Here and Now

Three weeks after my doctor surprised me with a diagnosis of rapidly accelerating Parkinson’s, I packed a satchel with a change of clothes (including a necktie, which I suspected I would not need). I tried to explain to my wife why I needed to go on a week’s trip—alone. To prove to myself that Parkinson’s wouldn’t limit me. Not yet.

The motel sign fizzed. Clumps of grass grew on the base of an abandoned gas pump. The Texaco sign wasn’t the Pegasus of my childhood but a firefighter’s hat. The diner run by the motel had a wraparound picture window through which a woman in a cloche hat stared into her cup of coffee. It reminded me of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. The original building that modeled for that painting is now a florist shop in Greenwich Village next to the just-closed Elephant & Castle restaurant.

I didn’t fear death. My first thought of death came in 1953, when I was eight. Death meant that I would never see Walt Disney’s animated Peter Pan, which had just been announced. From then on, I often understood living as catching up to myself in the future. A short-term future—ignoring the taste of the roast chicken my mother served while looking forward to the strawberry shortcake dessert.

Years later, after I had moved to New York City, I sat on a cracked plastic burgundy stool after eating a cheeseburger and ordered strawberry shortcake. It turned out to be a slab of crumbling shortcake, a dollop of real whipped cream, and a single, thumb-size strawberry. I complained to the waitress about the lack of strawberries.

“You ordered strawberry shortcake,” she said. “Not strawberries shortcake.” Welcome to New York. Why did that memory linger when other, more significant recollections have vanished?

A pal who knew Baba Ram Dass told me that Ram Dass had shared with him the secret of life.

 “What is it?” I asked.

“Take your Lipitor every day,” my pal said.

I survived long enough to see Peter Pan. There was always something to look forward to—some future I was so impatient to reach that I paid scant attention to the present. In 1954, a year after I discovered death, we finally got a television set, the last family in the neighborhood to get one. Or so I was convinced. A television set! I’d get to watch The Mickey Mouse Club. No such luck. My mother ironed as she watched the Army–McCarthy hearings. When Roy Cohn’s face appeared on the screen, my mother put the iron through the picture tube.

I had to go to a friend’s house to see The Mickey Mouse Club. I sent a fan letter to Annette Funicello. At school, we boys elbowed one another. Last night, did you see Annette in her bathing suit?

Every day, I paid half-attention to what was happening, living only for the rush home from school, anticipating a return letter from Annette that never came. I squandered my experiences with a too-devoted attention to the future. The older you get, the more the truth shatters your dreams.

“Be here now,” Ram Dass advised. Not easy to do. I kept yearning for . . . what? My lefty parents had been yearning, too—for them, it was the socialist utopia. In America, even leftists lived in the future.

In my motel cabin, I understood now, a little late, that I should have lived as if at any moment I could die. The problem with death is you don’t get to see how it all ends. I should have been more present.

The hollowness I felt was like the center of a yawn—or the center of a cyclone. Like a stillness before all hell breaks loose. Or all heaven.

I unpacked, putting on the nightstand the one book I’d brought: Cervantes. I’d been putting off reading it for years. I didn’t want my tombstone to read: He never finished Don Quixote.

Photo by John Carl D’Annibale /Albany Times Union via Getty Images