The Good Old Days

Roman Polanski, at Cannes for the showing of his film version of David Ives’ “Venus in Fur,” lamented the disappearance of the era which celebrated the difference between the sexes with such niceties as flowers for the lady.  That, along with his objection to women striving for parity with men in the job market, de-feminizing themselves, as he put it, may have made him seem like an old fashioned guy, but there was no mistaking the obvious underlying refusal to accept women as equal players in life’s game plans.  As someone who is liable for arrest in the United States for having sex with a minor, an event now decades past, but still on the books, Polanski demonstrated in those days another sense of the differential of power between men and women, but it all boils down to the same thing.  It will be interesting to see his cinematic take on Ives’ play which is a marvelous duel of the sexes played out in both witty and cruel sado-masochistic terms.  A similar nostalgia seemed to have animated a large portion of the English public as they reacted to the debate on gay marriage in the Commons last week.  What is the celebration of marriage really all about these days, when an increasingly smaller percentage of persons attend church on any kind of regular basis, when almost half of marriages end in divorce, and there is no shame attached to women bearing children out of wedlock, as the term so quaintly puts it, nor for males to get women with child and leave the relationship utterly casually?  Gay persons, on the other hand, who are willing to fight for the right to marry are ironically enough just about the most enthusiastic brides and grooms on the scene these days.  What does marriage have that partnerships do not?  I can tell you very simply that when my wife and I were divorced, and I moved from the situation of father and head of the family to a gay male living in or out of relationships, the majority of our old friends were polite but kept their distance, contenting themselves with a polite handshake and smile when they were introduced to my current heartthrob.  That all changed to a very positive and obvious social acceptance when they watched me and my man stand at the altar and exchange vows.  It was the ceremony, the public dedication, the merging of ourselves into the centuries of cohabitation that brought us finally into their welcoming embrace.  So, I say just go to a gay wedding, folks; it’s so liberating.  And while you’re at it, watch Michael Douglas and Matt Damon going through the utterly sad story of Liberace and his lover, son, and servant, two males locked into so much neediness, self hating to a degree that is hard to watch, and at the same time devoted to a public persona for Liberace that is so outrageous, flamboyant, and feminine that it defies any commonplace understanding of what a “homosexual” was all about in those long ago days before most persons even understood the word “gay.”  Up there in his furs and glitter, flashing his bejeweled fingers over the keys, he just seems so beyond any public definition of anything that he defies interpretation.  Brilliant, sad, and tiresome all at once.

Mother

My mother, Ruth Ketcham Beye, died on 28 May 1954.  She had called her doctor to complain of something, told him it was no big deal, and suggested he come by at the end of his working day for a drink, and a little examination.  He found her lying dead of a heart attack, stretched out on the living room sofa, with a small table holding two glasses, a bottle of whiskey, and a silver bowl filled with melting ice cubes.  The television was turned on to the Army-McCarthy hearings.  She was born October 17, 1892 so her formative years coincided with the Edwardian era.  If the first World War had not changed the serenity and security of her class, then the death of her first husband, newly married, in the influenza epidemic of 1918 would have done it for her personally.  She had little better luck next time around, as her second husband was killed in an automobile accident, after sixteen years of marriage, leaving her with six living issue.  Still I can remember the mother of a classmate sneering when I suggested my mother had had a hard time of it, "about time she had a bit of bad luck!"  True enough, she had a staff of five or so persons whom she was able to retain as a widow; although she did not work outside the home or keep house, she had a large establishment to oversee, and shortly after my father's death, she was elected to the public school board, where she served as president for at least a decade.   She was a rather snobbish ambitious woman whose children for the most part disappointed her.  Two daughters married Jews, something she took very hard, although one was on the surface of things quite rich, and she spent time in their Palm Beach establishment, presumably basking in the sun if not in her son-in-law with his to her distinctly foreign aura.  Her brilliant oldest daughter lived in what she considered a slum in New York City, wrote poetry, and was quick to tell her mother how much she despised what she stood for.  Her youngest daughter had to get married to a man whose parents were the simplest of working class people.  The worst was perhaps myself, a flamboyant queer notorious throughout the town.  I don't think she made any of us six feel acceptable.  I remember her once crying out to me "You're all failures."  The best thing I guess was that she departed this life when we were all still relatively young, and we had years and years to live free of her judgement, at least openly expressed, although of course what we repressed and carried with us took its toll.  She was 44 when Daddy died, 54 when the money ran out and she moved to a smaller house, and commenced to do her own housekeeping.  Poor thing, all the children had decamped except for the fruitcake son, who at least was an amusing cocktail hour companion for a widow, even if she had to overlook the derisive remarks directed at him, even in her company when they drove together through the downtown.  She never complained really, never explained.  She died at 62, when I was in Cambridge at Harvard Graduate School.  I was married, something inexplicable she never chose to bring up.  In fact the saddest thing of my life is that she died when I was so young, and I had never had the chance to bring anything up with her.  What was she like, what were the struggles of her life?  What were the joys?  Did she love Daddy?  Marry him because the other guy, her high school sweetheart had died?  How sad that she never got to see her children triumphing in their own individual ways as they went into mature adulthood.  We never knew her, she never knew us; as for Daddy, well, for me he really never existed.  Now here we are, the survivors, aged 90, 89, 87, and 83.  She and Daddy, they were so young!  My God, my own children are in their mid fifties!

Let's Twist Again Like We Did Last Century

When I was a boy we had a Victrola up in the children's playroom, but what I remember most of all was mother joining us to wind the mechanism up, put on "You Are My Lucky Star" from Broadway Melodies of 1936, if I remember rightly, and sing along with the music while the tears rolled down her cheeks.  She was thinking of my father, her late husband, whose death that very year put an end to the fun, merriment, and music which she always implied was the daily fare of life with Daddy.  I got into phonograph records myself early on when I went off to Andover, buying them in prodigious quantities, although we were not allowed machines to play them on in the dorm, nor indeed did I manage to pay for them.  It was another era, and storekeepers assumed the young gentlemen would make good, which indeed I did, after an enormous scene over the telephone, an instrument usually available only to announce a death, with my mother sternly and harshly taking me to task for my wayward, spendthrift habits.  All these 78" shellac records somehow made their way to Iowa without breaking, and in the next eight or so years were joined by literally about two thousand others.  I had discovered Dixieland Jazz, and learned that I could do my homework with the music blaring right into my ear.  Then I went to graduate school at Harvard, and Cambridge forced me to give up my loose ways, and I discovered eighteenth century music, and realized that Beethoven and Brahms were too heavy for my refined tastes.  Bach's Goldberg Variations was just about perfect.  The children arrived, and the house rocked with the Beatles and the Supremes, perfect for shimmying around the kitchen, martini in one hand, plates of macaroni and cheese in the other.  And later when I was living alone a young man entered my life whose severity coupled with demonstrable genius in music, art, and drama left me speechless.  He vetoed the background music on the phonograph--"either listen to music or don't, but give it respect and attention."  Gee, he was right; now my house is silent as the tomb.  "Disgusting," says my trainer at our Florida gym, a Bronx born American of Puerto Rican ancestry.  "You should have music on all the time, you should dance.  Come with me; we will take you to a place where you can learn salsa."  "No, no," he protests, "never too old for salsa, for music, for dancing."  I remember when I taught college in the Bronx, and stepped from the D Train at some stop up near the Bronx Botanical Garden, and as I walked the five blocks to my job, I was assaulted almost physically by the intensity of the music pouring out of the windows of every apartment on the street, from the cars driving by, shaken by the thudding and booming, by the piercing cry of the horns, shuddering as I noticed how many people turned their speakers to the world outside, oh, such a perversity.  On Puerto Rican Day I told my students that I could only live among WASPs.  No, no, I was not racist, I said, could not take the noise.  If there were WASP Day, I told them, the ranks of marchers would each carry a martini and not a sound would be heard, not a word spoken.  Ah, WASP day!  They say that the public address systems of Pennsylvania Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal are programmed to play only classical music because teenagers and vagrants will not congregate or stay near where they must listen to such music. I know that whenever I get my car back after it has been in the shop the radio has been changed from 24 hour classical to something with a loud driving beat interrupted by endless chatter, as though the repair man could not work listening to classical music.  Well, it is true I could not drive listening to that horrible stuff he chooses.  But I have to say that somewhere in the fluff of my forgetfulness lies the provocative recollection of years of teenaged jitterbugging, then being thirty and doing the twist, and forty and disco, disco, not to forget the fox trot, (it brought my husband and me together) and the waltz dance steps forever .  Yes, once upon a time I could have danced all night, and the thrill of it was just enkindled in me vicariously as I watched the London staged musical version of the 1935 film "Top Hat" Irving Berlin's confection made for Astaire and Rogers.  If it comes over here, don't miss it, is all I have to say.

Georgia On My Mind

The newspaper photographs depicting priests of the Orthodox Georgian Church physically battling with men gathered to demonstrate for the cause of male homosexuality in the country of Georgia in the city of Tiblis is yet another reminder that when the religious gain any kind of power and freedom from societal surveillance they go on the attack.  One would hope that just one time that new found freedom would result in an increasing effort to do good, spread love, honor the gospel pronouncements of the Christ for whom they exist.  But gay males always represent a threat that adherents to one of the branches of the Abrahamic religions cannot tolerate.  The religious ideas derived from that source are profoundly hostile to the idea of women's parity with men, and gay males are seen as a prime threat to the ideal of masculine superiority.  The source of women's inferiority to males derives in the very first instance from their generally inferior physical strength, augmented by their inherent physical weakness during their pregnancy and parturition plus their dependency during the early period of motherhood.  This inferiority is policed and underscored by the constant instances of male brutality visited upon the bodies of their wives, nowadays documented with precision by the worldwide press.  The Book of Genesis recounts the story of Adam's doom in his seduction by Eve in the matter of eating the apple; many scholars consider that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is rather better translated as a Knowledge of Pleasure and Pain, and thus Eve is inviting Adam to taste the joys of orgasm.  Jaweh's warning that death lies in eating the apple is another way of saying that when a couple procreates they have fulfilled their biological destiny, a milestone that leaves only death untried.  Sexual ecstasy is the one moment when a male loses control, and therefore the only time when his constant domination of women is in danger.  Gay males are in every way a threat to the heterosexual male.  He gazes at his fellow males with the look that betokens domination and invitation. He is insinuating, insisting that males are physically attractive, just as heterosexual males will not acknowledge that fact, fearful if they do that this exposes them to the same debilitating sexual interest that they impose upon women. He is not party to parenthood, so has no relationship with women that depends upon her physical weakness and his control of it.  He does not automatically assign women to the role of subordinate helper, because he will not be having a baby with her.  He looks at women as objects of parity; he destroys the hierarchy of the sexes, upon which the Abrahamic religions are built.  What is more, the very idea that gay males bring other males to orgasm, thus a male inflicting ecstatic powerlessness on his fellows, is a frightening anathema to the inherently control-mad heterosexual male.  What is more, every gay male will testify to the times in his life when he has had some mutually satisfying sexual encounter with a heterosexual (using those terms in ways that are sometimes counter intuitive) male, which is a testament to instincts most males would prefer were not acknowledged, better repressed, or, when excited, violently denied.  One can only imagine what passions were boiling in those violent Orthodox priests brutally striking out at the gay males standing before them in open acknowledgement of their sexuality.

London

A week in London.  Mercure Hotel right up next to Paddington Train Station on Praed Street with every kind of vehicular noise imaginable, yet never a sound penetrated our tiny little attic room on the top (5th) floor.  Heaven!  So much traffic, so many traffic jams, Trafalgar Square in a taxi trying to get to the Aldwych Theater, slow motion for twenty-five minutes, but never once was there the sound of a horn beeped in frustration from any cabbie, never did the cabdrivers, for that matter, depart from their genial, mannered, knowledgeable control of the cab. The streets of central London so crowded with people I was fearful, partly because they were all so young, so determinedly moving so fast, Saturday night by the fountain in Piccadilly so many wildly crazy drunken young men, soccer match just finished and much celebrating, oh, how I was fearful, and amazed to see dear old ladies looking not unlike Our Gracious Queen, same handbag, same hairdo, placidly walking along amidst the hurly burly.  Wonderful to be in a country where you do not have every other person packing a pistol.  Americans most generally remark on the marked decline in public anger, tension, hostility that marks the far more placid English scene.  It is more like the America of my childhood.  More foreign languages in central London than I have heard anywhere else including Manhattan.  The tube is crowded, the platforms are crowded, masses of people moving up and down on the escalators, racing along through the very claustrophobic tunnels that link the underground systems one to another. Trains come in rapid succession; buses move in their own dedicated lanes.  Except for traffic jams people are moved along efficiently and swiftly.  BBC Television News: reportage by persons who obviously had some training in what they were talking about, gruesome horror story news, the very staple of American TV, at a minimum and at that not repeated ad nauseam.  The debate on gay marriage in the Commons carried live in snippets interspersed with so many interesting intelligent observations by concerned parties of every stripe. It always seems so odd this fear of two persons of the same sex getting married.  What is going to happen?  What has happened?  Nothing.  But the debates were good.   Oh, Lord, how extraordinary to find intelligence and learning privileged in the public sphere!  Wonderful restaurants and oh were they expensive!  But then everything in England is expensive, and my friends tell me the salaries in no way match the cost of living.  The restaurants where the serving staff is salaried and therefore not trying to be our friend, unobtrusive, deft, and such a melange of nationalities.  Friends claim that it is hard to get native born Brits to do any work, and one must seek the immigrants.  That was what my son found when he was the executive chef in a London restaurant in the 1980's.  Lots of complaining about the ease with which layabouts can stay on the dole for decades.  The English peaches and cream complexions, boys and girls in their early teens, oh, Lord, how can people be so beautiful.  Was it Augustine who said sunt angeli isti Angli ("they are angels these English".)?  Or something like that.  I probably have the Latin wrong, but, hey, I am retired, and jet lagged, and don't give a damn, and my husband Richard is in another room (he would not tolerate such sloppiness).   Marvelous theater, the crispness of the acting remarkable, so many young persons in the audience.  Somehow I feel that persons my age can't take all the stairs, the crowds, and so stay home.  Of course, maybe I am still in Sarasota mode and expect every second person to have a walker or an oxygen cannister and tubes in the nose.  We lunched and dined with wonderful friends, always in some ways a wistful experience as time is indeed marching along very briskly, taking out one or two at every round of the calendar year.

Off To London Returning Sunday Week. Hiatus

Tallulah Bankhead ended her Sunday night radio show by singing in her husky whiskey smoker's baritone some lines of the following song, then closed off by saying "Good night, dahlings, until next week."
 
May the good Lord bless and keep you
      
Whether near or far away
              
May you find that long awaited golden day today
                        
May your troubles all be small ones
                
And your fortune ten times ten
                 
May the good Lord bless and keep you
       
Till we meet again

       
May you walk with sunlight shining
     
And a bluebird in every tree
         
May there be a silver lining
       
Back of every cloud you see

Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows
 
Never mind what might have been

          
May the good Lord bless and keep you
 
Till we meet again

May the good Lord bless and keep you
                   
Till we meet till we meet
      
Till we meet a--gain

Will This Be On The Exam?

The affair of the Harvard students who "cheated" on their take home exam, and for which many were expelled, has continued to exercise my moral indignation whenever the subject reappears in the news, or I read about it in some on-line communication from Harvard to its alumni.  I still think the professor was entirely wrong to permit a take-home final exam, wrong to establish a course with obviously minimal standards and then express righteous indignation that the students were not rigorous in establishing their individual integrity; the president and administration seem to me way wrong in turning a deaf ear to the numbers of students who claimed that the professor encouraged some form of sharing, deciding to fail so large a cohort rather than demand that the professor offer another final exam.  Everything is done on a computer nowadays, and for better or for worse, that technology makes inadvertent copying epidemic.  I am surprised that Doris Kearns Goodwin, a professor at Harvard, did not speak out, since she herself suffered the ignominy of having it revealed that substantial portions of a book she wrote on the Kennedy's a decade or so ago, contained numerous passages taken verbatim from the writing of other authors without attribution.  I am willing to believe it was a common scholarly inadvertence, most often caught by the author in question.  Anyway, the course was a total gut, the Harvard administration knew this, and so why are they completely bent out of shape?  As a teenager I used to write term papers for students at the University of Iowa, often buying them back if they received high grades and sell them as "used" for half price.  In my innocence (?) I was startled at how indifferent the graders were to the papers in question, how the same paper would receive such a range of grades, indicating to me that the grader probably read the first page and gave the student what was "normal" for that student, especially considering the absolute stupidity of the so-called "professor's comments" in the margin.  Of course, students should do their own work, but of course the administration should create circumstances where serious performance, high standards, and integrity are foregrounded.  I remember only too well in my Harvard days asking the proctor if I could go to the toilet and a witness followed me into the men's room to ensure that I kept my hands on my dick and not on some study aid I had secreted for instant help.  As an undergraduate at the State University of Iowa in classes of thousands swelled by the arrival of the guys on the GI Bill we took true and false or multiple choice exams as the final, if you can believe it, in the courses that the social sciences offered for distribution.  What a joke; half the guys in my row figuring me a nerd with a brain were copying where I put the marks on my paper.  I learned from these experiences, however.  As a college professor myself I forced myself to read in detail every paper, forced myself to create essay questions that would be in intimate dialogue with what we had discussed and highlighted in the classroom hours, forced myself to read carefully and immediately every paper, struggling to return them within a day or two, so I could ask for rewrites immediately.  We were in the moment, as the Buddhists say.  Harvard's buildings do not collapse like the ones in Bangladesh, but the glimpse into that so-called "cheating scandal" makes you realize the degradation of the factory model as applied to higher education, Ivy League education, no less.

Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen

My older daughter was here visiting.  Saturday night we will attend the ceremony marking her graduation from divinity school, as she prepares in middle age to take up the calling of a Christian ministry.  Despite my reservations about the existence of god and hence the validity of the foundations of the Christian Church I am deeply happy for her, since she has certainly blossomed into a calling in the years since she discovered the desire for this vocation.  We, as you can imagine, are talking a good deal about various ideas of god which I truly enjoy, having both started out life as a very devout, believing Episcopalian and having taught the subject of religion many times over the years.  She has the habit of attributing various and sundry attitudes, practices, and choices to the deity who now presides over her life, whilst I want to put all my chips down on the gambling table of life on the square played by reason or chance, or when I am feeling melodramatic, destiny.  My husband who sits nearby can only shake his head, being as he is a refugee from the years of irrationalities, mysticism and as he says nonsense that was the standard Catholic upbringing of his era.  He doesn't like to hear any conversation which allows for the premise that there may be a deity of any sort directing events.  My habit of mind is not so rational as his; I am an illogical and imagistic thinker, and so I have retained the story telling manner of exposition which accommodates less precise formulations that will seem "true" in another sense.  But as Pontius Pilate asked of the Christ "What is Truth?" when He announced that he had come as a sign of the truth.  I said to my daughter that the one text that is basic to me when I ever enter into any  discussion of what or what not may be true of the works and intentions of any god figure is Verse 38 from the Book of Job where Jaweh is said to thunder out at Job and Elihu as they try to parse the meaning of the misfortunes that have come to Job.
     "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
      "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?"
and proceeds to ask a majestic set of questions about the origins of the universe that in our perspective take us back before the Big Bang and into the Utter Unknowability of Things.  A great retort by god to those who would presume to understand the workings of the universe, and also what I always say to any tiresome religious zealot who determines to impose one or another ideas of behavior, values, or thought as being "God's Will."  I mean who are you to say so?  And that goes for the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and every one of those ministers of mega churches that dot the landscape of this country.

Eat Your Spinach

In my dotage I discover that I have acquired somewhat of an aversion to vegetables.  Parenthetically, I was interested to read in Mary Roach's new book Gulp, which contains everything you always wanted and also did not want to know about the digestive system, that vegetables are much harder to digest than meats.  In any case, last summer the husband of a youngish couple visiting us replied to my negative remarks about vegetables: "Charlie, you're in your eighties, you don't have to eat anything you don't want to eat ever again."  It seemed so liberating as he said it.  But a year has passed and I am still digging into my greens, my carrots, oh, all those things, because why?  because I am supposed to eat vegetables every day.  When we rise from dinner or any other meal, we tend to take the dishes to the sink, and any food worthy saving to the refrigerator.  When I get up in the morning, I go to the kitchen which is adjacent to my bedroom to turn on the coffee machine, and then return to make my bed.  That's what you're supposed to do.  I do not salt my food, I try to drink five or six glasses of water a day.  I brush my teeth carefully twice and day, and use a feathered toothpick on them all the time.  Why can't I leave the dishes on the table until way later in the evening, or even until the next morning?  I had a friend in a high level administrative position at a university and when I visited, his wife threw an elaborate dinner party for me, and after we ate she announced there would be coffee and liquers around the fire, and after ushering the crowd from the room shut the door, saying quietly to me: "Those dishes can just sit where they are until tomorrow."  We are getting ready for a trip to London on Sunday, for which I have been trying to organize us in the last two months.  I can tell you now the hour and the place of every lunch and dinner date; I have the printout receipts of every theatrical event we've booked into with notations of time and place, ditto for the museum exhibitions which required timed admission tickets.  There is a list of every telephone number we might need whilst in the United Kingdom.  We are dining before going on to the theater with a woman who is my coeval, and as a recent widow will deserve our meeting at her home and accompanying her into downtown.  The logistics are, if not formidable, at least certainly present in my mind, from the car and driver we will need to book beforehand to the two buses we will take to get her and us back to her house afterward (children of the Great Depression like us would have a very difficult time using black cabs both directions), and so far I have not worked out how to get us two back to our hotel, just hoping that the bus going in that direction from her place is still running late in the evening.  I can't tell if this oh so much tighter and grimmer attempt to take a firm grip on life derives from the increasing nervousness that the vulnerability of old age excites, or is it that I really don't drink that much anymore, and thus for the first time in my life am far, far more conscious of the hurdles or ditches one must jump than I used to be in the halcyon days of the extended cocktail hour once or twice a day or whenever, when we all were certainly not drunk, but certainly feeling no pain, and really not running a to-do list endlessly through our brains.

Memories Are Made Of This

Yesterday I started working out on our new exercise machine.  It is a very complicated affair with so many bells and whistles that it will take me some time to work my way through the instructions and demonstrations on the accompanying chart we have hung on the wall.  But I will master it, of that I am sure.  Still I needed to email the company with a question about the detail of some one thing, and walking from the gym shed to my office to type out my question I forgot the two terms that I had read on the chart to which I would be referring.  So yet again I was paralyzed by the realization that I cannot carry such data in my head from the backyard to a room in the front of the ground  floor, maybe thirty or forty feet, and the passage of five or less minutes.  And yet without hesitation I can say 5729, the telephone number in the house where I lived the first sixteen years of my life, or I easily recall the Italian for the number of the telephone of the Roman apartment we lived in back in 1963-64.  More bizarre still is the name that sometimes pops into my head, Fuficius Fango, a common Roman soldier whom Caesar raised to the rank of senator and whom Octavian, his great nephew, made prefect of Numidia.  And Roman history is not even my field! Surprisingly enough, although I remember quite well indeed masses of detail and theories of ancient Greek literature and culture, I cannot bear to read books on the subject and recently signed off from every reviewing anything having to do with it again.  I loved it; I am what came from deep immersion, but, no, that's over.  On the other hand it surprises me how strong are the erotic memories I carry in my head, and I was amused by a friend several years ago who called me blessed for the delicious thoughts I could entertain when I was in the nursing home. And indeed I felt blessed as I was writing my memoir since they were so integral a part of the story of my life.  My husband is a patient man, but he cannot bear it when I reminisce about my childhood and siblings, having heard it all too many times in twenty five years.  He has put his past away forever.  Indeed, I find it painful, shocking, and heartbreaking that I cannot honestly recall the voice of my first wife, and only traces of her face will appear in my mind's eye.  The dearest male friend I have ever made, wonderful Ted, father, priest, uncle, everything to me, died over forty five years ago, and I have no recollection of him at all, although I strive so hard to place myself once more in those wonderful afternoons I recollect as an intellectual truth when we boozed together and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.  But I can remember the songs from those days, the lyrics and tunes of songs from the Beatles, the Supremes, the Mamas and the Poppas; I can still hear Joan Baez leading us in the front of a protest demonstration in San Francisco.  And, yes, if I try real hard I can sort of hear the band from Nick's in the Village.  It was 1944 and my sister snuck me in, a fourteen year old, and I remember their signature tune as they stood when it was time to take a break, playing their hearts out marching between the tables and out the front door.

Hair

A female relative of mine had long shoulder length hair which in the course of time had turned quite grey and definitely moved toward white.  One day she had it styled and shortened so that she now wore her hair cropped relatively close to her skull maybe an inch, two or three or so (I'm not so good with measurements) long, and the effect was dramatic.  From my perspective it was all good; instead of hanging hair that fell now here now there around her face, which she had to push back from time to time, and which was a spread of a kind of dismal color, she had a head of hair that approximated her skull, that was neat and good looking.  But she reported to me that almost all women she met, at the library, in the store, wherever in the small town she lived, said (and it was only women; what male notices a woman's hairdo unless he is gay?) "oh, so now you're a lesbian," or "what are you trying to advertise?"  I was dumbfounded but evidently if you are going to look trim, handsome and intelligent like Rachel Maddow, you must be, well, you know.  Does that explain all those ridiculous women on morning television news or evening for that matter, whose hair is down to their shoulders and falling around them, as though they were all set to go out on a date instead of talking seriously about the world situation?  And especially when they are with male presenters on the same program, who not only wear suits and ties as a rule, but wear their combed and short in a business-like way.  That is to say, they do not call attention to their personal appearance.  Are women afraid that if they look business-like at all, they will be immediately judged a lesbian?  Are lesbians the only women in our time who are allowed to look intelligent, as though they are not about to be judged in a beauty contest?  Thank God for Angela Merkle as opposed to Hillary Clinton, who is a relatively old woman, always behind the podium with all that hair hanging down around her face.  Don't women get tired of flicking the stuff out of their eyes, nose and mouth?  Watching a seventeen year old girl deal with the strands of hair that have settled at her mouth can be very appealing, but then one does not expect much from a seventeen year old girl but to excite the fantasies of males.  But when you grow up and talk national news, hey, it's time to get that hair cut.  My husband and I have our own maneuvers with the bits of hair left to the elderly male.  He saw his growing grayer and sparser, and then really disappearing completely on top, and took the intelligent way out of that dilemma which was to shave his head.  Look at Stanley Tucci, that mouth watering confection of stage and screen, who has a shining bald head, which as one always knows with Italians or those of Italian descent,  is a sign of maximum testosterone and a very hairy chest.  Yummy!  Whereas I, with still a covering of hair that suggests the growth that was mine in my youth, have followed the instructions of my once upon a time hairdresser daughter-in-law, and comb it back which forces it to fluff up a bit.  More recently, I have been instructed by my soon to be granddaughter-in-law, to apply mousse to this fluff, not so much that I become like all those eighty year old women my age who have created impregnable and impervious helmets for their heads, but just enough to give it what they all call "body."  Well, I know from chance viewings in mirrors at funny angles, that there isn't all that much on the back and maybe sides, and pink, pink scalp shows through a lot of places, but head-on in the mirror, particularly with an overhead light shining down on it, I look as though I had a full bodied thick head of hair, and at the end it's only my view that matters.

Vandals, Ravage, and Ruin

Once upon a time I taught in a women's college where there was a policy of not hiring single male instructors (obviously in the days before discrimination policies).  I, who was recently widowed, was thus an exception, but there was also a studio art instructor, a single male, who was a last minute hire of desperation.  Outcasts, the both of us, we hung out together a lot, and as the months rolled by he painted a rather large formal portrait of me in oil, very much the grieving twenty five year old, replete with a black tie of mourning.  Years later, when it hung in the foyer of our departmental office at another university, where I was chair, more or less as a joke--the hang not my appointment--an abrasive bright New York Jewish lesbian (did I need the word abrasive?) who was a talented artist suggested that the work would be much improved if she added a representation of my current forty five year old bearded, flushed, and rounded face, as a doll head that the grieving youth would be holding in his hands.  This would be an allusion to a large collection of doll's heads that graced or deformed, take your pick, the mantelpiece in the conversational parlor of our baronial home.  I agreed, and she carried out her idea, but in doing so she made the head much larger so that in a sense it looked like the seated youth was holding the head of someone who had recently been guillotined.  It was unsettling, but to my mind it improved upon the placid aura of the original.  Years later a visiting artist friend from those long ago days of teaching together at the women's college was visiting and was horrified when she saw the portrait with the new head.  "That's vandalism," she exclaimed.  Luckily the original artist had died, though sad for him since it was way way too early, and I was freed of the necessity of having to explain or apologize to anyone.  But I have never forgotten her reaction, ever.  I somehow did not know or consider back then what is now commonplace, the idea that an artist always has a moral ownership of anything he/she has made.  Years later I was showing a very good Boston framer a group of Piranesi prints that needed re-matting since the paper or cardboard of the original mats had chemicals in them that were discoloring and damaging the actual print with which it had contact.  He was quoting me what would be a very substantial price for the work, and I was deliberating aloud whether or not I could afford this, to which he responded: "Well, so this set gets destroyed.  You know there is an awful lot of art in this world, and I guess it really wouldn't matter if some of it disappeared.  I can, as they say, nowadays, relate--well, in a way.  It's not that I feel the burden of the world's surplus art works, but having spent my life in study of Greek and Roman antiquity I am familiar with and comfortable with ruins.  Who would want to see the Parthenon whole, and tarted up with paint, like it was originally?  Who does not appreciate the rich vibrations one gets from reading the poems of Sappho which are so many of them, simply tantalizing fragments of the merest hint of ideas or images.  How breathtaking it is to walk into a Turkish village and find a temple growing out of the back of a stable, or rather really the stable having been added to the temple?  I love my grieving self, sweet, innocent, and full of promise, holding the impish bearded alcohol-flushed me of middle years.

What's For Dinner?

Richard had brought home a bunch of peppers, so I decided to make stuffed peppers.  I wanted lamb for this.  Today I went to all the meat departments of the supermarkets and specialty stores in a radius of maybe fifteen miles; none had lamb for sale.  "Only at Easter," was the stock response.  There was only beef, pork, chicken, and some ground turkey, and it seemed that beef was still the biggest seller despite all the alarms being sounded about the potential health hazards in consuming beef.  Ah, well, nobody seems to believe in global warming either.  Mary Roach whose new book entitled Gulp is all about the phenomenon of digestion has several pages on the diet of the Inuit who reserve a major part of their diet for animal organs, something, as she points out, not to be found in the butcher shops of the lower forty nine states.  Reading that took me back to the Sunday morning breakfast of my childhood when we almost invariably were served lamb kidneys sautéed in butter and vermouth on toast.  We children all loved that meal, and when I became a father and head of a household, my wife and I often served them to our own children as a Sunday morning treat.  Earlier on when I was a college student I often baby sat for my brother and his wife, enjoying a dinner with them before they set off for whatever they had planned for the evening.  My  sister-in-law kept a tight budget on the income of a young resident in the university hospital supplemented by her doing night nursing when he could be home.  A favorite was beef heart which I grew to love, although I must admit she sometimes did cook the thing to death, and the expression shoe leather was entirely appropriate.  When I was in graduate school my first wife and I bought it cheap at Haymarket and learned how to cook it in way we thought was better, and kept it relatively tender.  Calf's liver was something we were served quite often in my childhood home, and always very poorly cooked, that is to say, always overcooked, and it was indeed shoe leather.  It really wasn't until I was in my forties that my live-in boyfriend taught me how to take care that liver is cooked just to the point where it was still pink, and delicious--oh, all those awful liver dinners of my childhood, how sad! My second wife who had lived around the world as a child was exceptionally adventurous with cuisine, if indifferent to fashioning menus.  So she was happy to go along with me when I brought home fresh beef tongue, and the children were happy to eat it, served on a platter, and still looking as though it were going to be part of an utterance of "Moooh."  What I wouldn't give for a slice of tongue right now!  And we had cervelle au beure noire, that's calf's brains, again delicious, delicious, and sweetbreads a prettified name for some gland in the cow's neck or something like that, although I don't remember the children relishing that item, just as they would not go near shad roe sauteed simply in butter with some capers thrown in.  I almost never buy any of those bloody steak items I see at the meat department, and oh, Lord, I am so tired of chicken.  Beans give me gas, and Richard does not like them.  Thank heavens we live by oceans, since what we eat almost every night of the week is some kind of fish.  Oddly enough in the Iowa of my childhood far away from salt water we almost never ever were served fish, and when it appeared quickly turned our noses up at it.  De gustibus and all that.

What To Do?

The mellow glow of satisfaction is almost palpable.  The garden is perfectly pruned, manicured, the tiny new leaves on the roses and peonies signal all the beautiful blossoms just waiting to burst forth.  The items on my desk are now all neatly stowed, the magazines on the side table of my reading chair are arranged title by title, the to-do list of bills to be paid, letters to be written has dwindled to nothing.  I have been north not even two weeks and I have everything in order.  Now what?  A terrible emptiness, like a wave surging on the beach, sweeps in, and leaves me vacant, motionless in my chair.  Now what?  I need a project.  Two years ago I was making the last changes to a manuscript which was about to be published, last year I was preparing for the October publication.  Now what?  I keep making notes for a novel that I would love to write.  Why don't you?  I have so far in my life written four novels, none of them ever published.  My story will never be that of the unrecognized genius with his novel gathering dust in the closet.  No, I have many, many friends in the publishing industry, and over the years have the very great fortune of getting my manuscripts read, and I have had the luxury of receiving honest criticism from my friends.  So these manuscripts remain unpublished, and serve as a stern reminder that it does not look like I have the talent for writing fiction (although several years ago when the industry was not in such desperate shape one publisher friend did say of one of my pieces "If you keep sending it around long enough, you probably will find somebody somewhere who will take this on.  It isn't that bad.")  Self publishing is the way to go, I hear on every side.  But do I really care that much?  I toy with writing this novel I have more or less worked out in my head as an exercise.  Who cares if it is read?  Who cares if it gets published?  True, true.  Another voice within my head, a sterner critic reminds me all too crisply that the fantasy story hews so closely to a true life experience that maybe it has been dealt with sufficiently in my memoir.  That leads me to another fantasy of writing some episodes from my life fully disclosed in the memoir with the major details of the narrative radically altered, making a kind of Rashomon version of my life story.  That might be amusing.  For a day?  A week?  I need a real project, like going every day to work in a soup kitchen, but they don't seem to have such things in the small beach town where I live.  I had a very dear close friend who died last summer at 97 with whom I spoke almost daily for fifty years, and because we were resolutely intimate and honest in our conversations I had the sad privilege of bearing witness to the long, slow windup--or should I say rundown?--of her life.  When she retired, she bought a small printing press, and began to turn out exquisite hand made books of infinite delight and impeccable quality, and then she grew slower at that and the inspiration became scantier, and the contacts fewer, and she would complain to me sighing.  "Oh, Charles, I need a project."

Mrs. Chancellor

The news that Jeanne Cooper, who played Mrs. Chancellor on the daytime soap "The Young and the Restless" has died took me back over fifty years when, strange as it may seem, I had been invited to be a faculty adviser to the Delta Chi fraternity at Stanford University.  It was a culture utterly foreign to me, these energetic, butch, athletic, happy-go-lucky young males with whom I ate lunch most weekdays, and tried to match them in their exuberant conversation on subjects of which I knew nothing, specifically sporting events or sporting prowess of every kind.  But what was truly unusual about my experience at the fraternity house was the daily ritual of retiring after lunch to a kind of lounge set up with a for-those-days large television screen on which we all lounged about to watch "The Young and the Restless." If it had been a group of gay male students, not that such a group would have self identified in the sixties, I could easily have understood it, imagining the high camp comments that the program would have generated. But, no, these young men watched with utter seriousness, for some reason entirely engrossed in the daily turmoil and challenges faced by the women in the drama.  I have always wondered how the ritual derived and I have to believe that when these guys were little tykes, they sat at their mother's knee watching the program, a cultural habit reinforced over the years when they stayed home from school sick, and watched it while lying in bed, just as I a couple of generations earlier listened to things like "The Romance of Helen Trent," while suffering colds and sore throats.  As i watched Cooper play Mrs. Chancellor I was always struck by what seemed to me a great difference in the lines and attitudes given her.  The other women clearly did not like her much; she was rich which made her different, but they also ascribed to her a malevolence that they so rigorously and so righteously eschewed in their own personal relationships.  I saw it quite otherwise. She was smart, it seemed to me, whereas the others were always slipping into behaviors and emotions which led them from one compromising situation to another.  They were as a group all losers, and in that respect, I imagine mirrored the interior sense of failure housewives had back then.  Mrs. Chancellor was in a certain sense the villain of the piece, but with that went the understanding that she was a successful problem solver, had sharp, well defined opinions on everything.  In my eyes, and in male terms, she was a success, and they were failures. She seemed to me to be the magnet for condemnation to deflect attention away from the other women's intellectual laziness and indulgence in the porn of cheap emotion.  It sometimes surprised me that none of the boys with whom I watched this got my reading of it, and I wondered if I was just projecting.  I never discussed Mrs. Chancellor with any woman because I never ran across a woman in our social world who watched the program.  My film viewing experience with the guys extended one night to a porno film they rented and projected for the group to which I was invited.  It was my first time, at age thirty one, seeing porno, and my reaction was to laugh uproariously, at the distorted plot line, the stilted dialogue, the abrupt, awkward, and what I could only imagine as uncomfortable contortions of the bodies in their filmed ecstasy. The boys were offended. It was a night to remember, and here again, I was on some completely different wave length.  I guess I never would have made it as a fraternity man.

A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing

The extraordinary white middle class burst of enthusiasm for living in Manhattan and Brooklyn translates of course into the anxiety provoking jockeying for positions for their children in the so-called "good" public schools.  "Good" means adhering to the values of the upper middle class in terms of deportment, ambition, and execution.  Those parents have my complete sympathy even if when I try to thread my way between these giant baby carriages sometimes coming at one in tandem on Broadway in the eighties makes me grit my teeth and wish them all off to Scarsdale where they belong.  I raised four children so my wife and I were naturally as anxious as the next for our children's success.  My childhood had been spent at a private experimental school run by the Education Department of the State University of Iowa until I switched in grade seven to the public schools where I stayed until I graduated except for a year of at Phillips Andover.  My wife started out at Punahou in Hawaii and ended at Abbott Academy in Andover.  Did she ever go to a public school?  I doubt it.  Our children went K through whatever in the Palo Alto schools, the population of which was as you can imagine even back then upper middle class highly educated white people.  We moved to Brookline, Massachusetts; they went to the Pierce School in the Village before we bought a house in the Runkel School district.  As we were preparing our move, the Superintendent summoned me to his office to suggest that we might want to keep our children at Pierce because "Runkel is almost 98% Jewish."  This was not the anti-Semitic observation one might imagine; after all, the guy himself was Jewish.  No, he worried, I think, that these simple minded goyim would lose their way in the minefields of ambition and performance at the Runkel School.  But we had moved to Brookline expressly so our kids could sit in classes with Jews!  Of course, as time went by it was ironic that the very very upper class WASPs left the Brookline public schools for private schools where they would be with "their own kind,"and the Jewish kids after their bar mitzvahs sort of retreated into exclusive Jewish friendships, leaving my children ironically enough to make friends with the children of the Irish Catholic laboring class who were the towns public works employees.  My oldest boy chose not to go to college when he graduated high school, and his brother followed suit the following year.  The uproar over these decisions from my parents in law was vigorous, but my wife and I refused to impose our anxieties upon the boys.  They grew up in a home where their father was a professor, their mother an architect, where the friends of the family at frequent dinner parties made conversation based on education, wit,  intelligence, and experience suggestive of what universities have on offer for the young.  They either felt they had enough of that or for other reasons did not want it.  I still hear "you should have pushed them harder."  Ah, well, many are called, few are chosen.

Penny

Christened Mary Lois Pendleton (Mary after her mother), she hated that name, and always introduced herself as Penny, also the nickname of her father, the admiral.  At the start of our relationship she was startled to discover that my first wife, dead all of two months, had a monogram MPB (Mary Powers Beye); she was determined to change her name legally so as not to have that same set of initials.  She went to court to become Penelope Pendleton three weeks before our wedding, much to the anger of her parents, who characteristically sent her a telegram from New Hampshire to Cambridge, rather than pick up the phone and remonstrate with her.  She was resistive and combative by nature, although always quiet and repressed in her behavior, so if you did not know her, you might easily miss the steel in her.  I did not notice it at first, it was such a relief to be a partner of a quiet woman who seemed to take direction, after the five years of Mary's sense of high drama in the conjugal scene.  Penny had a twin brother who was always the adversary in her determination to succeed.  Males were so obviously preferred in the military culture of her family.  Brother was an engineer, she would become an architect, that is, something to do with structure, but with aesthetics, taste, and imagination.  Architecture in the fifties was very much a man's profession, stayed that way throughout her working life.  She spent her life pushing for parity with males.  Do you suppose that might have been part motive behind her choice of a gay male husband; she instinctively knew that he identified enough with her as a female, however much his behavior and thought patterns were traditionally masculine, that he would grant her a kind of psychic parity.  And, gay though he may well have been, they spent enough time making out in the early years of their marriage, to ensure that she never had the slightest sense that she was missing out on something, and she would know, since she had lost her virginity at sixteen, and was an active player thereafter. She told her daughters that she resented the sexual freedom of males. She could not, however, escape being a female.  She compromised her progress in architecture school, when her father lay seriously ill with phlebitis in Philadelphia, requiring the desperate amputation of his leg; she was the twin who made the journey to his bedside repeatedly, woman, daughter, the caregiver, if only figuratively.  The new wife, working her first professional job, soon was a mother, and with that her career came to a halt; mothers in the fifties stayed home, and on into the sixties as three siblings joined the first little darling. Ten years she lost to the wifely ideal, and then she was back into the race, with a husband picking up the slack, once the dirty work of parenting infants was over.  In her mother's last years she was in constant attendance on the weekends of a woman who had always been withholding; she was the good daughter.  Happily she had the satisfaction before she died of having made it in a major architecture firm.  Along the way the setbacks were horrendous, a major automobile accident which almost killed her, and then, when she was in her sixties, a ghastly fall from the upper floor of her family's barn which left her permanently crippled.  But she was never bitter, because she was always level headed enough to remember the fall was her own fault.  Her willingness to make that observation is evidence of her triumphant honesty, a kind of grim, plain, New England trait, so at variance with the theatrical smoke and mirrors style of her would be matinee idol of a husband.  As she told her children once in a moment of great candor, she would long since have taken them off and left him, if she had had the money.  At least she had the last thirty years of her life unencumbered up to her death May 8, 2005.

All That Glisters Is Not Gold

Recently a friend of mine who was raised in England denounced the prime ministerial reign of Margaret Thatcher, describing from his own experience how the newly privatized telephone company saw to it that the telephone service was immediately available to the businesses of the financial center of London, the so called City, whereas others, including my friend, suffered a series of delinquencies.  He ascribed a kind of conspiracy in which Mrs. Thatcher was determined to reward only her friends and cronies who were the larger corporations and businessmen.  But, I countered, couldn't we argue that her philosophy of humankind was based on the profit motive?  That all human activity that counts, would be for her, something that led to a profit.  I tried to put her into a bigger perspective.  Ancient heroic epic, for instance, isn't it about powerful people who plunder, who conquer and exploit?  Don't we have Odysseus in the second book of the Iliad striking Thersites with his staff for speaking out against Agamemnon and his shameless exploitation of the army and his greedy profit taking?  Doesn't the poet and by extension the poet's audience believe that the mighty are the glorious?  I once read an interesting anthropological account of the Aztec period in Mexico in which the authors pointed out that a priestly caste came about when men of power, strength, and imagination realized that this was a way to dominate the masses and exploit them for their own gain.  Can we not see the same thing in the workings of the Roman Catholic Church where an elite clergy has made a handsome living for themselves from the offerings of the many who have been led to believe that their salvation is determined by the priestly caste?  We live in a time when the newspapers are filled with the outrageous profit taking by banks and the directors and senior officers of corporations against whose sometime illegalities the government does not seem to make a move.  It seems that this is because in our time no one seems to argue against the notion that profit, gain, and wealth are absolute goods.  Isn't "Downton Abby" a kind of elegant statement of the virtue of exploitation?  So Mrs. Thatcher was not evil, she was true to a conviction firmly held, learned in the home of her childhood, that the individual's first obligation is to make a profit.   My husband, on whom I tried out these ideas at lunch, countered with the idea that humanity must base its raison d'etre on improving the condition of society as a whole.  Of course, Mrs. Thatcher would have immediately come back at him with her famous "There is no such thing as society, only people."  I think back to the Christian teachings of my youth where, yes, the well being of the whole of mankind was always in the thoughts and prayers we heard or internalized.  I was raised to believe that those who sought after wealth and power were likely to lose their souls, and while one could not stop them in their perverse and ugly desire for profit and gain, one knew that they were corrupt in heart and soul.  I guess I really do believe that, it's why I am thankful that I had the chance to make my life's work as something that was a service to others, glad that I have never had to measure it all out in dollars and cents, why it is, I suppose, that my instinct is always to shun people who labor for gain, rather than for service.  I imagine that Mrs. Thatcher could look back on her role in making the City of London the financial center of the world and take pride, and not look to the misery she helped to create elsewhere in England.  Many are called, few are chosen.  It's an ugly truth she was enunciating, one that is very much the mantra of the rich and powerful today.  But I am not sure that they are to be damned for thinking only of their profits, since I am not sure that there is any other philosophical or moral position out there to subscribe to in this day and age.  Certainly there seems little impetus in the belief that since the many cannot function an adversary or entrepreneur manner like the few they must support wholeheartedly an instrument of government that protects and promotes their interests against the rapacious few.  That is not vicious class war, as so many decry; it is a common sense procedure to maintain some check and balance in the flow of wealth as it circulates through the population of the nation.

Ernie, Scott, Move Over, Guys!

My recent reference to novels I have written pushed some of the many psychological buttons attached to my over-sized ego which propelled me to try to remember them.  Like all novice fiction writers I took my own life as the carapace upon which to hang the story's details.  My first attempt recalled a student in my class at Yale who in real life had suddenly before my eyes grown truly ill, dramatically declining by the day, so that I intervened, and when he confessed to his feeling sick hustled him off to the student infirmary where he was discovered to have diabetes, whom I met on a train platform years later, a married man in the suburbs.  In my novel of course it is all different, I really can't remember much about it although the title came from a song Perry Como used to sing "Everybody Falls In Love With Someone", but my intervention had to do with discovering that the kid was suicidal because he realized he was gay, and then later when he has grown up and started work, the two meet again, and of course, guess what? Cupid strikes with his arrow!  The next written in 1980 or so was situated in Ibiza where I had spent part of the previous summer staying with two fifty something Italian sisters adjacent to another house full of Madrileño friends.  The title "Provide Provide" alludes to Robert Frost's poem of that title, I believe, which ends "better to go down dignified/with boughten friendships at your side/provide, provide!"  The narrative line has to do with the jealousy of the one sister that the other has formed a close non-sexual bond with a young girl from Madrid who is taking over the familial function, becoming daughter, sister, friend.  Another plot line involves this vivacious young thing who is also secretly sleeping with one of the young marrieds in the party, and still another depicts a fiftyish American gay professor (now who could that be?) who frets with worry that he might have AIDS when he is not moaning over his loneliness.  The professor was added in a rewrite to give a more serious tone to the narrative, and it was a mistake; he is tiresome and lugubrious throughout.  When I was fifty five, teaching in New York, and working several mornings a week as a volunteer in the kitchen at Gods Love We Deliver, I wrote a novel about a young straight couple, he a cook in such a place, an Italian-American from Staten Island, she working as a volunteer, a WASP debutante from the Upper East Side, oh, god, you can see where this story is going, right into one of the greatest clichés of all time, so it got spiced up a little with the introduction of a flamboyant queenie sort of manager in the kitchen, who eventually dies of AIDS, causing a reunion of the couple who are of course in the grand tradition of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Breaks Up With Girl, Boy Gets Back Together With Girl.  The last time I found a paper copy of this (entitled Kitchen Duty) whilst organizing (what a laugh!) my files I teared up as I read it.  Last of all I wrote a shorter novel about a teenaged gay boy whose silver cigarette case, a family heirloom, is stolen from him by some townies when he is having sex with them, and the desperate measures he goes through to get it back.  It is a study in his courage and perseverance as he goes to the police and they help him with a sting operation since they want to get something on these early onset thugs before they get dangerous, and at the same time a mordant look at the social structures in a small mid western town where an upper class boy can break the law engaging in sodomy and feel free to go to the police about it who use the situation to gain control over some lower class troublemakers in the town. It was called "Give or Take."  I still think it is a wonderful story and very well written.  Gee Willikers, I clean forgot about the novels about Medea and Clytemnestra.

Saturday In The Country

I woke up in my bed here in Hull on Friday, 26 April; I had flown from Sarasota to New York City, then after a few days come by train to Massachusetts.  Although it seemed excessively cold after Florida I was ready to begin to tackle the garden.  Last November before leaving I had pretty well cleared out what could be brought to the ground, so the work ahead of me did not seem to be excessive.  Apart from a day at the dermatologist in town, I kept at it, each morning and each late afternoon, sparing my skin as best I could from the midday sun, and indeed was happy because the doc had not found any insidious new growths which usually flourish after a winter in Florida.  My gardening friend Sally shared the labors on that first Monday, well, did most all the work, transplanting two rose bushes and lots of purple aster and some other tallish thing, forever nameless to me, which has a beautiful purple bloom in late September into October and at the same time somehow dries up into the ugliest brown stalks.  I was going to pull it out until someone suggested hiding it in the midst of the phlox plants, so all one would see in autumn would be the resplendent purple. By mid-week I had become entirely feeble.  I discovered that I have lost strength over the winter even though I have been faithful in going to the gym.  Still I was happy that my tendency to topple over as I bent to prune or pick or pull at weeds in cracks between the paving stones was considerably diminished.  Hoorah for balance exercises!  Early this morning I finished preparing the garden, and surveyed the fading daffodils and jonquils, the forsythia turning just a bit to green, and the late blooming tulips all in their prime and saw that it was good.  I entered the house to tackle the backlog of mail in my study, mostly the journals and books that have arrived since April 20th, the cut-off date when our friend stopped forwarding to us.  It has been a horrendous experience.  The two issues of Vanity Fair to which I subscribed one day on impulse when I read an offer for 12 issues for 12 dollars, reeked as usual of some obnoxious perfume, were nearly too heavy to hold, and almost impossible to maneuver to what is there to be read, as one fights his way through so many ads of so many boys and girls, with mouths half opened and eyes half shut.  I was angry at myself for subscribing, angry for looking into it, angry for getting sucked into an account of a fistfight in some glitter society bar in the meat packing district!  I turned to the pile of New York Review of Books, and my heart sank at the titles of the articles.  Somehow I knew before looking that they would all be so earnest, so full of moral condemnation or praise.  I had to look away, and there was the New Yorker Magazine, five or six perhaps, and again, the gorge of satiety rose.  I looked at the cartoons in a couple of them, noted some clever film reviews, realized that I no longer knew which films I should be seeing, too long too far out of the loop.  Could not face those long intelligent well written articles, because, my god, there would be hundreds and hundreds of pages.  I looked further and saw two hefty copies of The Art Newspaper.  Did I really care about whether China was buying half as much from the galleries as last year, which the headline of one proclaimed?  No, I didn't.  And there at my feet were at least nearly a dozen of the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review.  My stomach turned.  As God is my witness, I cried out I'm never going to read the printed word again!

Travelin' Light

Brian Sewell remarks in his autobiography that he intends to burn his and his mother's diaries because "to keep for an unknown posterity too many papers is an insidious vanity."  I could not agree more.  I remember when I left my position at Boston University I threw out every lecture note, every draft of a scholarly article, well, just everything in my files, even though I still had a decade of teaching left for me.  I just could not face hauling this stuff on to a new location, and, okay, it was time to become a new Charlie.  Fate or sheer cosmic malevolence had already helped me understand the importance of "travelin' light," as the song goes, when someone got into our house as we, my wife and I, headed for different destinations following a divorce, and took all the twelve place settings (ten or so pieces to a setting) of sterling silver which had been wedding gifts. At the time I thought it was sentimentality that forced the wrenching grief upon me, but later reflection suggested it was caused by the sheer loss of so much value; still I was relieved by the freedom it gave me, and I was thoroughly instructed into a new way of approaching possessions. Way back when I was in graduate school, and my mother died, my wife and I in our makeshift tiny apartment were in no position to take on possessions so we passed on what might have been my share of the ancestral family paintings, rugs, and furniture.  Now I look at every piece of furniture we own as though it came from Goodwill; indeed when my wife and I furnished our gigantic Brookline home, we went out Thursday nights and cadged some really great stuff the rich burgers of the town were tossing out for trash collection.  Later when my husband and I moved out of our house in Cambridge, we went from a fifteen room house to a five room apartment, and sold three thousand or more books, and had a two day yard sale that was legend, if not for the throngs shopping up a storm on the first day, then for the sign of desperation tacked to the tree at the curb on the second which read "Everything free, take what you like." Helping my daughter empty her grandmother's house of almost one hundred years of accumulation, and in the same years dismantling my sister's home of nearly half a century has helped me to realize how much I loath possessions, especially when they can be so loaded with associations, some of them heart aching, but some of them bringing back nightmare memories.  And yet, and yet . . . . I can't seem to empty my dresser drawers and closets of so many, many pieces of clothing that will never grace my body again. I keep thinking I have lightened up, but there they are, all those T-shirts, pieces of underwear still in their wrappers. Why especially do I stop at Brooks Brothers in the Factory Outlet out in the Berkshires to buy more underwear?   I look at all the artworks I have acquired since 1948 when first I paid my then brother-in-law, David, $45 for a painting he had turned out at The Art Students League in New York, a very imperfect allusion to the painting style of Roualt, something I treasure to this day.  What will happen to all this stuff when Richard and I--I will not say "pass," sounds like we are playing a hand of bridge--die, and my kids have no room to house it all, and it has no monetary value?  Hey, I'll be dead, not my problem.  A friend from graduate school days who passed his life in some kind of sterile and wretched observance of service to "scholarship" whatever that might be, always used to say that a man's posterity is measured in the entries in card catalogs and bibliographies, ever sneering at baby makers and householders.  Well, poor guy, he is now utterly demented and I guess thus blissfully ignorant of the fact that most of what he spent his life on has been quite superseded by contemporary notions of what the requirements of the field are all about.  Will a memory of him survive beyond a decade as more than a subject of witty academic anecdotes?

Once Upon A Time In Ancient Greece

Friends have raved about two productions at Emerson, an adaptation of the Iliad which began its life in a theater in Princeton New Jersey with Stephen Spinella, no longer the wispy, Waspy youth he portrayed in Angels in America, but a solid, middle aged Achilles, and a variation on Euripides' Trojan Women with a few bells and whistles brought in from other works, both of which--I was about to say, sadly enough--I did not get the chance to see.  I am not sad at all actually; I have resisted seeing An Iliad (as indeed it is called), mainly because I don't ever want to see or hear another masterpiece of Greek antiquity, particularly not a dramatic rendition of a 16,000 line dactylic hexametric poem.  I very rarely find ancient Athenian tragic drama the least bit dramatic or compelling when done as the text suggests, and the "enhancements" as some might call it, only offend me.  T'was not always thus, of course, and I have even played Menelaos in a student/faculty outdoor production of Trojan Women at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, to me memorable for the moments at the very beginning when I was secreted in the bushes--our "offstage"--with the student playing Hecuba and struggled to control myself as she--for my benefit alone, there in the bushes--improvised her opening speech "Lift up, o stricken head . . . " in a combination of Yiddish and just off the boat immigrant Jewish English, the language of her father.  My friends tell me that Emerson did The Trojan Women as an anti-war tract, and that is generally what the world imagines was Euripides' idea when he created the play.  I don't think so.  First off, the fact of war is such a given in ancient society, and for a people whose view of life derives from an inherent tragic sensibility, the endless woe on display or forecast in Euripides' play is merely the inevitable background before which the characters do their thing. War is a horror, life is a horror, the language of the play does not take a position. What is extraordinary here, as in so many of Euripides' plays, is the sensational dramatization of the plight of women, the playthings of males, the victims of direct prosecution or the mistaken targets of careless by-blows. Cassandra soon to be raped, Andromache soon to be forced into bed with the son of her husband's killer, Hecuba queen and now led off in slavery to a man she despises and who despises her, that's what this play is all about--written by a male, for a male audience. It's about what it means to be a woman in fifth century BCE Athens.  I cannot resist mentioning a total irrelevancy that stays in my head along with the humorous moment in Norton whenever I think of The Trojan Women, and that is a Harvard-Radcliffe student production a million years ago when a very young, but totally accomplished Stockard Channing played Cassandra and made that long monologue speech something to remember.  The play's grim vision of things is not intolerable because of the distancing achieved by the elaborate formulaic tragic language and by the rigid structure of scenes and dramatic progress; furthermore, violence never takes place enacted for the audience.  Likewise, the Ilad is not an anti-war piece; the males portrayed in it gain glory, stature, identity, and of course more often than not suffering and death from wars and battles; it's what defines them.  I imagine that the early audiences for this poem sat in recital instantly alert and interested in the mayhem told about, their capacity for identification and hence suffering filtered through the scrim of that incredible rhythmic language which offers everything no matter how awful in a sensuous hypnotic beat that intoxicates.  But make no mistake: when Hektor and Andromache discuss the horrible future that awaits them both, at the moment that they are dandling their little darling son on their knees, Hektor cannot resist ending his litany of woe with a prayer to the gods that the little tyke will grow up to be as much a relentless killer as the father.  Vito Corleone, Tony Soprano, Hektor, go for it, kill, kill, kill.  Contemporary film and television rubs the viewer's face in the psychic muck of the violence and sadism on offer in the story line.  The idea has recently been addressed yet again in a book coming out from Brett Martin (Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution) who takes as his starting point the moment when Tony Soprano strangles an informer he chances upon in rural Maine.  I was fascinated by The Sopranos, all five years, but stopped watching violence after that.  Too close, too many bad dreams, too urgent an invitation for my complicity because visuals are so insistent.

May Day

On the first of May the workers of the world are supposed to unite and march in solidarity and remind the other classes of their societies how they are the backbone upon which is constructed their well being.  We see less and less of that across the world and certainly the idea scarcely ripples through the United States, where demonstrations in support of labor unions and the laboring classes are not existent; certainly there seemed to be no report of May Day activities in today's New York Times.  One can of course argue that the decades of almost religiously fervent hostility directed at the Soviet Union made exalting the working man difficult, since he was the poster boy for the Socialist Eastern European and Russian states.  But I always think back to the thirties and an incident when my little sister and I, accompanied by our uniformed nursemaid, had stones thrown at us by other children when we were out walking in the park of our small mid-western town and when we tearfully inquired of our mother why this might have happened, she replied quietly: "They hate us because we are rich."  And that always seemed to me just.  When some people who have done all they can and forces totally beyond their control keep them from improving their lot, then they might focus their anger and resentment upon those who have so much and seem to be doing to nothing to help those less fortunate.  I always welcomed the idea of labor unions and labor movements for that reason--well, also because my older sister authoritatively directed me to think positively about socialist values and goals when I was still a simpleton teenager.  But I always knew that I was something different; I was not working class.  My sissy manners certainly were not like the rough and tumble jumble of kids in my high school with whom I became friendly in an odd way over the years.  And they knew that I was not them.  We had what was called class consciousness, and they knew that I and my family were not in the grander sense of things their friends.  Where has that gone today?  I live in a small town with a large working class population, where many men go off at dawn in pick up trucks to construction jobs, where somewhat later their wives or sisters wait for the impossibly bad bus service to take them to the nearest malls where their employment ranges the gambit from cleaning services to sales clerks.  So much unemployment down  here, so many mortgages in default, yet the local paper which will give front page coverage to a bake sale for a benevolent organization and make the local crisis of sand dune damage the focus of their editorial page, will never mention the subject of banks and their role in the housing crisis, or how the national legislature quickly jumped through a hoop to restore air travel controllers to their pre-budget crisis level while they could not, would not move to restore, let's say, monies going out to pre school education or any of the other services that benefit the young of the working class.  When first we moved here, and I decided to buy another new car, mindful of those days of my childhood and the stones thrown in the park, I anticipated at least a few barbed comments from my neighbors who not only rarely ever refresh their stock of cars and when they do so select a late model used car at best, but, no, nary a word, as we sit here fat and sassy, comfortable, for the foreseeable future up to the grave.

Steam In The Locker Room

Well, well, well, a professional athlete has announced that he is gay, and he will continue to play professionally, a piece of news that merited even a call from President Obama.  When I think back over my youthful years when I had such notoriety as a flaming queer in my hometown I have to remember the great number of athletes who sought me out for sexual satisfaction, man to man, albeit, they more generally receiving and me giving.  But there were the university swimmer and the track star who startled me by taking on the passive role, there were boys on every team in my high school who routinely engaged in heavy necking and kissing before we got down to their business, and their was the basketball whiz who couldn't get enough of me, again performing the passive role, even after he married his childhood sweetheart.  And of course the black football player who probably sought me out because the racial mores of the day forbade him approaching any of the town girls with an amatory signal.  Many years later, when I could no longer be called a thing of beauty, I hooked up with a gentleman, a professional athlete of considerable fame, a friend of friends, from whom he had learned that I was gay, and since we happened to be in his hotel suite for morning coffee, he suggested that we put our cups down, and get better acquainted, as his extended exhibition tour of Europe had left little time for as he put it "sexualizing," and he was horny, even if I were clearly not, by gender or by age, the most exciting fruit to pluck from the sexual tree.  The youthful years of exaggerated promiscuity have left me in no doubt that gentlemen who do sports are more likely than not to be willing to engage in some form of sexual amusement with another male.  And, if you think about  it, why not?  Most sports involve constant body contact, require changes of costume in communal areas where extended periods of nudity are the norm, often demand teamwork that makes for emotional and intellectual bonds that could be the intense prelude to more engagement or indeed offer a substitute for emotional and physical involvement that society inhibits the guys from exploiting.  I have always considered the aggressive and outspoken homophobia of athletes no different than that coming from religious leaders who usually weeks later are found in a public restroom with some guy or are accused by the local hustler of engaging their services.  Years ago I had a gay friend who was a cop, a big burly typical Irish cop, right out of central casting, who was unabashedly gay.  And I asked him once if he had come out to the guys in the precinct, and he said no, explaining that they needed to bond closely if they were to maintain their esprit in the violent and crime ridden area where they practiced their calling, and this involved hours of horsing around in the showers and locker rooms, nude or semi-nude, in a series of high jinks, and jokes all of which were intensely homoerotic, as he saw it, and not for nothing would he destroy their bonding games by letting on that a real live gay male was in their midst.