Seasons Change

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and yesterday was the first official day of fall. I hate fall.

The Autumnal Equinox, I believe it is called, when there are 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. Equinox means when night and day are equal. It is the hallway point between when the sun rises at its northern most point along the horizon in June (the longest day of the year) and the southernmost point in December (the shortest day of the year).

Some people I know absolutely love the fall, with the beautiful foliage, the cool, crisp air, the aroma of spiced pumpkin lattes waffling from the local Starbucks.

Forgive me if I do not celebrate the harvest season.

Autumn in poetry, as well as in my own life, has often been associated with melancholy. As Frank Sinatra (and my father) used to sing, “It’s a long, long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September.” I’ve always hated it when days grow shorter, at least as far as the sunlight goes.  

Many people turn inward, both mentally and physically, in the fall.

When I was a kid fall meant back to school. Ugh! I’ve never gotten over that, except for my four years in college. I loved going back to school when I was in college. But then I had good reason.  I went to college in fun-in-the-sun Miami, so for me it was just an extended summer.

Summer has always been my favorite season, by far. Growing up a baseball player, I was truly one of the boys of summer. I’ve never out-grown that.

And this past summer was like no other. To quote Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times… It was the season of Light; it was the season of Darkness.”

My wife Terry and I just enjoyed one of the best summers we’ve ever had. We did more things, we visited more relatives, we went on more trips, and we spent more time together, than any other summer in the 36 years we’ve known each other.

Unfortunately, the reason we made the absolute most out of this past summer, the reason we squeezed every ounce of enjoyment out of this past summer, was because of Terry’s diagnosis of Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

It has been a year now since we’ve known something was seriously wrong, and back on that dark day in the spring when her condition was finally confirmed, we made it a point of emphasis to make the very most out of every day, every week, every month of this summer. And we succeeded.  It was truly a great summer.

But now summer is over. And Terry’s mental health is beginning to fall.

Turn of the century French poet Paul Verlaine wrote the Autumn Song, which has strong, painful feelings of sorrow. “All choked and pale, when the hour chimes, I remember days of old and I cry.”

Unfortunately, Terry and I can relate all too well.

Well before Verlaine, English poet John Keats wrote To Autumn, which speaks of the lush abundance of fall (harvesting of fruits and gourds) but also has a strong sense of melancholic reflection, as winter approaches and everything is dying.

I am afraid Terry’s winter is coming soon, much too soon. And I feel it very well could be our own winter of discontent. But unlike the way Shakespeare used that phrase in Richard III, I do not mean the time of our unhappiness has passed.  Far from it.

About 100 years ago Nobel Prize winning poet W.B. Yeats wrote The Wild Swans at Coole, where the changing of the seasons represents the aging process. “Upon the brimming water among the stones are nine-and-fifty swans” is in the first stanza and the poem ends with a question “By what lake’s edge or pool delight men’s eyes when I awake some day to find they have flown away?”

Terry is five-and-fifty years old, which should certainly be too young for me to have to worry about waking up one day soon to find that the woman who delight’s my eyes has flown away.

But it is not too young. Not anymore.

Fall is supposed to represent the golden years of our lives. Our summer truly was pure gold, but I am not looking forward to the fall.  I am not looking forward to Terry’s fall.

In the poem by Yeats, the end of summer and the beginning of fall represents the heartache of living in a time when “all’s changed” in the 19 years since he first saw the swans at the lake.

My dear wife Terry is changing right before my eyes, especially in the last 19 months.

Anastacia, an American singer/song writer who has had more success outside of the United States, wrote in her song Seasons Change:

Happy turns to sad

Sometimes life gets bad

Things get rearranged

Nothing stays the same

It just never ends

Here we go again

One thing still remains

Seasons change.

I think I made a point in one of my previous blog posts that I hate change, always have.   But I also made a point in previous posts that I was going to be more positive in the future. Look on the Brightside of Life. The glass is half full.  

So now Terry and I plan on making a concerted effort to enjoy this autumn. Maybe we’ll go apple picking. We’ll buy a pumpkin or two for the front of the house.  I have been known to enjoy a good Oktoberfest in the past. I might even go to Starbucks and buy a spiced pumpkin latte. Or better yet go somewhere that serves hard apple cider.

This fall we’ll continue to enjoy taking walks. With fewer mosquitos we’ll be able to enjoy our walks in the woods more. The sound of crunching leaves underfoot is always a pleasant one.  Maybe I’ll take Terry to a football game. My old high school team plays within walking distance of our house.

This weekend I’m taking Terry to her childhood home in Rhode Island for a Walk to End Alzheimer’s.  Fall always seems to arrive a bit sooner in New England.  The air is cooler up there, and soon it will be at our house as well. When it comes to Terry’s mental health, however, I just hope the temperatures are the only things that gradually decrease this fall.

On the ride up to New England we’ll enjoy the foliage, which has already begun up there. Once there we will enjoy visiting with Terry’s family.  And on the way home, we will begin to enjoy our time together this fall.

So yesterday was the first day of fall. And as the old 1960s expression goes, “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.”

I am afraid of what tomorrow will be. But we will try to make the most of it, with or without a spiced pumpkin latte.

Until next time, enjoy the foliage.

Bud

A Walk to Remember
by Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud, and I am taking my wife Terry home for a walk.

In 2005 Jon Bon Jovi asked “Who says you can’t go home?” on his Have a Nice Day album.

Well Jon, it was Thomas Wolfe, who wrote the novel You Can’t Go Home Again almost 100 years ago about a fledging author who makes references to his small hometown in a book that has national success, but the hometown folks don’t like the way they were portrayed and threaten to kill him.

That sounds like a pretty good reason to me not to go home again.

Like Thomas Wolfe, I’m afraid I used to say that to Terry too, when my work schedule did not allow us to visit her small hometown as often as she would like.

John and Paul, not the disciples (perhaps prophets though) but the great Lennon and McCartney, sang on the Let it Be album “You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead…We’re on our way home, We’re going home” in the song Two of Us.

Long before MTV, before there were such things as music videos, the Beatles videotaped themselves performing Two of Us at Apple Studios. The clip was part of the Let it Be film, and was also shown on the Ed Sullivan Show, the final time the Beatles appeared on that famous variety show.

The two of us, Terry and I, have great memories of the 36 years we’ve known each other. Since her Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease has begun taking its toll, however, the more recent memories seem dim and distant. Sometimes nonexistent.

But the old ones are still there.

When we first began dating in the 1970s Terry was a standout tennis player. In addition to playing first singles on her college team, she won her local tennis tournament every summer. It got to the point where the women’s tournament was no longer a challenge for her so she played in the men’s tournament, and even won that one year.

The local park where she won all of those tennis trophies, Slater Park in Pawtucket, RI, is hosting a Walk to End Alzheimer’s September 28 and I am taking Terry home to walk in it.

Terry and I enjoy taking long walks, whether on the boardwalk down the shore, on the Delaware Canal tow path not far from our home or just around our neighborhood. Next weekend’s walk will be a bit different, I feel. Full of emotions.

Terry and I have traveled to her childhood home in Rhode Island every summer since we got married, when I took her 250 miles away to live. Her mother and half of her siblings still live in the New England area. This past year, since Terry’s diagnosis, I think we set an all-time PR (personal record) for visits to New England.

We even made a few ‘day trips’ to RI. Nine hours round trip in the car for six hours spent with her family. In the past I would have never done that.  But now it seems well worth it. Besides, Terry and I enjoy traveling together. She gets to listen to music, which is becoming more and more important, and we get to spend time together. Even if it is spent going 60 miles per hour.

Terry was also on her college track & field team. She and I would run five miles together during my lunch hour most days when we were dating. One of the fond memories we have of those runs is that she never did learn how to spit properly. I grew up a baseball player. If there was one thing I could do was spit. But not Terry. You never see tennis players spitting, but runners need to spit every once in a while. Terry would either wear it or get it on me half the time. True love.

We no longer run, but we do walk. The Walk to End Alzheimer’s is a three mile walk. No problem. It will bring back pleasant memories walking though the nice park, especially around the old tennis courts. Terry and I used to ‘hit’ on those courts. We never played a match, we just hit back and forth. I could never give her a game. Terry is 5’2”, 100 pounds, so she didn’t exactly overpower me with her shots, but you could put a handkerchief anyway on the court and she could put the ball right on it, with a serve, forehand or backhand.

I was a decent intramural tennis player in college and even played in an adult men’s doubles league back in the 1980s, but I was never close to being in Terry’s league.

Once I signed Terry and myself up for the Walk, I started receiving e-mails and a package in the mail about how to raise funds for the cause. Ways to gain sponsorship. Ways to recruit walkers and sponsors.

To be honest, that was not my intent. I realize it is a great cause, but the only reason why I donated a few hundred dollars was so Terry and I could walk in her hometown, in the park where she used to be the top dog.

Back in the late 1970s, tennis was big, really big. When Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert ruled the courts.  Unlike now, where courts are overgrown with grass growing through the cracks, neighborhood courts were always full in the ‘70s. You actually had to go to the courts and wait for an open court to play.

And at the Slater Park courts, everyone knew Terry, or at least knew who she was. She not only was the queen of the court, but her humble, shy personality along with her infectious smile made her a fan favorite. Guys loved to play tennis with her because she could hold her own with them. Women loved to play with her to see if they could knock her off, like the local gunslinger.  They never could.

That is why I signed Terry up for this walk, to go back to her old stomping grounds, where she stomped on all comers on the tennis court.

But then I started thinking about this as a fundraiser, and I am reminded of the recent ice bucket challenge.

Back in late July my son sent me a video of himself dumping a bucket of ice water (mostly ice cubes) on himself and challenging his old college suitemates and fellow triathletes to do the same. I thought it was just another outrageous thing he was doing, like the time in college when he ate, despite having a stuffed nose due to a cold, a spoonful of cinnamon in front of an entire college cafeteria, causing crying girls to call 911 in a panic when he started turning blue.

Then in August I saw everyone around the nation getting ice water dumped on them. It raised a shit load of money for ALS.

But it got me thinking.  Did any of these people who did this actually know anyone who is suffering from that horrible disease? Or did they do it because it was fashionable?

Once a year I used to give a spiel for the United Way at my department meetings. I would tell my colleagues that there are many great charities to give to, but unlike some, where your donation could go toward a nice desk for the corporation’s national headquarters, funds given to the United Way go directly to organizations right in your own hometown.

Of all those ice water-soaked people, I wonder how many of them know someone afflicted with Alzheimer’s. A grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a parent?  Maybe even a spouse?

I would bet money that more people know someone with Alzheimer’s than with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

But fundraising for Alzheimer’s is not fashionable right now. Despite the fact that Alzheimer’s disease is the only cause of death among the top 10 in America without a way to prevent, cure or even slow its progression.

Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in America. SIXTH! The top five are heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke and accidents. I don’t see ALS in there. ALS is not even in the top 10.

But it is in fashion.

Terry and I will be in fashion later this month, when we don our Walk to End Alzheimer’s tee shirts at Slater Park.

The next time you are choosing a cause to donate to, remember Alzheimer’s. It may help a loved one remember you.

Until next time, “We’re going home” for a walk to remember.

Bud

                                                   Terry circa 1978

Highs and Lows

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud, not Negative Nancy.

After receiving a couple of “Hang In There” cards in the mail, a few  inspirational e-mails (including a special one from an old friend from college days with a great quote from LaoTzu “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”) and a few “You okay?”  long distance phone calls, I decided to go back and read what the hell it was I wrote in my last few blog posts, something I hardly ever do.

Usually I just go into the blog site once a week on my lunch hour, write whatever I’ve been feeling lately, hope there are no typos, and hit send, and that’s it. Never look back.  But after the responses I’ve received lately, I felt I better do some reading.

I have to admit the last two posts were a bit melancholy.  The character Debbie Downer from Saturday Night came to mind. (I always call that show Saturday Night because that was the original title of the live show I fell in love with when it first aired during my college days. Once it became so popular in the late ‘70s and TV Guide, along with most people who liked the show, started calling it Saturday Night Live, the new title stuck. I preferred the first two years, with Belushi and Chase, although Bill Murray was a great replacement of Chevy).

So, after reading the past two blogs I decided it was time for me to get off of the Pity Potty and put on my Big Boy Pants. It is time to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Sure, Terry and I were dealt a pretty shitty hand (can ‘pretty’ and ‘shitty’ be used in the same sentence?), when she was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease back in the spring.

I had to look myself in the mirror and say, as Cher said to Nicholas Cage in the movie Moonstruck, after her future brother-in-law said he was in love with her: “SNAP OUT OF IT!!”

I admit we have had a very different, up and down outlook on life since Terry and I were informed of her condition.

This past spring was probably the worst ever, after being informed that my wife had a deadly disease that had no cure. But then the summer came, and it ranked up there with the best summers we’ve ever had.

And we’ve had some great summers.

One of our first summers together, when we were dating, we both worked at a college summer camp for kids, Terry as a counselor for the nine-year olds and I was the Head Counselor (prime example of inmates running the asylum) and I also had the oldest kids, the 13 year olds. (speaking of Bill Murray, that was the summer the movie Meatballs came out and many of the other counselors came back from seeing that movie telling me “Hey, we just saw a movie about you.”). That was truly a great summer.

And Terry and I just had another great summer, and in part, the great summer we just had was because of the diagnosis. We began to seize the day. I think the phrase is “Crap a Dime.” (Or is it “Carpe Diem?” I never was good at Latin, which kept me out of the altar boys. Looking back, that might have been a good thing. I never had my hair parted in the middle by the priests who are now defrocked.)

Let’s get back to my original thought, before I get excommunicated.

Since we learned of Terry’s condition it has been an up and down ride, “twistin’ like an old beach roller coaster” as Luke Bryan would say. 

We have great days, having learned to accept our fate and try to enjoy today. Live for the present. But we also have lousy days, when Terry and I realize she can no longer do something she has done with ease for 20 years. But we need to concentrate on the good days. That is what I need to remember.  I’m afraid I was not remembering that the last few weeks. I need to accentuate the positive.

What was it that Johnny Mercer said back in the 1940s? 

“You’ve got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

And latch on to the affirmative.

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium’s

Liable to walk upon the scene.”

Pandemonium? Wasn’t that the capital of Hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost?  I’m afraid Terry and I may be passing through that place before all of this is over.

Wait, wait! Don’t be negative, Bud. I think Johnny Mercer meant pandemonium to mean chaos. (and the word chaos, spelled KAOS, always reminds me of Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, and that brings a smile to my face.)

But if Mercer did mean Hell, well maybe we’ll just keep on going. There is a country song that states:

“If you’re going through hell keep on going

Don’t slow down, if you’re scared don’t show it

You might get out before the devil even knows you’re there.”

So that is my new philosophy. Keep on going. Or as the blues/rock band Hot Tuna (some of the members of Jefferson Airplane) sang in the early 1970s; “Keep on Truckin.”  Maybe I’ll get a tattoo of that little guy with the big feet and one leg stretched out in front of him, strutting confidently across various landscapes, to remind me to keep going forward in a positive manner.

Positive thinking is a mental and emotional attitude that focuses on the bright side of life and expects positive results.  It is like what Monty Python used to sing; “Always look on the bright side of life.”

I believe there is power in positive thinking. It can produce more energy, more initiative and more happiness. Happy thoughts attract happy people.  A positive attitude makes it easier to avoid worries and negative thinking. When you are optimistic you expect the best to happen. It can make you feel inspired. It can give you the strength not to give up. It can bring more happiness into your life. Being happy is a choice. You can choose to be optimistic.  It can give you strength, like being loved deeply by someone. It can give you courage, the way loving someone deeply does. (and I don’t even practice Taoism)

So from now on, no more Negative Nancy, no more Debbie Downer. When life hands me lemons, I’m making Honey Bourbon Lemonade, Tequila-Thyme Lemonade, Electric Lemonade, Boston Rum Lemonade, maybe Tarragon Lemonade.

So as Eric Idle of Monty Python sang:

“Life’s a piece of shit

When you look at it

Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it true.

You’ll see it’s all a show

Keep ‘em laughing as you go

Just remember that the last laugh is on you,

And always look on the bright side of life…

Always look on the right side of life…

Until next time, keep on truckin’, stay positive, and look on the bright side. I will try to do the same.

Bud

Change

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I can’t remember if it was Mark Twain or Will Rogers who said “I’m all for progress, it is change I object to.”

Whoever it was who said that, I very much agree with him.

Like a lot of people, I have always resisted change. And for good reason. Most people genuinely believe that when we've been doing something a particular way for a long time, it must be a good way to do things. And the longer we've been doing it that way, the better it is.

Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Terry and I have been together for 35 years and our relationship has always gotten better with time. Now it is breaking. And we can’t fix it.

Change isn't simply about embracing something unknown, it's about giving up something old (good) for something new (not good).

I hate change!

Middle aged women often blame “the change” for their mood swings, hot flashes and their CRS (can’t remember shit). As a matter of fact, when Terry and I first realized something was wrong our family doctor told us it was just menopause. Or as Archie Bunker appropriately called it: “mental pause.”

Suzuki, not the motorcycle company but the Zen monk who made Zen Buddhism popular in the United States in the 1960s, said that “without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.”

It is change that is making me suffer, the change in my wife Terry, due to her Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease. I wish her condition was transience (brief and short lived). As it is I am losing my composure more and more often.

Author John A. Simone once said “If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change.”  That’s my biggest fear. We are in a bad situation and the situation is changing. But it is not changing for the better. It is only going to get worse.

In the same breath, Simone also said, “If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change.”

What if you are in a great situation? That is what Terry and I had. And it changed.

Terry and I were only married for 15 months before we began having kids. We had two children the first 33 months we were married before we realized what was causing it.

For 30 years our identity was that of parents. We finally became empty nesters and began living the life of a happy couple just a few years ago, and it was terrific. We were taking trips and not having to worry about the kids. We were doing things on the spur of the moment, without having to check the kids’ schedules.

We were living the dream, until Terry’s diagnosis. Now it is a nightmare. And there is no waking up.

We are still a happy couple, although I have to admit Terry seems to be much happier than I am these days. Although everyday life is getting harder for her, she continues to be upbeat and happy. She laughs every day, while I seem to be crying in my beer more and more often.

Woodrow Wilson said “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” Alzheimer’s has made itself an enemy of mine, changing my wife. Changing my life.

One of Terry’s brothers teaches at a very prestigious boarding school in Concord, Mass. Concord is where the famous Walden’s Pond is. That is where Henry David Thoreau wrote “Things don’t change, we change.”

Terry is changing right before my eyes, and it is killing both of us.

Ellen Glasgow, a famous novelist who grew up wealthy in Virginia about 100 years ago, said “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.”

Truer words were never spoken. The only growth in Terry’s change is those damn plaques and tangles in her brain. The only thing moving forward is the progression of her horrible disease.

Did I mention I hate change?

When I was a kid I idolized the ‘hippies’ of the 1960s who were a little bit older than I was. I was only 11 years old during the ‘Summer of Love’ and just 13 when Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in the Catskills hosted the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. 

But I did own a Nehru jacket.

Nehru was the prime minister of India in the 1950s and he was once quoted as saying “The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down.”

Terry and I were up, way up, enjoying life to the fullest. Our lives now are going the way of that old Nehru jacket. That damn wheel of change has gone and run over us.

Eleanor Roosevelt said “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

To some people that is very good advice. Once you find the courage to confront adversity it makes you stronger for next time.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I’m afraid the longest serving First Lady’s advice does not apply to me and Terry. We are facing fear all right. But we will not live through this horror.

The adversity we are facing is not going to merely make us stronger. It is going to kill us.

Through the first few months of this ordeal Terry and I have tried to accept our fate and find the positives in everyday life. We’ve tried to enjoy today and whatever happens tomorrow we will worry about tomorrow.

But sometimes it just gets to us.

Bob Dylan wrote a song called Things Have Changed. In it he says

Some things are too hot to touch

The human mind can only stand so much

You can’t win with a losin’ hand

I am afraid Terry and I have been dealt a pretty shitty hand, one we cannot win with. But we will keep on playing. What choice do we have?

Dylan also wrote more commonly known lyrics:

Come gather ‘round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you

Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimming

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin.

They are certainly a-changin’ for me and Terry. I hope that in my mind Terry will always be that cute, spunky little tennis player with the infectious smile.

One of the greatest authors of all time, Proust, who wrote In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past), said “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”

Until next time, don’t go changing

Bud

                                                           Marcel Proust