An Invitation To The Dance...

For years I have had this image of an undrawn cartoon in my head:

In a hallway of an ordinary home, outside a closed door – the bathroom door – waiting his turn impatiently is the cloaked and hooded Grim Reaper, like out of The Seventh Seal, with a towel draped over his arm, toothbrush and toothpaste tube in his bony hand.

The caption – “John never knew how close he had come to a brush with Death.”


Someday I am going to close my eyes and never open them again.

Walking home from the farmer’s market on Elmwood on this bright perfect August Saturday, I looked up at the tower of Lafayette High School. A red stone gothic squarish lump that could have been used as Dracula's Carfax Abbey, it feels like it was just plopped down here by an ogre on this wide tree-lined avenue with its mostly well-kept and brightly painted Victorian and neo-Victorian houses.

Today the wide green copper trim, flashing and top turret melding with ornately carved red stone popping out against an impossibly blue sky. Intense and unreal, like a digitally enhanced photo or one of those color saturated Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies from the 50s. Like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, for the cover of a brochure selling Earth to alien tourists.

And I realized someday, tomorrow or five years from now or three decades from now, I will never be able to see it again. I will not even remember it.

I will never see my nieces’ and nephews’ grandchildren get married, never know or imagine how they laughed or cried the night of their proms. I will be at most an old faded image, dressed oddly from decades ago, hair in some unflattering old fashioned style, in a photo somewhere or a video. Will they wonder about me?

Probably not. I have spent no more than a fleeting minute contemplating on a photo of my mother’s grandfather, as he stood proudly with his hands folded at his crotch in front of his corner candy store, or my mother’s grandmother and grandfather on her other side, in a portrait studio in Germany before they left for America, he 30ish but already bald with a portly belly, his fist pulling back his suit to reveal a pocket watch on its chain, proudly standing five feet from his much younger bride, full-faced and quietly pretty, holding a bouquet of flowers, and although she didn’t intend to, looking frightened for all the world to see.

Four months ago I had a heart attack. At 44.

I saw my cardio doctor this week, she told me to come in, when I called explaining the symptoms of a skirmish with viruses or hay fever, asking if I needed to make any special considerations while dealing with it. I went in and she said I was fine and prescribed only Nasonex, and the aching and congestion are already gone. As she saw me she shook her head softly and mewed that I was so young to have had a heart attack.

My surgeon too, had assured me before my operation that he had done bypasses on people as young as their 30s. The average survival time for people after a quadruple bypasse is 15 years. So I will be 59 then, he said. Not too young to have had a full life, he implied.

But have I had a full life? And if I haven’t, can I pack it in the next few waking years?

I am intrigued and inspired by C.S. Lewis. And Tony Randall, who once on David Letterman swept onto the stage in a Batman outfit and cape. “You’re not Batman!” Dave chided. To which Tony replied lustily: “I just had my first child at 72 – I’m Batman!!” And the audience cheered.

So right now the host and hostess have looked at their watches and announced that curfew is coming in 30 minutes, and I am deciding whether to dare stay and dance after curfew, to steal what I can steal of pleasure in these next few hours and see what the night brings, or to truddle on home like a good boy under the suspicious eyes of those who make the rules...