Waiting…for…the…elevator…

As a long-time appreciator of Christopher Hitchens, now sadly demised , I picked up a copy of his last seminal work, ‘Mortality’, a few weeks ago.  At 66 and daily seeing in myself the ‘normal’ wasting away effects that the aging process inexorably brings with it, I can’t help but send a considerable amount of time reflecting on my own future end. It is something that ‘Hitch’ certainly was no stranger to, nor is it an unfamiliar ‘familiar’ for many like me who make a profession out of second-guessing the human life experience.

To many who are perhaps a bit more positivistic than I, such painfully personalised reflectivity would seem like a remarkable waste of precious time, since although every last man-Jack among us will eventually have to deal with this same and eternally perplexing turn of highly intimate affairs, why push the agenda envelope unnecessarily? For me, however, Hitchens ever-playful discourse on his own mortal end is merely a logical extension of a resonance that has echoed in the shadowy chambers of my mind since I was first able to discern that such a place existed. After all, isn’t this allegorically part of the Really Big Ultimate Question? I refer to that gem of a poser, ‘The Meaning of Life’ (no reference intended to the Monty Python movie of the same name, although it was also singularly brilliant), lest there be any confusion between that and the more gender specific ‘How can I get into Jennifer’s pants’ that at one point in my youth was my own ‘Really Big Ultimate Question’?

When I was a child, my mother would regularly take me to the large department store in town, a huge, old and seemingly antediluvian Macy’s of San Francisco clone that consisted of a number of floors, all centrally linked by an ancient elevator in which an equally ancient old man ‘chauffeured’ shoppers up or down by means of a strange little wheeled device that I now know was a potentiometric control of some sort. The old man had a sort of small, round, folding seat that he would occasionally sit down on, but most of the time he seemed to be staring grimly at some unfixed point in the distance, as if quite happy to stand in his stooped-over manner, totally unmindful of those he was accompanying.

In those nostalgic days elevator music was still a concept in some marketer’s wet dream and automatic elevator controls….lordy! Unheard of! Sales receipts and billing vouchers from client transactions in (for example) the Women’s Undergarments section would go into little baskets that zipped along overhead wires from the cash register to a central receiving balcony near the ceiling, and from there into boxes for after-hours accounting purposes. At Christmastime (since we were all Christians back in those days, and Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Zoroastrianism, Wicca, and Eid hadn’t yet penetrated the American mainstream of consciousness) sparsely instrumented Salvation Army bands would hold forth at the store’s entrance, playing starkly off-key Christmas favorites as we approached.

At any rate, at such moments the elevator marked the passage of each floor slowly accessed with a resonating ‘DONG!’, a sound I soon came to find involuntarily etched into my brain (where it doubtless today rebelliously persists in occupying valuable brain cell matter that could be put to better use in my embattled hippocampus). Consequent to that, whenever I hear a similar sounding ‘DONG!’ today, I am instantly transported back at least half a century to those preadolescent days of childhood innocence. An auricular time-machine in terms of functional aspects, perhaps, such a sound nevertheless instantly transports me to a different place, populated by half-shrouded and mist-enwreathed shades of unconscious anxiety.

I was reflecting on this very fact just now, after the ‘DONG!’ sound suddenly intruded into my daily stream of consciousness once again, causing my entire train of thought to suddenly derail and leaving a jumble of thoughts and off-focus ideas lying all tumbled up by the side of the grade. I never did determined exactly what had caused that familiar ‘DONG!’ (it definitely wasn’t a cell-phone, although it might have been a failed Microsoft Windows command warn-off chime), but it certainly took me back in an instant to that particular setting of my earliest puerile recollections, as it never fails to do.

In the nanosecond it took to do so, I was again back at that rumbly old department store elevator that smelled like stale cigarette smoke, standing patiently on the threshold of its immense entry doors and waiting with child-like fascination for the darkly familiar old man to unsmilingly enfold us within its creaking and dimly lit interior.

Musing all this over, it half amuses, half terrifies me to suddenly realise that without a doubt this same scenario shall repeat itself yet again, one final time in my life, although hopefully not any sooner than necessary (a prospect I now admittedly find myself spending more time wondering about). Although I seriously doubt that the old elevator man’s name was Charon (or even ‘Joe Black’, since he certainly didn’t bear even the most remote resemblance to Brad Pitt), that possibility is certainly not without the realm of the possible.

This time, however, if and when that final déjà vu replay of that old recollection finally does reoccur in its irreversible finality, I know for a fact that instead of that wide-eyed child of my youth, there will be a somewhat tired elderly man gaping distractedly at the verge of that lift as the doors open one last time, wondering just exactly what in hell lies ahead.

Of course, as we all know, Hollywood movies and childish memories notwithstanding, to the contrary Death never takes a holiday when we find ourselves waiting for the elevator…

Note: I could conceivably spin this subject out for my usual 4000 or so words, since it is a rather complex and convoluted subject at best, but as we all know, words are even less substantial than the air they are spoken into (regardless of the ancient Hawaiian belief in the terrible, irretrievable and intractable power of spoken human utterances) and ‘to air is Human’. Rest easy, Hitch, wherever you are. Air today, gone tomale!