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Eenie Meenie Miney

I’ll be the first to admit that I have been left far behind in the vocabularic peculiarities that are now used to describe non-normative sexuality. Perhaps it’s Age, but more likely naïveté, that has led to this deficiency rather than lack of exposure.

I entered medical school in the mid-sixties when the youth were beginning to out themselves, and when some of the gloves were starting to come off -or maybe there was a growing awareness that a few of them had actually been wearing gloves. At the time -at least in my  school- Medicine seemed bicameral and only accepted two genders, male and female, with perhaps the door held slightly ajar for babies born with ambiguous genitalia or other genetic syndromes that made classification difficult.

For some of us, at least, it was a simpler time. Gender and sexual assignation were one and the same; preference as to which was really which was non-negotiable. But times and self-designation began to change; Medicine and the Law limped behind until the rift started to expose the consequences of their inaction.

I’d like to pretend that I saw these coming but, alas, I had no idea of the scope of the issue. In fact, in my mind, this straying from the norms was at best a marginal fashion. Anatomically, at least, we were what we had been assigned, and I assumed that perhaps the fullness of time and the machinations of society would iron any deviations into the acceptable crease. I had not reckoned with the discontent that enforced conformity might produce. When one has not experienced qualms, when one accepts the way the chromosomal dice have landed, it is not easy to grasp the uneasy restlessness of those few who will not play the game… or were not willing to join either team.

I say ‘few’ because I did not know; I did not understand. In time, of course, the discrepancies became too obvious to ignore in practice. At least in my gynaecological practice…

At first, there was confusion, I suppose -mine at first, perhaps- but theirs too. Not about their role, but mine. Initially, my lack of training forced me merely to listen, to empathize and then to help when and where I could. And, naïvely, I thought that was likely all that was required -and maybe all that they could reasonably expect. There was much psychological turmoil and disbelief that there was so little I could do, and yet I was relieved that I had heard them without disparaging their distress, or trivializing their problems.

But it soon became apparent that the eventual ramifications of their choices had the potential for far deeper consequences than either side had anticipated. And I’m not sure that I even appreciated the extent of the consequences of this disparity until after I retired. Only then, for example, did I come across an essay in the BBC Future series that touched upon some of the problematic issues. In an essay, Zaria Gorvett, a freelance science journalist for BBC, addressed the problem of why transgender people are ignored by modern medicine and what that might mean for their health: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200814-why-our-medical-systems-are-ignoring-transgender-people

‘[T]here are thought to be nearly a million transgender people living in the US… Rather than devising new ways to cope with changing social norms, transgender people are often shoehorned into inappropriate boxes instead.’

And the example she starts with is ‘a transgender man – he identifies as male but his biological sex is female. He has been living as a man for around 20 years… he is registered as a man on all his legal documents, from his passport to his medical records.’ All along, he had been taking small doses of the male hormone testosterone, but he suffered kidney failure and his condition deteriorated, therefore necessitating a kidney transplant. The criteria, for consideration of transplantation, however, differ between men and women and he lost valuable time in sorting out what criteria would apply to him.

As Gorvett points out, ‘When you factor in the large data gaps in everything from the average life expectancy of transgender people to the right dosages of medications for their bodies, along with the widespread lack of knowledge among doctors about how to address them – let alone treat them – and the high chance of them being refused treatment outright, it soon becomes clear that transgender medicine is in crisis.’

Indeed, in the UK, ‘“You can register as male or female, but you can still only choose between these two options – you can’t say if you are transgender or non-binary,” explains Kamilla Kamaruddin, a doctor who works for the National Health Service (NHS) and transgender woman. “So that’s quite difficult.” Or, if gender issues seem irrelevant to the visit, the patient may choose not to mention it, because of perceived stigma.

And, ‘The gender you’re registered as also dictates which screening tests you are invited to, meaning that thousands of transgender men could be missing out on potentially life-saving cervical (Pap) smears and breast exams, while transgender women could be missing out on abdominal aortic aneurism check-ups (or prostate cancer screenings, if they live in the US).’

Male and female physiology are different and many medications behave differently in each. ‘Females also have more sites for certain drugs to bind to, and are therefore more sensitive to them. They tend to clear them more slowly, so they are more susceptible to overdoses.’

Perhaps because of the stigma and subsequent lifestyle, ‘The group has higher rates of heart disease, certain cancers, mental health problems, suicide, smoking, and substance abuse than the general population – as well as an HIV prevalence which is  up to 42 times the national average. Transgender people are not only more likely to get sick, but less likely to seek treatment when they do.’

Still, I think we’re beginning to understand the problems they face. This gender dysphoria is an ancient condition, though, and actually gender fluidity may go back farther still. Gorvett writes about more enlightened recent attempts at assisting both with surgery and with hormonal replacement. The problem, however, is in the continuing stigmatization of those who are not mainstream. Those who do not fit neatly into societally condoned roles.

Maybe my age is tempering my reaction, or clouding my judgment, but I do wonder why there continues to be such marked antipathy to those who do not look like us, behave like us, or (gasp) think like us. Are we so insecure in who we are that we are threatened? And is it redress for the difference that we seek, an expectation of contrition? Do we really demand repentance, or is it homogenization?

I, for one, have come to think that the world would be a poorer place if we -the cis creatures- and we alone, were all that was on offer…

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A shoe for your thoughts

I have often wondered about shoes. Not their styles, or colours, of course -I am indifferent to fashion- but rather about the protection they afford. The benefits they offer. Although I no doubt toddled around the floors barefoot when I was too young to know any better, and even if I nowadays relish the feel of grassy lawns or sandy beaches on the unshod skin of my tender feet, I am still on guard, lest I feel too much.

Feet are like that, though: pampered and protected from the world beneath them. On them sits the heavy responsibility of moving through the world; on them resides the ability to investigate what hides around the corner or what lives beyond the hill ahead. On them rests the weight of being.

I suppose I could have treated them differently from the start, eschewed (sorry) their comfort at least wherever society did not mandate their use, but I saw things differently then –felt things differently then. There are likely reasons why evolution gifted us with soles as sensitive as fingers; in our ape days -our chimp days- it was no doubt a valuable resource in our daily arboreal quest for food and mates, but times moves on. Gravel exists, broken glass and thorns adorn our paths, asphalt heats up like the barbecues we often use; it is the ground on which we move; it is not a tree world, anymore.

And yet, sometimes I wish it had been different. Sometimes I yearn to caress the ground beneath me like a face, but I realize I have left it too late. It would be painful now. But I can dream, and hunt for stories of those who have lived life differently -or at least, like me, have had adventuresome thoughts. Life lived in imaginative worlds is, after all, why we read.

I stumbled, quite by accident, upon an essay by a fellow traveller who had considered the zeitgeist of shoes with far more intellectual rigour than I could ever have hoped to achieve. Randy Laist is professor of English at Goodwin University in East Hartford, Connecticut, and his essay, entitled What do shoes do? immediately attracted my long-dormant curiosity on the subject: https://aeon.co/essays/why-shoes-act-as-a-symbolic-foundation-for-human-identity

He, too, was forced to confront the existential crisis of hope meeting reality: ‘My feet, blissfully shoeless, arrive at the curb to meet a jagged expanse of sun-baked asphalt, gravelly pebbles and the remnants of smashed beer bottles.’ It is a challenge we would all face in an unshod world -an unfair choice. But there is no doubt we have left something valuable behind. ‘As Shantideva, the 8th-century Buddhist monk observed, with the leather soles of just my shoes, it is as though I covered the whole earth in leather.’

And as Laist adds, ‘This leather planet, the world created by shoes, is different from the barefoot world: detached, abstracted, insulated. It is a world less concerned with the topography of the ground and less attentive to its objects and textures. It is ‘duller’ and less ‘sensitive’. At the same time, this artificialised condition releases me from the grip of my physical circumstances and lets me ‘transcend’ the physical world toward my own desires… The most fundamental thing about my shoes is not the way they look or what they do, but how they affect my mobility, my freedom and, therefore, my being. They act, even if at a subconscious level, as the literal foundation for my understanding of myself, specifically as that understanding informs my sense of where I can go – what kinds of projects are within my sphere of possible futures.’ The choice nowadays is, in essence, a Hobson’s choice.

‘The shoe, one of the oldest forms of human technology, is the prototype for all other technologies, a catch-all term for instruments and procedures that allow us to break ‘the surly bonds of earth’ and proceed into unnatural or unwelcoming environments.’ Laist then waxes even more poetic. ‘Vehicles such as cars, boats and rocket ships are like shoes writ large. Spacesuits, hazmat suits and vaccines are like whole-body shoes. The media of language and art can also be thought of as technologies in this sense; like shoes, they also separate us from direct experience to provide us with a new, ‘heightened’ reality.’

I like that thought -that I have perhaps, only traded worlds: one movie theatre for another. My son, in the way of most very young children, saw that from the start, of course. And yet, I wonder if he was seeing a different movie from me, even if I still feature in it. It was a very much less complicated life when he was young, and I still remember one incident as if it was yesterday.

Michael used to watch me, study my every move, and then try to copy it. I’d noticed, for example, that when he prowled the back yard behind the house, he grasped his hands behind his back like me as if he was considering something important. And if I happened to be wearing a hat that day, he wanted his, too. Our children are us in more than genetics.

I used to sit on the porch overlooking the lawn when he was out there, but since it was an old wooden structure, and rough enough to have splinters, I usually wore shoes. This frustrated him, I could tell -he liked to run around on the grass without shoes or socks- and I remember he asked me about it one day.

“Daddy,” he asked, standing on the lawn next to the porch, “You said you liked to walk on the grass in your bare feet…”

I smiled and nodded. “I’m not on the grass right now, Michael.”

He kind of nodded his head as he thought about my answer for a moment. “But you could be…”

I smiled again. “I’m afraid I might get splinters when I stepped back on the porch, if I had bare feet though.”

He tilted his head at that, clearly puzzled. “What’s a spinter, daddy?”

I had to chuckle. “A splinter is a little piece that pokes out of the wood and sticks into your skin.”

“Does it hurt…?”

“Well,” -I didn’t want to frighten him about the porch- “sometimes, I guess, but you have to pull it out of your skin before it goes in even further.”

I could tell by his face that he was processing the information inside somewhere. “Is that why we always wear shoes on the sidewalk and stuff?”

How do you explain societal customs to a 4 year old? “The skin on your feet is pretty sensitive, don’t you think?” He nodded, trusting I wouldn’t try to fool him about that. “And you don’t know what else you might also have to walk over, do you?”

He thought about it some more. So far it seemed to make sense to him. “So you have to guard your skin, Daddy?” He wasn’t really asking, I don’t think -just working his way through the idea. Then he raised his head to look straight at me. “But my feet like the feel of the grass and it’s soft…”

He walked away from me with his hands behind his back. There was a lot of thinking to do, obviously.

That afternoon after we had lunch, I told him he could play out in the yard again, and I would be out on the porch in in a few minutes.

“Maybe we can play catch, Daddy?” he asked, hopefully.

I nodded and went to look for a big ball we could throw around. When I came out, I sat down on the edge of the porch and removed my shoes and socks to make him happy. But I didn’t see him at first –I suppose he was playing in the bushes at the end of the lawn. “Michael,” I shouted. “I thought you wanted to play catch…”

He suddenly emerged from behind a tree at one corner of the yard, wearing his thick red winter socks. “I’m ready to play catch now, Daddy,” he said, running over to the porch.

I have to say I must have stared at his socks, because his face broke into a broad smile when he noticed my surprise.

“Whadya think, Daddy? Good idea, eh?” Then he noticed I was barefoot. “You don’t have to take everything off to feel the grass, you know…” he said, staring at my feet. “I’ve got my soft shoes on…”

Michael never stops teaching me things.

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We came crying hither

I have to wonder about myself nowadays. I used to be a typical, societally conditioned male who seldom shed tears; I kept my grief tightly wrapped, and only unexpected pain, or major anguish was able to wet the cloth. Nowadays, though, I find myself weeping at the strangest things -and not all of them sad. Compassion or forgiveness from strangers often makes me well up. The other day on the TV news, the sight of the head of state hugging a woman, who only moments before had been screaming invectives at him from a crowd was enough to have me sobbing. The trusting eyes of an injured dog is too much for me to watch; even the minor key of a Rachmaninoff prelude is often enough to make me wipe my cheeks.

Apart from being oversaturated with years, I’m not sure what has changed in my life; maybe I’m just top-heavy with the time, I have been allotted. And yet, I don’t mean to speak of tears as undesirable, or somehow a weakness. In fact, if anything, they make me feel more in touch with… well, with things out there -things outside my body. Things that were not obviously linked to me -until, that is, I realized they were. To paraphrase, the work of the 17th century poet, John Donne, ‘Nothing is an island entire of itself; everything is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… the death of anything diminishes me, because I am involved in the world.’

Anyway, it seems to me that’s how I feel, and it manifests itself in tears of recognition with some long-lost connection I’ve stumbled across; I am an old man finally digesting his years, cataloguing them and putting them in some semblance of order, finding meaning in the never-ending chaos of Life. So, yes, it is a sweet sorrow, but how, or why, the feeling is connected with tears has remained as much a mystery to me as the relief -or is it satisfaction- I experience from the episode.

I happened upon an essay the other day by Thomas Dixon director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University in London whose title seemed to promise some answers:  https://aeon.co/essays/read-it-and-weep-what-it-means-when-we-cry

He starts by suggesting that ‘Since ancient times, philosophers and scientists have tried to explain weeping as part of a shared human language of emotional expression. But, in fact, a tear on its own means nothing. As they well up in our eyes, or dribble down our cheeks, the meanings of those salty droplets can only be tentatively inferred by others, and then only when they know much more about the particular mental, social, and narrative contexts that gave rise to them.

‘We cry in sadness, grief and mourning, but also from joy and laughter. Some are moved to tears of pity by human suffering; others have wept the enraged tears of the oppressed. A tear-streaked cheek might be produced by nothing more than a yawn or a chopped onion.’ 

But, he soon gets waylaid by other, less noble ways of viewing them: ‘Theories of tears have always struggled to do justice to their threefold nature, as secretions, symptoms and signs. Are tears to be treated like urination, like a rash, or like a work of art? Does their interpretation require the expertise of the physiologist, the physician, or the metaphysician?… Those who object to public weeping often refer to it as a kind of ‘emotional incontinence’.’ I find it hard to view tears that way; I have to hope it’s more of a cultural thing -and yet it explains nothing to me.

Nor am I particularly enamoured with the mid 20th century psychoanalytical approach, attributing tears to either ‘repression [or] regression. The first implies that tears are a kind of overflow or discharge of previously repressed emotion, while the second presents the phenomenon of adult weeping as some sort of return to infantile, even prenatal, experiences and emotions.’ A bit too contrived, I think.

Darwin had a similar penchant for the laboured explanation of tears: ‘Tears, for Darwin, were never more than a side-effect of some other, useful behaviour. He started from the observation that the reflex secretion of tears was initially caused by ‘the irritation of any foreign body in the eye’. He then hypothesised that in cases of loud infant screaming, during which the eyes were closed tightly, that same reflex could be brought into action by pressure on the lachrymal glands. Over many generations, Darwin speculated, the association of tears with infant screams of pain and hunger gradually became extended to painful mental states of all kinds, so that tears could be produced even in the absence of irritating foreign bodies, or of screams.’ Uhmm…

Nobody seems to have come even close to a consensus, and as in previous considerations of the inscrutable, I am reminded again of St. Augustine’s likely apocryphal observation about Time: What then is Time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

And, despite the autumn of my long list of years, I’m not sure I know what to make of tears, either. I suppose I’m not even certain what questions need to be asked, but then again, maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Asking the wrong people.

I remember when my daughter was still very small, and largely innocent of the ways of her elders. One summer’s evening, while I was reading on the porch, I saw her sitting quietly on the grass behind the house, just staring at the trees that guard us from the traffic on the distant road. The wind was riffling roughly through the leaves, and a robin was complaining about another bird that had just flown onto a neighbouring tree. Catherine seemed to be listening intently, rocking her body this way and that, obviously enjoying the branches swaying in the wind as if they were conducting an orchestra.

She looked so at home out there, so totally enmeshed in the moment, it seemed removed from time; the yard was an enchanted faerie ring. I put my book aside, swept up in the awe of the scene and walked over to feel her magic.

At first, she didn’t hear me, but when she turned her head I saw her face was streaked with tears.

I put my arm around her and hugged her. “Cath,” I whispered, so as not to break the spell. “Are you all right, sweetie?” But her eyes were calm, and her expression was enraptured. Beatific, almost.

She looked at me for a moment before answering, and I could see a puzzled look slowly forming on her face -as if she could not quite understand the question. Then she smiled, as if she suddenly realized my confusion.

“I wasn’t crying, daddy,” she said, stroking my cheek with her little fingers. “I was just emptying my eyes…”

I should have known, I suppose…

by

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

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Hypomnematamania

I wouldn’t exactly call myself a hypomnematamaniac, or anything. Actually, I just discovered the  concept of hypomnemata quite recently -a few days ago, in fact. I had a bit of time on my well-washed, socially distanced hands, I suppose, and the thought occurred to me that I had never read all of Plato’s Republic, nor had I ever completely conquered Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, although I had heard interesting things about him when I was in university. Imbued with the same spirit, I thought I might even tiptoe past the first page in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and see how far I could get.

But let’s face it, even assuming I had been able to accomplish these things, and that any of my friends had ever heard of the authors -or actually cared- would I be any better off? Sometimes, even if you’re terminally bored, you just don’t want to read the entire 2000 word magnum opus by some philosopher with an unpronounceable name -especially when, with a little luck, there’d be a three or four sentence synopsis of their thoughts in Wikipedia. You don’t always have to confess your sources to impress people…

At any rate, it got me wondering about the primacy of message over methodology. Do we enjoy poetry for its information or its enchantment; Shakespeare for instruction, or pleasure? Is there, in other words, something greater than plot -the messenger looming as large as the message?

There was a pre-internet time, millennia ago, when a younger me was enamoured of the précis. It first occurred to me when a friend reminded me that we were supposed to hand in a book report the next day on some assigned reading in my first year university English Lit course; I had been busy with other of my own reading. She recommended her copy of the Classic Comic Book version that managed to reify the story. Why in the world would I try to read something as unreadable as Spencer’s The Faerie Queene when somebody had already done it for me -even if it was only Book 1? It was my first hypomnema, I suppose -although it was not really a series of notes, or observations on the story, as much as a plot summary… Okay, a cheat-sheet. But any port in a storm, eh? And anyway, you have to start somewhere.

But the years have changed me -or perhaps it’s merely my reading material; I am now as impressed with the presentation as with the point it’s trying to make. The realization that I am the messenger of my own story is sobering. And, as with most stories, there are parts of it that might themselves be singled out for further study, lessons that could be learned even while the narrative continues apace. In fact, analyses of these snippets might well presage the conclusion -point to where it might all end up.

Indeed, the rather pedestrian thought occurred to me that these clues are embedded in most stories -it’s how they progress. So it was with some relief to find that I wasn’t alone in this line of thought -although in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In his essay, Andrew Hui, an associate professor in literature at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, suggests that much of the historical development of philosophy may be reducible to a series of short aphorisms describing their tenets:   https://aeon.co/essays/aphorisms-tell-philosophys-history-as-fragments-not-systems

He rather likes the tidiness of aphorisms and asks ‘What if we see the history of philosophy not as a grand system of sustained critique but as a series of brilliant fragments?’ Why indeed? Much as I enjoyed all of my university philosophy courses, there were only so many insights I could take home with me each night. Only so much wisdom I could store, let alone retrieve over the years.

So, the packaging was important; aphorisms are only lightly wrapped. And after all, even ‘science turns what is a mere aggregate of random thoughts into something coherent.’ But you have to start with the thoughts, the ideas, the intuition before coherence develops. And they may not all overlap. We, the beneficiaries can only hold so much.

I suppose I took what I thought was important from all and sundry: Descartes, no matter how many other fields he influenced, started me thinking with one simple aphorism: ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. Or Socrates: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’; Plato: ‘Time is the image of eternity’; Aristotle, Plato’s pupil: ‘What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies’; Thomas Huxley: ‘Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.’ But, although the list seems endless, whatever I quote still requires examination -the aphorism is merely the gate to a further field of thought -the fence only holds the idea, it does not describe it. That is the recipient’s duty. ‘Good aphorisms demand to be interpreted. And in their interpretation is an invitation for the readers to engage in their own philosophical enterprise – to do philosophy themselves. Aphorisms, then, are at once before, against and after philosophy.’

And yes, I imagine there is certainly a benefit for someone disciplined enough weld these pithy statements into lengthy profundities -organizing them much like putting similar essays in one box. I cannot argue that. But how much of that discipline would accompany me through the years? Only the wisdom, probably; only the succinct observations.

There was, of course, a time when I was closer to the source -a time when I was still in university and trying to decide what to do with my life. I had been asked to consider an academic career, and I think the idea probably went to my head; Margaret was not pleased, to say the least. At any rate, it resulted in the woman with whom I’d been in a rather tenuous relationship deciding to leave me. It was the 60ies, and the second wave of Feminism was crashing into the Vancouver beaches. I’m not sure whether that played a role in her decision, but she quoted Simone de Beauvoir at me on that fateful night in a West End restaurant, I remember.

I had just attempted to congratulate myself for being considered for the academic invitation with a toast. Perhaps I initiated it too loudly, though, because several people in the restaurant turned around to stare at me. Margaret, clearly embarrassed, scowled at me, gathered her coat, and stood up to leave. When I stared at her, wondering what I had done, she wrinkled her face, obviously furious, and hissed at me – “Qu’est-ce qu’un adulte? Un enfant gonflé d’âge”. We were both in the same philosophy courses, so I recognized it as a Simone de Beauvoir quote from her Woman Destroyed: ‘What is an adult? A child blown up by age.’ It hurt, and yet, as sometimes happens with a remark made in anger, she was right…  How could I forget it?

I thought about her accusation for years after we parted company, even though I declined my professor’s offer and wandered elsewhere instead.

And so, along with the likes of Santayana, Spinoza and Sartre, the aphorisms of Simone de Beauvoir have also  accompanied me into old age. Not their entire oeuvres, mind you, just the important bits of their thoughts: hypomnemata -much like another fragment that has wedged itself in my head from the poet Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

I would not have it any other way…

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Who’s there?

The past is prologue, isn’t it? Or at least it can help to explain how we now think about things -whether we accept the inevitability of uncertainty or flee from it like a pestilence. Of course, nothing can ever be completely certain: the sun may not rise tomorrow and yet we must act as if it will or accept that any plans or dreams we harbour are pointless. On the other hand, certainty itself is a spectrum…

I didn’t mean to bathe uncertainty in such an academic light, but it underlies an age-old schism of thought that I hadn’t appreciated until I happened upon an essay contrasting the views of no less personages than René Descartes, and Shakespeare. Written by Lorenzo Zucca, a professor of law at King’s College London, I felt at times I was attending a seminar on 17th century thought. https://psyche.co/ideas/much-ado-about-uncertainty-how-shakespeare-navigates-doubt   I suppose I was…

That Shakespeare lived in an age of uncertainty is well known; one of the biggest issues was religious conflict. Zucca sets the stage: ‘In the premodern world, religion provided absolute certainty: whatever we knew was implanted in our mind by God. We didn’t have to look any further. Once that system of beliefs started to collapse, Europe was left with a yawning gap. Religion no longer seemed capable to explain the world. René Descartes and Shakespeare, who were contemporaries, gave opposite answers to the sceptical challenge: Descartes believed that our quest for knowledge could be rebuilt and founded on indubitable certainties. Shakespeare, on the other hand, made uncertainty a leitmotiv of all his works, and harnessed its creative power.’

Take Hamlet, for example. ‘The whole play is marked by a deep doubt about how perception can mislead us… This sweeping type of uncertainty, let us call it philosophical doubt, has to do with the limits of human ability to know the world from a subjective viewpoint. How can we be certain that our beliefs are anchored in an indubitable perception? What if we are dreaming or hallucinating? Hamlet is a young philosopher who is incapable of making up his mind about anything.’

And then, of course, there’s Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum -the certainty that although he could be deceived about the truth of what he saw or thought, the fact that there was something that was thinking could not be denied. Certainty could, and did exist, even in the fog of uncertainty that cloaked much else.

But, can we even compare the visions of poetry with the logical assessment of philosophy? Is it merely pears piled on top of potatoes? Can we –should we- accept uncertainty?

Well, according to Zucca, ‘Shakespeare’s vision from uncertainty brings together the imagination of a poet, the judgment of a philosopher, and the creativity of a scientist. Being capable to stare into the abyss without being swiped away emotionally is a great attitude for whoever wishes to further our understanding of the world and the way we live in it.’ After all, ‘Moralising is another way of creating certainty out of chaos, and that would impinge on the view from uncertainty. It would require creating cardboard characters: villains with no redeeming features… Uncertainty makes freedom and creativity possible.’

Zucca asks us to imagine a life of absolute certainty –‘We would know our time and place of death, when we’d fall in love, and what our job would be. Who would be our friends and who the enemies.’ Would that be a life worth living? Maybe ‘Violence and conflicts arise from the confrontation of dogmatic, certainty-obsessed worldviews. The vision from uncertainty asks us to keep making sense of our life without imposing our values over one another.’

In a totally different Magisterium, I suppose, I am reminded of the days when I used to make up little stories to tell my daughter before she went to sleep at night. She loved the fairy-tales that I read from books, of course. She liked the idea that the words printed on the page magically contained the stories -as if pictures and ideas somehow hid inside them and my job was to unveil them for her.

Sometimes, though, she would fold her little arms over her chest and chide me for changing the words, or skipping over parts that she particularly enjoyed. But one time, when we were on a trip in my Volkswagen camper van and I’d forgotten our regular books, I decided to try something different.

“How good are you at imagining things in your head, Cath?”

She looked at me with the perceptivity of a three year old. “Did you lose the fairy book, daddy?” was her first reaction.

“Well, I forgot to bring it, I guess. But would you like to see if you can imagine a new story in your head?”

After looking around me to see if I was just hiding her bedtime book, she sighed theatrically and nodded her head -better a new story than no story was written all over her face.

So I made up a story about the adventures of a little girl, Dorothy, who lived in a bread-box and Catherine loved it so much that she asked me to tell it to her again the next night. But she questioned me before I began.

“Dorothy and I had a nice time last night, daddy. Does she do something different tonight?”

“Are sure you want her to, Cath?” Certainty had seemed her gospel with the fairy-tales. But maybe that was because it came with the assuredness of pre-printed words and pictures. There was an order to them that was hard to circumvent. Dorothy and the breadbox, though, was a different world -a world Catherine had begun to imagine and it was open. Uncertain.

She nodded her head, excitedly. “I can’t wait to watch something different in my mind tonight,” she said and settled as comfortably on my lap as the cramped little seats in the van allowed. And then she looked up at me with a wiser, older expression on her face. “It’s nice when there’s no picture on the page that tells me what to see,” she added, and waited with an expectant smile, eager for the night’s drama to unfold.

by

The gift of accompaniment

I remember it from my medical practice; I remember it from dealing with friends with incurable illness: the feeling of helplessness in commiseration. The recognition that my often naïve suggestions, intended to help, were not what was required, nor even wanted, for that matter. Sometimes there are no solutions; sometimes presence –listening- in itself is enough… No, not enough, but at least comforting.

I suppose some people come to this realization naturally -instinctively understanding what is needed- while for others it is absorbed only gradually and after much trial and error. Some issues require solutions, guidance, and expertise, but some require the simpler yet more difficult task of companionship. Being there, often with wordless compassion. Silent empathy.

Not trying for control and directing things can be difficult, but usually there is a time for silence. Sometimes, there is an inevitability that simply has to be accepted. It’s a subject that many of us would rather not confront, and yet we have to -it is important. Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to the short essay in Aeon written by Nicholaos Jones, department chair and professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. https://aeon.co/ideas/at-times-of-suffering-the-greatest-gift-is-accompaniment-by-another

Jones writes about the issues that often accompany suffering: ‘despair, dissonance and desolation: despair as hopes for the future confront the inevitability of fate; dissonance between an imagined future and present reality; and the desolation of being alienated and isolated when others withdraw.’ We want so badly to solve the problem, and console the suffering person that we find it hard simply to listen without interfering. Indeed, their despair can become our own.

A remedy he suggests -if that’s an appropriate word to use- is one of ‘accompaniment’, and his way of illustrating the process is, in itself, helpful and imaginative. ‘In music, the accompaniment is the musical part that supports the melody or main themes of a musical performance, as when an organist or guitarist accompanies a choir, or a drummer and bass player accompany a lead singer… accompanying another involves lending support to the other in ways that amplify or strengthen their efforts… accompaniment aims to acknowledge and engage with the efforts of another – not for the sake of helping the other achieve some goal that’s impossible to achieve on one’s own, but for the sake of enriching, and making manifest the value of, the other’s efforts.’

So, ‘To accompany another is to give companionship against despair… one who accompanies offers consolation, being with another in their solitude by creating opportunities for testimony, listening and hearing without judgment, and reinforcing the other’s dignity by acknowledging their experience and struggle.’

There’s something about that which strikes a chord, don’t you think? There are times when we need to recognize that not everything can be solved -an exceptionally difficult concept to accept. But, it’s important to embrace a truth the other knows all too well, and in so doing, embrace them. Indeed, ‘It succeeds not by resolving problems but by aligning with the other – experiencing the other’s suffering in common, allowing the other’s struggle to matter.’

I learned something about that in my early years of medical training when, as a third year medical student, I was assigned to the gerontology ward of a general hospital. In fact, it was a sort of bribe, I suspect: in turn for doing entrance physical exams and handling the nighttime preliminary calls by the nurses for the elderly patients, I was given free room and board.

There wasn’t really that much to it, so I spent a lot of time reading, and talking to the patients. One patient in particular, still stands out in my memory, however. Jane was a 94 year old, frail looking woman who always seemed to have her wheelchair placed near a window overlooking a little park in front of the hospital. Loosely strapped in the seat so she wouldn’t fall out when her head occasionally fell forward in a medication-enhanced somnolence, she never seemed to bother with any of the other patients who talked to each other while similarly positioned by the same window.

I was new to gerontology, and, apart from my recently retired parents, I had never before had much interaction with the elderly, so I wandered over to talk to her. I have to say I was a little unnerved by the thinness of her skin, the sparsity of the spiderweb hair remaining on her scalp, and the degree to which her cheekbones were so prominently on display. She kept grinding her gums together, almost as if her tongue was searching for some teeth and she barely looked at me as I pulled up a chair beside her.

“Hi,” I started, a little nervous about how to talk with someone so old. “My name is G -well anyway, that’s what everybody calls me- and I’m the medical student assigned to your ward…”

She turned enough to allow me into her head through two large rheumy eyes that rotated in their sockets as easily as well-greased ball bearings. A tentative smile appeared briefly on her thin lips, and then quickly disappeared. “How do you do?” she answered -rather formally, I thought. “My name is Jane… Did they send you over here to cheer me up?” she added, as if it was what the nurses did if they remembered.

I shrugged, rather embarrassed at the thought that I had been sent on an errand. “No… I’ve just seen you sitting here day after day, and thought I’d introduce myself.”

She studied my face for a moment and then blinked. “I thought perhaps they sent you to convince me to take some more of their pills.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that -I was just learning to be a doctor. “Pills for what, Jane?”

Her face relaxed into another brief smile, and she looked away again. “Cancer, and pain, mostly…”

“So… Are you not taking them?”

“Sometimes -when the pain gets too bad, I relent a bit.”

“But…”

Her smile broadened and she finally turned her head to look right at me. “But you can’t convince me, G.”

I was confused. “But why don’t you take them?”

She sighed and her eyes softened as she tried to decipher my question. “I’m 94 years old,” she started, her voice soft and confident. “And I’ve had a good life. There’s no cure for Age, nor is there a cure for my cancer. The pills just make me miserable…”

“Are there no other pills they could try?” I was trying to make sense of her rebellion and she must have seen that.

Like two little birds, she sent her eyes to slowly circle my face before she allowed them to rest on my cheeks. I could tell she was trying to read my expression. I must have looked puzzled, because she reached over and grasped my hand to reassure me.

“I’m sure this is hard for a young doctor like you to understand, but I don’t fear Death…” she said, smiling at the notion. “…No more than I fear Life at any rate,” she added.

The idea of accepting death was new to me, and I suppose it showed on my face because she squeezed my hand more strongly this time.

“None of us can live forever, Dr. G. Life’s not a battle we have to keep on fighting… Eventually, we’re allowed to walk away if we want.”

I smiled and stroked her fingers with my hand. It was her eyes that smiled at me in response.

Thinking back to that time, I realized I had learned something they’d never covered in my lectures. Of course, Jones was right in his essay about the value of accompaniment, but I have to wonder if it was Jane who was actually accompanying me…

by

I am undone

By now, you’d think we’d have a pretty good idea who we are. I mean, we’ve been assessing and predicting things about each other since… well, a long time. And because each of us feels a pretty unbroken identity from when they were a child, it probably makes sense to assume others do as well. ‘I am that I am,’ is the transliteration of what the voice in the burning bush told Moses. Identity is fixed; it’s only the attributes that change… Or are they actually co-dependent?

Is there another way of assigning identity other than by characteristics, or traits? One obvious way is by appearance, of course, although that changes over time. So, what is the form of identity for which we are searching in, say, a long lost friend? What are the interpersonal interactions all about? What is it that makes her that same person you knew, even if she now seems… different? Imponderables all.

I began to wonder if the whole question of what I’ve relied on to determine a friend’s identity may be couched in my expectations -as if they were buried, somehow, in what their peculiarities had meant to me, and therefore, perhaps, in what I hoped to get out of the  encounter. Who I, not they, in other words, had become.

Not certain if this was a helpful insight, I decided to keep an eye peeled for writings touching on the subject. An article, written by the journalist Carlin Flora, a former features editor at Psychology Today, but writing this time in the online publication, Aeon, seemed close: https://aeon.co/essays/are-novelists-or-psychologists-better-at-describing-people

Entitled ‘Indescribable You’ she asks ‘Can novelists or psychologists better capture the strange multitude of realities in every human self?’ She starts by quoting a paragraph of an author describing some of the attributes of a character in his novel which ‘touches upon [her] looks, social class, psychology and behaviours. It’s hard to imagine a better description, and it’s certainly superior to what people provide to each other conversationally or on dating websites. And yet, any particular reader will project his or her own stored images, memories and worldview upon [her]… we’re constantly describing ourselves and others.’

But, ‘Writers search for emotional granularity, consequential details and apt metaphors, while sociologists and personality psychologists have come up with sorting tools such as the ‘Big Five’ personality traits – extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness… But across time and contexts, any of these characteristics can change… A million tiny human factors – tone of voice, brand of shoes, frequency of smiles – form a gestalt as difficult to pick apart as it is to pin down. If a person contains multitudes and is perhaps even infinite, how can we compare infinities? … This fluid state of affairs is often captured best by writers, who tend to have an agenda when delineating characters.’

Indeed, ‘Novelists know that behaviour is always more revelatory than a grocery list of traits… writers often expose not the ‘truth’ about someone, but rather the gaping distance between how they see themselves and how others view them.’

We seldom have omniscience, however: what we experience, is what we get, and any analysis is, by necessity, only temporary. Even if we have used the ‘Big Five’ personality traits in an attempt to categorize their tendencies, as Flora writes, ‘Tendencies, while real, are not as revealing as countertrends: a friend is an extravert, except when she’s with her colleagues. A daughter is agreeable at school, but pretty cranky at home.’ We are all contextually fluid in other words, and our -and their- personalities, quirks, and preferences are all bundled together.

This was on my mind when I saw her: the short thin woman apparently holding court with a friend in the middle of the Food Area of a large shopping mall. With her shock of fluffy red hair, and gesticulating arms it was typical Jane. If there were people around, she’d find a table somewhere amongst them, hoping for inquisitive glances that she could return with interest.

She had always been like that -all through university, at any rate. But I hadn’t seen her since graduation. We were frequent lab-partners in our biology classes because our last names both started with the same letter. Even when we first met, it was as if I’d known her for years -and since I hadn’t, there was a lot of ground for her to cover. Her curiosity was insatiable, both about me, and about whatever classes we shared.

I remember the time of our first assignment, when I found it difficult to risk dissecting the long-dead-and-pickled Taenia solium (pig tapeworm). I tried, unsuccessfully, to hide behind my eyes I think, but she just laughed, picked it up with her bare hands, and pointed out its frightening scolex through a magnifying glass she’d brought for the occasion. Jane was like that.

She was always a pleasure to be with, even if I didn’t want to talk. And if I didn’t ask her a question about something, she’d answer as if I’d meant to ask -always with a warm smile that threatened to break into a laugh if she caught me staring at her.

We both enjoyed each other’s company, so I’m not sure why we lost track of each other, but I imagine my being shy didn’t help. And then, of course, our career paths diverged and, well, new memories greeted us both.

And yet I never forgot her, so when I saw her unmistakable hairdo even from across the Food Court, I knew I had to say hello. I waited until her friend left to pick up their orders, and decided to walk over and say hello.

“Hi,” I managed to rasp, feeling dizzy because my heart was pounding so fast.

She looked up from her coffee with a start, and managed an embryonic smile for me. “Hi,” she answered, warily, and stared at me for a moment.

There was an awkward silence.

“I… I’m G,” I stammered, using the nickname she’d always called me. “Biology at McMaster…?”

The smile never left her lips, but her eyes scanned my face as if it contained a barcode somewhere that might help.

There was no question in my mind that it was Jane. She had the same olive-green eyes, the same slightly lob-sided grin she had always unleashed whenever she was puzzled in Biology class. “We were lab partners, in Biology… maybe nine or ten years ago…” I explained to the still baffled face

But, except for the little grin, her face remained a blank slate, and her eyes continued to sample my expression, hoping for a clue. Suddenly, they stopped, mid-scan and seemed to fixate on my hair. It was always bursting with unruly curls that I’d never been able to tame.

“Oh, yes… Now I remember you,” she said slowly, and a little uncertainly for my liking. “Didn’t you have trouble with a tapeworm or something…?”

I nodded hopefully.

“It’s nice seeing you again,” she added, obviously pleased with herself for remembering, even though her voice didn’t seem that happy I’d suddenly re-appeared in her life.

The painful silence returned and obviously neither of us could think of anything more to say. The thousand questions that had been bubbling through my mind seemed suddenly inappropriate. Things had changed.

I suppose time does that, though…

by

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief

I don’t know what to think of laughter anymore. I used to be happy with it solving so many issues, soothing so many cuts, but now I wonder whether it was only me all along just applying patches to the wounds. It would seem that humour is no laughing matter -or, rather, it’s the laughter itself that confuses the issue. And it’s not always fun and games that provoke it. There is a serious side to it as well. A guilt-ridden side.

Like most people, I suspect I have always taken the wonder of laughter for granted; it feels almost as delightful to witness as to perform. But it has not always enjoyed this role. I recently read Laughing Gods, weeping virgins, laughter in the history of religion, a 1997 book by Ingvild Selid Gilhus, a professor of History of Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. I learned that laughter has evolved. She writes about a time when it was looked upon as sinful, or at least a tool used to maintain control by whatever gods a society honoured – it mocked or shamed disobedience.

Then in the medieval period, laughter was shunned as the secular body’s attempt to escape from spiritual control, escape from holding God foremost in one’s mind and it was suppressed with guilt. Of course, the occasional escape valve was necessary, so the church in France allowed laughter for the Feast of Fools and roles were briefly reversed, the lowly becoming powerful, the carnal spiritually acceptable.

A more interesting question, though, is why humour exists at all. Why do people laugh? Gilhus’ book only touched on its encounters with religions, and yet it seemed so much broader than that. We laugh a lot, it would seem -some studies suggest every 20 seconds in an average conversation. But studying laughter is fraught. As the authors, E.B. and  Katharine S. White observed, ‘Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.’

And yet, even bearing that in mind, there have been several theories that have attempted to explain laughter. One of them is superiority -we laugh when we think we’re superior to something. The purpose of the joke is to mock from a more exalted position. Freud had a say as well, feeling that we find something funny if had been repressed and then suddenly leaked out… I’m not sure how tenable that idea is, but Freud will be Freud, after all.

The theory that seems the most credible to me, however, is incongruity. This was championed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson and his popular essay published in 1900,  Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. He realized that it was difficult to subject such a pleasurable and universal experience to any meaningful analysis -much as having to explain why something was funny, means that it probably wasn’t. But the incongruous is difficult, or impossible, to reconcile and the very attempt, in Bergson’s phrase, is something ‘mechanical encrusted on the living’. In other words, artificial when it shouldn’t  be, and the realization of this juxtaposition is ludicrous and therefore humorous. We’re trying to recognize ourselves in something that isn’t…

I’m not totally convinced by that argument either, and yet it may be that he is simply referring to what happens when we attempt to solve the incongruity. And I suppose it’s the very attempt to reduce the process to reasonableness that bothers me. So it’s more in the inept exercise rather than the success of the explanation that leads to the humour in the situation -the incongruity made manifest.

But Bergson dissected things even further, and felt that if too many emotional states were involved -sadness, fear, melancholy, and so on- they would interfere with seeing something as humorous -interfere with our ability at laugh at it. How then, to explain the comedy in Voltaire’s alleged deathbed response to a priest who was encouraging him to renounce Satan? “This is no time for making new enemies” was his reply.

And yet, laughter also ‘appears to stand in need of an echo’ according to Bergson. I came across a readable article in Aeon that summarized it more broadly. The essay was written by Emily Herring, at the time, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ghent in Belgium: https://aeon.co/essays/for-henri-bergson-laughter-is-what-keeps-us-elastic-and-free  Evolutionary theorists have hypothesised about the adaptive value of laughter, in particular in the context of social bonding… Most friends share ‘in-jokes’ that are meant to be understood only within the context of their particular social group, as do certain communities brought together by a football team, political opinions, or shared specialist knowledge… Our laughter ‘is always the laughter of a group’, as Bergson put it.’

Again, though, is he still dissecting a frog only to have it die? This is remains much too reductionist for me. Somehow humour lies in its spontaneity, its unexpectedness. When it is contrived, it may result in laughter, but is it the same animal…?

For some reason, the question takes me back to those days of innocence when my children were young and everything was new and fresh to them. They helped me see the world differently.

I remember one time when my son was fascinated by the reports on TV of continuing protest marches in some country or other. Although he was only about four years old and not at all clear about the reasons for the demonstrations, he was obviously fascinated by what he kept referring to as the ‘parades’.

“But actually, parades are different, daddy,” he eventually volunteered as he watched with fascination.

Thinking he had perhaps grasped the angst of the people protesting against their government, I asked him what he meant.

He looked at me as if to say that fathers could be so unobservant sometimes. “There’s nobody standing on the sidewalks watching them… Everybody’s walking in the street,” he added.

“They’re all protesting,” I explained, realizing he might not understand the concept.

“Is that why they keep bumping into each other with their elbows?” he said, and smiled knowingly.

I had to laugh, but was it humour I was reacting to, or his awareness of the seeming incongruity of their actions? And did the distinction actually matter? Maybe innocent detachment – and unexpectedly naïve observation- is really how it all starts…

by

Neither here nor there

I don’t think I’m very good at handling conflicts -I hate confrontation; I prefer the view from the top of the Bell Curve where I can safely watch the goings-on of the extremophiles in their respective antipodes. I suppose that’s why I gravitate to boundaries where, if I’m careful, I’m neither here nor there.

This is probably not a recipe for success, let alone conquest, but nevertheless it is a position well suited to observe the vagaries of both sides. After all, the victors should not always be the arbiters of history -not even history lasts forever…

But what, exactly, constitutes an ‘us’ and ‘them’? I realize we all seem to fit into categories -much like we all belong to families- and yet, exclusion from one list doesn’t necessitate exclusion from another. The allotment often seems quite arbitrary in fact. Random. If a member of another sports team is injured, say, should I rejoice? Their loss might confer an undeserved advantage to our ‘side’, but surely it means less than if we’d won with both sides playing their best.

I know this sounds naïve, especially when applied to teams and competitions -it’s what games are all about isn’t it? You’re supposed to pick a side… But does the choice imply that you are therefore expected to dislike the other team? Hate them, even? I think not. And what about victory? Is it for all times, or given that it is a competition, does the other side have a chance at the next encounter? After all, if the results were always a foregone conclusion, it wouldn’t be much of a contest, would it?

With this consideration in mind, I thought it might be valuable to canvass various opinions as to the origin and value of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ thing. It turns out that there seem to be as many opinions as there are conflicting groups, so in a bid for compromise, I settled on a rather lengthy essay by the journalist Marek Kohn entitled, appropriately enough, Us and Them: https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-love-our-friends-does-that-make-us-hate-our-enemies

‘We come into the world with open minds, ready to tune in to whatever language or culture surrounds us. But as we lock on to the strongest signals, the others become less distinct. As our sense of ‘us’ develops, our sense of ‘them’ degrades… New-born babies gaze with equal attention at faces regardless of ethnic appearance, but by three months they prefer looking at faces from their own ethnic group… These findings are unsettling. They suggest that a sense of ‘us and them’, with its accompanying biases, can emerge from vital processes that are not directly concerned with sorting people into in-groups and out-groups… During its first nine months, an infant seems to refine its models by narrowing its focus. In the process, it loses its ability to recognise less familiar-looking people as individuals.’ Unless, that is, they possess some feature that appeals to it.

Kohn sites innumerable examples of studies that suggest, much like William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, that we search for features with which we can identify -shirt colours, fashions, opinions, talents, and so on- and join the groups that serve our purposes. ‘Humans are not simply social beings but political ones. From playgrounds to corridors of power, they are constantly forming, modifying, ending and generally complicating alliances. Stable cues that signal alliance, such as speech traits or styles of dress, offer regularities that help people orient themselves.’

But, what should we do with them? Is it ever a justification for discrimination? Mistreatment? Kohn is disappointingly coy in his ultimate conclusions: ‘Perhaps we simply have to accept that the relationship between us and them is always a work in progress.’

I was thinking about this when I met some friends for our still physically-distanced meetings outside the local coffee shop. The four of us were an elderly eclectic bunch: Harjit with his turban, Arthur with his accustomed woolen sports jacket and tie, and Jeremy with his long, snow-white Santa Claus beard. I, alone amongst them, was appropriately attired in my grey long-sleeved sweat shirt and contrasting black sweat pants -you don’t overdress for coffee. All of us, according to the custom of the day, had our face masks hanging from an ear, or tucked into a handy pocket however -each of us was ready for a nearby sneeze or cough.

But Arthur was already complaining by the time we’d found a sufficiently large patio table that overlooked the grassy meadow of the adjacent park. “Look at them,” he hissed, pointing at a group of twenty-somethings walking through the grass towards some trees close to us. We all turned our heads to see who he was pointing at. “No masks,” he continued when he was sure he had our attention. “Not one of them…” he added with disgust evident on his face.

“But they’re outside, Art,” Harjit said. “Not everybody wears a mask outside. And besides, they’ve obviously just come from a baseball game -look at their uniforms. We were like that when we were their age… Immortal,” he added with a wistful smile.

“More like vectors,” Arthur grumbled and had a sip of his coffee.

“Except for age, they’re not so very different from us,” Jeremy said, brushing some doughnut crumbs out of his beard as he spoke.

Arthur rolled his eyes theatrically, and put his coffee down carefully on the rickety table. “Come on, Jer,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “The youth nowadays are all the same. Look at them. They’re crowded together, and patting each other on the back… very irresponsible if you ask me.” Nobody did, however -Arthur was very sure about things. Too sure, sometimes.

The crowd must have won their game, because they seemed in a jovial mood, and gathered at a bench under the trees. Soon, a couple of members of the losing team appeared from trees on the other side of the grassy meadow. In contrast to the winners’ red, both were attired in grey uniforms, but one of them was coughing badly.

“What’s wrong with him?” I could hear one of the reds yelling at the two greys.

“Don’t know,” the healthier grey answered back. “He suddenly got worse after the game. I’m trying to get him home,” he explained.

“Was he okay before…?” the red asked.

The healthy grey that was helping his friend shrugged. “He said he was a bit tired, but he’d been out partying last night, so…”

“I told you,” Arthur said in a low voice to the rest of us. “They don’t think of anybody but themselves -no thought for the rest of us in the community…”

Suddenly the grey collapsed, gasping onto the grass, and everybody on the red team stood around in a wide circle as one red ran to help the coughing man. “We’ve got to get him to the hospital,” he shouted, obviously searching for a phone in his pocket.

Nobody had one, of course, so the red yelled at our table. “Can one of you phone 911 for us?”

“He’s probably got Covid,” Arthur whispered to the rest of us.

But Harjit already had his phone out, and signalled to them he was phoning. “Can we help?” he yelled at the crowd, and started across the field towards them. Two of the players ran to stop him from coming closer.

“He might have the virus,” one of them yelled at him.

“I’m a doctor,” Harjit replied. “Or at least was until I retired…”

But the two reds blocked his way as one of them looked over his shoulder at the young man lying on the grass. “Thanks, but he seems to be settling now,” he added. “We can manage till the paramedics get here.” And he gently took Harjit by his shoulder and guided him back to our table. “Thanks again,” the red said to him again, and turned to leave.

“I think the youth of today are just fine,” Harjit said when he sat down with us again.

Fortunately Arthur decided to sip quietly at his cooling cup of coffee.

“We are all ‘us’ nowadays, I think,” Jeremy said as he added a few more crumbs to his beard.