“THE LONG GOODBYE, PART FOUR: FINAL TEARS”

For Mark King Schwartz, 1960-2020

They call dementia “The Long Goodbye” because it is an agonizing and protracted death of the souls who love the victim.

For many years now, I have grieved a man who was still alive, trapped in an earthly vessel which, at its best, was never able to accommodate his indomitable spirit. 

 But now he is unshackled, free to be my friend again: buying a round of Cuba Libras at the “Lunch Counter” at that big “Bucky’s” strip joint in the sky, commandeering the DJ Booth at The Veranda and singing a medley of Sinatra tunes, and driving the “Great Red Shark,” his candy-apple red 1973 Olds ’88 convertible, the engine of which I burnt out on the way to Houston in the summer of 1980.

He might even finally be able to dribble a basketball.

He is free now and so am I.

I would like to be able to say that his illness made me a better man: to appreciate the things I have, to love more deeply, and to cherish the new friends I have to replace the ones I’ve lost.

But it did not. It stunted me and made me bitter. I felt vaguely guilty about my undeserved good health, my law practice, my beautiful new granddaughter.

And I was angry. Angry at God. Angry at myself for letting our friendship diminish in the years before his illness. Angry at him for not being there when I needed him.

But when I heard the news he had died, I felt an exceedingly undramatic sense of relief, like his beloved Longhorns beating Kansas in football, a desired but wholly expected result.

I am through crying now.

 

The last time he suffered a setback and we feared the worst, I hustled to Austin and sat silently with him for a couple of hours, not knowing it would be the last time I would be in his physical presence.

Later that day, I got the rare pleasure of sitting with two of his children, children who I had thought I would know as well as my own. But by historical accident and fateful cockup, I did not. Had it not been for that day, I would still feel that.

It was that day they learned I had written the three prior segments about his illness in my blog. I was able to hear his eldest daughter, an aspiring stand-up comic who inherited her father’s great voice and comedic timing, read my words.

It was the first time I had ever heard anyone read my words aloud and it frightened me, fearful I would offend them by not doing their father justice. I feared I might lose the next twenty-five years of their lives.

As she read, she would falter and her eyes would well up with tears, but then she would find her voice again and even laugh through her tears.

I will always remember every minute of the day I was married, the day my son was born, and the day I walked my daughter down the aisle.

But I will also remember the day I listened to little Kitty Schwartz read my words about her father for the first time, reading them like she wrote them, as if by anointed process, her father’s voice all I could hear.

You don’t get many days when you can look up and say, Ok, Big Guy, You can take me now, because this is about as good as it gets.

 

This blog has always been about transition and spiritual growth, how a dinosaur ex-fraternity boy from deep East Texas found spirituality and enlightenment in an unlikely place: a yoga mat.

Ironically, he too had found solace and peace on a yoga mat. In the early stages of his illness, he would take classes at a studio in Tarrytown. With a wandering spirit and soul, he could live without traditional norms. I can completely see how yoga would provide a centering place for him, where he could find comfort in its repetition and traditions.

His mother is a yogi of emeritus status and I believe his practice was also a way to seek her out and hold her close in a mind that had begun to haunt him from within.

His mother was also a brilliant professor of German at UT and has forever scared the living shit out of me, but we all sat at her dinner table one wonderful afternoon and talked yoga. For the first time in her presence, I felt a heretofore unimaginable sense of metaphysical equality. Together the two of us even attempted a tandem tree pose.

While I do regret we never got to take a yoga class together, I do imagine him on his mat in those early stages of his illness, going through the poses by rote, struggling to maintain safety and stability in his life against the tide of uncertainty he must have felt on a daily basis.

So, in the end, somehow our friendship persevered across time and space, on yoga mats two hundred miles apart, whether we knew or not.

 

 

In the early 1980s, there remained at the SAE house in Austin the surviving tradition of inviting the members of the senior pledge class, at the final chapter meeting of the year, to stand and provide their reflections on four years of life at the fraternity. The Eminent Archon would call your name and bark, “tears” and you would stand on your chair and share those memories nearest and dearest to you.

We called it: Final Tears.

It is not lost on me the irony that I would have to be “invited” to share my innermost feelings or that I would do so only in an insular environment, but please remember I am the product of an certain era -even as I try not to be a prisoner of it.

It is perhaps even more ironic that “tears” was actually not an invitation at all, but rather a command, held over from our pledgeship, where an active member would scream, “tears” and the pledge would immediately jump up on a chair and await instructions, such as a demand to recite John Walter Wayland’s “The True Gentlemen” (worth a read) or the entire Greek alphabet while holding a burning match.

If you made a mistake, you started over again, without blowing out the match.

Tears.

The depth and genuineness of the revelations might surprise the uninitiated. Hulking ex-jocks crying like babies expressing their undying love for their pledge brothers. Cynical future lawyers choking up when recognizing that this would be the last meal they would share together. Good ol’ boys from deep East Texas describing unlikely but enduring friendships with the sons of Yankee civil rights lawyers.

The stories had only thing in common: Tears.

So, it is somehow appropriate, as I sit here in quarantine suffering my fifth day of frank symptoms from Covid-19, that I would receive the news that my best friend, Mark King Schwartz, had died.

So, these are my final tears for him.

 

© Thomas C. Barron 2020

THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

            I was a cardiologist's wet dream: a fifty-one year- old white male, twenty-five pounds overweight, with a high stress job and in a torrid love affair with fried foods. To be fair, I was also a runner with five marathons under my ever-expanding belt, even though I now competed in the spectacularly unflatteringly- named "Rhino" division, having somehow leap-frogged the somewhat -less- insulting- but -still -unflattering "Clydesdale" division altogether.

            But after over thirty years of relentless pounding, I was now face to face with the specter of my own running mortality. Plantar fasciitis gave rise to chronic runners knee, resulting in the only protracted injury-related layoff of my extraordinarily average running career. Joints ached under the additional strain of the extra bulk and it took two Advil, a knee brace and a back support truss just to get me out the door.

And then one day I just stopped.

            Over the years,  I willingly accepted the abuse of running as part of some battered, psychologically mutated protestant ideal that Texas boys of a certain era absorb on the bristly brown grass of August two –a–days. Please forgive me as I may have failed to grasp the gentle wisdom of my high school football coaches but I was too busy watching the heat rise off the ground like amoeba. Most all of it essentially carried the same general theme in any event: If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not doing you any good.

No pain, no gain.

You ain’t hurt, get back in there.

Water? You don’t need water. That’s why you have salt tablets.

But they didn’t tell me what happens when you quit.

In my junior year in college, I was sixty pounds overweight, smoked two packs of menthols a day, hadn’t eaten a fruit or vegetable other than a Frito in three years and polished off a bottle of rum before sundown most days.

But in late May of 1981, I had the Austin Flood Epiphany. On May 24, 1981, I rolled all the dope I had into a joint the size of a panatela, which I smoked during the worst flood in Austin history, not knowing until later whether or not I actually dreamed up the white Volkswagen microbus floating down South Lamar carrying four old hippies and two cases of contraband Hawaiian shirts.

During the previous semester, I had lost one girlfriend, several critical GPA points for law school and, in general, touch with the bounds of propriety. On the other hand, I had rediscovered Taco Bell and marijuana.

It was when my roommate found me nude on the floor looking under tables, mattresses and stereo equipment that I had my very own personal moment of clarity.

He asked, innocently enough, what I was looking for.

To which I replied: April.

Whether it was an epiphany or whether I had simply run out of dope, I can’t be sure.

Armed only with the Socratic teachings of my high school football coaches, I unwittingly took my first steps to yoga. It was, to be sure, a circuititous route.

The next day, I quit drinking, dope and eating red meat. The Over and Under among my dearest friends was anywhere from six to fifty-seven hours. (For those of you keeping score at home: Drinking- 120 days. Grass- 180 days. Red meat- 18 months.)

I also found myself on the track at Memorial Stadium at 3 o’clock that next afternoon with the sun throwing daggers at Austin, Texas even though priests and nuns might be outside. The amoeba patterns emanating from the synthetic track, while different from those of my scorched high school football field, were somehow comforting. 

That day I made it almost a lap before I had to stop and retch.

I was twenty-one years old.

Every step on that track that summer was simply a step. I required of myself only one more step, not daring to think beyond that lest the attachment of performance poison the otherwise pure process. All I wanted was that calm feeling at the end of my run when my heart rate subsided and all I could feel were the toxins pouring out of my body. It was utter self-containment. That was enough. There was no thought or distraction- not even a sense of commitment.

In retrospect, even my running wardrobe seemed almost obstinately anachronistic: white tee shirt, gray gym shorts and brown suede (yes, I said suede) Adidas Samba soccer shoes- perhaps the worst possible thing a human being could put on the their feet in order to run. In the seminal age of polyester Dolphin running shorts and New Balance shoes, I needed only the act of running, not the accoutrement. As ever, I felt enough of the interloper as it was without trying to take on the airs (and thus the responsibilities) of a real runner.

Six months and sixy pounds flew by.

            Thirty years later, the idea of not running terrified me. What if I could never run again? It was far more than the fear of inactivity or the aging process- it was the fear that there would be no escape-  no sublime catharsis- for me against the monumental pressures and petty indignities of my daily existence. I feared I would grab an Uzi and start looking for a McDonalds inside of two weeks.

            Other than my rather unnatural fascination with thrift store shopping, running is the only remotely Zen-like experience of my day. There is just something about a loop around White Rock Lake late on a fall afternoon with the crisp air, the smells of Fall in my nose, the leaves crackling beneath my feet, and the sun sneaking below the treeline which somehow majestically transforms me into a larger, more worthy, human being.

            What would happen when that went away? What other passions would I be deprived of? And how quickly? The softball which was now my left knee simply appeared out of the void. It frightened me in a way I was not prepared to be frightened. Is this a sore knee which it swollen or is this a queen of-diamonds kind of tumor? Remember, you’re getting to that age, a little voice was telling me.



NEXT TIME: “OM. Really?!?“

(c) (2013)