J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock laments his becoming an old man, with a bald spot in the middle of his hair, with the bottoms of his trousers rolled, measuring out his life with coffee spoons. He describes “the Eternal Footman” holding his coat and snickering. He hears the mermaids singing to him until “human voices wake us and we drown.” What a neat paradox that is, both an awakening and a drowning. Measuring out his life with coffee spoons. One would have thought Eliot would have him measuring it out with tea spoons. More British, you know. In recent years I’ve been measuring out my life with equally mundane items. Every three weeks I sit down at the dining room table and measure out my life by re-filling my three weekly vitamin holders. Every three weeks. And it seems like I’m doing that ritual far more often than every three weeks. More related measuring sticks: the number of prescriptions that need constantly to be re-filled, the number of doctor and dentist appointments that fill my calendar, the increasing number of obituaries for old friends and relatives. I’m sounding morbid, I know, but that’s the nature of growing old, morbid thoughts while waiting for that Eternal Footman to take me by the hand. Dylan Thomas exhorts us to “not go gentle into that good night,” to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Emily Dickinson said that death was the “supple suitor” who woos us with pallid innuendoes and then whisks us away in a “bisected Coach,” leaving behind “Kindred as responsive as Porcelain.” In June we’re flying to South Dakota for my brother’s memorial service, and I’ll be one of those Porcelain Kindred, the last of my family still standing. I’m not looking forward to it.