And I was just thinking...Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Geez, I thought I came up with that gem but no, it was Dale Honest-to-God Carnegie. Next I suppose I will find out that my dad's gem "To be a king is not worth it" was spoke or spake by someone of the same ilk. I have Googled both and can only find the quote by Dale Honest-to-God Carnegie. So maybe my dad was an original thinker. But I do so enjoy Mel Brooks who once opined "it is good to be king" and I tend to follow that line of thinking more. My dad was not an uber achiever so I can well believe his catchphrase of not being king was his way of minimizing the hurt of not being more than a Willie Loman-type salesman and I his Biff.
I was playing guitar with the original Old Duffer 1.0 and as he was leaving he was telling me his children were estranged from he and his wife. I was on the other side of this fence as I was once estranged from my parents, or rather my mother, who had no gems of her own other than what she wore. Her line that "she gave me life and she could take it away..." scared the hell out of me but then I found out this was somehow against the law and she couldn't or wouldn't do that and by the time I was 16 I was really a psychotic mess. So when I left for graduate school in 1976 I rarely went home after that. My mother had a breakdown the first semester I was gone and was hospitalized. I came home to be with dad and my mother's mother only to find out mom had checked herself out of rehab AMA to be with me. She was an awful sloppy drunk and for years I never went home. I would on occasion sneak home to see my grandmother and her sisters but not the parental units. And my mother refused to come up to see me as the mountain should come to Mohammad on those occasions.
Mother died in 1994 at age 59. I was a mere child of 39. My dad and I had ten good years together after that. He would come up to visit this mountain at least four times a year. When I had surgery for cancer he delayed his own cancer surgery to nurse me back to health. He died of cancer that following year. But, as I said, we had ten good years together. That is not to say I wasn't a bit abrasive to him at times, a little bitchy as it were. And, yes, I regret that. But I digress.
Old Duffer 1.0 is estranged from his two children. Maybe that is why he feels a bond towards me. Someone to play with and commiserate with. Or, maybe, just maybe, he is in cahoots with the rabbi and it is a ploy to bring me more firmly into the fold of the congregation. Whatever. The Old Duffer 1.0 is saddened by his children so if I can help to explicate the estrangement from the child's point of view maybe that will ease his pain. Old Duffer and Mrs. Old Duffer are lovely people but I can see how the professorial Old Duffer might be an annoyance. It takes all my patience and good will to suck it up and play with him for two hours at a stretch. Now he wants me to join he and his wife at the community sings and play along with Mitch, or rather Sally. I doubt that will happen this month but maybe in the future.
Actually they want me to play and that is a compliment of sorts. But the mere thought of listening to others flail at the sing-along makes me quake. I think this month this orphan of the storm has too much going on to engage with these good folks. But the thought, just the thought, of doing this and giving up my childish things and joining the ranks of Duffers leaves me cold.
I do attract the Old Duffers of the world. Mrs. Shankland across the way, or street as it were, has bonded to me on a strange mother/daughter sort of way. She constantly comes over and checks out my garden and gives me extended visits where she talks non-stop about things that interest her, like Old Duffer 1.0 and I, like a good child, cajole and listen. And such is the nature of my relationships with the Old Duffers of the universe. To cajole and listen raptly.
I suppose this makes of me an Old Duffer aficionado. I do so loves me a good Old Duffer. My dad was a premature Old Duffer and really grew into the role when we spent a few weeks together in my tiny condo as he stayed with me post kidney surgery. That last six months when we both had cancer diagnoses was the closest we had been in a long time. Not since those summers when he beat me at tennis as he refused to chase the ball and insisted that I hit it back to him without reciprocity were good years. And I last time I saw him I think I had a foreshadowing of his passing, which he did a few weeks later. I knew when the neighbor called me that Monday night that he was gone, even before she found him laying dead in the family manse.
And now I have Old Duffer 1.0 once a week, grooming me for the community sings. Gotta love Old Duffers.
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