Don't Look Back

Years ago I had the opportunity as chair of a department to arrange a kind of bogus academic appointment of five months duration for a charming and marvelously talented Italian woman whom I wanted to stay in the USA as more than a tourist.  A school teacher in Italy, she deserved an extended break, and I wanted my family to get to know her as I had while traveling abroad.  We all enjoyed her stay, even the night she tried cooking dinner for us adults and the kids--weirdest Italian I ever knew, she could scarcely boil water.  A special treat for her was that another member of my department was married to an Italian who made her welcome in her own language.  They were with us the day we took her to the airport to say farewell, and it was this Italian fellow who marveled angrily at how we Americans could turn away from the goodbye kiss and pick up emotionally where we were before she arrived.  "We don't look back, Peppe," I told him, "this is too large a country and we move too frequently."  I thought of that today as we signed the Purchase and Sale Agreement, and someone asked me if I were alright leaving my extraordinarily large and beautiful garden.  "Think of all the years you put into building that," she exclaimed.  "That  was then and this is now," I replied more intent upon the details of the moving van, my husband's drive to Florida, my airline tickets to the same destination.  It was like leaving that marvelous house in Cambridge after thirty years, that  grand and spacious Edwardian--I almost want to say mansion--in Brookline where I had lived the last years of my married life as a father as well as chief cook and bottle washer.  My daughter and I went back to the next door neighbor when she sat shiva for her husband and I looked out the window at what I only dimly recognized as the place where we had lived.  I have never since been by the house in Cambridge.  When I used to lecture at Stanford after I had left the university, I sometimes went by the old house, just to verify that it was as wonderful a knock off of Mies as I always said it was, but I could not really empathize with the guy who once lived there.  That was then and then wasn't now.  I once walked through Harvard yard with a former colleague from Stanford who had gone through Harvard from freshman year to PhD to a minor post in the decanal office until he went on to teach on the west coast.  "I don't know how you can live so close to this place and walk through here where we are now," he observed with what I realized was a catch in his voice.  I looked around me, and, yes, to be sure, it was the fabled Harvard Yard. We mounted the steps to enter Widener Library a place I visited almost every day, as an author and scholar.  And I had to confess that until my friend brought it all up, I just didn't make the connection.  I thought it was just a library.

Into The Void

While on the Cape I was the guest at a dinner party where six persons sat grouped loosely around a relatively small wrought iron table situated on the brow of a slight cliff above the beach looking out onto the ocean.  The group was remarkably congenial, the conversation amusing and never-ending, and, yet, in a sense, there was another guest at the table.  None of us could divert our gaze from the endless waters stretching out to the horizon, snatching only quick glances at those to whom were talking or hearing from, somehow intoxicated and hypnotized by the view. (remember Xenophon's tired band shouting out "Thalatta, thalatta" when they caught sight of the Mediterranean again?)  Contemporary cultural critics constantly object to our obsessive preoccupation with electronic devices; they are the bane of our times.  That evening I was witness to one remedy.  Have an ocean to hand, or, rather, in view.  No one's gaze was diverted from the water, even when at times, the conversation faded, even when several went into the kitchen to help things along.  The spell of the view demanded total surrender.  I was older by thirty years than the others at the table, and I knew a wonderful secret that they in their busy busy lives as spouses, parents, and professionals have yet to learn.  Yes, you can sit idly staring at the sea, it is so hypnotic for almost anyone, but then again it is perfectly possible to surrender to the absolute nothingness of life, a truth easier to comprehend and embrace as the finality of death is more apparent.  My hostess on the Cape played for me the tape of an amusing interview with Willie C. K. or some such on one of those late night talk shows.  This K. fellow managed to shut the host up, a blessing that saved the event for me, and proceeded in his very witty way to explain why he forbade his daughters to have cellphones.  The underlying philosophical truth to his spiel had to do with the fact that one needs to disengage from being endlessly busy (cellphones, texting, etc etc) to embrace the elemental nothingness of life.  And my hostess and I smiled at one another because we had both specialized in ancient Greek literature in our professional learning days, a body of texts guaranteed to take one away from endless fascination with promised salvation which personifies cultures dependent upon religions of the Book.  It is good to get behind that endless smile, stop struggling to keep up the pretense of meaningful and successful days, put down the electronic toys, sit there, staring into space, the immensity of the nothingness, the vast emptiness of it all.  It can work as the absolutely perfect tonic!

Fear Of Falling

I have been afraid of falling, well, since the last time I fell, years ago, it was, and stupidly running, clumsily in looping gait of a seventy something year old over the uneven brick sidewalks of Cambridge that I had thrilled to when first I came to Harvard in my twenties.  I got up from that fall with no external damage but aching enough to want to skip what I was running to, an adult education dance class, of all things!  The years have rolled by and my fear of falling intensified as my balance seemed ever shakier, and my footstep less sure.  And then there were those awful stories of the falls of friends, so many of them ending with the doleful observation that "sometimes you don't get up from a fall."  Indeed my sister-in-law slipped on the ice when she was eighty, got pneumonia while in bed waiting to recover and was done within days as I remember it.  And a decade later maybe her husband, my brother, fell down some stairs, was in and out of a hospital and then weeks later he was dead.  As some old geezer I used to walk with said in commenting upon a friend who had fallen and died "shook the stuffin' outna him."  Yesterday after having maneuvered some pretty steep and twisty wooden stairs at beach houses at the Cape, I was on the ferry heading back to Boston and saw a seat by the window and rushed down between the rows of seats arranged as a movie theater, tripped on some metal support and went down between the rows hitting my jaw on a chair arm jutting out and other parts of me on god knows what.  Nothing really happened, I banged up my cheek and it bled, and there was minor bleeding on my hands, but it was the shock, yes, the great awaited feared for FALL.  When I came to although I was not out, I heard so many anxious voices "Are you alright?"  Yes, I was, but the crew could not have been nicer.  One young man stayed by me until I was seated (not after all that, of course, in the window seat!), got me paper towels for the blood on my cheeks, went to the Red Cross box and got Band Aids, Wipes, and ointments.  He came back periodically  to check on me during the crossing.  I returned to psychic normalcy, and it was he who facilitated it.  God Bless Him.

Washing The Dishes

Here at the seashore we have a brand new Bosch dishwasher which for two people who go out for meals on a pretty regular basis would not see much use if it were not for the fact that we drink inordinate cups of tea, coffee, and lemonade daily, and must run the machine to get clean drinking vessels.  The Bosch is famous for making no sound as it runs, an observation that always reminds me again of life in our glass box house in Palo Alto with its not quite to the ceiling fashionable interior walls through which noise could pass with abandon, and thus we were all of us assaulted constantly by the non stop whir of dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer responding to the needs of six and often seven persons.  It sounded like a factory, well, it was in a way, I mean a family production unit.  I happen to like to wash dishes by hand, at least at this time of life when I am retired and there are just the two of us, although I set to with gusto even when we have two or four at table in Sarasota.  We have no dishwasher there, and it is entirely satisfying to soap up, sponge off, and rinse the utensils, pots and pans, and dishes we do use.  We both seem to love it, in fact, often vying with one another to be the one at the sink following a meal.  Maybe it is no more than a control issue, or that infrequent chance to do something that is of real value, always a problem for retirees particularly as they advance in age.  It also says "tidy," a somewhat ominous term I use cautiously always remembering the hilarious boozy loud gatherings of thirty or so years ago, when drinks went on longer than they should have, dinner did not seem to come out of the kitchen on time as planned, dishes sat about on table, counter, and, well, just everywhere, and everyone had a riotous good time.  Ah, those were the days.  That cohort from those party days, where are they now? dead, living elsewhere, demented, that's where.  Tidy is what I was reading about in the Times today, that is, some woman, a latter day Emily Post with books on proper behavior, and one I particularly noted, her admonition to those who would make "spontaneous" telephone calls, and she is talking about a friend calling a friend.  This is evidently becoming a universal no-no.  Email, she advises, and schedule the call ahead.  I was startled by this, only because I absolutely agreed, I who spent years of my life chatting on the phone.  But, indeed, I am dumbfounded to pick up on a call and discover it is someone I know to whom I have to respond with a demonstration of personality and the history of our mutual affection.  I've recently discovered texting.  That is as far as I want to go with riotous spontaneity.

Off To The Cape

Tomorrow's blog just got published, and expect a hiatus.

Why Do We Need The Moon When We Have The Stars?

Yesterday at the gloaming I wandered through my garden dead heading the spent blooms of the fifteen or so rose bushes bursting in flower and watering the newly planted petunias.  The temperature was perfect, dry, not too cold, not too hot, there was a stillness, the world around me was at rest, the garden had never looked better.  I reminded myself of the numerous mornings I had sat on a nearby bench deep into the garden's perfumes, watching the fountains playing, hearing their plash (as Henry James would have it).  In thirty days I will leave this scene forever to take up residence on third floor condominium the long galleria of which overlooks a courtyard with swimming pool, shuffleboard, and lawn, and distance glimpses of a shopping mall parking lot while out the front door onto the walkway the view is to the nearby middle school, actually a form of some architectural interest, although in the foreground is the macadam parking lot for the teachers.  By midday the temperature will reach the high eighties and the humidity will go above fifty; air conditioning will be inevitable.  We have wintered in Sarasota for five years, and the relief at being able to walk out every day without the fear of slipping and falling makes it wonderful.  But we have discovered in addition the delights of the symphony, the opera, the five theaters, the chamber music concerts, jazz concerts, all easy and close to drive to.  There is the bus that takes me in minutes to the  public library and the wonderful bookstore.  If I am willing to take the time I can take the bus to a university library, an major art museum, and a university lecture series although I usually drive.  That is our winter in Sarasota.  Summer will be emptier.  But I will still be able to go on foot to the supermarket, the gym, Trader Joe's, the home pasta shop, the masseur, and three fabulous restaurants, one French, one Italian, one Japanese.  Here I sit in my garden, loving every minute of it, but knowing that the winters make it impossible, knowing that almost every one of those activities above require either a tortuous trip into Boston 21 miles away over hideously overcrowded highways.  People on the south shore, well, I just don't know what they do with themselves.  So, bye-bye, blossoms, it was great to know ya!

The Fall Of A Sparrow

Today's (Sunday June 22) text was Mathew 10:24-39 containing Christ's celebrated observation that not even the fall of a sparrow is outside God's concern. "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them fall to the ground outside your Father's care" is the modern day translation into English, and for some reason Google won't come up with the King James version.  The passage was used to good advantage by Shakespeare when Hamlet shrugs off his own death saying (V.2):
"There's a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be
not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
In the same exhortation in Mathew Jesus is quoted as saying:
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother . . . ."
It is a horrific vision, and yet both passages taken together work so well with the news of the world as reported in today's Times--the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the Ukrainians versus the Russians, the Shiites versus the Sunnis, the Buddhists versus the Moslems, one religious war after another (even those that do not on the surface seem to be over religion, e.g., Putin's actions, which are perhaps more nostalgia for Stalin than a new found allegiance to the dastardly Russian Orthodox Church).  All these, however, are the end result finally of a god against whom it is useless to resist.
The monotheism of the religions of the Book, as they are called, is frightening in its implications, the demand for blind belief, and what else could it be, since none of us knows anything about the world beyond our senses.  The sparrow falls and is seen by no one, because it does not matter.  Will this great truth ever be recovered?  Will those who insist upon fighting against their fellow man because they have the truth, that the sparrow in them is being constantly watched, will they ever realize that all their killing, their maiming, their cruelties, are simply the outcome of their fragile beliefs in the unknowable?  Sunday's text is a terrible text, humankind's absolution from their actions, because responsibility rests with a higher authority.  As the sparrows fall in Iraq, Syria, all over the Near East, Southeast Asia, thither and yon, it god's eye that beholds and is accountable.  The humble human perpetrator satisfies his instinct for blood lust and is not responsible.  As a student of ancient culture I have always been more comfortable with religious belief that stems from a notion of a deity or set of deities who have all the human frailties and as such will inadvertently trample on humans, in a childish rage kill humans, in an irrational passion favor a faulty human, a deity or deities who is an acknowledged force but not something to be obeyed, since one never really knows what is involved.  Today's Old Testament reading was the story of God's commanding Abraham to cast out Hagar and his love child to placate his old wife Sarah, and how Hagar and baby suffered in the desert until God was done with his sadism and said enough is enough and found her a good husband and good things ensued.  Abraham's absolute loyalty to God is the underlying subject and it is rewarded finally in the hapless Hagar's successful marriage.  Such misery and rejection, and the happy ending because Abraham did cruelly as he was told.  It's a perfect fit with what Jesus had to say today.

Exiles

James Meek has an interesting piece in the current London Review on being English or being Scottish, living in one or the other place, the degrees of identities, in his case with an Anglo father born in India.  Deep as I am these days in packing to move forever from our home by the seashore renders me susceptible to thoughts of my own attachment to place.  My husband and I have lived in this house for ten years, although to be fair, the winters were spent in Cambridge and then in Sarasota; it started out as a summer home and weekend home.  My first encounter with this little town was years ago in a random search in the Boston paper's Sunday real estate lists, where I encountered an incredibly cheap unheated place, in liveable but ramshackle condition, which provided me with an excellent occasional retreat from my wife as our marriage slowly disintegrated.  My neighbors were cheerful working class folk with whom I had nothing in common, and our relationship was limited to the wave and smile when passing on the street.  My husband insists that it is my consummate snobbishness makes me say "nothing in common," but, no, what I mean is that I don't talk sports, I don't talk jobs, I don't talk salary, I am not a religious person, and I am at odds with America's foreign military adventures.  As a younger man I spent many, many hours chatting up males very similar to my neighbors in post coital situations, so I absolutely do know how to relate under the proper circumstances.  "Nothing in common" seems like a reasonable observation.  It was the same when I bought my house in Cambridge; at first the neighbors were elderly retired working class people who eventually sold out to young couples whose interests ran from child rearing to granite counters in the kitchen.  I'd long since finished with  the former and had not money for the latter.  Before that it had been Brookline where our aggressively upwardly mobile Jewish neighbors looked from their windows at us with our raggedy children, out in our driveway, surveying our old Volkswagen Microbus, me with my long hair and our echt goyish habit of standing about, my wife and I, there in the driveway  a martini glass in hand and said: "There goes the neighborhood!" Before that had been Palo Alto and Stanford where everyone we met seemed also to be thirty, have four children, drink too much, teach at Stanford for the same sort of pay,have an Ivy League PhD and live in a Miesian knock off.  But it was the Californian culture that alienated us, the endless drives on freeways, the complete strangers who stopped to offer me a ride when I decided I need to start walking to work, what Gertrude Stein identified in Oakland seemed to us everywhere in California "there is no there there."  I  could go on and on, all the way back to my natal spot where too large a family income and my gayness kind of separated me from the crowd, and so I guess it is in the nature of things, although I think of myself as gregarious and once upon a time was known as the life of the party.  And now Sarasota where we have been, as they say, "wintering" for the past five years.  I don't think we're going to be a big success, certainly not in our condo, where our neighbor two floors below us sets the tone with her bumper stickers:  "For God and Country" "Prepare to Defend Our Freedoms" "Vote Republican"  "Vote Marco Rubio" "Vote Rick Scott."   A couple of years ago at a brunch for donors to the wonderful Asolo Theater Student Conservatory which is our one big philanthropic effort  I was getting on famously with the woman seated next to me, who as we were leaving said "I hope you won't have a problem getting over the bridge like we did," to which I replied "what bridge?" to which she said  in a puzzled tone "Well, how did you get here?" and it dawned on me that she thought we came from one of the barrier islands, Longboat Key or Siesta Key, where all the million dollar condos are, and of course where the donors live.  I said "we don't come over the bridge, we live down by the mall."  She, stupefied murmured "mall?" then asked fiercely "which side of Tamiami Trail do you live on?" and I said "the east side."  It was as though I had farted.  She turned away and I was back in no man's land.

Weeding

Woke up much too early, but that is what was ordained, so arose, went out into a crisp--for this Florida blood glacial--sunrise morning to do some weeding.  There was growth all along the edge of the raised beds and between most of the slabs of the pavement between them.  I stood bent over for a bit, and was instantly reminded of my mother in a similar position.  She was a short, definitely rotund woman, who had a commanding manner, being not only somewhat of a snob (family in a America for centuries, late husband super star doctor) but a long time president of the town school board, commanding, when she was standing, but bending over in the garden did not show her to advantage, plus she had a habit of wearing plaid cotton wash dresses as she went about her notion of household tasks (there was staff who did the heavy lifting).  Weeding was an obsession, nay, an addiction.  And so I saw her this morning in my mind's eye--that large plaid bottom of the bent  over figure.  Our property had many formal gardens on different levels of the land as it sloped up from the street and then sloped down to the fields that lay beyond.  The gardens were tended by a man who worked six days of the week, but there was always a weed here or there, and they caught her  eye.  Always, and no matter what she was doing and where she was going.  I can remember her weeding "just a bit, just for a moment," while waiting for her to drive me on some errand.  I can see her in her dressed up business suit, about to go to a school board meeting, the big pinstriped bottom, of the bent over figure.  Weeding is perhaps like saying the rosary, it frees you from having to think, relaxes the anxiety of things left undone, worrying about children and friends who need your correction. Weeding is meditation.  Moreover, weeding in as an absolute good, an unequivocal forward march in the struggle against the tyranny of encroaching nature threatening in its blind instinct to insinuate into everything, just as here where I am weeding the formal gardens, the raised beds, the stone pavements, the fountains with their jets of water depending from one level to the next, the carefully trimmed and pruned rose bushes are the imposition of order upon anarchy.  I weeded for two hours, standing and bending over, delighted that I managed to keep from toppling over, as I often thought I was going to do, kneeling on a little cushion to rest the muscles in the back of my thighs, but instead damaging the kneecaps, and again glorying in the pathetic little fact that I could rise from that position without a railing.  Then to breakfast, to read the Times, and when it came time to go once more into the breach and do battle against the weeds, I found that all the joints had frozen while I sat, and so I limped back to my battle station, and only very slowly managed to bend and then to kneel, and I thought to myself that it never occurred to me in those long ago days to wonder if my mother found weeding the least bit taxing physically.  She seemed like a fixture of the garden, like the plants, the trellis, the ordered rows of flowers and vegetables.

Passwords And Systems, And The Way Of Life

Some days are living hell, and you know you were not meant for the times in which you are living.  A trip to the Apple store where I bought another IPad and, completely by chance,  my husband and I got newer versions of the IPhone, set up two days of such torture that I am not yet recovered, although at the same time, trying desperately to realize that from the perspective of the gods (for whom we are but sport, right?) it was my experience that was all too comic.  My first act of utter pride was to insist to our genial salesperson who had quickly enabled the IPad and handed it to me, that I knew perfectly well how to use it.  As a matter of fact, I had bought one in 2012, took several "lessons" from the Apple people, but never figured out what I needed it for, and eventually handed it on to my daughter. I was now in the market for another only because I was infatuated with the ease with which a recent visitor had been able to field all the questions during our cozy hours together sitting deep into the pillows on the living room sofa simply by glancing into the Google site on her IPad and typing in all the questions and reading the answers.  So easy, so much better than jumping up all the time and rushing over into my study to Google on the computer.  The problem of using it only developed later--I mean Google and Youtube were not the least as they are on my big computer; but it was setting up the cellphone that almost destroyed me.  It required I cannot recall how many separate steps, each with a different password, all of which I had to recall from my brain, since I had not come prepared with my typed out list, more valuable to me than my passport, and indeed kept in the same "safe place."  Miracle of miracles, although with many a false step and tortured efforts of recall I got all of them right and the cellphone was up and running.  My shirt was drenched with sweat, somehow the agony of it all, the constant terror of memory failing me in the midst of the fog of misunderstanding--I mean who knew what all those strange terms and nicknames were referring to?--left me defeated even in my triumph, as we sent successful test emails from the store. Successful because we were using the store's Wi-FY, but as I was to discover only days later, I gave one wrong identifying number of the access to the WI-FY in our home so that when I tried to send more emails from home the cellphone's screen lit up with the notice "Does not Recognize Network" or words to that effect, it's all a nightmare jumble in my memory.  So I called Comcast and a genial man proceeded to "talk me through," as they say in the business.  But at least half the screens I brought up at his direction turned out not to have the boxes, or the buttons, or the numbers, or whatever else he was directing me to, and he was left to offer such gems as "I guess they've done an upgrade," or "you need an upgrade," or "these things are so much easier in Microsoft."  After an hour of wandering under his direction from one screen to another, I said "Enough! I'll go back to Apple." "Good luck!" he replied, "they invented this email system but they're not too good at understanding what to do."  Next day back at the Apple store, standing at the Genius Bar, my genial genius was too kind and understanding, and we went through all the passwords, for which this time I  had the list, but in the end, the fog of confusion had not lifted.  He recommended going home trying the cellphone near the modem, plugging and unplugging the modem, telling my cellphone to "forget" the WI-FY system and then re-enter it.  I was close to tears.  Once home I realized that I had not remembered the crucial words "Does Not Recognize Network" and so quickly called a number that the fellow had just given me.  A new and busy voice answered to say  that the man I was supposed to talk with was "not on the floor," but that he would be happy to help.  He began a series or rapid fire questions, and each time I had to ask him to repeat, I grew vaguer and fainter, and more and more minimal, and I knew that we were enacting one of those terrifying scenes of interrogation in old black and white Nazi era films and I was sitting under the naked bulb, and growing more and more confused.  At which point I said in almost a whisper "never mind, I can't take it, I can't talk anymore, I don't care about the emails, I have to hang  up," and left him sputtering into the phone.  As I was about to lay my head down on the desk my husband picked up the phone and proceeded to toy with it.  "Look here," he said, "I think you told them the wrong identifying number to begin with.  You said you were going to use your old telephone number from when you  lived in Rome."  And so I had, and so I did, and so thereafter we lived happily ever after and the mail system works.  But why didn't the problem of that wrong number ever surface during the two days of nightmare and torture?

Marriage

Derek Jacoby, the Boston Globe columnist wrote enthusiastically yesterday of a rally soon to take place in Washington in support of "traditional" marriage.  I am not sure they come right out and say, marriage between a man and a woman," but that's what the thing is all about.  I have no trouble with endorsing that idea, although I don't see that it has anything to do with the present day ubiquitous transformation of the relationship into legalized unions of persons of the same sex.  Legalized says it all; every citizen ought to have access to a union that is sanctioned and fostered by the laws of the federal government.  But if I were planning a march on Washington in support of traditional marriage, then I would be concentrating on that which brought the institution into being in the first place, and that is the production of children, and more broadly the continuation of the species, the support group for their elders in their decline.  Obviously the emphasis upon man and woman in the traditional definition of marriage is production of offspring, which makes childless marriages whether for convenience or the geriatric status of the bride and groom rather beside the point.  So children would be the focus of my march on Washington in support of traditional marriage because our culture has created the highest divorce rate in the world and the greatest percent of homes headed by single mothers, and the largest group of children born out  of wedlock.  These statistics are the truth that is eating at the blissful institution founded by Adam and Eve.  There has to be a giant cultural shift away from the individual and toward the collective, anathema, I know, to conservatives.  But before we even get to the issue of the moral necessity for greater social welfare there must be a radical rethinking of the individual's obligation to the group.  In marriage the children ought to be the focus, rather than the relationship of the parents.  Private happiness must give way to working on the welfare of the family, which most often translates into the increased well being of the children.  And here the notion has been lost that the children's immediate obligation is to the family.  They will not grow and mature and become better persons by their cello lessons, Little League memberships, play dates, oh, yes, those are enriching and enlarging, but it is by clearing the table, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, shopping for groceries, and as they mature cooking the meals, that children become happy, competent, and fulfilled, even if along the way there is incredible bitching and whining.  Most couples who separate and then remarry discover that the second time around is pretty much of the same old, same old; after all they are bringing their very same personalities into selection of the new situation, and those personalities probably most likely made a similar choice in the second mate.  Marriage could come back to being the biggest emotional and physical event in a person's life more than the best party ever thrown, something entered into as a way to lose oneself in a larger entity, forget self, and along the way create a group of people who maybe might be there at the end of the road with some positive support and true love.

Behind The Peaceful Calm Of A Good Night's Sleep

Once a month I must renew my subscription for the sleeping pill I take nightly by calling the office of the doctor who writes the prescription.  He in theory writes other prescriptions, for instance, ninety day supplies of lisinopril and metoprolol and so on which indeed some flunky in the system actually handles. but zolpidem (which is the generic name of the sleeping pill), because it is a "controlled substance," must be dispensed by the doctor himself, and only in thirty day renewal orders.  And, I must request a renewal in a timely fashion, too early, and the insurance slaps my hand, and tells the issuing pharmacy to hold the order.  A "controlled substance" means that it is a drug to which I might become addicted and abuse it by wanting larger and larger doses. Prescription pain killers like the oxycontine products are the big trouble makers; they figure in all the seamy stories of suburban housewives and their addiction.  Because I am someone prone to take on any feeling of guilt I can find, I cringe at the moment of reordering, sure that the receptionist to whom I make my request is sitting in judgement on my need.  The matter is always fraught when I see that I shall run out on a Monday and know that to be sure that the request from receptionist to doctor to pharmacy is made in a timely way I must start on the previous Thursday, but that is also five days ahead of the projected expiration of my supply, and will the powers that be come back at me with "You're too early" ("you sick druggie", is always the subliminal addition).  Next week I am going to the Cape and while there I will run out.  This means ordering a new prescription days in advance of normal, and that means explaining to the receptionist, and she to the doctor and he making a notation on the prescription order so that the pharmacy can clear it with the insurance company counting out the pills.  That's how I see this transaction, a bunch of disapproving, head shaking persons one talking to another about this guy and his sicko needs, when of course in a rational moment I realize it is a series of electronic transfers.  And if this were not enough, I cut each pill in two so that I might have solid sleep throughout  the eight hour period, waking up mid night to take the second half.  You should see these little old arthritic fingers using the cutting machine, trying to keep the miniscule pills even on the chopping block.  I suppose the executioner in olden days had the very same problem.  The pills tend to bounce off and god forbid they role away, and I don't notice or simply cannot find them.  I will be short, and there is no reprieve from the insurance company, no notion of a "bakers dozen" with that outfit to prepare for such a contingency.  And when the month has thirty one days and the prescription reads only for thirty pills. well, we won't get into that.

Waste Not, Want Not

I was brought up short on page 178 of the English translation of Roberto Bolaño's The Third Reich when the narrator describes buying a book or pamphlet from a street vendor reading it then and there, actually saying "I glanced through it and then tossed it in a trash can."  It is something I cannot imagine my doing. My shelves are filled with the results of casual curiosity.  I am not a hoarder, but at the same time I consider anything I have purchased deserves its time on my shelves, its very materiality must be respected, before perhaps a timely review will suggest casting the item away.  This instinct which I choose to believe came to me from having grown up in the Great Depression, even if in very comfortable circumstances, gives me pride.  I like to "make do" with what I have.  Just this week I was putting on a pair of kakhi pants certainly a decade or so old, with frayed cuffs, with a serious tear, neatly sewn by my beloved, and I have to say, without giving a glance to a several other pairs of kakhi pants newer and in far better condition on nearby hangers.  I don't feel comfortable wearing them when this older pair "will do." In another closet I have been pulling out winter clothes to give to Goodwill in preparation for living the rest of my life in the tropics, and as I worked there, I came across a number of light weight summer formal jackets, some actually with matching pants, thus a suit--indeed the one in which I married six years ago--and my heart sank.  It is not exactly a perversion but there is something peculiar in my appetite for seeking out the perfect lightweight summer sport jacket.  There must be six or seven in the closet here, two or three in New York, and already four on the rack in Sarasota.  Of these there are only two I believe that I wear enough to justify owning them.  When I go to throw one of them out, something stays my hand.  "But, wait," my inner voice counsels, "you may really love that jacket next season, may have underestimated it all along.  Once gone, never retrieved."  And yet, in the course of my life I have left, moved out, emptied of furnishings, four or five houses where I had lived a wonderful life, full of excellent memories, and never looked back.  Thirty years in Cambridge, and all I can see when I go back into the town are the uneven sidewalks and the unkempt crowds.  No nostalgia at all!  I must work to develop the same indifference to the contents of my closets.  A long ago lover of mind counseled that one should never own more than one change of clothing.  Extreme, perhaps, but I get the point even if I cannot surrender to it.

"Have I Played The Part Well?"

It is Sunday afternoon, I have a tickle in my throat and wonder if I am coming down with the cold which a recent house guest brought with her.  I feel languid--it must be the impending cold.  I could not nap, am bored with reading the books I have stupidly assembled on economics, since frankly I cannot understand a word of them.  Ditto for the latest book by T.J. Clarke on Picasso.  Am I really getting that dim or is his prose and thinking as tortured as I fancy it is?  Should I confess that instead of worthwhile activity, I have been sitting at the computer bringing up photo news items about the Duchess of Cambridge and the rest of the Royal Family?  My husband is constantly deriding my interest in the royals, laughingly assigning it to my rube Middle Western upper middle class background, fraught with temptations of imagining a kind of aristocratic aura when of course none obtained.  Maybe that is so, although I tend to think not.  It is rather that I am fascinated by persons who perforce live public lives that are a self conscious construct at all times.  When I first studied Roman history I was deeply moved by what Augustus Caesar is reported (by his wife Livia and her son, Tiberius) to have said as his last words before dying: " “Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.” He came to supreme imperial power by ruthlessly suppressing all the opposition following the death of his great-uncle Julius Caesar.  A country boy from a middle class background despite his pedigree (his mother married down) he used his connections and his ambitions to take on the opposition and rule the country, eventually being given the title of Imperator, from which descends the western tradition of royalty and emperors.  He realized that the political situation upon the  death of Caesar threatened anarchy and he made himself become the focus, and eventually the very symbol of the Roman State, and on the way to this, collapsed all democratically elected opposition to his position.  "L' état c'est moi," yes, indeed, and perhaps it did not begin with him, but he survived long enough, and made the Roman Empire stable enough that he left an indelible stamp on the idea.  Now while it is true that the English royal family has, as they say, zilch political power, they clearly hold an enormous totemic fascination for the English people as well as other nationals.  It is fascinating to me to watch them in action since they  are exactly what Augustus was talking about.  One is not supposed to touch the Queen, the people gasped when Michelle Obama hugged her in an impulsive gesture of friendship.  She cannot be touched because she is not supposed to be a flesh and blood human being but sacred as an icon.  That is fascinating to me.  When her son,  the Earl of Wessex, on her eightieth birthday was asked "What sort of person is your mother?", he paused and finally answered, "She really isn't a person, she's the Queen."  It is said that members of her immediate family make obeisance every day when they first are in her presence.  The idea that one self consciously inhabits a role at all times while in public is fascinating, that denial of any social reality for the sake of a constructed identity.  I can never make up my mind whether I am fascinated or horrified, thrilled or terrified by it.

Father's Day

My late wife always used to say that the days for celebrating parents were inventions of the Hallmark Greeting Card company, vulgarly commercial and to be disregarded.  Unfortunately the one for fathers has sunk into my consciousness enough that I am always aware when it rolls around.  It makes me so sad, since I seem unable to look at anything other than my many flaws as a father.  First off, I did not play catch.  These things are part of tradition, I guess.  No one threw the ball with me (I cannot imagine my father, even if he had lived past my sixth year, throwing the ball with me, but then I can scarcely imagine him, period.)  I never ever thought to throw the ball, nor encourage my sons in neighborhood sports, and actually declined my younger son's request to join something called the Pop Warner league, I guess it was for football.  There is an article in this Saturday's Times op-ed page on the virtue of a man demonstrating a strong work ethic to his son, the idea being that a male is defined by his having a work ethic and a serious job.  I was always compulsive about fulfilling any obligation that my work imposed upon me, and I was always ambitious to succeed at a higher level than that at which I was working.  But at that same time I valued slacking off, wasting time, and doing nothing.  One day--out of the blue--when the children were in grade school out in Palo Alto I perversely said, "Let's all go to the beach," and so they did not go to class, but instead we packed lunches and went over to San Gregorio Beach  My older son says he was oppressed by the energetic ambitious drive of both his parents and wanted none of it.  That's one of the few remarks that have come my way since the children have become adults.  As the song goes, we don't talk much anymore.  It's probably inevitable when strong personalities develop and go their own way.  My younger daughter once said when I complained how unlike me all four of my children were, "You gave us independence, complete independence, and that meant freedom to be different from you."  So there you have it.  I guess I am sad because I don't have the sense of being a father.  And maybe that is because I never had one and don't know what one is supposed to be like, and thus can only imagine myself to be me, not a father.  And that has to do with my instinct for playing roles, and not knowing how this role goes.  And that probably has to do with my being gay, and though I managed to my mind to conceal this from my children while they were growing up, I never felt close enough to other fathers to belong to the fathers club and thus never got the walk, the talk, the attitude.  Years ago my children's friends once called me "more of a Jewish mother than our own mothers."  There I was in the kitchen making cookies for them when they all trooped in after school.  I guess I auditioned for the wrong role.

Schooling

One of my granddaughters will start college this fall.  She lives in the Midwest where she has chosen to go to one of the smaller units of the state supported system of higher education about a three hour drive from her home.  Of course, she will live on campus, but she is anxious to be able to get home at least once a month.  Recently her family sent me the announcement--maybe also invitation--of her high school graduation that astounded me because it was so fancy.  Printed on quality paper, some attractive gray blue color, with lace edging, all the information printed with unusual, flowery script, containing a photograph of the young lady, set in envelope within envelope, as though it were a high class wedding invitation.  I can imagine in the days when a high school diploma was the end achievement for most youngsters in America that such a document made some sense, but nowadays when it is the merest bump on the race to educational triumph kindergarden to doctor of philosophy (I exaggerate), such pretension surprises.  It is not unlike so many Americans today who will sacrifice everything to go to a college well beyond their means.  I can think of a family who actually eventually declared bankruptcy after sending their daughter all the way across the country to a private relatively costly college when she could have taken an apartment with some of her high school chums and gone for considerably less financial outlay to the local public metropolitan college, a branch of the state university system with considerable academic reputation.  But both daughter and parents wanted the higher priced spread, like having a Miele dishwasher.  Because of the cost the public and the educational review magazines are demanding more and more immediate result from the college experience.  This is perhaps the dreariest fact of contemporary higher education: administrations are stripping away all the philosophical and cultural surround that once made it such an exciting, different, mind blowing experience and concentrating on offering courses that suggest immediate application to a professional life.  It has become a trade school writ large.  I have nothing against learning the bare facts that are immediately useful, but to take the focus away from all the richness of art, music, literature, contemplative discussion, hours of idleness, crazy thinking going nowhere, conversations between student and faculty, chilling out instead of getting ahead, that's sad.  But like everything else in America most institutions of higher learning have become part of the world of business.  When I started out I was paid so low a salary that no one but the truly dedicated would consider working for that amount.  Like going in on the field in the Marines it tested your resolve and I am glad of it.  Now senior faculty make a really lot of money, and despite their pretentious claims they don't work all that hard.  Beneath them on the salary scale are the new feature of education, the faceless, nameless hoards of temporary teachers--the so-called adjunct faculty--who will never be eligible for tenure (because that costs the university big bucks).  They are the Walmart workers of high education, they are the ones who teach these kids whose parents just paid the fantastic sums for the education. Sounds like every other scam in America today.  It's sad that it is our future generation here which is being shafted.

These Are The Times That Try Men's Souls

A long awaited guest is coming to stay today  until Saturday noon.  Since we have "depersonalized" our house for the  real estate market, the room we have for her contains nothing but a futon which will be removed directly upon her departure.  She can live with that.  Since we stupidly packed away almost all our cooking utensils for the depersonalization, making something pretentious and interesting in the kitchen is more or less beyond us, so we will go out to dinner both nights during her visit.  Fine.  But then the real estate agent drops the bombshell that because Sunday is Father's Day when everyone will be clustered around the barbeque in the backyard watching His Nibs demonstrate how important he truly is the running of the household, the open house this week will be on Saturday.  Luckily our friend is scheduled to leave on a ferry at noon on Saturday, so we will get her  out of the house  and on her way just in time.  But then, as it turns out, the agent calls again to say that someone must  see the house at nine on Saturday morning, no other option, so that means that the house cleaner must come in on Friday evening--very kind of her--and we must hide ourselves away Saturday morning early.  Okay, let's see Friday evening, the house cleaner arrives and works upstairs, and we sit downstairs making brilliant conversation, then we go out to the restaurant, and with luck return home and the cleaner has finished the downstairs.  Saturday morning, we pull ourselves together and go out to breakfast at nine, linger til we get the all clear sign from the agent.  It is supposed to rain, so there will be no diversion of walking on the beach or in the nearby conservation park.  There are no bookstores, or any commercial diversion like a mall.  None of us drinks which always provides enough blur to any social situation that you don't quite notice.  Martinis while the cleaner is vacuuming upstairs?  No big of a deal, as they say in California.  Mimosas for the Saturday morning breakfast? Best way to take the morning in stride.  None of this will be happening.  But luckily the friend is a very dear friend, talks as much as I do, and we, as they say, go way back, 1967 to be precise.  She has been through it all with me and my family.  So, I guess, and it is indeed true, we can just sit and stare at each other quietly.  She just called to say that she has come down with a cold, and was that going to be a problem.  That a problem?  Get real, dear.  Pneumonia is an old man's best friend, I told her.  Don't forget that.

Smiling Through

I like to think of myself as a jolly fellow, possessed of great good humor, who brings light and joy to those among whom I move.  In the last six months I have had that sense of me more than once acknowledged, nay, insisted upon by others, not least by two doctors who attended me, once in a delicate surgical procedure to remove a nearly melanoma-like growth and the other in my annual physical examination.  In neither instance were the circumstances what immediately calls to mind gladsome moods, and yet I have to say that both doctors in the midst of the proceedings had to exclaim what joy I always brought into any encounter, the surgeon declaring that I quite made her day, if not her week, of otherwise totally somber and serious undertakings in the surgery, and the primary care physician insisting that he waited with joy for my annual visit and examination.  I bring this up principally because my husband, after twenty five years in my company, and as one can well imagine finding things growing dry and stale, is frequently insisting what a sour view I take of life, how negative I imagine everything to be.  It is true in a way, I have to agree, that I am quick to note what might go wrong but I find it a liberating perspective.  I look back upon my life and see myself at six being kissed by a father leaving the house in the morning, brought back at the end of the day in a coffin after a fatal auto accident.   I think of myself as a twenty five year old husband who has spent a dreamy Sunday over the newspapers, helped his wife lay out a spread with which entertain two friends at midday meal, spent an afternoon locked in amorous embrace, only a few hours later to summon a physician hurriedly at the wife's insistence, and an hour later watch in speechless horror as her corpse was loaded into the undertaker's car after a doctor pronounced her dead.  And then at thirty six to learn that my dearest friend, seven years my senior the father, brother, uncle I never had, a kind of family priest to my second wife and me in our growing marital tension, whose last words to us as he left for Europe were  "Be nice to each other," who six months later on the day he was to return to the States, as it was reported to me, rose from his hotel bed, and fell to the floor instantly dead of a heart attack.  And finally to find at fifty eight a wonderful new friend at the university I had begun to teach in, who spent enough of his weekdays in New York to allow us to enjoy theater together, whose wife often invited me to join them near Hartford where she worked, a man of only forty something years of age, suddenly stricken with a virulent cancer whose treatment the oncologists threatened would be arduous, long, and very uncertain, who an hour after that pronouncement suffered a fatal heart attack in his hospital bed, something that both his wife and I instinctively knew was his psychic and physical rejection of their words.  Well, in sum, I don't expect good things to happen necessarily and prefer to fortify my soul for the misadventures of life that make it all too tragic, to expect the betrayals offered by circumstances and my fellow creatures.  But what my husband does not seem to understand is that this view of things allows me the freedom to feel pleasure, laughter, and joy almost all of the time, because there's nothing left to lose.

The Peace of God Which Passeth All Understanding

This morning I sat out a long wait for the next available commuter train home after a visit to a medical lab for tests.  I was in a large room with high ceilings and glass panels through which natural light filled the space, where people with their coffee from a nearby shop occupied maybe twenty or thirty tables reading or talking with one another.  I had a lots of time to kill, so that from time to time I took a rest from my reading to survey the others as they came and went in the room.  There was one table at a certain distance where a man of maybe sixty or sixty five years of age, with greying hair and jowels, sat placidly talking.  He was thoroughly nondescript and would hardly have engaged my attention if it were not first for the fact that he was talking to no one visible.  Of course, nowadays we are familiar with people talking into some apparatus on their person which conveys their words electronically to another, but upon careful inspection I determined that this was not the case.  My man was talking to the air.  Interestingly enough, he did not seem to be wildly declaiming into space, or evincing any of the other behaviors by which lunatics are so easily identified, but rather he seemed to be speaking quietly and calmly, gently and at peace, sweetly I might even say to judge by the look in his eye and the curve of his mouth.  On the table in front of him sat two stuffed animals, one a rabbit with long floppy ears, and the other a bear, who was modestly dressed in a pair of blue shorts, both of them sufficiently shabby and threadbare to suggest that they were in some way life long companions of the gentleman speaking to them.  I was interested to note that he was so non-threatening that a youngish fellow perhaps a student came to sit at that table to drink his coffee and read his paper not the least bothered by the strangeness of his table companion (or companions?).  After well over an hour the fellow gathered up his stuffed friends one under each arm and made for the entrance to the hall, and he passed close enough to my table that I caught him saying "Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la" on his way out.  Shortly thereafter I myself left to make my way to the train station which involved passing in front of two persons who had set up with placards, microphone, and loudspeaker whose message had to do with God's imminent destruction of the earth, the horrors of punishment awaiting those who did not follow the commandments of the Christian god.  Hell and brimstone and Sin, always Sin, were the important items of the texts written out on the placards, and these were accompanied by the harsh and angry voice of one of the two, calling out with a sneer and a howl, pointedly directing his words to whomever chanced that way.  What defense does one have against such hostile and destructive imprecations?  Well, instinctively, I suddenly said softly "Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la," the perfect protection against the malignity of the moment.

Lullaby And Good Night

My husband is having a terrible time sleeping through the night.  This has been an on and off problem for years, exacerbated by the fact that he has prostate problems which make him wake up to pee more than just once in the night, and, like many control queens, he has trouble getting back to sleep as he starts to review all the problems in his foreseeable future.  He cannot take sleeping pills since he is a recovering alcoholic for whom such potentially addictive devices are off limits.  Me, on the other hand, I have been taking Zolpidem for years, or as it is sometimes better known by its trade name Ambien.  I am totally addicted, but thankful that in all this time my dependency has not escalated so that I feel compelled to take more than one pill a night.  Sleep was once no problem at all; like most youngsters I fell into a deep sleep and woke up in the morning utterly refreshed.  When life became filled with more tension, nature helped me out by introducing masturbation, so that after a healthy orgasm, I rolled over and went sound asleep.  The beauty of sound sleep was marred when I took a job as a nightwatchman when in graduate school, so that I worked from midnight to eight and then went off to graduate seminars, piecing the requisite amount of sleep out of the rest of my day.  If that eight month experience had not irrevocably deranged my sleep patterns, then the careless prescription of a heavy dose of seconal given me by some doctor to assuage my anguished sleeplessness when my first wife died, certainly did.  I well remember the moment years after when I realized I was addicted as I was helping myself to another seconal pill at ten in the morning, and somehow I had the strength to throw the rest down the toilet.  Sleep was patchy after that, sometimes good if the sex was good and the liquor wasn't overwhelming.  And then I was in my fifties I guess and phoned my doctor one morning because I woke up feeling seriously dizzy for which she summoned me into her office.  "You are not going to have a stroke on my watch," she said as she wrote me out a prescription for the Ambien, "sleep is everything."   Years later long after she and I parted company, and I heard that she had left the practice of Internal Medicine to become some kind of specialist, I wrote a note thanking her for making my life wonderful again.  I have slept well every night since.  Almost never in my life have I consciously remembered dreams nor awakened with a dream going on.  I have never had a nocturnal emission to the best of my knowledge.  Peculiarly enough in the last few years I have sometimes awakened as I was experiencing horrible dreams of persecution, hatred, fear inducing threats from humankind and the environment.  That, as many would say, seems reasonable since it reflects my natural sense of catastrophe and my paranoia.  I remember my mother in law telling me starting when she was in her seventies that her sleep was patchy, restless, and never enough, and I am so thankful that has not been my lot.  I cut the pill in two and take the second half when I invariably wake up after four hours. It is a colossal drag to cut them, my arthritic old fingers, my precarious vision, my general nervousness make the grand process of using the little pill cutter an entirely frenzied hour of fear, desperate to make the halves more or less equal, frantic when they are way off.  I suppose I would have better results all around if I read to myself Good Night, Moon when I want to drop off; it worked like a charm when I read to the children.

"I Need A Project"

Several years ago colleague of mine, a decade older and thus further along on the road to ruin, was regaling me over lunch with the story of maneuvering with his wife the Frankfurt airport terminals, being pushed in his wheelchair first by a stewardess from the airplane, then by a young lady from the express train that was to take them north to an island where he had summered since he was a boy in the late twenties.  I softly remonstrated at the enormous effort and general anguish this trip always produced to which he memorably replied in his wonderful Berliner English "What am I supposed to do?  Sit on the sofa until the stroke comes along to do me in?"  In the end, poor fellow, overcome by blindness and deafness, that's precisely what he did, raging against the emptiness and his impotence.  One of my dearest friends, at some point in her progress to her death at 97 complained to me: "I need a project."  I was amused at the time.  Although I was conscious as well that she had employed her time continuously since her official retirement turning out hand produced elegant small books of great distinction, I did not quite understand how this really rather old woman thought she had the physical strength, the necessary professional contacts, the mental acumen to do something quite so demanding.  And now, here am I.  I need a project.  When I retired from the classroom twenty years ago, I knew that enough was enough, and a semester substituting for a suddenly incapacitated professor at Tufts, lecturing on Euripidean tragedy, and (oh, horror!) reading student papers again, reinforced that decision.  I could not stand the lecturing, could not stand the students, and, really, truth to tell, bored to tears with classical antiquity or at least "professing" it.  I had amused myself in the previous two decades writing a few novels; I decided that I would take that up seriously.  But nothing I wrote passed muster with the many professionals in the publishing industry who generously agreed to offer judgement.  Then a publisher suggested writing the life of Odysseus, and a year or so of busy work ensued.  Somehow along the way enough speaking gigs and the subsequent publication of the lectures filled in the background of what seemed to be an engaged life.  Then there was the project of taking up a condo in Sarasota, and then surprise! a  publisher came with an offer to publish a memoir that I had shown him a couple decades earlier.  More time filled up with writing, and this time with some appearances at bookstores after publication.  That definitely signified that I was an author, you see.  And now we are selling the house with the garden.  No more weeding, deadheading, tending to plants.  Florida full time.  But wait.  What to do?  No talent at fiction, haven't considered researching anything from antiquity for so long that the field has long since left me behind, actually totally unmoved by dipping into Greek texts.  Cannot imagine picking up the Aeneid and trying to finish making sense of my ideas about Virgil and Apollonios, ideas twenty or thirty years old by now, for God's sake.  I need a project.  Maybe I will teach a course on ancient tragedy, on a volunteer basis, of course, to a classroom of retirees who are enrolled in an academy doing something they call lifetime learning.  Is that a project?

Where To Freshen Up

I was in Harvard Square yesterday morning drinking a coffee at Au Bon Pain and waiting until it was time to meet a friend for lunch.  It came to me that I wanted to use a toilet, and thought to myself I could go down the street to Widener Library or I could go to the Coop.  Of course the place where I was had a facility as well, but I remembered it from years ago as small and smelly, and something you had to fight your way to through a sea of tables, maybe even flag down an attendant with a key.  No, it was not that urgent.  There was a quasi public toilet in the Holyoke Center, quasi in the sense that it was private in that you had to walk through something like a subway stile (is that how you spell it?), and yet right there on the ground level and the guards seemed to let people through in a random fashion, and yet, you had a very definite feeling that if someone who looked like a homeless person would not get through. I have always said that the years of pain and humiliation going to Harvard Graduate School were worth it to be able to use Widener, and that is still true, but now more for the polished gleaming and very clean large mens room than the endless rows of book stacks.  I can remember when I bought a family membership to MoMA so there would be a clean place to take the children, not to mention myself in midtown Manhattan.  But that was before I discovered the excellent attended toilet on the sixth floor of Saks.  Having been the director of a graduate classics program consortium made up of Fordham, CUNY, and NYU has given me the benefit in my retirement of a stack pass to NYU's Bopst Library with its excellent clean toilet  facilities throughout the building, and this is on the south side of Washington Square.  And to the north there is the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural Science more or less across from each other on opposite sides of the park in the low eighties, good places to have membership cards, if only for the toilets.  So that pretty well covers things for me.  Still this morning I did not want to walk all the way back to Widener when my ultimate destination was in the opposite direction.  I would go to the Coop!  And then I discovered that their toilets on the third floor were just two rooms with a line out in the corridor.  Was it always like that? and that you could smell them from out in the hall?  Dismayed I started down to meet my friend, realizing that I would just have to wait for whatever restaurant he directed me to, and hope that it was large enough to use and clean enough to endure.  But  lo! on the floor below where I had been there was--miracle of miracles!--a sign directing the passerby to yet another toilet, empty, unclaimed, more or less from the look of it, unused.  Like finding the Hope Diamond in the sands of the Sahara!  A few minutes more I met my friend and wanted to blurt out the exciting discovery I had just made.  How strange then, that I kept silent, not willing to share this treasure even with him, all the more bizarre in that he was even then planning to leave Cambridge in another ten days, and as I knew was just that moment entering the Coop for the first and no doubt the last time.  But I will go to my grave with my  secret intact.  Of course, if anyone reads this . . . . .

Friends, Protectors, Lovers

I have been reading the biography of Siegfried Sassoon for the simple reason that the book cover caught my eye--he was a very handsome young man--and his name is one you are always reading about in studies of the period of the First World War and after, mainly for his poetry that was precise in its depiction of the physical horrors of trench warfare, and for his eventual stance against the war.  A curious fellow torn between the life of a country gentleman who lived for fox hunting and cricket and a London man, a poet, aesthete, and friend to so many of the great names who made the cultural history of that period from Thomas Hardy to Lady Ottiline Morrell.  He was attracted to his own sex, but for the longest time too shy to act upon it.  When he finally had physical relations they were always with handsome, very young, and usually very needy guys.  Eventually he married but that was another matter altogether.  He brought to mind the sexual history of a dear old friend of mine whom I met in graduate school, who even at that time came across as a elderly, pompous scholar to those who had no real notion of him.  Which is not to say that the persona was untrue; there was just a delightful witty sentimental kid underneath.  When he finally revealed to me his sexual interest in males, he also disclosed that he limited himself to paid sex, arguing that he was so physically unattractive, so already as a youth creaky, pompous, and pathetically shy in matters sexual that a clear cut financial bargain before bed was clearly the best.  Over the years I knew him as a sexually active male, I often met the gentlemen whom he paid to consort with him.  A great number of them were handsome, very young, and obviously needy, most often college students, or in the first stages of their serious preparation for life.  It sort of sounded like Sassoon all over again.  I once was introduced to a stunningly handsome and clearly charming gentleman of maybe fifty who I was told thereafter had shared his charms for a fee over his beautiful years with Roy Cohn and Cardinal Spellman.  I know that it is impossible to discern the sexual proclivities of persons from social encounters, but offhand I would say that the majority of young men clustered around my friend were not probably seriously homosexual. And of course we all remember the long time relationship of the very straight Leonide Massine with Diaghilev.  These thoughts came to me this morning when reading in the Boston Globe the initiative to arrest johns rather than prostitutes with the headline saying something about "buying and selling lives."  I would be the first to attack the men who kidnap and drug young women and force them into prostitution, and seriously fault the men who buy the services of these girls.  But I think that it is possible to understand sexual intercourse as a service, and that those who engage in it can have a variety of motives, and many different ones honorable in different ways.  I remember the woman who had a small apartment in Athens, a woman somewhere in her thirties, she accepted male visitors, walk-ins to use the parlance of modern commerce, vetted by a fierce older woman at the appointment desk who would not hesitate to call the police if any guys were threatening, a career that ended when she became a somewhat stout forty five year old, at which time she took her lifetime earnings and opened a dress shop on the ground floor and continued to be a solid and respected part of that street's business community.

Discrimination

I have been following for the last few years the vigorous efforts on the part of a few businesses owned by Christians to acquire the legal right to deny their services to persons whom they believe to be, I guess you would have to say, sinners.  One such situation involved a wedding catering group which argued that their firmly held Christian beliefs prohibited them from involving themselves in a gay marriage celebration.  This seems to me stupefyingly un-American in that we are a mongrel country, a people of enormously different and divergent belief systems, united by our belief in the supreme value of liberty with a constitution that specifically prohibits a state religion; ergo all beliefs are private and those involved in publicly sanctioned commerce cannot discriminate.  Historically we have come together as a society that accepted difference. My indignation is enormous, and fueled in large part by what I have had to endure through the years of my teaching career by students who arrogantly wanted to impose their belief systems upon my teaching and the classroom experience.  I think, for instance, what I have encountered so very frequently.  The class will be studying Sophocles' Oedipus the King and a number of students will insist that "he is punished for his sins."  First of all, I will insist that he is not "punished."  His abdication as king and his self-mutilation are his own attempts to impose upon himself some sense of personal responsibility for what he has done.  This is a noble act by a human being, actually supremely arrogant in its way, to wrest from fate the responsibility where it truly belongs.  Oedipus really "did" nothing.  He went out of his way to leave Corinth just to avoid what the oracle had foretold; he was blameless in that ancient culture for his attack on the man who barred his progress at the crossroads; as any heroic figure newly arrived into a state he would be the natural spouse for the reigning monarch (every legend suggests this), and as such he marries the widowed queen.  Fate "acted" upon him, he "did" nothing.  But many Christian students will have none of it.  He  is a parricide who commits incest: these are "sins."  There is no way to get them to understand that sin is the knowing transgression of the laws of god, and that the ancient Greeks had no such moral or religious system. "The Bible says so, God says so." Whatever these tiresome mindless children learned in their Bible classes must trump investigation, discussion, the acceptance of alternative value systems.  There they sit in their know-nothing splendor braying at the top of their lungs about things they know nothing about.  If the catering service can deny the gays, why have I not had the right to keep such knee jerk Christians out of my classes?

Oh, Once Upon A Time

I wallow in nostalgia, looking at the Youtube video of stills of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan while the music of "Diamonds and Rust" is sung and the lyrics printed across the screen.  They seem to in love, so young, so happy, having such a creative good time; it is painful, and I think of me and my first wife, Mary, and how much we talked together and experienced new things in life, we were so young.  Just coming to Boston and buying our groceries at Haymarket on Saturday.  Who in Iowa had ever heard of artichokes?  Bob and Joan look so deeply complicated into each other's psyche and life, and I think back to Mary and me, and her smile while she was teaching me what I did not know, God, what an idiot I was!  So naive, so uninformed, and so odd that she died at 26 and I went on to write books and articles, and so somehow it seemed that I was the learned one.  You had to know her, is all I have to say.  It wasn't diamonds and rust, but it was a kind of heartache.  And then I married again, and Penny, well, she really wasn't ready for all that, and I hear her when I go again to Youtube to a performance of Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, and medley of the latter's songs.  It makes me think of the sorrow and tension of our marriage--"I Don't Want To Play House" "Divorce" oh, so many more all chronicling the pain and misery of marriage as it was lived by ordinary people, bored with each other, stupified by parenthood, yearning to get out, knowing that they had obligations.  All those years that the children suffered with us as parents.  I shudder as Fathers Day approaches.   Oh, Lord, how those country western songs nailed that impossible situation.  Was it really all better back when complete repression ruled the household?  But did it ever, or was the prevailing hypocrisy better able to mask the truth.  Funny how the music of Nashville, or the lyrics at least of those songs, takes it for granted that promiscuity, adultery, heartache, and sorrow are the ingredients of any marriage.  All so complicated and difficult.  In my third marriage I cannot think of any music that defines the relationship I have with my husband.  Without children in the home there is not that claustrophobic, hothouse of emotions, so many people bouncing off one another.  It is often remarked that the narrative in ancient tragic drama derives from the family.  Country western lyrics reflect this, although there is nothing do desperate.  Old age, they say all passion spent, yes, and in a good sense.  If you can make the increasing frailty and impending death part of your vision of a fulfilled successful life, then yes, indeed.

A Little Late This Morning

Excuse me if am brief and incoherent.  For the last couple of days I have been engaged in collecting stool samples which requires of me a certain psychic disposition for which I must prepare myself.  I have behind me rich memories of dealing with shit.  My wife and I at a certain desperate point in our early married life had three youngsters in diapers simultaneously.  This was in the good old days when diapers were cloth, and were washed to use again, from which the shit--or 'kaka,' as I think we said in front of the tots--had to be dropped out or scraped out depending on the consistency before the diaper was deposited in the pail from which as the days rolled by evil smells arose.  So now, taking the tiny weeny shovel attached to the cap of each vial supplied for fecal analysis and poking about in the material my intestines have offered up each morning allows one a certain distance based on those accumulated memories.  More recently when I was in my fifties I was a volunteer ward aide at Cambridge City Hospital where I had the pleasure of revisiting human excreta, as we say in politer circles.  Many of the patients whom I was charged with cleaning up for another day lying or sitting blankly staring at the wall--they being the more advanced daffy ones--had, I was to discover, filled their diapers during the night.  Thank God, we had moved on to disposables.  I am sure parents nowadays scarcely notice, so quickly can they remove the plastic with its treasure load, toss it all away, and move on to cleaning up the tot.  Today before I began this filling of the vials I was out in the yard digging in the earth, oh, all so symbolic, similar colors, and so on and so forth, planting petunias in a large empty bed where in years past stood tomato plants.  We hope to be gone before the tomato season, but realized that the prospective buyers touring the grounds would not be taken with the vigor of the weeds growing in the patch.  So petunias it is.  Onward and upward on another lovely sunny morning down by the seashore!