Each day that is left is a bonus for the old man. I treasure it and my amazing fortune in sharing that day with my chosen spouse. I sing this song in a personal card for her collection as she begins her 84th year in a week.
At the same time I want to make it public in my last issue for February as a token of my appreciation to her for sharing 60 plus generally peaceful years with me through thick and thin.
A day to remember that stays and then grows, When a boy meets a girl and all at once knows his life has new roots for a budding tree, To plant by a stream that roars wild and free.
We hang on its branches a shining new dream, And watch it grow strong By the watering stream. As dreams load the tree and life moves along; We are free as can be with the memory strong.
And now we are old, but the tree is still strong; I remember that day, and I was not wrong. We still have room to hang up more dreams And the memory will live even should I change streams.
With apologies to the presiding appeal justice hopefully showing up at left, the old man’s title today, once again courtesy of Dickens, came to mind when I re-read portions of The Unnamed reviewed in my last issue.
In that story one “funny” episode during his compulsive walking spell involved his inability to conduct the defence of one of his wealthiest commercial clients on a charge of murdering his wife. One of his senior partners, with other associates, was three weeks into the trial when Tim, who had prepared for the trial for months, decided to surprise his colleagues by appearing in the courtroom ready to participate.
He was wearing a bicycle helmet specially designed to monitor his brain waves to detect changes before and during the walking attacks, head shaved for proper sensor contact. The judge noted Tim’s presence when court was called to order, informing him that he had indeed arrived and should remove his helmet if he intended to stay. Tim immediately stood and stated his intention to participate with the judge’s permission. Then in the midst of the statement he suddenly turned and walked out without turning back, saying, “On the other hand I think I’ll leave.” His walking attacks often started the same way, no matter what he was doing or where he was.
That episode reminded me of the awesome power judges have over the lives of barristers who appear before them. Experienced lawyers sometimes go to great lengths to avoid certain judges whose displeasure they may have incurred in previous appearances as they well should do for the sake of their clients.
Soon after admission to the bar I was briefly partnered with a more senior member of our local legal fraternity, which then held but ten or so members. He was widely known in the community for wicked and acid comments and sometimes sharply rude wit about his legal colleagues, the court and the community in general. Yet he always appeared as counsel properly robed when called for and bowed to the bench as required, all in the “best traditions of the Bar” as they say. One afternoon as he argued a case on a sunny, drowsy spring afternoon before one of the touchier and more irascible members of the county bench, he noticed the judge looking dreamily at the sunshine through the windows drifting off. My friend lowered his voice and gently dropped a case book on the table. That startled the judge to attention, demanding to know what had been said. Our witty member muttered to himself, “I don’t think you heard a word I’ve said for ten minutes, you old fart.” Well, the jurist’s hearing apparently had sharpened for he immediately pounded his gavel and ordered opposing counsel to attend his private chambers. My friend tried to put a different twist on his muttered comment but nevertheless apologized profusely for any lapses he may have been responsible for thereby avoiding further penalty.
I had a few experiences with disgruntled judges as well. Once I had a chamber application for which I had to appear in a larger centre, where I faced a whole courtroom full of lawyers making a variety of applications in cases they were handling. The fearsome jurist assigned to hear them all seemed in a foul mood from the beginning and as I knew I was likely the most junior of the lot I expected to be the last to be called. Even with senior counsel appearing early he was picky, surly and embarrassingly demanding for every particular, even asking one chap to point out in his own mouth where the lawyer’s infant client’s dental problem was located. After the usual lengthy lunch adjournment, I sat waiting to be called for most of the afternoon. When I came to the front I hesitantly stated my credentials, then made a point of expressing my thanks to His Lordship for his patience through a long and difficult day, presented my application as filed in the material he was given. Whether he took pity on my obvious inexperience or whether he was too worn out to be difficult any longer I don’t know. Still, he appeared to accept my thanks as if it was intended just that way, dealt with my matter quickly, and everyone went home happy.
Some years later I had a rare success in a personal injury case, but the insurance company lawyer filed an appeal, to which I was forced to respond. It was heard in Victoria before a panel of three appeal judges. Only the judges, the clerks, and the two lawyers were in the courtroom. At one point during the appellant’s presentation standing at the podium on the counsel table he was scrabbling around his appeal book and other files for a particular reference, which I knew I had right at my finger tip. I sort of half rose from my chair and offered their Lordship’s the citation. Instead of thanks I heard a rap of the gavel and a stern reminder from the judge in charge that “Counsel is expected to stand when addressing the Bench!” Of course I rose immediately and offered sincere apologies to the court for my errors and omissions.
I must say that particular judge, whose name I do not recall, ever after reminded me of that 1925 cartoon above. My learned friend already had some 15 years of experience with one of the prominent Vancouver law firms by then and many years later became British Columbia’s Chief Justice as well. As I never appeared before him I have no idea whether he became as stuffy and pompous as the chap we appeared before those many years ago.
May all our learned jurists receive their just rewards!
The Old Man did not find the answer to the title question in the novel I want to review here. Nor did the character in the book, whose story it is. I will not call him the hero or the protagonist because basically I do not find him a sympathetic individual. Furthermore I find many of the people in the society depicted by the story equally unsympathetic and that is sad as it is very really the society in which we North Americans are living today.
The book is The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris, published in January 2010 by Little, Brown and Company of New York. The copyright particulars list the book under 5 fiction categories including lawyers and psychology. The author is a young appearing man who, in his jacket publicity photo, looks something like one of those boyish computer nerds who became overnight millionaires in the 1990s.
He seems too young to have the experience or depth of understanding I found in his writing but in an interview about his first novel found on his personal website some explanation can be found. He cites his youth in the Florida Keys, college in Iowa, a stint working for an advertising agency (a subject of his first novel), a MFA degree in California during which he started that first novel, scrapped it, thought about it for some three years and finished it in fourteen weeks. It won numerous awards.
Many of the book reviews for this second novel call it a comedy, acidly funny, and Stephen King found it “Hilarious in a Catch 22 way, but with an undercurrent of sadness that works counterpoint to all the absurdity.” Personally I found nothing really funny about the story except perhaps in the way that satire can sometimes by funny. We can certainly laugh at some of the ridiculous things that happen in the character’s love story, in the story of his absurd compulsion to walk till he falls asleep, and in his lawyer’s story.
The story begins with the short sentence, “It was the cruelest winter.” It then plunges the reader into the first episode of compulsive walking that forces him to leave his office. It is the physical or mental condition that dominates the story. In this case he left his law office only lightly dressed and continued until he finally managed to get into a cab to take him home before falling asleep on the back seat. There we meet these main characters as Tim Farnsworth and his wife, Jane, as well as their only daughter, Becka, in what becomes a strange but touching love story. Money appears to be no problem for this family and even when he is found sleeping in an alley or in a park flower bed, he always seems to have enough cash and access to his investments when he needs to prove his independence. Threading through the whole is Tim’s high intelligence and his twenty years as a successful attorney, making partner in one of New York’s largest and most prestigious law firms. He brings in millions of dollars in fees every year. His attempts to keep his affliction from his partners could be considered one of the comedic aspects of the story.
I found Tim’s mental process during the progress of the condition (one of the many doctors he had consulted had dubbed it benign idiopathic perambulation) quite fascinating and my need to continue from one page to the next of this novel almost as compelling as Tim’s inability to stop walking and hypnotic in its effect.
Being somewhat inclined to rely on chronological and geographical markers in my thoughts and scribbling, I was somewhat challenged to follow times and places as the tale proceeds, with somewhat sudden flashbacks appearing from time to time and never being completely sure where Tim is in his current walking exercise or how long the story takes to the end, in terms of Tim’s life. I was never sure whether the things and people he saw or talked about were real or part of his hallucinations.
It all ends sadly of course. Still, as you read you will find meaningful discussions about the American Dream and its consequences, about nature itself and our place in it, about the nature of God, about the existence of body and soul as separate entities and about the amazing abuse the body can take before it destroys itself.
Tim’s walking compulsion ends in a tent, during his last sleep, in a bedroll in an unnamed northern American mountain pass in the midst of a roaring blizzard, and I found the ending recounted on the last page strangely comforting:
He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen … listen … listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.
If you are not easily put off by a modicum of sex and the occasional f… word and are otherwise intrigued, I think you should give the book a try.
Since my last issue I have been thinking a good deal about a project I had started then, dealing with our trip to Kansas City in 1985. My intention is to copy into my computer a selection of slides and prints of the pictures I took during our trip and prepare a series of some 5 narrated slide shows with a Photo Story program from Microsoft.
That means I have been avoiding current events more than usual partly because here so near Vancouver, everything including newscasts has centred totally on the Winter Olympics, for which the opening ceremonies are to begin this weekend. I have discussed in a previous issue my lack of enthusiasm for the whole idea of the Olympic movement and though I hope for a good outcome, it is impossible for me to adopt the enthusiasm for it now evident all around me. It also means I will try one more issue on the subject of that 1985 trip across the great western plains and mountains of the United States.
The daily papers I picked up at some of our stopovers for a flavour of opinion in the local areas stayed in storage for lo these many years and now become a reminder of those times. Ronald Reagan was just five or six months into his second term after a resounding victory in 1984. By June Reagan was having trouble getting his budget through Congress, reports were abroad about a White House connection to both overt and covert support for the Nicaraguan contra rebels, columnist George Wills, who 25 years later is still a talking head on television, was writing about trouble with the liquidity of some of America’s Savings and Loan institutions. He pointed out the complexities of the banking system requiring the populace to trust the bank system mostly on faith and surprisingly for one on the right side of the political spectrum, he said “modern society requires government that looks over the shoulder of, and occasionally nags, the makers of the many networks of institutions on which we depend.”
Weather was hot during the whole of four weeks on the road. Our car, a diesel, was not air conditioned and most of our driving days were long. On May 22nd we drove some ten hours from Yakima, Washington to Boise in Idaho, much of it following the path of the old pioneer Oregon Trail. In my journal that evening in Boise I remarked,
“Another thing that impressed us was the mile after mile of arid, semi-desert country so well connected up with super highways. The few places that are tamed for human use are really only oases in a vast desert.
It strikes me too, in driving those many desolate miles today, how narrow is the margin between life sustaining growth and extinction of our kind. Amazing as it is to see what wealth has been wrought by our technological exploitation of available resources, we are always near the brink. There seems no security to our existence. In this arid country fantastic quantities of food are produced in the few tamed oases where water from the rivers and deep basins can be used for irrigation. But imagine how quickly this would all turn to dust if the taps were turned off. All it would take is one serious interruption of power sources to stop the pumps and the flow of water. That is only one example. ”
It took us three more days across the emptiness of Wyoming and Nebraska to reach Kansas City and our reservations for the Rotary International Convention. Vice president, George H. W. Bush, was scheduled to speak for ten minutes to the last plenary session, and though we had arranged an alternative tour to follow that afternoon, I was totally astounded with the vast amount of security abroad all that morning in preparation for his short attendance. It irritated me to be stopped and checked repeatedly to get into the hall and by the obvious cost of all the staff and equipment to enable him to make what I suspect was nothing more than a political gesture on behalf of then Senate Majority leader, Robert Dole, of Kansas.
We left the convention on the morning of May 31 and took another couple of weeks to get back home via visits in Kansas, several days in Salt Lake City and stops across Nevada and California along the coast through the redwoods to Portland and home. It was a memorable journey for us in many ways but we soon settled back into our stay-at-home ways.
The Old Man's Post has been flagging so far this year! January is never my best month. So in order to keep the blog going, I will mention that much of my computer time was spent poking around with my photo albums and trying to deal with some of the mementoes kept for many years. Somehow I will have to be brutal about disposing of the stuff, and hopefully be a bit more careful than my successors will be about deciding what goes in the garbage, what gets shredded and what is given away.
In the last week or so I came upon a box containing a bunch of notes and memorabilia from a driving tour of the States after my retirement a quarter century ago. It was in the spring of 1985 when my wife and I used the Rotary International Convention in Kansas City as an excuse to see some of the country of my birth and to touch base with cousins I had never met in the Mennonite region of eastern Kansas.
Among my notes in that box was a steno pad containing a sort of handwritten daily journal, from which I will copy a few lines for your consideration. We had started out from Vancouver at 2:30 PM on May 21, 1985, stopped at Bellevue, Washington for supper at Denny's, getting a full course senior's turkey dinner at $2.99 each, and reached Yakima about 8:30 PM where we booked into a Motel 6 for $23.66 including tax. After nine in the evening I went for a walk, then wrote the following as part of my first journal entry for the trip:
I took a walk to downtown Yakima and found an all night Arco market. It had been hot all day and by 10:00 PM it was still 75 degrees F. The town was pretty well shut down. A few taverns, card rooms and eateries had some activity and young people hung around, drove around downtown, restless, having no apparent respect for or fear of institutions or older people. They didn't bother with me at all as I walked along minding my own business, but I felt a certain uneasiness in the strange place. At one point a convertible with five teenage girls in it was stopped by a patrolling police cruiser, lights flashing, and the girls were questioned. When they finished the girls pulled away and drove slowly around the corner while I waited for the light. They were beautiful young ladies but were giggling among themselves about the cop and when they got just out of sight of the police car the girl driving turned around and thumbed her nose at the cops. I also walked past several clusters of boys just hanging out, yelling and generally looking for trouble. This was before ten at night and I'm sure they found it later. I saw some long hairs, some shaved heads, some normal, but the pit of my stomach told me it could be one of those "long hot summers" for the young. They obviously haven't enough to do, and perhaps too much money to do it with. They seem to be looking for something. They won't be cowed and disciplined as the youngsters of the thirties were. Today they are not awed, much less over-awed, by wealth, position, or power, and I think they have a good idea of their own power. Let's hope they don't hold the rest of us to ransom with it.
So that is the first issue of the Post for February 2010. Perhaps I'll find something new and more interesting to say in the next issue.
