Extinction Now

I read yesterday about extinction. A new class of animals — 22, in fact, and one plant — have disappeared from the face of the Earth. No one can find them anymore in any place, because those animals and that plant are all gone. They no longer exist. Humans and Nature have combined to rob them of being alive . . . forever.

Eleven of the animals are birds, two are fish, eight are mussels. The New York Times even ran a photo on its front page of one of the birds that’s now gone. It was a Maui nukupu’u. It had a yellow belly and a thin beak that curved downward. It looked to be about the size of a canary. But it is no more. It was last seen in 1996.

Of course, every death is an extinction. When you and I die, we will cease to exist. Our bodies may be encased in a coffin and lie six feet underground. Or we may be cremated and placed in the ground or scattered to the winds or poured into an urn or a cigar box. But as live individuals, we will no longer exist. As individuals, we will be extinct.

Even people whose bodies are preserved and displayed in some public way are just lumps of flab propped up by chemicals and wooden splints. But as living beings, they’re dead as doornails.

No doubt some of the 22 animals just declared extinct had already been captured and stuffed and exist as dead objects in museums somewhere. But they exist as empty shells, dead to the world in any meaningful sense for the rest of cosmic time.

The same will be said of us as individuals. If we have children, some of our DNA will live on throughout generations, perhaps. Our names and brief biographies will be dredged up when people use their computers to trace their ancestry. But those will just be words, the way words are now used to describe the animals that have just been officially declared ‘extinct.’

But everything we were and everything we did and everything we wrote or painted or sculpted or composed or built or planted will exist as second-hand extensions of who and what we used to be.

As individuals, we will be as extinct as the Maui nukupu’u.

That is a bitter pill to swallow. And so for centuries, billions of humans have refused to swallow it. Instead of accepting their future extinction, they make up stories that give them an after-life. They figure they’ve got one life on earth and then when they run out of that life, they give themselves an “after-life.” So they don’t ever really die. They just move from one plane of being to another.

There is no credible evidence for this after-life. There is no reason to suppose that such a place or thing exists. But people want to believe there is such a thing and so they just believe it. Period ! They make it up and call it ‘holy.’

The idea of just fading into nothingness is too painful for many people to accept, and so they create stories that make them feel better. The stories don’t have to be true. They just have to calm people down and relieve them of the pain and sadness of dying-into-nothingness.

These life-after-death stories don’t usually include birds and mussels and clams and other extinct animals. But they often do include dogs and cats. People like to think that their beloved pets will be waiting for them in the after-life.

Of course, this after-life scenario is nonsense. But who cares? Whether there is or isn’t a pleasant after-life where my dog Fritz is waiting for me won’t be known until I die.

But by then, none of it will matter.

My extinction on Earth will be as complete as the last song of the dodo bird.

Disappearing into nothingness is one of extinction’s most reliable promises.

Modest Expectations

Physically, nothing has changed for the better. I continue to feel clogged in the middle. My guts are distended. The pain is subtle and discouraging. Doctors lean toward a diagnosis of severe acid reflux, although I think something else is involved. Maybe the pancreas.

I’ve had blood tests, which showed an alarming spike in Lipase. The normal range is 11-55 u/l. My number was 576. That’s what got me into the hospital two weeks ago. The number then dropped to 72. But a week later, it was back up to 240, and may be even higher now. Lipase is associated with the pancreas.

I’ve had an x-ray, two ultrasounds, and a CAT scan. Next Sunday, I will have an MRI. Tomorrow I see a urologist. The next day, an orthopedist. A week from Tuesday, a gastroenterologist. He’s the one who ordered the MRI. He wants a closer look at my pancreas. I hope the deep scan will also show my distended guts, which are the source of my discomfort.

And then, of course, there’s my back pain from two cracked discs and a troubled spinal column.

Meanwhile, I try to figure out what to eat that won’t add pain to my acid reflux, if that‘s what it is. I am losing weight, which I can’t afford. I am just under 5 foot 10 inches tall and weigh 133 pounds. I should weigh at least 140 pounds.

I am eating an apple right now, even as I write. It’s from a local orchard three towns away. I drove there last week and bought half a dozen of honey crisp. I also bought a jar of apple butter. I’m hoping my acid reflux will give these apples a painless pass.

And so I am living my life, for the past month, around the pain and general discomfort of my old body that’s in retreat. For most of my life, I was in very good shape. I was an athlete in my youth and stayed thin and active throughout most of my adulthood.

But then I turned 84 and the tables turned, and now exercise walking is almost too much to bear. I spend hours sitting in my recliner chair, reading books and newspapers and watching films on Turner Classic Movies. I also watch the Red Sox play good, hard baseball, as they compete for a ‘wild-card’ spot at the end of the regular season.

Baseball remains the perfect sport in our imperfect world — a work of kinetic art posing as an athletic contest. And it brings me much joy. The ancient Greeks would have loved it. Baseball comforts me in ways that go beyond wins and losses. The staggered pace of play. The concept of hitting a ball traveling at 95 miles an hour with a piece of hard maple or ash. Standing still and then suddenly running as fast as you can to ‘steal’ a base or catch a hard hit ball. The strategy of throwing the ball in a specific spot or swinging the bat to pull the ball or hit it to the opposite field. This perfect game is a free-for-all within the confines of a Rubik’s cube. An art form with enough flexibility to break your heart.

My brother Bill, 11 years younger than I am, has his own medical quandaries, following open-heart surgery last year. We commiserate over cell phones. We watch the same Red Sox games in our separate enclaves. He introduces me to interesting writers he has discovered. We both need the sea to be nearby.

Once upon a time, when he was a small child, I appeared at his bedroom window wearing a Santa Claus mask. His eyes grew as big as the moon, and he stammered as he spoke through the window glass, telling Santa what he would like for Christmas. I kept nodding, as if everything he asked for would be his. And sure enough, when Christmas morning arrived, everything he had asked for was there under the tree.

Promises kept.

But Santa no longer appears at our bedroom windows. And promises have become too fragile to be tucked into neatly wrapped packages.

Instead, we edge our way through the days hoping for a calm digestion and a steady supply of oxygen. Our expectations have become as modest as a high tide or a sacrifice fly.

A peanut butter and honey sandwich is like nectar from the gods.

Nine/Eleven

This is the way Don DeLillo begins his 2007 novel, “Falling Man”:

“It was not a street but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

“The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

“He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. There was glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light. He walked past a Breakfast Special sign and they went running by, city cops and security guards running, hands pressed down on gun butts to keep the weapons steady.

“Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. It happened everywhere around him, a car half buried in debris, windows smashed and noises coming out, radio voices scratching at the wreckage. He saw people shedding water as they ran, clothes and bodies drenched from sprinkler systems. There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood. Paper cups went bouncing oddly by.”

---

I was supposed to leave for Paris two days later. But all flights were cancelled. The sky was empty of all flights. America held its battered breath.

By the time I arrived in Paris later in the month, Le Monde had already published an oversized magazine devoted entirely to the catastrophe. I bought a copy and still have it. One page shows a close-up of the famous photo of a single man plunging to his death in almost a ballet-like pose. The photo was deemed too shocking, too unnerving, to be shown and was, for a long time, unofficially banned from publication worldwide. The Le Monde image is a rare ’keepsake.’

That falling man served as the impulse for the title of DeLillo’s novel.

Of all the words expressed at the time about the cataclysmic events at the World Trade Center, the words that most unnerved me were reportedly spoken by a young school child who happened to be in the vicinity with her teacher. I only heard this reported once, but I assume it’s true.

The child looked up, as people began to leap to their deaths from the upper floors. The child reportedly said to her teacher: ’Look ! The birds are on fire.”

Labor Day Lament

When I was in grammar school and high school, I used to hate Labor Day. Not just hate it, but dread it. It was the semi-official end of summer, which meant my free time away from school was over.

I loved my summer freedom. When my mom and I lived with my grandparents, summers were quiet and lazy in the country and the locusts buzzed and the dew took its time to dry and the apple trees were climbable and the hand pump brought up clear, cold water from deep below and I didn’t have to do anything, other than sometimes cut the grass with the hand lawnmower or help my grandmother weed the vegetable garden.

I didn’t have any friends my own age, but that was fine. My grandmother was loving and my grandfather was interesting and my two uncles also lived at home, especially my uncle George, and they played with me and took me seriously and taught me how to throw a football and a baseball and what to listen for in music.

And when my mom met a good man and re-married, we left my grandparents’ house, and my summer life turned interesting in another way. Now we had a small cottage on an island that was really a peninsula. And we would go down there after school ended in June and would spend the rest of the summer at the cottage along Long Island Sound until the start of September. And when my brother was born, he made our life even more sweet and enjoyable, and he and I would eventually play very serious games of wiffle ball.

Even when I was a senior in high school, I always dreaded our move back to our winter home and the start once again of a school year.

I never like school, even though I did ok in it. I got good enough grades and was a big shot in athletics and had friends and so-called influence on student activities and won some awards. But I was always happier away from school than at school, especially during my wonderful summers at the cottage by the sea — which I still half-own with my brother.

And so Labor Day always stood as a killer of happiness, a kind of execution ritual, the ending of a transfigured state of simple miracles.

The irony is that I eventually went on to graduate from university with a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree and then taught fulltime at a private day school for eight years and part-time in community colleges and ended up as director of a university’s news bureau. All that within my time freelance writing and watching films as the film critic for the New Haven newspaper.

But even today, decades away from my time in high schools and universities, I feel a kind of dread when Labor Day arrives. It still represents the ending of summer freedom and innocent happiness and outdoor breezes and the sea nuzzling among the rocks and the seaweed and the casualness of clothes and the nights of open windows and the sound of baseball games on the radio and corn-on-the-cob and sitting in the shade of the black cherry tree on the coastline at Lighthouse Point.

Labor Day was always a kind of death knell. A Bergman-esque visit by Death himself to end the summer chess game.

At 84 and long-retired, I can still do many of those things after Labor Day, without having to pack it in and go teach or study or seek out news to print. But all of that lacks the sense of casualness and day-dreaming encouraged by summer and its golden laziness.

With Labor Day comes responsibility and seriousness. No more vacations, no more wistfulness. Time to buckle down and focus. Freedom must take a back seat. The time for bare feet is past. Butterflies are heading for Mexico. The brutality of football is already in motion.

Soon it will be time to rake dead leaves.