"I'd Like To Meet This Guy Or Even Better, Be Him"

Sometimes in the past, I have presented excerpts from writing I like, because of its exceptional style, or synchronistical perspective.  (Meaning they think like me.  ”Why didn’t you just say that?”  I probably should have.  Maybe next time I will.  Anyway…)  

Today, I offer excerpts from a character I like.  Not a fictional character.  An actual person, recently interviewed in the paper.  I just appreciated his character… is why I said “character.”  

Promoting a new Netflix comedy series called The Kominsky Method, there was a transcribed interview with the show’s leading actors, Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin.

Michael Douglas seems all right. 

But it’s Alan Arkin I’d like to meet.  (And, possibly switch and become, in a conceptual variation called Freaky Jew Day.)

Alan Arkin, 84, performed with the Second Cityimprovisation group in the 1960’s. That naturalistic approach has always informed Arkin’s relaxed delivery of his lines, even when they’re totally scripted.

For reasons of, primarily, laziness, but also because I don’t want to learn things I’d rather not know, I shall refrain from exploring Arkin’s personal history, leaving me to imagine him, defined exclusively by this interview.

From which I shall now selectively quote.

On aging:

“There are glorious things about getting old.  Like I can’t hear about two-thirds of what people are saying to me.  It makes me so happy.  People getting up and giving you a seat.  That’s a nice thing.”

On staying physically active:

“My days, there’s no time for boredom.  I get up in the morning, I take my pills, that takes care of I think until about 10 A.M.  If I drop one on the floor my morning is gone.  I’m looking for the pill and, having somebody help me get up.”

Arkin’s response to the types of roles he is offered:

“I look to see what page I die.  That’s the first thing I look for.  And when I’m going on a gurney.  I like when I’m on a gurney, because you don’t have to talk very much. You just lie there and people feel sorry for you.”

On filming in the South in 1968 (shooting “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”)

“What happened was we got there six month after the march and so the whole town of Selma went out of their way to try and change their image (and) bent over backwards to be decent to us.”

On issues concerning political correctness:

“There was a poem a few years ago talking about different minorities.  What he ended up saying was something that I absolutely, fully support.  Words don’t matter.  The words are not going to cure anything, they’re not going to help anything because you can say beautiful things but if you heart is closed, it’s going to come through.  If people can sense your love, your concern, then the words don’t make a damn bit of difference.”

On still working in his eighties:

“People give you enormous accolades for just being able to stand up.  ‘Look at him!’  Here’s a standing ovation.  ‘He’s standing up.  Give the guy a hand.’”

And that’s it.

While taking in Alan Arkin’s printed remarks, I felt, at various moments, a reverberating compassion, a genuine, calming sense of grace (the guy meditates, just like me), an innate courage facing challenging conditions, a warm and welcome ironic twinkle, and an intuitive wisdom, if you agree with him, (or an annoyed irritation if you don’t. I happen to do.) 

One might perhaps wonder what Alan Arkin is like when he’s notbeing interviewed.  I say, paraphrasing my mother, about people’s troubling behavior:

“Let his family worry.”

All I know is, I got a kick out of this Alan Arkin character in the paper.

And I thought I would pass him along to you.