redux: on (someday) turning 90

Last year my yin and I went to her mother's cousin's boyfriend's birthday party at his country club, and although this sounds like the start of some impossibly long and complicated joke, it is actually the simple truth.

(Note: no truth
- even if true -
is ever simple.)

But this is beside the point.

The point is that it was this mother's cousin's boyfriend's ninetieth birthday. To put this fact in perspective, one has to remember that when this mother's cousin's boyfriend was born, alcohol was illegal and the 19th Amendment was only six weeks old.

But this is also beside the point (as well as overly didactic) and fails to adequately set the mood.  The point is:

We walk into the clubhouse to find a room full of gray hair, red wine and mimosas. We say hello to the mother's cousin's boyfriend and then locate a corner table where the mother's other cousin (the one with the boat, not the boyfriend) sits with his wife. We sit with them, answering questions about my yin-in-law and her beau until they arrive. At which point, we continue answering questions, albeit more quietly.

After drinks we move one room west and take our place at table #4. There are perhaps 45 people scattered about, fewer than ten are under 40, and disinterested servers move from table to table asking, "Chicken, salmon, or prime rib?"

(the room is too hot)

I ask for a vegetarian plate, and after a house salad and rolls, a bowl full of over-cooked veggies doused in butter arrives. I try not to think about it, thinking (wishfully?) 'at least it's not margarine' as I attempt to eat around the spinach, which has been cooked so thoroughly that its characteristically vibrant green has been transformed into a hue resembling nothing so closely as pine needles at the height of wreath season. At this point my yin and I exchange a grateful look, wordlessly acknowledging the wisdom of our decision to forgo a traditional caterer for our upcoming matrimony.

After the main course there are speeches, and ultimately a ten minute DVD montage of the mother's cousin's boyfriend's life. I find it fascinating, especially how the change from black and white to color film stock in the Sixties marked both a metaphoric and historical break in the story being told. I saw not only the Polaroid emergence of a post-War consumer society, but also the tipping point in the mother's cousin's boyfriend's life as he crossed over the threshold from youth to middle-age. The pictures of the soldier and young husband and father were suddenly gone, replaced by a man whose children were nearly grown, whose remaining years seemed less certain.

this is the deceitful nature of images.

In the mother's cousin's boyfriend's life I saw the history of America in the 20th century, from Depression

to War

to the Boom

 that followed the Bomb

I watched the mother's cousin's boyfriend move from the Bronx to Harlem to Paramus, New Jersey - the decline and white flight from the burroughs across the Hudson, Jews and Gentiles alike.

I watched children appear and grow into parents.

I watched parents, and then siblings, fade from the picture.

(do photographs,
as Benjamin argues,
truly destroy the aura?)

The mother's cousin's boyfriend told the story of a boat ride in 1936. it began at the Bowery, Hudson-bound, and stopped at 125th Street, where the mother's cousin's boyfriend's childhood friend had arranged to meet two girls. One of them, named R______, became his wife.

They were together 70 years before she passed.

How much death does the most fortunate among us witness? Is watching our loved ones die the price we pay to ascend to the title of patriarch? Of matriarch? Is this why our elders see so much so clearly?

(a final question)

Placed next to

the unintelligibility of death|the problems of life

How can

compare?

[lapse]

After this video came the group photo, which may someday resurface at his 95th or 100th birthday. It was another tiny fragment of life enshrined and embalmed - the present moment ferried by the camera into the past...