True Ancestor

Diary of a middle-aged, overweight jogger

Last year at about this time, I was stretching out in preparation for the Soldier Field 10-Mile run -- a beautiful run along Chicago's lakeshore, ending at the 50-yard line at Soldier field -- when I injured myself.

You know you're well into middle age when you injure yourself stretching. That's kind of like Julia Child cutting herself in the kitchen and bleeding to death.

I had gone down into a kind of catcher's crouch to stretch my achilles tendons. Something in my left knee went snap-crackle-pop. I tried to run the race anyway, but after two and a half miles I suffered a stabbing pain in that knee each time I landed on my left foot. I limped back to my car.

I apparently didn't do anything too serious to the knee; a little rehab and I was feeling chipper again, after a couple of months. This year, I am trying to run the Soldier Field 10-Mile once again. I may not even make it to the starting line.

As I approach 49, I find running incredibly, immediately unpleasant. From about my 100th stride until I'm done, I'm working very hard, I'm winded, I'm cranky -- and I'm unfathomably slow. Yesterday I ran roughly 6 miles in about 1 hour, 10 minutes. That's barely a 12-minute mile pace.  You could put on your earphones and dork-walk at that pace (see image below for dork-walking instructions).

I still favor the left knee a little; this morning, my right achilles tendon is tender to the touch and throbbing. I came limping into the office like a zombie. Every time I get up or sit down, I grunt and wheeze like a geezer.

The event is two weeks from this Saturday. My goal is to finish. In one piece. Under my own power. On the same day I started.

--T.A.

Middle Daughter Gets Bit

Middle Daughter, possessed of a globe-trotting volunteer spirit, has become infected with something else: malaria.

Sometime during a couple of fun, eventful weeks teaching English in a small school in Tanzania; a brief "safari" (really just animal sight-seeing); and a Passover Seder in Dar es Salaam with most of the other Jews in the country), she must have been bitten by an infected mosquito. Despite having religiously taken her anti-malaria medication, she got the illness nonetheless.

People live with it and recover from it all the time. However, she won't be home until mid-May, at which time she faces gum surgery. Will they perform gum surgery on you if you have malaria?!

Having a kid that's sick on the other side of the world is a horribly helpless feeling. What can you do, short of helicopter parenting (of course, helicopters can't fly that far).

In other news, closer to home, Gabe continues to round into fine form as a left-handed pitcher. The neurosis surrounding the development of young baseball players has become so shrill, I e-mailed the coach of the Freshman baseball team at the high school Gabe will likely attend.

I asked him: Does a kid really have to play travel baseball and skip camp if he wants to play in high school? Does he really need lessons in this, that and the other? What does the parent of a 12-year-old who loves baseball need to do -- and not do?

To his credit, the coach said, 'Let him play and have fun. Don't worry about it.'

The coach was also Middle Daughter's gym teacher; he said to send his regards to her.

And I send her whatever healing vibes I can, in these anxious few weeks before she finally comes home.

--T.A.

I read "The Omnivore's Dilemma," so I'm a weirdo.

I've had two conversations with separate friends -- successful, intelligent, warm-hearted friends -- who cannot understand why I bothered, with all the books out there, to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

I find this even more troubling than the book itself, which takes a deep but clear-eyed look at the dysfunction of our industrial-based food system and its ominous deficiencies. The reaction of my friends is troubling because it is evidence of the author's conention that as Americans, we pay more attention to what kind of cars we drive than to what we put in our bodies.

It's true that the book is a rather extreme look at how our food chain has been twisted beyond recognition by our dependence on (and chronic overproduction of) corn, chemical fertilizers and monoculture. But it's also true that this way of producing food is at the very heart of our mental, physical and spritual malnutrition. We believe we can and should have whatever we want, whenever we want it. And we make it so, at great personal cost to ourselves and our environment.

Pollan is a very fine writer, and he's too smart to be dogmatic or doctrinaire. And he's learned more about food than you or I will ever know, so it's worth paying attention to him.

"Who is this guy?," one friend asked when I described the book, "Marx and Engels?!"

Uh ... no, I said, he's just a guy who thinks we ought to know, really know, where our food comes from.

"Why?," my friend shot back. "Are grocery chains evil? What should we do about it? Go out and forage for everything?"

No, I said, not necessarily. Although you'd learn a lot about your food if you did.

"Yeah, but you know what?," my friend sad, "I don't want to learn about my food. For thousands of generations, my ancestors could think of little else. Now that we're freed from that particular form of mental slavery, we can study, we can think, we can enjoy our relationships; we can work out and stay physically healthy. We can spend more time helping people who need help."

Well, we'd be a lot healthier if we didn't grow plants and animals the way we're growing them now, I said. But this particular friend is a cardiologist, and this was his opening to hold forth about how we have so much more heart disease now largely because we're living longer, and how we have more tools at our disposal to stay healthy than humankind has ever enjoyed.

Another friend, a stay-at-home mom whose husband works in her family's very successful business, could not believe I'd spend a week on a beach in Mexico reading a downer of a book about how awful contemporary agriculture can be, and about a guy who wants to learn about food so he goes out and kills, dresses, cooks and eats a wild pig. Eww. I told her I couldn't find my back issues of People.

Pollan does his homework in this book, and he shows how the monocultural practice of agriculture is not only unsustainable but also not particularly healthy. He finds and spends time working at farms  -- large, organic farms -- at which farmers rotate crops and livestock so that one's waste is another's nourishment, and the whole environment is the better for it. He slaughters chickens at one of these farms, and he's horrified by it. Then he spends a long chapter in the book deeply but openly pondering whether vegetarianism is the only morally defensible eating philosophy (he winds up deciding that we are meant, on the whole, to be carnivores, and that many of our healthiest landscapes and communities depend at least in part on the grazing of livestock).

We consume so much, and we consume so much fossil fuel in order to grow, harvest, transport and prepare so many of our foods, that we owe it to ourselves to be very educated on and mindful of the origins of our food. The Omnivore's Dilemma will get you most of the way there.

--T.A.

The Sears Tower, Alan Dershowitz and Martin Buber: Thoughts on a Brief Ascent

Sunday, as I was climbing 2,109 steps -- ascending 1,353 vertical feet in the process, during the world's longest indoor stair-climb -- I had the time, and the motivation, to set my mind elsewhere. These climbs are relentless, endless -- then, suddenly, they're over. They're hard work, they're paralyzing, they're inspirational. They're life in a nutshell.

I wanted to think but I couldn't until I got home. It's hard to think when your lungs are working that hard.

So I came home, had some coffee and lots of water, and set to thinking: why does what we believe, or what wisdom tradition we follow, matter? Why does any of it matter?

I had two weighty tomes to consider: Alan Dershowitz's The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century, and Martin Buber's Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. The former purports to set historical context and then make a case for the continuous necessity of the refashioning of Jewish identity, in the same way that any organism constantly refashions itself. The latter looks at the Revelation at Sinai as a historical event of surpassing importance in human history, captured in Biblical text and infused with layers of meaning beyond anything a mortal mind could fashion.

Any human endeavor is just a stair-climb: great heights achieved -- elevator down. Fleeting. Borderline meaningless. Attaining a height opens vast panoramas of understanding that may inspire you -- but how do you share it? How do you pass it on?

Dershowitz's book, which is scarcely a decade old, seems more dated than Buber's, which is four decades older. Dershowitz's concern is a fleeting one, whereas Buber's is transcendent. Dershowitz wants Judaism to survive but it doesn't seem that he can say exactly why. It matters to him, it's been meaningful in human history, even though the theology is inscrutable and the extreme adherents are depriving the larger kehilah of a desire to belong or to grow in their Judaism.

Dershowitz says that anti-Semitism is all but dead, that "it may become in the twenty-first century a faint shadow of what it has been in the past two millennia." His focus for most of the book is on the survival of the moral, ethical and cultural uniqueness of Judaism, and on the dangers of success and comfort to the survival of the Jewish project. It's only toward the end of the book that Dershowitz turns his attention to what made that uniqueness possible.

We must make Jewish education important not only to the survival of Jewish life but also to success in life in general. We must devise curricula that use Jewish sources to provide all students with competitive advantages in their business, professional and personal lives. We must persuade our children that studying Jewish sources will make them not only better Jews, but also better lawyers, doctors, corporate executives, teachers, literary critics, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, and citizens. Best-selling books have been written about how the teachings of Confuscius, Jesus, Machiavelli -- even Ghenghis Khan -- can lead to success. Why not the writings of the Prophets, Maimonides, Rabbi Akiba, Israel Salanter, Joseph Soloveichik, and Ahad Ha'am? Jewish scholarship has always balanced the practical with the theoretical. The traditional rabbi was as much a dispenser of pragmatic business advice as of ritual guidance. The modern rabbi and teacher must bring the Jewish sources alive and make them relevant to the current generation of students.

It is the essence of the Jewish vision that Buber always understood, was ever fascinated by, and bringing Jewish sources alive his singular gift. His brilliant take on the Divne Name ehyeh asher ehyeh goes to the burning essence of that vision.

And it is God Himself who unfolds his name after this fashion. The exclamation was its hidden form; the verb its revelation. And in order to make it clear beyond all possiblity of misapprehension that the direct word ehyeh explains the indirect name, Moses is first instructed, by an exceptionally daring linguistic device, to tell the people "Ehyeh, 'I shall be present', or 'I am present', sends me to you," and immediately afterwards: "YHVH the God of your fathers sends me to you." That Ehyeh is not a name; the God can never be named so; only on this one occasion, in this sole moment of transmitting his work, is Moses allowed and ordered to take the God's self-comprehension in his mouth as a name ...

The meaning of the name is usually ascribed to the "Elohist," to whose source this section of the narrative is attributed. But quite apart from the fact that there was no Elohist in this sense and that, as has been said, if we eliminate complements and supplements, we find a uniform and firmly constructed narrative -- such discoveries or conversions are not born at the writing desk. A speech like this ehyeh asher ehyeh does not belong to literature but to the sphere attained by the founders of religion. If it is theology, it is that archaic theology which, in the form of a historical narrative, stands at the threshold of every genuine historical religion ...

At his relatively late period Moses did not establish the religious relationship between Bnei Israel and YHVH. He was not the first to utter that "primal sound" in enthusiastic astonishment. That may have been done by somebody long before who, driven by an irresistible force along a new road, now felt himself to be preceded along that road by "him,"  the invisible one who permitted himself to be seen. But it was Moses who, on this religious relationship, established a covenant between the God and "his people." Nothing of such a kind can be imagined except on the assumption that a relationship which had come down from ancient times has been melted in the fire of some new personal experience. The foundation takes place before the assembled host; the experience is undergone in solitude."

By the time I reached the 103rd floor at about 8:10 Sunday morning, I was sweaty and tired. I had done something arduous and meaningless. I wanted to think again. I came home and, after the coffee and the water, took an Advil and wondered again about what can't be solved and wrote about it here. The Sears Tower and Buber and Dershowitz all came together because they all made me think about what matters and why.

And that was my Sunday.

--T.A.

"Jewgenics": Jewish genes, Jewish values and Jewish mortality

(cross-posted on Jews By Choice)

I've been reading with some interest about Jon Entine's new book, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. The author, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), explores the connections between genetics, identity and values, and uses this approach to address the question, "Who is a Jew?"

The answer, in one sense, is "Almost everyone." The DNA of the priestly tribe of the Cohanim can be found in India, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia; the other tribes, most of which vanished, subsumed their families into host cultures and spread their DNA so that, according to Entine, "we are all related to King David" (this is convenient for those with a Messianic bent who hold with the prophetic decrees that the Messiah would come from the House of David).

In a wonderful and funny article at Slate, William Saletan reports on a forum at the AEI in which scholars and bioethicists confronted questions raised by Entine's work: "Are Jews a race? And is intelligence genetic?" The questions have urgent implications not only for how culture and religion are shaped and transmitted, nor for the future of Judaism itself, but about how the strengths of communal identity may also create the conditions for endemic genetic weakness. Jewish genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs, Saletan reports, may be transmitted along the same genetic pathways as intelligence. Genes associated with brain growth have also been found to be associated with breast cancer (they are also associated with a lack of visio-spatial coordination, which may help explain why the volume on Jewish Sports Heroes is such a slim one).

Because intelligence has been so highly prized and richly rewarded in Jewish communities throughout history, Jews have bred for intelligence. Those that were not intelligent enough were basically voted off the island. (The result, AEI Scholar Charles Murray said, was that "anyone who was Jewish and stupid 2,000 years ago found it a lot easier to be Christian.") Jewish families and communities developed and lived in relative isolation, assuring that the quality of intelligence was enhanced with each passing generation.

Despite the hand-wringing about Jewish intermarriage in Diaspora, Saletan quotes Entine as saying that the rate of Jewish intermarriage is at one half of one percent -- astonishingly low, by any standards; the lowest of any community in the world. The value of marrying within the faith (or is it a culture?) is impressed upon modern Jews, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else. The value of peoplehood that perpetuates great strengths may also increase the likelihood of disease. Seen in this light, the convert is yet more indispensable: someone who feels called to live within the Jewish tent must have deep (perhaps even genetic) compulsions for doing so; may be highly intelligent; and yet will bring a genetic diversity that will help weaken the strains of disease that travel along ancient and preserved DNA pathways.

Some of the scholars, especially the bioethicist Laurie Zoloth, expressed a revulsion toward the idea of any kind of Jewish genetic superiority, a revulsion shared by most Jews I know. It is beyond ironic to think of Judaism as representative of any kind of "master race," and it flies in the face of Jewish teachings about the equality of all peoples.

And yet, the above-average intellectual acuity of Jews as a whole appears, like any gift, to come at a price. The question, Saletan says, then becomes: do we seek to minimize the spread of genes that predispose our children to both genius and early death?

All this brings me again back to the art of spiritual seeking rather than the science of genetics. But maybe they're two sides of the same coin. Maybe those who feel drawn toward Judaism have a genetic strand that has begun to glow inside them. Those who remove themselves from Judaism's iron embrace may actually be doing more, by their very absence, to perpetuate and diversify Judaism than those who stay glumly and resentfully within the fold.

But, as Saletan notes, we Jews live with the questions. The biggest question Entine raises is whether our very sense of who we are is determined more by our genes than our deeds, more by our ancestry than our autonomous selves.

That's a question I guess we'll just have to live, and live with.

(h/t: Richard Cohen)

--T.A.

Fatty McFatfat: Scourge of a Nation

Me True Ann-Sister's post, about getting out into the world and discovering how normal obesity has become, has merged in my mind with recent news stories and birthed a science-fiction idea:

A woman emerges from a years-long coma, through which her lover has nursed her. They leave their home and emerge into a world of amorphous, short-legged blobs of blubber: the nation's gone obese!! Glued to its cathode ray tubes and gorging on its snack foods, the corpulent country is deemed unworthy of takeover or even terrorist attack, and its citizens are left to suffocate in their own blubber.

In a desperate attempt to save itself, the nation has "elected" a diet guru as president. Said guru has decreed that all nourishment will be supplied by her own personal line of nutritional supplements: the populace is put on a crash diet. The threshold of every house is a massive scale. You can't leave without getting weighed. And if you're over your decreed weight, Madame Leader's Strike Force swoops in and whisks you to one of her thousands of fat farms, where you're starved and forced to build roads, fix infrastructure, and drink her clear broth, under massive statues of her in her spandex, waving benignly at her chubby peasantry ...

OK, I need to cut back on the hallucinogens, I guess. But my sister's post really affected me. That, and the fact that, at 5 feet 9 inches and 205 pounds, most Body Mass Index measurements tag me as "obese" (I'm not).

"Don't feel bad," an athletic trainer-friend said to me. "According to that chart, I'm overweight." He looks like a GI Joe doll.

I was pudgy as a kid. My brother called me fat so often that we eventually agreed that he owed me a dime for every time he called me fat. I think he owes me a sum greater than the national debt. I went through adolescence and got thinner, but never stopped feeling fat.

When I get out, everything gets put in perspective: I'll go to a ballgame or a concert, and oh my God! The size of some people! It's frightening! Their arms quiver like mounds of jell-o! When they walk, their butt-cheeks look like two dwarfs fighting in a sack! Like my science fiction heroine, I'm tempted to  clutch my hair at the temples and scream: "What's become of us?!!"

I agree with me sis, and Joyce Maynard, whom she quotes in her post: we're eating for entertainment. We feel empty inside. We want to be filled. So we're entertaining ourselves to death.

--T.A.

Prisoners of Pain

Middle Daughter has been couch-ridden for more than a week. She has watched every single episode of the first five seasons of Gilmore Girls. She has prevailed upon friends, and her little brother, to reconfigure the family room so that she can face the TV without having to turn her head at all. The One True Wife brings her food, gets her to walk a little, takes her to physical therapy. Her brother keeps her company, watches TV with her. But he draws the line at Gilmore Girls.

Middle Daughter is in the thrall of whiplash, after having been rear-ended by a sophomore (and a brand-new driver) at her school. Middle Daughter felt no ill effects for almost a week. Then, all of a sudden, she couldn't get out of bed.

The double-impact (she was rear-ended and pushed into the car in front of her) caused almost no damage to the cars. But it apparently caused what the doctors have called "temporary brain damage," the result of a concussion, or something like it, caused by the rabbit punch her brain took from the sides of her own skull. In addition to the pain, Middle Daughter has been unable to concentrate, has had trouble thinking of words and remembering what she was in the midst of doing.

We are all anxious about her. She is anxious about her schoolwork, having missed more than a week, a span which included mid-term exams in AP classes that her prospective colleges will pay attention to. The One True Wife has taken on the mien of an embattled ER nurse. Everything takes a back seat to a child in pain.

Others who have suffered whiplash -- it seems like everyone has -- comes forth with endless advice. Don't lie down. Don't sit up. Walk. Don't walk. Don't take Advil. Don't take Tylenol. Don't take sleep aids. And they ask the obvious and the irritating: Has she been to a doctor? (Of course, you idiot.) Has she been to a chiropractor? (Hell no.) Has she tried acupuncture? You should sue. Have you called your insurance company?

I find myself exasperated with Middle Daughter. Impatient for her to get better. Worried that she's taking on a kind of Permanent Victim mindset. It's selfish, of course. This is not a kid who would lie in order to find an excuse to sprawl on the couch for a week.

Today Middle Daughter will sit on an exercise ball. The Wife will take her to physical therapy. In the afternoon, if she can get herself dressed, she will try going to school. She'll need someone to carry her books for her.

We are all so incredibly frail. We cling to our equilibrium and live like lemmings because the possibilities are sometimes too terrible to confront. But really, when you think about it: isn't living with pain, coping with crisis, the norm, not the exception?

And isn't the ability to emerge from catastrophe (h/t: A Pedestrian View) the thing that makes us fully human -- and profoundly glad to be alive?

--T.A.

Everybody's sick

In the home stretch of a Midwestern winter, the wheels come off. You get sick, you get Spring Fever; you can't tell which is which; you get weird headaches; cravings for chocolate and sleep and a seat in the bleachers; nothing matters. You just want to lie down.

You feel old. You can tell your warranty's expired. You look lumpy. You can't get a smooth shave. You're dotted with shaving cuts. You're stuffed up, but when you blow your nose, nothing happens.

You're body's confused: yesterday, record-breaking warmth, in the low 70s. Tomorrow's high will be in the 30s. This afternoon, a cold front will howl in from the northwest, and the sky will turn gray as your skin, and people will be visible only by the bags under their eyes.

The One True Wife and I have been passing a cold back and forth. Middle Daughter was rear-ended on her way home from school two weeks ago, and five days ago was suddenly in so much pain she could barely get out of bed. An MRI revealed nothing, so now the Wife is taking her to see a spine doc to see what can be done. The only thing that cheers Middle Daughter up is watching her DVDs of Gilmore Girls and getting college acceptance letters.

Gabe is staying home from school today. He woke up sounding like Phyllis Diller, and looking only marginally better.

Other people's struggles, on the one hand, and other people's climates, on the other, put this late-winter dysthymia in perspective. So does waking up and doing a brief meditation on gratitude. No matter what. I've done this for a few years now, and can say, for you compulsive quantifiers out there, that it makes a 30% difference, 80% of the time, in the quality of my day.

The crocuses are poking through the thawing dirt; the last mounds of blackened snow are melting like the Wicked Witch, revealing sodden newspapers from late last year that got caught up in the maw of passing snow plows; the occasional Spring Training game can be caught on the radio; it's light when I drive home from work.

So there's hope.

--T.A.

And a room to every purpose under heaven... A time to snore, a time to sleep...

Ann Althouse notes with wry approval the latest architectural trend: separate bedrooms.

Once again, the One True Wife and I are ahead of the curve.

It began a few years ago, when my nocturnal heavy breathing turned into a full-bore snore (right about the time I edged over 200 pounds). After a few visits to an allergist, and a sleep study that might have been gleaned from the how-to manuals of Abu Ghraib (a tasteless exaggeration -- but not by much), I decided to lose some weight. I did, and the snoring diminished. Winter set in, and I gained much of the weight back.

And so the Wife perfected the routine of retreating to the pitch-dark guest bedroom in the basement, along about 3AM. This is when she begins emerging from deeper levels of sleep, and when one violent schnork from me will keep her up, or mostly up, for the rest of the night.

Add to that the confusion of a premature end to hibernation, and you have a recipe for connubial calamity -- if we're both in the same bed. But that's rarely the case through the night. And by the time morning comes, one of us will be in the basement -- she, in full retreat from my snoring, or I, retreating from her out of deference (and a frisson of fear).

In recent weeks, the Wife retreated to the "dungeon" to find respite not only from my snoring but from the early-morning, late-winter sunshine that would come bounding into the room like a white puppy, a little too cheery, a little too early. Spending the morning hours sleeping in the basement kept her from waking up weary, because in our bedroom, she said, "I'd have to sleep with my arm over my eyes and my ears at the same time." I dare you to try that and not get tired.

I don't think our marriage would survive separate master bedrooms. There's something depressingly solitary and self-indulgent about the prospect -- and something deliciously improvisational about sleeping half the night in a room that's theoretically reserved for others. We like to curl up together at the end of the day, talk, decompress and sink into sleep together. Plus, I keep her warm -- my naturally high internal thermostat being one of my principal gifts to the marriage.

So, rather than actually dealing with my snoring, and the host of medical problems that can result from it, we're just going to go sleepwalking through the house in the wee hours, finding different places to rest our weary bones and get a break from each other, which, even in our unconscious moments, turns out to be quite salutary, thank you.

But just a few hours at a time, mind you: once we had separate bedrooms, I'd just be that much closer to being put out at the curb with the rest of the recycling.

--T.A.

Loving Like There's No Tomorrow: Day 1

Somehow, being here with Annie has brought it home: the first phase of my life -- the phase of restless dreaming and assumed immortality, of trying on careers like hats, and of disdaining the aged and infirm because they seem to have been born that way, not immortal like me -- that phase is over.

It's been over for awhile, but it's taken me time to realize it because I've been fortunate. I've been healthy. The people I love have been healthy. Even the people I don't love, but who are loved by the people I love, have by and large been healthy.

That's all different now. To see a sibling, a beloved, kindred soul, so utterly devoted to caretaking, is to learn, the hard way, the most ancient lesson of Nature's own devising: take care of the people you love, because (a) it helps ensure (karmically, if not practically) that someday, someone will do the same for you, if you're lucky; and (b) it's one way, especially later in life, that love is expressed.

There are four siblings and 13 1/2 years between Annie and me. We are almost bookends of the Baby Boom, and, for all practical intents and purposes, the products of different parents. Her parents were young, inexperienced, recovering from a world war and, in my dad's case, the loss of a beloved only sibling. Annie's parents were young and physically vibrant; they were beautiful and they were blessed. They had time, and they were passionately in love.

My parents, those same people, were a lot more experienced, a little less healthy, and so familiar in their love, and so jaded as parents, that they often seemed to me to be on auto-pilot. Which isn't to say they didn't pay attention; it's more that they seemed to wearily anticipate everything, including what I was going to do before I did it, and yet they didn't stand in life's (or my) way. If it wasn't going to kill me, I'd learn from it. If it was going to kill me, they'd see the thought cross my mind and kill the deal without me even realizing it. Mom had recovered from polio; Dad smoked a pack and a half of Chesterfields a day, was plagued by a bad back and heading for quadruple bypass.

Mom smoked, too. I remember car interiors blue with cigarette smoke. The knobbed polyester of my winter jacket collars smelling like nicotine. Dad dumping the butts from the ashtray of the VW bus into the gutter in front of our house.

At that point when it became clear cigarettes were bad for you, Mom had already smoked her way through her pregnancies. She quit cold turkey, and dad took up cigars: the immortal phase of their life was over. They paid attention. They made changes. They had six kids and the world on their shoulders. They were in their mid to late 40's -- exactly where I am now.

They understood mortality in a way they hoped I didn't have to. And I didn't, until today. Today, I lived a day in the life of my oldest sister, a day devoted to a new life -- a flame to keep an older life warm. A day of driving, shopping, waiting, attending, cooking, cleaning, and cuddling a kitten; a day redeemed by the fragile new life that is always emerging somewhere -- so why not here?

"Was I stupid to get this cat?," she asked me. I replied that I thought it's always better to regret having done something than having not done something. This still-nameless, tremulous, terrified, trusting kitten is life itself to Jacques, and even more so to my sister, who noted that said cat, a two-month old Siamese, could be with her until she's 80.

At that point, I'll be 67 or so -- older than she is now. People we love will have died by then (cats, too). We will have become yet more experienced in caring for, perhaps even being cared for by, people we love and whom we hope will still love us. We will be experienced mourners. Our ambitions, should we have them, will be brutally modest.

Or we'll be entirely gone. And if that's the case, we'll leave only love behind; not the kind of love that sets the world on fire, but the kind that changes soiled sheets and clips toenails and adjusts your position in the bed; the kind that puts your wheelchair where you can see the birds and the squirrels; the kind that feeds you like a baby bird.

The kind that's sad and vigilant and inexhaustible. The kind that lasts forever.

--T.A.