I rise to testify in my own defense

The Column: 05.29.24

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I spent 12 hours in a New York ER last Saturday and upon discharge was given ten pages of test results and now I have more information about myself than I know what to do with. I went into the ER on my own steam, by taxi, no siren, because I had experienced a few surprising memory lapses (name of principal physician, name of building I reside in, what I did the previous week), blanks that a few minutes of research could’ve filled in, but my love was alarmed so I left the West Side where the novelists live and went to the East Side where the neurologists practice, where they put me through CT, MRI, had me follow their finger with my eyes, and now I’m feeling fine, thank you, but now I must look at long diagnoses of lobes and fissures, global this and that, and the word “transient” bothers me. I know they don’t mean it this way but I imagine myself with baggy pants, holes in my shoes, holding a wine bottle, the kind with a screw top, and I don’t drink.

There was no intracranial hemorrhage, praise the Lord, and I do wish that a neurologist or a physician’s assistant had written “patient was focused and well-spoken and presented a chronic sardonic sense of incongruities that brought care providers to the verge of amusement,” but I will take what I can get, which was discharge and a cab ride home.

“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,” said King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and that was even before neurology came along to put more salt in the soup. It is a dark book, Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…. there is nothing new under the sun.”), and so we skipped it in Sunday School in favor of Jesus gathering the little children into His lap and saying, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,” thus putting His stamp of approval on immaturity.

Ecclesiastes is not a book for a man my age to be reading, all about the meaninglessness of life and how your hard labor is in vain: I believed in the meaninglessness of labor back in my teens and twenties and then found a vocation and have been happier ever since. I much prefer the Song of Solomon, the bosomy passages, the banqueting, the beloved and all her delights, I’d walk a million miles for one of her smiles, she’s the jam on my toast, the one I love most, so help me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

You can’t tell me the guy who wrote “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” was the same guy who wrote, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave.” And indeed I look in Wikipedia where they say it weren’t so, that Solomon was tenth century B.C. and the book came out seven centuries later. I will leave this to Jewish scholars. We Christians don’t buy into meaninglessness; we believe we are candles in dark corners, some brighter than others.

I once wrote good obituaries for the St. Paul paper and I like to think that some of them were pasted in scrapbooks and now a teenager is reading them with interest, learning more about great-great-grandpa Al. I once did an early morning radio show and provided cheerfulness to grad students coming off three hours of sleep to go to the 8 a.m. seminar who then went on to fine careers in botany and biology.

I did a live show on Saturdays at 5 p.m., which many young couples came to on their first date, their parents being fans of mine let them borrow the car, so it was a safe date, better than ingesting unlabeled drugs on the riverbank and skinny-dipping while semi-conscious, and those couples were bored to tears by my nonsense but those marriages have now extended into happy grandparenting and I take some credit. I dare say my couples turned out better than George Carlin couples or Black Sabbath couples or couples who jumped straight in the backseat and were parents before they could vote. I did what I could for my team. I ran the race though I walked the last couple of miles. I left the faith or thought I did but the faith didn’t leave me. I married Jenny and she loves me even in my current condition. The defense rests.

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