The Justification of Existence

Dwight Garner's piece in the Sunday Review section of the Times describing Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, Roger Ebert, and various other worthies filling their last months, weeks, nay hours, with significant creative activity fills me with dread and anxiety.  I keep thinking of my thesis director who was ever on the alert for hints of a slacker in me.  I remember him when I was twenty five, just starting on my dissertation, and my young wife unexpectedly died, and he said to me "Well, this gives you more time to work on your dissertation," odder words of consolation one cannot imagine.  I guess he detected the lounger in me from the day we met.  My childhood home lacked a father from the time I was six, so I really had no model for someone on the go all the time.  I have a feeling that my mother sent out the unstated notion that a male had to justify his existence, although she obviously considered that her bearing six children was more than enough from her, since my strongest recollection of her is sitting reading in the living room (household tasks were done by staff).   Sitting reading obviously led me to become a serious undergraduate, then graduate student, but my Doktorvater, as the Germans call it, switched the emphasis to "produce!"  If it wasn't a dissertation, it was an article, and then it was a book, and there seemed no end to this.  He once told my dearest friend and colleague, also his student, whom he chanced upon on the roof of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens drinking ouzo and admiring the sunset with his friends, "Well, Ted, drink it up or type it up."  To his credit Ted, brilliant raconteur and one of the laziest persons I ever knew, chose the former, even if it did contribute to his checking out permanently at 43.  I will never forget my Thursdays with Ted (a helluva lot more fun than those Tuesdays with Morrie, I'll bet), when we went to Woodside from out Stanford offices for two or three martinis, then on up into Portola Valley  for a late, late lunch in dappled shade and soft sun.  So here I am at 83 for God's sake, and no book or article on the horizon of my imagination.  Thank God, I have gardening to palm off as "something I must do," when in fact I find myself sitting on a bench lost in the perfume of the roses, watching the bumble  bees attacking the Russian sage and the variously colored birds swooping down to bathe in the three fountains that over-decorate our garden.  When first we built this lavish setting my daughter who came to inspect cried out: "Oh, Dad, this will be perfect for you here, you'll go out just like Vito Corleone in "The Godfather."