Neanderpundit

I was about the most manually dextrous person I knew; at 40, I could still easily tie a knot in an eyelash, and sometimes i could even manage two. These days if I can tie a knot in a phone cord I consider it a good day. The pain and numbness in my hands has gotten to the point that I often end up doing delicate tasks as much by muscle memory as anything else, like a newly deaf person talking, they can still do ok, but you know it’s going to deteriorate after a while.

I haven’t discovered any possible solutions to my hand issues that don’t involve extraordinarily expensive tests or chancy surgeries, and it doesn’t look like anything is going to change in that respect anytime soon. So I keep at it, and before horribly long, I suspect, I’ll have to leave the ral delicate work for younger hands, or those couple of hours a day when they are at their peak performance.

Getting old is not for pussies. Especially not when you’ve lived a rugged life.

I read John Howard Griffin’s “Black like Me”. It’s an okay book, was then, is now. It’s an interesting insight into the differences- at least when it was written- between the races and the way they live.

Having read the book, I was all on fire to go out and fight the injustices being perpetrated on blacks by whites, and I was pretty vocal about it. My mother tried to argue me out of my newfound fervor, but dad just got me in the truck, and we went for a ride around downtown Gary.

There was gunfire, and plenty of it. There was a lot of disorder and disaster. Even as Itried to retain my righteous indignation I realized that ‘Black like me” contained a piece of a story, and there were other pieces it didn’t contain.

It dawned on me- and this was a p[retty early ages- that maybe just because someone writes a book and gets paid to do so, it doesn’t make them the expert on anything.

Quite a few years later, but still many years ago, I managed to lay my hands on an email address for Sir (Not sir at the time, btw) Arthur C Clarke. We had, over the course of two or three years, an email correspondence. One of my very early emails to him explained that I was a devoted fan, who loved literally all his work, and that even if he should turn out to have feet of clay, I would still enjoy his work.

There were allegations that Clark was a shorteye, later on, though I never saw any concrete evidence of this. My fears of the author having feet of clay were founded in some reality.
His response?

“I assure you, my feet are made of the Very Finest Clay”

I have always looked- not at the shining visage of the hero, but lifted up his pantleg and pulled down his sock. Invariably, clay. Inevitably, heroes fail, they fail themselves, they fail each other, they fail you. I have come to eschew Heroes. Perhaps it’s because I’m older and more cynical, perhaps i just came to smart on the subject sooner than many. Nobody can question my heroes because I have none- even the people I respect most, I’m often more familiar with their failures than successes.

Of couse, as I’ve found out in the last several days, God forbid you question the integrity of someone else’s heroes. Eric Hoffer, god rest his ornery soul, was spot on, on that one.