Hub Kid Bids Fans Adieu
In 1960, when John Updike, a lifelong Red Sox fan, was only 27, he wrote lovingly of Ted Williams’s last day at bat in "Hub Kid Bids Fans Adieu." Talking about Williams’s life (like Updike, Williams was not a born and bred "Hub Kid") as “Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor,” Updike concludes , “So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.”
Updike, another hub kid, despite his nostalgia for his small town Pennsylvania childhood, the town and friends which have deteriorated, has also quit. Lung cancer, the product of those first cigarettes sold him at the train station when he was 15, has felled him. But like Williams, Updike left us with two home runs, a book of short stories, MY FATHER’S TEARS AND OTHER STORIES and ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS.
“Morocco,” the first story, the only one written before 2000, is about an American family on vacation. Everything goes wrong. Plans and hotels go awry. Updike, the autobiographical narrator, remembers, “We had achieved, in Morocco, maximum family compression and could only henceforth disperse. Growing up, leaving home, watching your parents divorce—all in the decade since, have happened. But on a radiant high platform of the Eiffel Tower I felt us still molded, it seemed, forever together.” The rest of the stories talk about children far away when families are no longer compressed.
The other stories, written in Updike’s last decade, mainly hone in on men who are aging, hate its encroachments, but know it’s better than the alternative, which he fears—yet know it’s coming. Older possessions, like aging small towns, are a comfort—and a rebuke—a reminder that nothing ever stays the same. In Morocco and Paris, the family belongs. In these last stories, age has “islanded” the ironically named Fairchild as well as the author of the stories. Travelers no longer belong where they travel—even when, like David Kern, they try to go back where they came from—and can’t find their way. His father-in-law “moved among us…like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction.”
In the title story, “My Father’s Tears,” the autobiographical narrator learns his father has died suddenly while he was in Paris with his first wife: “She put her arms around me in the bed and told me, ‘Cry.’ Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.”
In the stories, no one weeps tears except for words of loss. But in “Endpoint,” the poems written on each birthday from March 18th, 2002 till the last one en route to a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts cry out in anguish because they feel the end coming. After the birthday poem of 2007, there are poems from his hospital bed at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Referring to our “wastrel lives,” he looks askance at his books as “the piled produce of bald ambition.”
Noting “Age I must, but die I would rather not,” seeing himself as “an Adam being nibbled like old ice,” looking at “A life poured into words—apparent waste/intended to preserve the thing consumed/For who, in that unthinkable future/when I am dead, will read?” he wonders what it was all about, what his life achieved. Always haunted “How not to think of death?, “ the writing helps. He calls, “Be with me, words, a little longer; you/have given me my quitclaim in the sun.”
The words of “Endpoint, the last ones he wrote before the trip to the hospice, give Updike his quitclaim. Painfully marvelous, they cry out for respite while knowing, as the last poem in the series cries out in an echo of the 23rd psalm, “Surely—magnificent, that “surely”--/goodness and mercey shall follow me all/the days of my life, my life, forever.”
Tucked away in the end of the book under “Poems, Light and Personal,” among light poems about Monica and a poem “To a Well-connected Mouse” is “Requiem,” the poem that says it all in farewell:
“It came to me the other day:
“Were I to die, no one would say,
“’Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
“Of promise—depths unplumable.’
“Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
“Will greet my overdue demise;
“The wide response will be, I know,
“’I thought he died a while ago.’
“For life’s a shabby subterfugre,
“An death is real, and dark, and huge,
“The shock of it will register
“Nowhere but where it will occur.”
Like Ted Williams, John Updike’s poetry knows when to quit. We can only wish that this transplanted hub kid had not quit so soon.
Which Would You Rather? Worry or Die?
WORRIED SICK: A PRESCRIPTION FOR HEALTH IN AN OVERTREATED AMERICA by Nortin M. Hadler (Caravan/Univ. North Carolina Press, June,2008) and OVERTREATED: WHY TOO MUCH MEDICINE IS MAKING US SICKER AND POORER by Sharon Brownlee (Bloomsbury, January, 2008)
Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, THE WRITING DOCTOR, at www.writingdoctor.typepad.com, email: [email protected],
585-385-1515, 16 San Rafael Drive, Rochester, NY 14618
Tim Russert is dead. Wiped out and gone. Although doctors knew he had heart disease, they didn’t realize it was fatal. Like more than the men felled by fatal heart attacks, Russert had no chest pain. A diabetic, he was overweight.
In 1998, a CT heart scan found Russert’s calcium was 210, which meant his risk of a heart attack was high. Should he have had an angiogram? His cardiologists didn’t think so. If the angiogram had shown the clots in Tim Russert’s vessels, would bypass surgery have saved him?. Even after his death, doctors differed on what an angiogram would have indicated. After his death, his internist asserted, “The number one predictor of mortality is waist circumference.” Was that all?
A week after Tim Russert’s death, Drs Ezekiel Emanual and Victor Fuchs published an article in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) deploring “The Perfect Storm of Over-utilization.” Arguing for reducing overutilization to control costs by altering the combination of physicians’ training and attitudes and patients’ wishes and worries, vaguely they say “The best hope for reining in costs is to devise financial incentives for physicians and patients that result in greater health value.”
In the same vein is Sharon Brownlee's book,OVERTREATED - Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer (Bloomsbury Press, December, 2007). Brownlee argues that “much of mainstream medicine's therapies and treatments are never double-blind tested and the financial structure of the current system is literally killing people.”
Worse yet is Nortin M. Hadler’s new book WORRIED SICK: a PRESCRIPTION FOR HEALTH IN AN OVERTREATED AMERICA ( Caravan/University of North Carolina Press, June, 2008). Hadler’s diatribe s should not be confused with Arthur Barsky’s book of the same name, WORRIED SICK: Our Troubled Quest for Wellness ( Little Brown, 1988). A legion of other polemics on “overtreatment” ignoring undercare crowd the web sites on staying well.
Claiming “they,” doctors, “health“ providers, even medical writers like me can make us sick with worry., these worry wart writers stagger readers’ imaginations.
It’s up to you. Which would you rather? Be worried sick? Or dead? And would a cacophony of medical advisors, positive and negative, keep you well (or well-er)? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Still, fair is fair. Warnings are in order. Books like Hadler’s and Brownlee’s, articles like Emanuel’s are hazardous to your health.
From our point of view (a blogger's privilege), worrying sick is better than dying young. Could Tim Russert’s life have been saved by early, aggressive medical action? .. Like their patients, doctors differ. Some are aggressive, some more passive. Everyone has a point of view. That’s why there are books. And blogs like this one. Read them and see for yourself.
But reading and warnings aren’t all we need. The night Tim Russert died, we had dinner with a Pulitzer Prize journalist. Shaken by Russert’s death, my pot-bellied husband and our girthy dinner companion skipped bread, potatoes, dessert.
Until the next day. When the brownie brigade started marching again.
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