AgainstTheWind

Give Prudence to the Simple

One thing I hoped to achieve in blogging was a conversation with some of my friends and family. A hint of one going in the comments to yesterday's blog. I'll try to follow on the health insurance topic as well as foster care soon.

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Part of Marianne's moving routine was toting the treadmill up the stairs of her apartment. I remember Ina May had a similar story about the treadmill in the basement. I took care of Cameron and snapped photos.

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Yesterday I indulged my desire to gamble. I'm a bit compulsive when I find something that interests me. I act exactly as the rat hitting the button that sometimes rewards and sometimes doesn't. Hit, hit, hit. Bridge? I'm getting better. Casinos. I stay out! No need to go there and create a new demon to fight. So yesterday I cashed out of my "positions" in the stock market, scoring another nearly one per cent gain. That left my money available for today. I couldn't cash out today. And I won't be able to watch but a few minutes in the morning, as there is a bridge game. I hope to set a stop loss before I go, to at least limit the damage.

Dimitri Nobokov was on NPR talking about getting his father's last novel to the publisher as I drove home from delivering D-- G-- some milk. I'll take her to the doctor tomorrow to see the surgeon about putting in a port for dialysis. Her kidneys are failing. Nobokov's novel is about love, and death and suicide and such light little themes. I've never read Lolita and only small parts of Pale Fire, but his words are arresting.

In Laura, Nobokov uses a hopelessly fat lepidopterist with a hopelessly nymphomanic wife. The fictional husband is committing a reversible suicide one body part at a time. Nobokov is writing about losing toes and feet as his own feet are plagued with infections.

Daddy, as his memory was fading and the neural connections were flashing out played endless games of solitaire on the computer. It's a method of trying to cling to what control remains. I know because I just finished my Soduko puzzles. And I constantly monitor my feet; the sensation is ever receeding, and my mental acuity dying off. Life and death in a perpetual dance.

It's spring here, and the lizards are dying in droves in the French door. Mosquitoes are buzzing about my head, and the school yard announcements are audible from my back yard. And of course someone has said all this much much better. David Warren had not posted an essay online for so long I made free and wrote his email asking where he'd gone and put himself He last posted an essay on Easter. He's been on annual leave, and taking care of aging parents. He writes today on the precariousness of life.

I recommend pushing a stroke victim out in his wheelchair, under the spring sun amid birdsong -- and the laughter of children playing in a schoolyard -- after he has been shut in the whole winter. An old man who cannot talk, but does not need words to radiate his pleasure, in being still alive. An old man who suddenly defies his condition, to tell his crippled old wife, after sixty-something years through thick and thin together, that he still loves her.

And while we dance the dance of live and love and death, it's on our heads to responsibly know the enemy and fight the good fight as it is necessary. There is an essay on one of my favorite heros, a man of action and words, one of the greats of last century. The Claremont Review, on Churchill. Churchill wrote his mother after being captured in the armored train in the Boer War

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."

The only time I faced a loaded gun, even with no shooting, I don't remember exhilaration at all. I'm a coward. Please God, give me strength!

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Proverbs 1:1-4
The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel;
To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;
To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and equity;
To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion.

and an alternate translation of the last is
"To receive instruction in wise dealing, In righteousness and justice and equity;"
"To give prudence to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion."

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