Waiting for Joey

Every now and then I feel called to write about waiting. There was the piece in October 2016 filled with anticipatory grief, hand-wringing and finger-pointing. You get the picture. Waiting is a pervasive and burdensome feature of modern life. It’s so pervasive that sometimes I don’t even notice it or name it. I forget that it’s the background radiation, the Musak playing behind everything. Like eating and sleeping, we do it every day, all the time. In fact, it’s often intertwined with eating and sleeping. Waiting for the food to defrost, the bread to rise, the popcorn to pop. Waiting to fall asleep, a particularly stressful suspension of animation since you never know consciously when it will end. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the singularities, the biggies. Waiting for your water to break, for your baby to descend out of the birth canal, for your mother to die and then for your own death which, like sleep, generally sneaks up on you. 

One of the accommodations Frank and I have made for one another is that we never keep each other waiting. Earlier in my life there were people who repeatedly left me sitting over cold coffee, standing on corners in midtown. This was in the olden times before texting. After twenty minutes, I would stop pacing and just march off gritting my teeth. Keeping people waiting is, in my opinion, a colossal power grab. It’s someone else imposing their priorities on yours so that your life is deprived of the oxygen it needs to survive. Right now I’m waiting for Joey. 

Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash

This particular Joey shares a birthday with Frank, November 20, 1942, so I know exactly how old he is. Like other people who are 81, he gets tired at the end of the day. Aches and pains introduce themselves and keep him tossing and turning, trying to find a position that will accommodate his throbbing shoulder, his bad elbow. There is no shame in getting old. It is what it is. This particular Joey has spent more than fifty years in public life and doesn’t seem to have an exit strategy, doesn’t seem to know how to retire gracefully, to return to the relative obscurity of being a guy from Scranton who has already had more than his share of good days and bad days. Holding on long past your expiration date is not uncommon. Moguls do it, entertainers do it, athletes do it. RGB did it and it cost us dearly.  There is so much at stake. Every minute that Biden puffs himself up and croaks defiantly at the public is a minute we’ve lost. Every minute that his handlers try to protect him from scrutiny is a minute we’ve lost. This is not the fourth quarter of a basketball game. Running out the clock should not be an option. It is an enormous injustice to voters. He croaks at us, the people he’s supposed to be serving, telling us that he alone can do it…that he can beat Donald Trump in Arizona and North Carolina, contain the flood waters of Christian Nationalism, delay the ravages of climate catastrophe, and manage the so far incremental assaults on democracy. Every minute wasted on that pathos brings the election one minute closer. It is unthinkable that millions of people are left powerless while we are kept waiting. Waiting to see if something will change or, if not, waiting for the terrifying election results.

Some people are outraged that the media appears to be ganging up on the President in his hour of need. They want to know why the pundits didn’t ask the Ex to withdraw after his thirty-four felony convictions. I would suggest that this is a meaningless argument. It goes without saying that Trump is a morally indefensible stench of a man, a bully, a thief and a con artist. There’s not much point in demanding he step down because he doesn’t care what you think. All he cares about is winning and right now it’s entirely likely that he’ll get what he wants. Of all the talented, qualified women and men in public life, we have been asked to privilege Joe Biden because he’s sad about getting old and deserves our well wishes and our support.  Harsh? So be it. Liberals and Progressives who have made choice a major plank in their platform have themselves been given no choice. We will go to the polls on November 5th, because of course we will vote. But we will be stripped of the essential function of citizenship, the opportunity to vote for a vital and viable candidate to reverse the maga-tide and lead our precious and fragile democracy. 

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.