Snow Birds Going Home

I guess I should be pleased that I am able to control so many details of my daily life as I make the plans involved in moving myself along with our household from Florida to Massachusetts.  Packing items into my briefcase is the test: will I remember the electronic chargers, the Kindle, my numerous medications and vitamins, my passport, the keys for the apartment in New York, "the New York wallet" with all the museum passes, the subway card, and so on and so forth?  Our condo apartment has been readied for our departure, cleaned up, swept out; I actually feel tranquil and what is more not the least apprehensive for having that feeling.  Is it at last a mastery of my situation or a demented old person's ignorance of all the issues that are involved in this south to north move?  It will be the last time.  We have decided to sell our house up north and move back down here permanently, a decision that fills me with waves of uncertainty.  Florida is not our kind of place, despite the superb temperatures in the winter months: it is a little hard to take the obvious disapproval for same sex marriage one sometimes encounters; I will not go into guns and religion.  And the summers are so hot and humid.  Still we are doing it, moving down here.  Unlike every other move in my life, and there have been many, this one does not generate the enthusiasm of expectation.  I don't know how to describe it.  If I say "it doesn't really matter," I can hear the voice of a friend of mine complaining that her aunt, very much my age, confessed recently--complacently not depressed-- that "nothing really matters anymore."   My friend says that's depression or the onset of dementia.  I don't know.  It seems to me that the goal is to be in a place where you can walk around easily because there is no ice nor snow.  Maybe I'm crazy, but mobility is all.  I can even drive a car down here easily because there are very good side streets for my kind of driving alongside the Los Angeles inspired four to six lane roadways that they call "roads" or "boulevards."  I wonder what it would be like if I lived alongside some one of my children and grandchildren, as though we were in Greece or Italy, old nonno there by the fire or out under the arbor.

Quite the Hiatus!

I wonder if anyone will happen to read this blog, it has been so long since I gave my readers the option of dropping the habit, summer of 2913, to be precise.  Why did I stop?  Because I thought that I should be doing writing more deserving of my talents, like writing a novel, although my history of fiction writing is studded with rejections.  Unlike most aspiring writers, I cannot claim to be the "unsung Milton" or whatever that phrase is, since for the past three decades I have formed friendships with editors, agents, publishers all of whom at one time or another have generously read my storytelling efforts, and all of them have come back with "close, but no cigar."  I've had better luck with memoir writing, and friends sympathetic to my writing craving, have suggested a memoir of my teaching years, something I had begun and abandoned when I concentrated on what became "My Husband and My Wives," where a reader might notice I have larded in lots about the teaching.   So I have been alternatively writing my teaching memoir and an ambitious novel of events largely taken from my life starting with a young married couple with two sons living in some place not unlike Palo Alto and ending with their marital despair played out against the suicide of a favorite student.  On the way the husband discovers his inner penchant for male sex when he is seduced by a young Sicilian waiter one summer whilst working on inscriptions at Selinunte.  That last event, having nothing to do with the real life of the author, though crucial for the narrative arc, is a lavish verbal statement of the author's wishful fantasies, and one of the major reasons he took his hands permanently from the computer keys. Sex fantasies for this eighty four year old male, rather than exciting a flutter, make the psychic eyes scrunch up at trying to make out the dim and completely out of focus bit.  Suddenly converting bits of reality into fiction to make a story seemed like too much work, and the author stopped work on his memoir because, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn (gives you some idea of his originality).  Still and all, I love to write, I love to talk and, because I live in venues where most of my auditors, stare at me quizzically with an explosive "hunh?" as their considered response to my words, I guess doing a blog may resolve all "my issues" (God, I love that phrase!).