Jules had just turned 83. He sat in the otherwise empty diner. Corner booth. Back against the wall so nobody was behind him. He was on his fourth refill of coffee. Decent for diner coffee, not the wondrous beans he ground up at home. The point of being at the diner was to “Be at the diner.” The coffee was mostly superfluous, though the caffeine was a necessity. Even with the caffeine, he was struggling not to doze in the booth.
Jules was mostly fine. Life was a flat-line these days. Never too high, never too low, unlike most of his life. Around 70, three years after retiring, life had slowed to a healthy crawl. He stopped leaving his house as often. His body began failing him, but his mind—at least to his own understanding of it—seemed as sharp as it had ever been. Jules was an honest, but suspicious, old fella.
As he sipped, Jules picked up a list his daughter had sent him. It was a printed copy of an online article. A list of 75 positive affirmations. She thought he was depressed. She was probably right, but who wasn’t depressed when your friends started dying, and you don’t have anything you have to do, and your wife has been dead for a decade, and your daughter lives on the other side of the country, and you’re not sure what to do with your days, other than go to the diner on occasion and watch the life of your small town pass by? Who wouldn’t be depressed?
He looked down at the list.
1. I am a successful person.
Jules thought, “Successful? Who’s measuring?” He stopped measuring himself around age 48. No mid-life crisis. A gradual acceptance of the fact that life wasn’t anywhere close to perfect and that perfect never existed and that good enough was good enough. He didn’t care if anyone really thought he was successful anymore.
2. I am confident in everything that I do.
Jules shook his head and snorted. If someone was confident in everything they did, they wouldn’t be human… or… they wouldn’t be anyone he could relate to. He was confident enough to do moderately well in his endeavors. He was reasonably attractive. People generally found him pleasant and mildly amusing. Not too angry or aggressive. Like anyone, he got grouchy when he went too long without food or coffee or his breathing exercises. Or if the Sixers went on a losing streak.
Jules found an understated and surprising confidence in fatherhood. He loved his daughter more than anything. Reva was somehow turning 50 in a month. His granddaughters finished high school recently and were now out of the house, in college. Becca came out west to attend school near Los Angeles. Jules was just north of Santa Barbara, where he’d moved some years ago. She came up to see him every month or two, brought him his favorite sandwich—an Italian—from a deli near her school.
His confidence had been shaken by the dissolution of his first marriage. He was in his late-40s. Reva’s mother went through a mid-life crisis and moved to Spain. Jules and 14-year-old Reva were left in her wake. In the end, it brought them together. At the time, it was pure hell.
3. I am doing the best that I can.
Jules zoomed in on the word “best.” Was anyone ever doing the “best” that they could? Not even Nikola Jokic, MVP of the NBA and star of the title-winning Denver Nuggets, always played “the best” he possibly could. Jules loved basketball. He’d been a great defender as a small forward on his high school basketball team. His knee gave out during an adult men’s YMCA game, an over-30 league. The memory was burned in there. Driving the lane and, a pop, and he was on the floor of the Philadelphia Jewish Community Center, December, 1981.
4. I choose to be happy.
Jules wrestled with happiness his entire life. Or had he wrestled with unhappiness? He realized now it was something you could choose, to some degree. You could choose to be “happier” in moments. To find a way beyond your thoughts, turn off the endless stream of images and ideas in the mind. “I can choose to be happier… sometimes.” That would be a better affirmation. More realistic.
Jules sipped the coffee again. He took a bite of what was left of a blueberry pancake.
5. I am in perfect health.
Jules nearly spit out his coffee. Again… perfect, best. These absolutes. Why couldn’t we set our collective standards a little lower than perfection. For the last 60 years, Jules had observed the word “perfect” and “perfection,” and resented the way society ingrained the impossible as an attainable state. He’d replace it with, “I am alive and my body still kind of works.”
6. I am resilient. I will get through this difficult time.
August 4th, 2013. Violet’s accident. She was walking out of the Santa Barbara library. Corner intersection. Walk-signal. Pick-up ran a red light. Killed instantly. Only 13 years together, he and Violet. Jules wanted retribution for the first year or two. Guy was sent to jail. Jules screamed in the courtroom, Reva and the girls holding him up. The scream was a mix of agony and relief. Then, with therapy, and anti-depressants, an occasional special brownie, he let that pain dissolve like all the other pain that had dissolved over the decades.
Jules thought to himself, “Yeah, I did get through that time, with the help of therapy, pills and marijuana.” I’m resilient. I’ll get through this difficult time. That was the phrase he could’ve used as a teenager, too. Adolescence. Family mental illness. His mom was all over the place. His dad worked as a way to avoid her. Jules and his brothers absorbed her neediness and then moved out.