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.