I’ve been having waves of melancholy washing over me the last couple of days. I haven’t been able to trace the source. I think it’s just a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I’d feel better about it if I could say it’s this big and momentous thing in life but there’s nothing really that wrong. The biggest thing is probably a lack of a partner with whom I can just talk it out and who will make me some comfort food and tell me that everything is actually ok. I know it is but sometimes you need to hear that from an external source because the internal wells just run a little dry.
There’s nothing terribly wrong at work other than the having to bear up as the linchpin of outpatient clinical geriatrics. There have been a lot of new patients with serious psychosocial dysfunction recently – mainly stemming from families trying to nonchalantly pretend that nothing is changing as an elder is obviously succumbing to the ravages of cognitive decline and then the crisis happens and there’s an expectation that I will somehow be able to restore things to the way they used to be. I cannot do that. No one can. Life is change and aging accelerates that process and if you are unwilling to adapt your approach to life to those inexorable changes, there will be unpleasant consequences. The ones I am unravelling this week involve a serious traffic accident, misappropriation of funds, and adult children who are content to let clearly demented parents make very bad decisions for themselves and then trying to shove the consequences of those decisions off on the health system. It’s emotionally exhausting work and there’s so few of us involved now, just as the graying of the baby boom is starting to truly accelerate, that it’s very difficult to take a step back and recharge the batteries. I am trying to stick it out for another three years but I get tired just thinking about it.
There’s been disasters among my friend group as well. Two friends whom I have been assisting with health issues have died in the last few weeks and a couple more are going through major life crises such as sudden unemployment. Another one, whom I have endeavored to help stabilize through a period of serious mental illness, is on his way to state prison for acts committed while in uncontrolled manic episodes. The fixer/nurturer in me is beating myself up wondering what I could have done differently in all of these situations to ensure a different outcome. Probably nothing and my intellectual self knows that. My emotional self doesn’t always want to accept that answer.
Theater usually helps get me back to my happy place but the rehearsal process on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is making me feel old. Maybe it’s all the teen early twenties ensemble leaping about the stage (a couple of whom I held as infants not all that long ago). Maybe it’s those bouncy catchy Sherman brothers songs that have a feeling of forced gaiety behind them. Maybe it’s the property itself – which I first saw in a movie theater back in 1968 – that is dredging up memories of my childhood and making me wonder what happened to that six year old kid and did he make the right choices and has the life he lived meant something over the last half century or so.
The movie version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a bit of a milestone for me as a child. I remember it as being one of the first films I was aware of where I asked my parents to take me to see it (my father did the honors – he was my movie companion in my childhood – my mother was at home corralling two toddlers too young for movie theaters). I remember falling in love with the over the top Edwardian fashions, wanting to see Neuschwanstein for myself (It took me another sixteen years to make that happen), and being unconvinced by the cheap blue screen work. I was also more fascinated than scared by Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher and was quite surprised when my mother knew all about his prior history as a principal danseur with British ballet and as a Shakespearean. (Look up his Oberon against Vivien Leigh’s Titania at the Old Vic in 1935).
I had been given the Ian Fleming Book for Christmas the year before the film came out and had read it. Anyone who has knows that the film deviates from the book in multiple ways and it was my introduction to the enormous changes that sometimes befall stories in their adaptation to the screen (Truly Scrumptious, Vulgaria and all sorts of other pieces of the film came from the fertile mind of Roald Dahl who wrote the screenplay). I also had a Chitty coloring book that was done from the original story boards and which had somewhat different plot points, the Corgi Chitty model car with wings that popped out when you pulled a lever and with the main characters all in their proper places. Jemima became lose after a few months, fell out and was never seen again. I also had, somewhere in there, a gerbil named Chitty who only had three legs. What happened to the fourth is something of a mystery.
It all feels like I’m spinning my wheels a bit and not moving forward. When I got into a rut following Tommy’s death, I was able to use writing and theater to propel myself forward. Then the pandemic and the books it produced kept up that momentum. Now I feel like it’s stopped. Yes, I’m working on another book but it’s not flowing and I don’t feel like I have the ability to get it out of my brain and onto paper. The career is entering its last phase. I don’t feel that I can physically continue to do the theater thing at the pace I have been doing it for a whole lot longer. I can’t make myself write as there’s no shut down pushing me that direction. I am reminded constantly that I’ve entered the decade when you have to start learning to say goodbye to your peer group as they begin to fall to perfectly normal life processes.
Time to find a really sappy movie and at least feel some ersatz emotion. Sometimes if I can find a chink in my armor and let some emotions out I feel better the next day. One can but hope.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 