It's a good October and it's only begun

The Column: 10.07.22

It was delightful and a big relief to see Aaron Judge hit No. 62 this week and break Roger Maris’s record and see Roger Maris Jr. hugging Aaron’s mom in the stands. Judge is a great ballplayer and a decent understated guy and the country needed this beautiful moment. And if he’d failed, we’d be reading turgid commentary about the trauma of eminence and high expectation and instead we can admire the guy’s beautiful swing. He’s 6’7” with a strike zone the size of a wardrobe trunk and he’s batting over .300 and he’s graceful and well-spoken and whatever they’re paying him, it’s worth it to have him as an example to youth.

It was also good to see Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis shaking hands in south Florida after the hurricane ravaged the Gulf Coast and talking about government coming to the aid of the victims. Florida always was a paradise for people of modest means to live cheaply in pleasant weather and the state sometimes lucks out with hurricanes and now you look at the wreckage of mobile home parks and it’s heartbreaking. Most homeowners don’t have flood insurance. A conservative could argue that insurance is your personal responsibility and if you skip it, that’s your problem, but a conservative up for reelection can’t argue that, so the prez and the gov form a compact to work together.

This is how it used to be, Republicans and Democrats joining hands in times of true emergency. If it was uncomfortable for Governor DeSantis to ask for help from a man who is not the rightful president, nobody cared. There are the miles and miles of destruction; let’s help these people and resume sparring later.

Two beautiful moments, the swing and the handshake, and they happened on these golden October days, a good week all in all. We old codgers sit and wait for young people to take over the world we screwed up and this week gives us some hope.

“Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard, who only lived to be 42, died of TB, much too young to enjoy the blessing of old age as I do. I was in the sixth grade when Eisenhower was inaugurated. Our teacher brought a TV to class so we could watch it. We didn’t have TV in our home and I was fascinated by this one: the screen was the size of a saucer. We crowded in close and watched the old man take the oath. (He was 62, eighteen years younger than I am now.) He’d commanded Allied forces in Europe and was elected and reelected in landslides. I don’t recall anyone bad-mouthing Eisenhower except for some nightclub comedians whose names I forget.

This is the beauty of being my age. Kids say, “Get a life” and I got one and I can look way back and see some incredibly dumb things I’ve done — me, a college graduate and an Episcopalian, a good speller. Well-spoken people are capable of being dumber than dirt and the beauty of being old is that your dumbness is way behind you, receding, and you won’t do those things again. I can be frustrated by my new laptop and how Apple engineers have worked to make it more challenging, adding many features I don’t need and making essential functions so bizarrely complex I must read the instruction manual, which is written by engineers for engineers and not for the ordinary American.

I did dumb things in search of euphoria and then I had two wisdom teeth pulled and the surgeon gave me a sedative and I found euphoria and didn’t particularly like it. Numbness is not a good goal in life. And I eased myself into a life of cheerfulness. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” And that’s it. Write it on a Post-it note and put it on your forehead.

I did the sedative thing, I experienced exhilaration when I rode the roller coaster at Coney Island, and now, seeing No. 99 lope around the bases, seeing two guys take off the gloves and shake hands, wow. It’s a golden October, it’s a good country.

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