken on the elevated trains filled with people with their own troubles. Sickly children and old men drooling onto the New York Post. My mother functioned as an intermediary between people with irregular heart beats and fearsome cardiologists playing god. She gave the specialists their due, but she wasn’t intimidated.

I don’t know how she would have dealt with the new environment of managed care. Now, instead of the gruff, bedraggled Dr. Shapiro and the Jewish patrician Dr. Levine, we have medical systems, corporations that rise like over-airconditioned lego sets, blocking out the loving sky. Instead of feeling held in a familiar embrace, we are atomized into individual units of fear. We are relegated to waiting rooms. And this dehumanization is a suffering all its own, even if, baruch ha-Shem, there’s nothing very wrong. Or only a little wrong. It wears you down and your mother is long gone. She’s retreated into the blue, into the hot rocks. She’s left you behind to dine on the stories, to make a meal out of all the different ways people get old. Some days, it’s just enough, but some days, you gorge yourself on the stories and need to lie out on the Goshen stone or the living-room couch to recuperate, to take your best shot at digesting the indigestible.

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My 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement is available from Amazon or on order from your local bookseller.