As usual, I end up doing things backwards.  Instead of receiving cards, I choose to send one on a significant occasion.  60 is not 50, even less 40, to say nothing of 30, but has much to share with 70 and 80.  This is what makes it a significant, watershed moment.  So much of the past that is utterly past, and so many intimations that the cookie has indeed crumbled, and enough pride left to say to one and all: how about sharing a few crumbs with me: they are delicious!

The title is a list of the fundamental identities a man takes on and fucks up in a lifetime.  First, being a son.  Then attempting to mold the experience of being a lover into that of being a Catholic.  And seeing spin-offs of these renewed efforts in the shape of boys and girls, squirts and Eastwood calls them, corks as I prefer to say.  All of my children know Paris, and the motto of Paris just happens to be: it can sink but it never drowns.  And finally seeing the lover business become as serious as a Mass for Paris (and not Paris worth an occasional Mass, as Henry the fourth famously said), alongside the unexpected life-line of friends who don’t forget but who shake off affronts and neglect and begin as if all over again.

I have a new photograph of my granddaughter Yas, holding the head of a beautiful and tender looking horse, slightly taller than her.  Her right hand is hugging the horsey, and her left has his or her reins in hand.  Authoritatively.  She is two years younger than Ellen, and is wearing a black t-shirt that my son John might have worn in his hey-day, with blue  and silver letters in an order saying “Love me tender.”  The “ME” is bigger than both other words.  ”Love” is a close second, and tender bringing up the rear end, as if the adverb was an afterthought.  the whole picture seems to say: is there any human out there as capable of standing by  me the way this horse does?  I have three copies of this portrait of Yas, sent by my one and only daughter Laure Amina: one for me, one for John, and one for PJ.  You ought to stop reading now and go over to “Deezer” or the equivalent and listen once again to Elvis singing “Love me tender.”  Perhaps my father will be able to sing the most important parts by heart.

When one hits 60, one says that the time of full disclosure has arrived.  I have hinted at this throughout the long story of this blog, and as with so much else in it that is simply not available for people a little too far away, it has been ignored.  I have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and will have to step into postures and medication that remind me a lot of descriptions my Dad has sent over before deciding that it was all too much pain for so little gain.  As with so many other ailments and disfunctions, please remember that we have excellent doctors over here.  They have saved my life more than once, but wouldn’t have been able to but for the grace of having Helen around to go and pull their hair.  Now she’ll be pulling mine, which gives me the opportunity to praise the lord for previewing a case of precious baldness to keep me to a certain extent out of her clutches.

I spent time over at John’s a couple of days ago, and will have to talk about that in detail.  It’s a pain in the ass to have to deal with memory loss: I was embarassed in his presence to confuse one of our residencies with another.  He was embarassed too, but an absolute doll in hiding it, in putting it away discreetly.  I was astounded, flabbergasted, knocked on my ass to see that the young man had cleaned his apartment from the balcony to the doorstep.  Mary Ellen or Helen could spend many more hours improving on his performance, but then you don’t ask amateur golfers to perform like Tiger Woods.  As both of us were broke, we made a bottle of rosé last much longer than it usually does with people whose throats are tilted down into bottomless pits.  (An English translation for something my ex-wife taught me: avoir la dalle en pente!) We sat down and started talking, because this is something we know how to do, and enjoy doing.  PJ was supposed to come, but as I pushed the button on John’s new mobile phone, seeing videos and pictures of the family he’s so close to and so adamant about, I understood why.  Diane looks like a time-consuming person.  I’m happy for him.

At 60, my message for all my family, including my Uncle Tom and Aunt Norma, is that I truly don’t understand why you don’t write every day.  That must sound totally preposterous, and, as Mona would say, so utterly selfish on my part as to border on being simply unbelievable.  But it’s just the simple truth.  Why are we more like the people in the series “friends” or “mad men” and not a little more like the Keats family?

 This birthday greeting is getting to be a little too long, but I shall return to it tomorrow, August 21st, sixty years after I ripped my mother’s body apart, as she always reminded me throughout my childhood.  For the moment, I must make good on a promise: the promise of commenting on one of her prize-winning sentences.

Here is the sentence: “I give them both, Dean and Ellen, good and wholesome advice but it goes hurriedly in one ear and out the other.  (I remember the route). 

So this is what I’m still doing at 60.  Reading and writing, that is to say, commenting upon what other people have said.  like a Jew.  A perpetual commentator.  And I don’t require masterpieces.  But I am giving to bestowing prizes, like I did with this beautiful recap of an entire life.  She remembers the route!  I’m sure I’m going to go way beyond her meaning, but you have to understand that in life as in letters there is something called the fallacy of authorial intention.  You can’t go far with the idea that the author had full control over what he has written.  No more so than a mother or father over their squirts and their corks.  Dad isn’t much of an author, but he is someone who has that to pass on to his grandsons.  the idea that you pretty much don’t know all that much about parenting.  All you can do is hope for the best.  Back to the prize-winning sentence, because I’m pretty word out bending over backwards talking about a man who gets worn out keeping in touch with his only son.

We all know Mary Ellen so well, and yet let me say that we don’t know her at all.  She has surprised all of us with what Mona would call mistakes.  And yet, when in the presence of her flesh and blood, what comes out of her mouth is all good and wholesome.   I don’t know anyone who would take issue with this.  Except perhaps just about everyone, who all will smile to see the great and unavoidable consequence of shaping your life into such narrow perfection: the people to whom you’re talking get bored.  And so, with her customary honesty, Mary Ellen looks at another repetition of what she has experienced in the past, while her husband looks on dreamily, saying to himself that it’s not worth the trouble to give kids advice, they have to learn for themselves.  I love this image of my mom contemplating the road of her good and wholesome advice.  I must say I love this image as much as I love the photograph of my granddaughter Yas.  Yas and Zas: isn’t it amazing how close they’ve come, out of the sheer accident of linguistic behavior.  I’ll be sending this post to Laure Amina, because it’s important for her too to see that Yas and Zas are just one letter apart, letters coming at the end of the alphabet, announcing all manner of correspondance with the beginning of the alphabet.  Y and Z.  Perhaps my daughter and son-in-law may look askance at turning “Yasmina” into “Yas.”  Like “Grandma” got turned into Zas.  Because grandma didn’t like being called grandma, because she has a lot in common with Jack Benny, who never made it past 49.  This is just the way things happen in the USA: this are among the happiest of accidents anyone could imagine.

I must confess that I too give advice.  I would never say that it is good and wholesome, because, as my Dad knows all too well, there’s a streak of meaness in me that just won’t go away.  Not only original sin, but very singular personal sins too.  Sins of pride, sloth, and distraction.  That have done permanent damage.   I look at them today like my son PJ will have to look at his tattoos in 30 or 40 years, regretting the long-term consequences of the adrenline-filled moment when you decide to do something with such long-term consequences.  PJ is now a major tattooed mother-fucka.  In the meantime, his grandmother can look at the route of her wholesome advice (she would have advised not to leap off the cliff into such a major set of tatts) and feel something like peace.

I still haven’t finished with the prize-winning sentence.  It’s a deep one, when you stop and think.  Because I don’t think there would be this kind of humor (if  you don’t laugh when you read that sentence, then something is wrong with you) if there were not depths of irony and gratitude all over the place.  Because in fact, Mom is pretty sure, as is Dad, that things will turn out for Ellen and Dean pretty much as they have turned out for Mona, Sue, Tom.  But for the grace of God, nothing would turn out well, but in the family we can count on them turning out well.  Not as well as we would have liked: I don’t think any of us are as wholesome as Mom would have liked us to be, and I’m sure she is thinking here of all three of us, with our  own landscapes and disappointment and failure.  Thus she looks out on that route, the advice rushing in (because she is in a hurry; unlike her husband, she has always had a sense of urgency in these pedagogical tasks) only to seep out on the other side of a seemingly empty head, filled with designs no one would dare to contemplate.  But for the grace of God, we’d all make shambles of our lives.  Mom looks out  over that route, and I believe that it is her way of giving thanks for so many surprising blessings.  At 60, there is not a sliver of distance between us on this one.