Senior sleigh ride

After a couple of weeks of being obliged to deal with minor – but extremely annoying, persistent and impossible to ignore – physical nuisances, I am put in mind of Zeus, the father of the Gods, and the shenanigans of King Sisyphus.

You know the punchline in the story of Sisyphus:  He’s the guy Zeus condemned to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this frustrating and meaningless action forever. 

His days at stone rolling can be likened to those of unnamed persons, working at the futile task of staving off the siege of years.

The truth of it is Zeus got sick of Sisyphus’s scheming and deceitfulness.  So, he designed that particular punishment for King Sisyphus to match the hubristic belief that he could outsmart Zeus himself.  

Yeah.  Ole Mr. S. was a tricky and slippery dude.  Back in the day.  But not that clever: So far as we know, he’s still rolling the rock. 

And I was wondering if there are any parallels in the real world today.  Like for other people who try to deceive – not Zeus, or God or Morgan Freeman – but themselves. 

Not that I know anyone like that.

But let’s say there is a person who has taken up residence in Denialtown, right down the road from Who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding.  Around the corner from Getreal.com.  Maybe you’ve visited that neighborhood.

Let’s pretend that such a person could never admit to herself certain things that she does not want to admit.  Why should she?  What is the value?  Who benefits from such confessions? 

No one that I can think of except maybe the I-told-you-so crowd that insists on being right all the time and gloating.  Who needs ‘em?

You can speculate on what such a person might be pressured to acknowledge if you want to.  Go ahead.  What could it be?  That she’s been coloring her hair since 1998 not because it’s the cool thing to do, but because it would be white – white! – without her steady commitment to color and chicanery.

She dyes her eyebrows. 

She wears athletic shoes!  O.M.G.  And skinny jeans!  Hahaha!

She maintains a Facebook account and even Instagram in what some might call feeble and grasping efforts to be ‘with it,’ though it’s fairly certain that she doesn’t know what ‘it’ is. 

She tweets for goodness sake.

(She has the niggling feeling that all those followers are perfunctory.  Most likely they are following her just in case she has something they might want some day.  They will say they knew her when.)

She’s rolling her own rock up the mountain of inevitability!  She thinks she’s fooling Father Christmas.  Or someone.

But let’s say Sisyphus overcomes.  Yes!  Let’s say he reaches his goal and pushes that boulder up to the top of the incline.  Then what? 

He finds himself at the top with that big ole rock under his arm by his side, like a pal.  He surveys the landscape with a sense of accomplishment and exhilaration.  He inhales deeply.  Cool at last!

Here’s what our protagonist fears:  She fears that just then, when she, er, Sisyphus has had only a moment of glory, when he’s only just begun to take in the panorama before him, he will feel a tremor.  A faint wobble.  Was that a tiny earthquake?  Maybe it was a gust of wind.

Poor King Sisyphus doesn’t know that Zeus employed his fiendish wit by enchanting the boulder to perpetually roll away.  File it under You Can’t Win, old Buddy! 

That rock will lean; then it will strain in place, pause for the briefest moment, perhaps drawing a breath before lurching and throwing itself down the other side. 

It’s all over now for Sisyphus, right?  He can never catch up to that rock.  And what if he could?  Is he going run around in front and stop it in place midway down that slippery slope?  Spoiler alert – no, he’s not.

And even if he did, what could he do but start trying to push it back up the hill! 

I’m beginning to see as I near the crest of the mountain, I need to outfit myself with a toboggan.


It’s downhill from there and I want to enjoy the ride.    

Music soothes the old brain

Recently, I found myself in a room with a saxophone.

Apparently, I arrived in the midst one of those “common but mysterious short-term memory failures, [where] people find themselves in a room, without remembering why they ended up there.”

Precisely. 

So, there I was, a little bit breathless, and pondering:  Moments ago I was there, but now I am here.  With a saxophone. 

Why am I here? 

This is not an existential question.  I know why I am here.  I am here to make the world a better place.  Duh.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Nevertheless, in spite of my certainty regarding the meaning of life and my place in the universe, I was hard-pressed to know what-the-what I was doing in that particular room at that specific moment with an E-Flat saxophone.

And then there was the sax itself, staring back at me; also no doubt, wondering how we wound up together.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…!

Researchers say the doorway may be to blame. 

That’s right.  According to Gabriel Radvansky, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, the very act of walking through a doorway may tell your brain since a new scene has begun, it should store prior memories, thereby causing strange memory lapses.  

"Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away… Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

OK.  Perhaps it is existential.  I think I forgot why I came into this room; therefore I am essentially still in the other room. 

Or, maybe these ‘event boundaries’ are my own personal wormholes whereby Morgan Freeman messes with me just because he can. 

In theory, mental event-boundaries are useful (so says Mr. Notre Dame) because they help us organize our mental timelines and remember not just where, but also when a particular event happened.

I get it.  It’s like when Mr. Plath asks me, for example, how long we’ve had Netflix and I piece together the answer by saying, “My hair was still long because the first one of those red envelopes got stuck in it when I thought I had to lick it to seal it and my hair got in the way.  And I thought we’d be able to get ‘Finding Nemo,’ which was about 2004; but of course we never could, which makes me wonder if we should go ahead and subscribe to HBO Go or one of those other movies services?”

It is patching into place memories – like passing through doorway after mental doorway, event boundary after event boundary, until he’s gone into another room wondering why he even asked me such a question in the first place.

But I digress.

I have crossed through a portal into a room which contains a saxophone.  To find out why, I need only retrace my steps, turning back the swinging doors of the event boundaries that brought me here.

Easy peasy.

Let’s see:  I had been wondering, after mistaking an old movie for a good movie, “What is that thing where you forget the ending of a bad movie and wind up watching the whole thing with a nagging suspicion that you’ve seen it before only to find, in the last unraveling of the plot, that you do remember the stupid ending of the thing and you just lost two precious hours of your life watching it again?”

So I went online to find out how to stop doing that annoying thing. 

I found an article at Live Science entitled “People with Dementia May Have Hidden Talents, Strange Case Shows.”

It told the story of a man in South Korea who was formerly meek and mild but got dementia and began saying what he thought at work without regard for the feelings of others.  Kind of like what’s-her-name at Sony Studios who said Angelina Jolie was a self-absorbed brat or whatever.  But then he started playing the saxophone and it made him nicer again.

And I thought, wow, that could be me.  The hidden talent part, I mean.


And I wound up in a room with a saxophone.