Did you say something?

I remember almost everything that happened to me during the past 80 years, with the exception of whatever happened today. My Dad had been playing pipe organs to set the mood for silent movies, and then he installed sound systems for the new talkies. Almost everybody listened to the radio in those days. Radio announcers and actors were invisible. Their audience could not see what they were doing, or whether they were frightened or smiling. What they said was it. Enunciation was in, ear-strain was out.

Sometimes I don’t hear what’s being said. People amuse themselves by watching their words go in one of my ears and come out the other. This has little to do with how loudly or gently the words are spoken, but with olivopontocerebellar atrophy, the exclusive ailment I live with, known, if not very well-known, as OPCA. My OPCA experience now includes constant and intrusive dizziness. You’ve heard of taffy pulls, and probably seen the machines that pull strands of sticky salt water taffy in amusement parks. OPCA imitates that process. I walk around as though my head is stuffed with salt water taffy.

That taffy-pull makes me pay attention when I’m walking, or reaching for things, or taking a shower. This concentration often blots out other things going on at the same time. If someone is telling me something while I’m thinking about my next step or lifting my coffee cup, there’s a chance I will listen but not hear.

On the other hand, I sometimes miss what’s being said on TV or radio because of what historians may someday record as The Great 21st Century Lip Lapse. Even some of the pros drop syllables and merge words into each other, and some directors permit actors to dissolve their most fascinating words into a whisper understood only by alert lip readers. Could this difficulty in shaping words be a consequence of advanced styles of romance? Movies and TV dramas become more competitive, shootings become more bloody, car crashes more crumpling and kisses more aggressive. The Hoover kiss has emerged, its brief vacuum perhaps reshaping the lips, tongue and voice box.

Politicians and retirement brochures speak of golden years, sometimes seeming closer rust than gold. Every year is golden, but all is not gold that Twitters.

Coming clean about grime and punishment

Words were a pleasure the Victorians could display in public, an exercise of pure mind rather than impure limbs. Thus countless letters concluded with the words Your obedient servant, signed with whatever flourish could be managed without blotting the watery ink.

When I question my brain I’m always the obedient servant, obeying brain’s directions because I have no choice. Brain is in charge. It originates or vetoes all decisions. It doesn’t appear to think about them. The heart beats, a wound bleeds, the eyes blink, a lie is told, forbidden chocolate is swallowed, an angry punch is delivered, a smile appears and lunch digests without much of a thought, obedient to the brain and whatever instructions have been carried from brain stem to lower back stern by the body’s own Ma Bell network.

Talking to my brain is not like praying to God. I love God and really want to do God’s will. That requires choices. It is hard to know God’s will about killing people in a just war versus an unjust war, or even about killing prisoners when the robed priests of the judiciary turn their thumbs down versus killings authorized by government secret agents, gang bosses or other practitioners of organized grime.

This problem has been around for a long time

The apostle Paul had a problem with this, too. In his letter to the Romans, chapter 7, verses 19 and 20, he tells it this way: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

“Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

For Christians, sin is a technical word, the way heart is a technical word for surgeons and something else for Hallmark. Preachers sometimes call for punishing the sin and not the sinner, a view seldom applied to fellow preachers who are sex offenders. Paul once cited deference given to an unknown god, but if there’s an unknown devil its name is Sex, baffling and threatening to believers from the time of Eve. It is a religious mystery, but its experience is denied to the Roman priesthood. It lives on in an undercovers sort of way, especially among the laity. Some look to scientists, some to clergy, for answers.

Believers of all religions and of none feel an urge to live good lives while also, like St. Paul, pondering urges that may be disturbing. Systems of justice have no consistent way to deal with bad behavior beyond punishing the guilty in the same old ways. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work.

What does matter is strengthening the search for justice and its lesser-known twin, mercy, particularly in protecting children from sexual violence. Ireland, which not long ago was a model for religious devotions, has imploded in sex scandals of historic concern. The victims were children and most of the accused were priests, brothers and nuns.

These and hundreds of similar crimes are reported day by day, but little is understood about preventing them. Apprehending the perpetrators, who include men and women of every description and occupation, is only a beginning. It should trigger heavy-duty programs to find out what makes otherwise ordinary men and women prey on children, programs comparable to campaigns against AIDS, polio, TB and other threats.

Does anyone choose to be a despised molester of little kids? So how do they get that way? Can they be identified and helped, or will they prey on the young until they’re sent to prison and their victims live on with the horror of it?

All we know for certain is that the prospect of prison does not deter the folks who commit these crimes. That’s not enough to know about this monster behavior.

When faith is lost, where do you look for it?

I like my house. I’m hooked on a heating and air conditioning system that keeps the place pleasant during blizzards and heat waves. Shelves of familiar books, a washer and dryer that always hum when we’re together, frayed favorite carpets, towels and shirts, all are plusses in this place where I’m used to the aggressive cat hair.

It isn’t as up to date as it could be, and it doesn’t have a swimming pool, but it is okay and comfortable and challenging all at the same time. It is sort of like church.

Sometimes faith gets dry, like the plants my wife left for me.

When things break down, I don’t ever think about walking away from the house and never coming back. Sometimes church breaks down, as in inquisitions, burning of witches, disdain for Christ’s example of love and forgiveness, sexual misadventures, cruelty toward the poor and the collapse of character into self-satisfaction.

Plumbing problems at home? I won’t move out. Integrity problems at church? They could provide a cover for religious anarchists, victims of neglect and spiritual loners to shed it all, but this lets a spiritual recession tumble into a great depression of the spirit.

Architects will build better houses as time goes by, and believers be better at building faith. Nothing is more real than faith, or less understood. The evolution of the created world is tediously gradual. So is the evolution of faith.

Church is described as the mystical body of Christ, unseen except in its human dimension of pulpits, pews and steeples. Faith in this visible church is a counterfeit of faith in the mystical body. To lose confidence in the pulpit is not the same as losing belief in God. Doubts come and go. The Eternal never goes.

Human faces fill empty spaces

By A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

I drove all of the navigable sidewalks on my electric scooter, but the neighborhood just looked empty. When you live alone there are times when you’d like to fill up those empty spaces with human faces. While I was bumping along, watching out for cracks and crevices in the pavement, I thought about a friend I haven’t seen in 70 years. We used to ride our bikes on sidewalks like that.

My wife’s diabetes took her into medical catastrophes as painfully pointless as waterboarding. At the same time I began stumbling and fumbling, courtesy of a neurological short circuit. We sold our house, said goodbye to a quarter century of friends, and moved a thousand miles or so to be close to family. Sally’s diabetes became even more aggressive, she moved to a nursing home, and didn’t live long after that.

Anybody who makes that kind of switch at a certain age, and with a disease that will soon stop him from driving, is lucky to have family and good neighbors nearby. But long-time friends and co-workers are not there. There are no jobs. If the move is into residential suburbia, and long winters, hobbies are savored. God bless computers!

So as I steered my scooter along bike paths and sidewalks my thoughts went from Billy Anderson, my 1930s bicycle pal, to others who put some real happiness and friendship into my life. I became so caught up in it that after I went home I started writing down the names, and picturing the people in my mind.

Some were childhood pals, some were girls I dated 65 or 70 years ago, some were co-workers and a couple of them were wives (but not simultaneously).

This was fun. I tried tracking some of them down via the Internet. I’m ruling out the grouches and remembering a lot of upbeat, smiling people.

This is dandy medicine. It isn’t covered by Medicare, but then, it doesn’t cost anything. It perks up the blood and lightens the feet. It will be a permanent part of my rebuttal when a self-centered mood starts to take shape, the mood that says even the silent monks see other monks, that a cat is good but not always good enough.

There’s no patent on this idea. Just think Rewind, and look for the cheerful voices and grinning faces out of the life you’re living. Call it daydreaming, call it mentalism, call it whatever describes it for you. I call it God’s gift—bigger even than the computer.

What we don't know about crime is a crime

By A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

The declaration that “all men [and women] are created equal” suggests more about the graceful character of early American patriots than about the intentions of a Creator.

Drawing upon English traditions and common law, the men who conceived the Declaration of Independence affirmed that everyone should have equal protection under the law. That was a revolutionary idea. It still is.

Angry revolutionaries seen on 21st century television sometimes risk their lives to challenge unjust rulers, but with more thought for the triumph of their cause than of equality for everyone, no matter what their religion or gender may be.

Men of property, planters and printers, teachers and preachers, were among the leaders of the American revolution and all they had to do was look around and see that all men were created equal to each other under English common law. Their eyes were upon each other, but they scarcely noticed their wives and daughters and sisters. Even those who were descended from indentured servants, shipped to the colonies, didn’t see slaves as equals under the law of the creator or the law of men.

Men voted for women’s rights

Many are the refinements of law, inspired by the revolution’s enthusiasm for persons more than property. Slavery was eventually abolished by white citizens who fought for emancipation. The right of women to vote was established by the only citizens who had the votes to do it--men. These were actions of a maturing society with an evolving grasp of what it means to be equal.

Whipping posts, dunking as punishment or interrogation, tormenting a prisoner in stocks, were rejected one by one. A prison cell for debt, self-defeating as it was, lost its place in the justice system.

Sending children to work in mines and factories came to an end, and children were given a status close to equality.

More recently the nation’s conscience began to unravel historic misconceptions about homosexuality. Maybe it wasn’t an ugly choice made by a disarranged mind, but instead a consequence of the way the genes lined up. Some babies were born with one sexual orientation, some with another, some were girls and some were boys, some had dark hair and some had light. Some, tragically, were born with alarming physical problems.

As people understood that being different is not the same as being unnatural, the punishment of consenting adults as criminals for engaging in homosexual activities came to a halt.

Laws to prevent two persons of different races from marrying? It seems incredible, but such laws were enforced not so long ago.

Knowing how little we know

Not even the sages of science were immune to the cramped beliefs of recent generations about criminality, sexuality and race. The smartest observers today know that most of what can be learned about these matters is still to be learned.

The United States is in the third world of justice and law, with the largest prison population on earth and disclosure that its highest officials sanctioned a return to torture as though 1776 had never been lived. Neither police nor courts, neither legislatures nor news media, know why people commit crimes. Burglary, rape, embezzlement, stabbing, cheating are predictable—but the people who do those things are not. Punishment hasn’t stopped those crimes in the last thousand years.

Shady impulses stir criminal behavior, and nobody knows much about it. Congress and state legislatures cannot even pass foolproof laws to wipe out their own institutional corruption once and for all.

People still look to secular government and to religious institutions to set rules of peace, justice and morality, and to be models of faithfulness to the rules. Instead, religion and state provide ongoing models of hope being dimmed by stress, indifference and corruption. Sexual abuse of children and adults is widely associated with churchmen, including cardinals and bishops in the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant evangelicals and leaders in other faiths.


How equal is dementia?

Religion’s adherents and converts may overcome failures, and encourage others to enrich the lives of themselves and others, but religious devotion is not expected to change qualities given to a person at birth. Religious teachings are generally presented in a “one size fits all” format, applicable to everybody in the same way. Nobody has figured out how someone who starts life with the burden of dementia, maybe an anti-social or psychosexual disorder, will absorb the golden rule as taught in Sunday school or celebrated in sermons.

Criminals cause crime, and it would be more efficient and cheaper to find out what’s nudging them and how to intervene, but it hasn’t happened. Apparently some people enjoy taking chances, pressing their luck without going to a casino, cheating on taxes and stealing from wimps. The glib claim that poverty causes crime has never been true, and its absurdity never more evident than in the arrest of billionaires for cheating themselves, their friends, the poor and the government. Prison terms are no more successful in wiping out crime than in preventing hurricanes.

Given the world’s experience with political organizations both secular and religious, campaigns, committees, letters to the editor, lawsuits and countersuits, climate change may put beaches on Pike’s Peak before justice issues are resolved. We ought to find out what really causes people to murder, steal and destroy, and how they might be drawn to healthier occupations.

Getting older? You bet your life

By A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

When I was a middle-aged fan of the feathered I used to think about retiring with binoculars in another decade or two, enjoying plenty of time for birdwatching.

When I finally got around to retiring the owls were hooting at me because I had the time, but I no longer had eyes that could even spot squirrels poking at my bird feeders. My ophthalmologist recommended that I buy bigger light bulbs. The owls hooted some more.

That was a long time ago. And now, 26 years after I joined, I’ve received a renewal notice from the AARP, as the American Association of Retired Persons is known. I’m offered a choice. I can renew for 1 year, or 3 years, or 5 years. As an optimist I’m opting for 5 years, which will cover me until a bit before my 90th birthday.

A friend told me that’s a ripe old age, and I thought I’d do a fact-check on that. What makes someone ripe? One reference book says something may be called ripe when its thread-like tendrils discolor and stop growing. Check!

Another way, especially if you’re wondering about a melon, is to rap on it to see whether it sounds hollow. If it sounds hollow, it probably is ripe. There’s nothing personal about this.

Growing old is an adventure, with risks, fears and satisfactions. Old age is sometimes treated as though it were a disease all by itself. Nobody has a cure for growth, or truly wants one. Old age is the consummation of human growth. Older folks have diseases. So do a tragic number of infants, children, young moms and dads. Jesus, who died young, offers the promise of eternal life, but no personal example of aging. No further example was unnecessary because, from the time of a person's birth, there's no change in Life's expectancy of a loving and generous spirit.

In the 21st century the words of Moses to Pharaoh resonate with power many generations after they were spoken. Exodus says that Moses was 80 years old when he insisted, “Let my people go.” In Psalm 71 there’s a prayer, “So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, till I proclaim thy might to all the generations to come.”

Now that’s a positive fulfillment of advanced age—to proclaim the power of God, not necessarily from a pulpit or in a letter to the editor, but by being a living proclamation of faith. Faith is explained by catechisms, but it builds from the inside out.

New friends from old memories

From the Post-Journal, Jamestown, N.Y., Sunday, June 7, 2009

By Ed Wall

Eighty years ago I watched my grandpa in his rocking chair devour the Jamestown Post, starting with the headlines and not stopping until he checked out the classified ads. I learned to read at age 4 because I wanted to know what the Katzenjammer Kids were saying in the comic strips.

Many years later the morning Post and its evening competitor merged into The Post-Journal, still printing the news, including births and deaths. I had lost touch with the family of Harold Lind, my 1930s boyhood pal in Celoron, so I wrote to The Post-Journal. I also checked listings with Ancestry.com on the Internet. Results were swift.

The Post-Journal letter was read by my pal’s nieces and nephews in Oregon, Delaware and New York. All were born after Harold’s death during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, but they knew about him.

They remember Harold’s parents, Walter and Ruth Lind, as their own dearly loved grandparents. Harold’s brother Warren died many years ago. Lady Lorna was Harold’ name for his little sister, Lorna, whose own children responded to my letter last month. Lorna died a couple of years ago. Her brother Laurel, called Larry, lives with his wife in Indiana. I remember him very well, even though I haven’t seen him in more than six and a half decades.

Larry wrote me that, thanks to the World War II GI Bill, he earned an electrical engineering degree, and worked for a major company. After retirement he spent several years as an electronic circuit design consultant.

"I remember you as my big brother’s best friend," he wrote.

I couldn’t think of a better way to be remembered.

My thanks to The Post-Journal and to all of the Linds, former Linds and near-Linds who have been in touch. Harold and I were inseparable when we were maybe 7 to 10 years old, and after my family moved away we were in frequent touch. We moved, as many did during the Great Depression. My dad, George H. Wall, was pipe organist at the Winter Garden theater and broadcast a daily program on Jamestown’s only radio station at the time, WOCL, but the national money crisis along with the advent of sound movies made it necessary to move on.
While I lived in Celoron with my grandparents, William Sheldon and Della Kinney Olmstead, I had all the children’s diseases that were standard in those days. When the doctor tacked a quarantine sign on the front door one day, allowing no visitors, I was discouraged because I heard nothing from Harold. The explanation turned out to be simple. We had picked up the same disease at the same time and were both quarantined at the same time.

We were both in uniform in 1942 when we spent Harold’s last Army leave, before he went to Texas for tank training, goofing around in New York City. I never saw him again. Harold was the kind of straight arrow, smart and upbeat, who should be remembered, and as Memorial Day approached this year I wanted to be certain he had not been forgotten.

I discovered from his relatives that there’s no chance of that.