Does the phrase “Mercury is in retrograde” resonate at all? If you need a moment to look it up, I will pause in this narrative; frankly, I could use the break.
Okay … now, having done your research … back to our nearest planetary neighbor. Put aside the fact that entire civilizations have been threatened with extermination and that once again we are going to dig for oil off the coast of California as well as in the Gulf of (I still call it) Mexico. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
In my smaller world, my Island neighbor of over 30 years just passed. He was 97 and not a great advertisement to entice me to go much beyond my present 88 years, but still … a loss, nonetheless. My best friend confronted the recurrence of major cancer (false, alarm… thank you, very much), my spouse fell, fracturing her right leg just below the knee and, and, and … that brings me back to the planet Mercury and whatever the hell it is doing.
There is a theory that we are born with only so many heart beats and when we use them up, we die. Could be. I have come to believe that we are born with a finite limit of stress we can endure and, in my case, just about my entire allotment was used up in California building a career and eventually a television icon out of Cagney & Lacey.
Worn out at 58 years of age (read my new book, Before and After Cagney & Lacey, out soon from McFarland Publishing) I moved to Miami Beach … as far as I could get from Hollywood while still residing somewhere in the continental United States with a warm beach.
That move was 30 years ago. It has been just over double 30 hours since that leg break and I am already stressed to the max. It is not my spouse. She is a brick. A patient patient, and a good soldier. She is not the problem; it is the new world for which I am not prepared.
Do you know that when you Google the locations for Medical Supply Stores in Miami Beach you get four addresses, none of which are still in business? They just no longer exist. Try to buy a bedpan at a Walgreens or CVS; fuhgeddaboudit. Retail is Amazon and you just tell your spouse to (literally) hold her water until that truck arrives in two or three days.
A wheelchair, a porta potty, a walker? Amazon will get them to you … disassembled. This, for a guy who has trouble figuring out which end of a light bulb gets screwed into … what’s it called?… a socket?
People ask me if I miss show business. Are you kidding me? The only thing I miss is staff. I loved delegating. Now, it seems, I must confront the realization that I am ill-prepared to be the age that I am. Believe me, coming full frontal into that reality is exhausting.
Then again, I could look on the bright side. I do not have to worry as much about our country’s loss of its three branches of government, or the loss of the rule of law, or dirty bombs in suitcases arriving at a baggage claim area as much, or for anywhere nearly as long as my grandkids do.
As to what’s up next for this television watcher other than the so-called news? In need of a laugh, I turn to late-night. Highest rating for that goes to Jon Stewart on Monday nights’ The Daily Show via Comedy Central. A true comic genius. There is really no one in second or third place compared with him but next in line are the opening monologues of soon-to-be canceled Steven Colbert, on The Late Show (CBS), then Jimmy Kimmel’s opening bit on ABC, followed by Desi Lydic, a periodic host on The Daily Show, then the other Jimmy … Fallon … and his intro of The Tonight Show on NBC. Also on NBC, Saturday Night Live … but only the cold opening and the parody of the “news” (hint: you can high speed through the show and once the musical “artist” is done, next is a commercial and then the only sure-fire thing on the program, the news segment will appear). And last … and most certainly last … is Bill Maher on HBO MAX. If you can stay awake long enough for his New Rules feature which ends the evening, it almost makes sitting through the rest of the show worth watching… almost.
That’s all folks … except, inquiring minds might ask, what is the opposite of retrograde and when does it occur for Mercury?
Follow Barney at: www.cagneyandlacey.com
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To purchase “Cagney & Lacey and Me” go to Amazon or Apple Books
“Before and After Cagney & Lacey”, a second memoir… coming this Spring from McFarland Publishers