A Litte Learning Is A Dangerous Thing

The Times today has yet another account of some rich person giving Harvard millions of dollars in a friendly rivalry with some other rich person who has been flinging his money around for education in the last few days.  Harvard is awash in money from their celebrated endowment, to the assessed worth of their physical plant, to the money that pours in a grand scale from their many admirers.  It is amusing in the thick of all this largesse to hear the constant complaint of fear at the lack of funds which will hamper some one or another aspect of their educational mission.  Like the regulars at the court of Louis XIV they just have no idea what life in the educational factories of this country is like.  And by the same token their students, most of whom have been, if not exactly bred, well, then indeed fed, clothed, and exercised to take their place in this exotic and demanding setting are like no other entrants into America's education mill.  They are as borzois paraded out to train before the pack brought out for exercise from the local pound.  The elites talk endlessly of their despair at not accepting or encouraging deserving intellects from low income people into their elite establishment.  I doubt many of them could imagine how very much those folks need to take one sniff of the Cambridge scene to feel an instinctive aversion rise in them.  I used to teach at a humble place, and often talked to those among my students who did make it into Harvard who could regale me with stories of the entirely different language, the different assumptions, social behaviors they encountered.  Children in the United States who are born into affluence are usually also born to ambition; getting them into an Ivy League is usually first and foremost on their parents' plate even as they lie in their basinette waving their chubby legs in the air and murmuring goo goo ever so sweetly, looking up at the Evil Fairy peering down at them, with her Phi Beta Kappa Key necklace, the word "summa" woven into her blouse, her package of Advanced Placement materials at the ready in her capacious bag.  These children are like those who enter the fabled ballet schools in Russia, reared from their earliest days to perform, to accept the ritual and sacrifice of casual normal life for the promise of excellence and all it obtains.  As such they present a facade that cannot be chipped.  Pity the ordinary guy.  Indeed I knew one, a product of my home down, his father had gone to high  school with me.  He came over once to our house when my niece from back home was visiting, and laughingly allowed that he was sure the Admissions Office had accepted him just to have someone "ordinary" on the dorm floor.  He had no illusions about his talents, his ambitions, his drive, nor his chances of developing close relationships with the guys around him whose concern for managing all their electronic equipment was equaled by their nervous expectation of of not correctly anticipating the pressures put upon them by their professors.

The Photo Gallery

My husband has indulged me by spending countless hours hanging the framed photos I have accumulated over the years of various family members and close friends.  Today I was looking at a photo of my paternal grandmother pouring tea at some afternoon do--you can see other ladies in the background, a silver pot, a plate of something or other.  So genteel.  She was from Boston, often remarked upon by my mother, who grew up in Oak Park, Illinois as did my father.  My mother could never get over the mystique of Boston where she had spent a couple of years at a finishing school, the educational program of which I guess included a course or two at Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking School.  She always mentioned Fanny Farmer with a peculiar flourish, as though the lady were an habituée of the court of Louis XIV.  The Boston grandmother lived to be very old, so that my life span began before she bid this earth adieu, and I had the chance more than once to hear that plummy marbles-in-the-mouth Boston accent over which I do believe my mother secretly swooned.  The odd thing about this hyper gentility was that the grandmother was married to my grandfather, who immigrated to America as a teenager before the Civil War, and had grown up in a small farming community in Braunschweig.  Enlisting in the Union Army gave him citizenship and somewhere along the line he acquired business skills which brought him to sufficient prominence that a public school building was named after him. as an immigrant a gentleman who died long long ago, and thus was unknown to almost all of us.  He crossed the ocean with only his teenaged cousin for company and the two boys somehow worked their way on farms all the way out to the Midwest.  How he got from that to the woman from Boston pouring the tea is a mystery.  Still more mysterious is that the father of this Boston grandmother came from Maine, and left there as a teenager, and walked, yes, walked all the way to Boston, another courageous youngster on a mission, and when he got to what is now Charles Street which was in the nineteenth century the embankment of the tidal basin, he claims to have sat down, taken off his shoes and socks, and soaked his feet in the soothing waters of the Charles River.  And how do we get from that scene to the grand dame pouring the tea?  Which of these people knew each other?  Did the German immigrant ever have the chance to exchange anecdotes with his father-in-law?  And yet we know that the couple met and married in Oak Park, a suggestion that she never went home again, never brought Wilhelm around.  He fathered nine or ten children and promptly died. There are no photographs of him, I don't remember hearing anyone describe him.

I Coulda Been A Contendah

For a narcissist and egomaniac like me reading the obituaries in such publications as The New York Times and The Harvard Magazine is torture.  What have I ever done with my life?  The chances that I have missed!  True enough, growing up in a little nothing place like Iowa City is not exactly the springboard for a major launch--think "unsung Milton," and all that sort of thing.  But then I went to Andover when I was fourteen and roomed across the hall from the son of the famous German painter-in-exile, George Grosz.  Why didn't I ever get an invite to their Manhattan pad?  Heirs to Union Pacific, Kohler Plumbing, and the Los Angeles Dart fortune lived just down the hall.  Why oh why did I leave Andover after one year when I had those four available to cultivate serious friendships?  When I was eighteen I left home for New York City, but did I find fame and fortune?  No, only gonorrhea.  When I read the poems of Frank O'Hara I could kick myself. Where was his gay set, all of them just graduated from Harvard, and so three years older than me, and surely out in some bar or another, and I was bright, witty, good looking, hey, sexy! Why when I was mingling with my brother in law's painterly crowd in Greenwich Village did I not meet young gay males on the make to fame and fortune.  Frank O'Hara and his chums, they must have been everywhere in the Village. I could have become one of those bright young gay things, who went on to celebrity in Manhattan.  Instead I got married at twenty one, still out in the boondocks in Iowa, was part of a married couple at Cambridge, and, hey, then what? majored in classics and pursued a doctoral degree! Classics, dude! Doctoral degree!  Duh!  Dullsville.   This is not the road to a great obituary in The New York Times!  People who anguish over death seem to forget its one great consolation: chances are you will not know how meager or non-existent your obituary was.  So I shall keep that thought by me, try to do less measuring when reading those obits.  Actually they are a constant source of inspiration for anyone.  Persons of such creativity as to have had lives that are recorded for posterity in the Times demonstrate a remarkable capacity for reinvention and more often than not leave behind at least two and sometimes three well developed and successful careers, not to mention marriages.  Reading obituaries, apart from those needy sickos who have to measure everything against themselves, are an inspiration and suggestion of all the rich chances on offer in human lives.  I recommend obituaries to teenagers as must read literature; it gives one such hope for a creative interesting life.

Original Sin

I am planning to teach a course centered on the tragic dramas enacted in Athens in the fifth century BCE, but with very few of them surviving in manuscripts into the modern age, there are certainly not enough to form very coherent generalizations.  Still we can talk about the ancient notion a "tragic sense of life," reflected in the story of the Iliad, and how that view is other than the Judaeo-Christian notion of original sin.  The Genesis story of Eve's disregard of the Lord's prohibition on eating fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil set in motion a series of rejections and human disgrace which is often simply labeled Orginal Sin.  "In Adam's fall we sinned all," as the old saying goes.  God's covenant with mankind expressed in Yaweh's announcement to Noah that there will never be another flood is not so powerful an expression of divine concern as the later pronouncement by Jesus and his followers that He promises eternal life to all those who will believe in him.  Original Sin is an idea that is in strict contradiction to the ancient Greek notion of having to explain misery and evil doing.  They were more in the vein of Dick Cheney's "these things happen."  When Herakles is driven  mad by the goddess Hera so that he kills his children, the explanation is that this is still another manifestation of her insane jealousy of his mother whom her husband had impregnated.  Divine malignancy, then is the answer to this horrible tragedy.  Nowadays when a human father does such a thing, non-believers will look for pathologies in the perpetrator's brain or some other medical circumstance, and Christians will see this as yet another expression that man is inherently sinful and prone to breaking the laws of God with the right provocation.  Human misery is sometimes a lot more bearable when it is clear that there is a cause, even if it is divine action, the will of god.  Human beings "matter" in this view of things.  Sometimes world events are so awful that this view becomes difficult to sustain, the horrific events known as the Holocaust, for example.  Sometimes the Greeks flatly stated that such things were the due to the gods, for no reason particularly, other than inherent divine malignity.  It is comforting for some persons to know that the misery they suffer is in no way caused by them.  It would be nice if the finger-pointing, holier than thou, well to do citizens of our communities would not so often assume that the poor and homeless are what they are because it is "their own fault."  There is the underlying notion of "original sin" perverting their human judgements.  It is always dubious to ascribe God's will to any act; better to remember the Lord speaking out of the whirlwind in Verse 100 as I remember it in Job, rebuking those trying to "understand" Job's plight, thundering out "Were you there when I created the world?" in effect, lay off, you know nothing.

Tenure

My husband who taught in public schools for the best part of his career has always been a strong supporter of the tenure system.  Anyone who is familiar with the over invested way of the modern American parent will know that as a rule parents have no sense of their child's academic failings whether by poor performance or by limited intelligence, and they almost always fault the teacher.  Contrary to the high regard in which the public school teacher was held in the early half of the twentieth century, their role in American society has consistently been devalued since those days as income has become a more popular index of worth, raising the--to my mind--highly morally dubious professions of real estate, investment banking, financial planning, attorneys, and the like to the new pinnacle of perfection.  Everyone has their story of the desiccated old bitch who ruined some year of the subject of something because she mumbled, didn't care, she couldn't hear, and so on.  They are often featured in films.  I was not immune to the disregard in which public school tenure procedures were held when I met my partner (we weren't to be married for twenty years), even though as a college professor I of course held tenure as well.  It has always seemed to me to be obvious for the college professor, given the well known knavery that haunts the corridors of higher academy; feuds, cruelties, knives in the back, these things are the daily fare of the university professor.  School teachers by contrast never seemed to be quite so hostile in their interaction.  And, indeed, when I met my soon to be partner I was startled by the genuine pleasure and pride his colleagues took in teaching youngsters.  Part of it is, I believe, that they are seriously invested in the growth and development of the intellect and soul of young people, whereas college professors are there to dish out the facts and show why they are the facts--take it or leave it.  It's the difference between fine dining and a cafeteria. In any case, as my partner later husband immediately demonstrated to me through his very own job, if someone has real oversight, and he was the department chair, then they have the obligation to observe and review the performance of everyone in the classroom.  I had taught twenty years by that time and had never had a colleague review my teaching, and of course colleges are rife with hilarious legendary professors who are so boring and out of it that students routinely get up and leave the class without the professor noticing.  Nowadays I have been told most students are on facebook or games when they have their lap tops open in lectures.  But my loved one seriously took on inadequate teachers, patiently explained their pedagogical problems, got them to mend their ways, and if over time they could not, went to the union to explain that he intended to move against the failed teacher.  I was amazed, more amazed that in the four or five instances, relative good will obtained through to the dismissal of the offender and that the union gave the procedure its blessing.  But the lesson here is that observation, correction, firmness, a standard, common courtesy and good will must underlie the procedure.  To my mind tenure is there to protect the school teacher from the community, and compassionate, intelligent department heads who have the will to observe, judge, and move for dismissal are there to protect the tenure system from abuse.

Bearing Witness

A colleague at Stanford was a naturalized citizen of German-Jewish birth who had survived her wartime incarceration in Dachau.  She was a neurotic mess, occasionally remarking that she wished she had thrown herself against the electrified fence there and ended her life.  So strong was her instinct for suicide that despite having a very nice Jewish American husband, two darling children, a tenured position she did indeed manage to do herself in.  She haunted me later on since through my friendship with her husband my wife and I moved into the top floor of a two family house that his mother let in Brookline where I took up residence when we moved back East for my job at Boston University.  This was the quintessential Jewish mother, all Gemutlichkeit but tough as nails, who asked me once "Why did she do it?  That was years ago, why didn't she get over it?" words spoken I realize by a Jewish grandmother who could never excuse the psychic damage suffered by those little ones, but to me betraying a shocking indifference to what it meant to be a Holocaust survivor.  Years later on a trip through Germany I visited Dachau as a conscious act of piety toward my former colleague, and had a weird experience.  I had picked up a hitch hiker, a young German male, a college student on his way to Vienna.  We were just outside of Augsburg, and I told him that I would take him to the exit ramp near Munich.  He figured out I was going to the town of Dachau--I didn't even realize it was a town!--and said he would get off there downtown.  Moments later he popped up with the intuition that I was going to the camp, preserved as it was as a monument to the Nazi horror and a memorial to its victims. He wanted to join me.  And so we went, and it was so laid out that once you started going through, looking at all the photos, growing increasingly more menacing and frightening as the Nazis bore down on the Jews, there was no way out but to turn back ignominiously, or suck in your breath and continue on to the horror of the logical end.  By the end the young man and I were holding hands and crying, he muttering "They never told us any of this when I was in school." A couple of years I was in Munich with my sons, and I felt I had to take them through, although they were only in their early teens, and then a few years later I was with my daughters, and so another guided tour was imposed upon them.  I felt false this time, as though I had assimilated the experience too much, made it mine, the way teachers do, could talk about it with my offspring in a meaningful, intelligent way, help them with their anguish.  But afterwards after a brief pause for coffee or whatever, they looked up from their guide books and asked excitedly if we could now visit the famous Munich zoo, and as the image of a zoo came into my head, a concentration camp for animals I suddenly realized, I burst into tears and sobbed as I had not done so strongly before, but it was not for those beasts, but the vision of the fence that enclosed them, perhaps not unlike the fence against which my long ago colleague yearned to hurl herself.

Happiness In The Kitchen

Sometime mid-afternoon yesterday my husband pounded in the very last nail to hang the very last item of my vast hoard of paintings and photographs which the moving van deposited here at our condo some few days before I arrived myself on August 10th.  All the dvds have been shelved, and nearly all the books; only his tools await sorting out for their very own special place on the gallery of the so-called "guest" condo.  I would have put them in a less conspicuous place, but then I do not have the romance of building and repairing things in my blood, an inheritance from a father who made his living by carpentry.  Last night I made risotto with freshly pesto sauce into which I had put chunks of cooked chicken.  The risotto was made in six minutes in our excellent pressure cooker while I sat idly by in the living room sipping slowly on a white wine spritzer.  The fact of the matter was that, if I had not almost entirely given up drinking, I would have downed one or two martinis to take away the incredible edge of nervousness and dread which my moments of cookery inspired.  I had approached the kitchen in so light hearted a manner it was hard to believe how broken I left it.  First of all, this was the first meal we had not eaten in a restaurant in the last two and a half months, so that, despite a lifetime of cooking--for many years three or at least two times a day, with between one and four hungry, discriminating, rebellious teenagers at table--I had pretty much, hard to believe this, forgotten the drill.  Assembling the pesto was as though I were putting my grandfather's gold watch back together again, somehow I just kept forgetting basics, like the garlic, for god's sake!  I had to go back to the processor time and again to blend in yet something else originally overlooked.  When I had got the gleaming multi purpose electric gizmo from Bellevue or something like that which friends rave over--it steams, sautees, slow cooks, pressure cooks, who knows what else--I discovered I had quite forgotten how to put on the sealing rim for the lid, how you turned the thing on, the timer, too, how you set the valves so as to avoid being blown up.  By this time we were approaching six o'clock, after I had told my husband an hour earlier that the meal would be out "in no time."  I got that damn lid on, set the timer, took a white wine spritzer into the living room and waited for the explosion.  Six minutes later I did not even hear the"six little beeps,"  which the instruction booklet told me accompanied the appearance of zero on the timer panel.  Dare I open the damn thing without the beeps?  But I could not go back in time to await the beeps, how could I?  So, steeling myself, I repeatedly pushed some pressure release and the steam came out and eventually stopped and I opened the thing.  A spoonful proclaimed "delicious!", called hubby to the table, ladled out steaming platefuls after having stirred in the chicken bits, the pesto and grated parmigiano.  "Fabulous" came from my spouse.  I was almost too broken to eat, God, I thought to myself, am I going to have to go on doing this for the rest of my  life?

Saturday Morning

I posted two pieces yesterday by mistake so I will make this brief and sketchy.  Saturday morning, most people are taking a breather, unless they have small children, in which case, hey, what's different?  But we retirees for whom the days roll on like the Mississippi can only mark Saturday at least in Sarasota because there is the Farmers Market, fifty two Saturdays a year, and well worth the visit.  Our tendency to stock up--and attractive way to describe the pathology of hoarding--is tempered with the realization that in a week we are off to London, so it will a brief visit for some marvelous truly fresh fish, home made pasta which we have been getting for years now, some home made pastries which we should not eat from a stand owned by a couple who left administration in industry to set up this mom and pop business in retirement, so called.  And many, many others, some real farm stands with whatever produce is available fresh at this moment of the year.  I can't wait.  It will no doubt be in the high eighties already.  When I opened the door to pick up the Times on the mat I could feel the wave of heat and humidity lunging at me.  Funny though, it is not always such a negative. Last evening we ate out at an Italian restaurant and the tables in the outdoor area had a sizable group of us who enjoyed what passed for a breeze, who wanted the smell of "fresh air" in our nostrils.  As we sat, ate, and drank, the temperature was up there in the eighties but it was just fine.  The only people breaking a real sweat were the servers going in and out from kitchen to table and back.  A delightful elderly gentleman looking rather like a homeless man was playing jazz coronet, and various other instruments at a small stage in the corner.  We saw the John Le Carree or however you spell his name with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.. A suspense movie, not my kind of thing, but a friend assured me there was no blood and disemboweling, so I went along with my darling husband who was down to hanging the last ten photos on the walls of my bathroom and bedroom (He had just that afternoon made the comment "There are going to be a lot of frames for sale when you go," chuckling all the while, and it startled me to realize that no on else on earth could possible care about this display), went along with him "to share" and sat beguiled by the action, the lighting, the design of the scenes, and the marvelous acting, but most of the time not able to follow the plot, and I wondered if that was because there were conventions of narration in suspense films that I did not pick up on or I was just getting too mentally slow to follow it all.  Well, this did not turn out to be so short.  Garrulous, no question about it.

Where A Fall Off A Balcony Can Lead

When I was four I fell from a balcony down onto a flight of stairs onr floor below.  The damage to my spine was considerable; I was in extreme pain for hours every day.  There were no really successful pain killers back in those days for which i suppose I was lucky, although being wrapped in blankets,itchy, raw wool blankets that had been soaking in boiling water--Sister Kenney's way of dealing with the then unknown progression of the after effects of a polio attack--was a raging daily nightmare and did nothing.  I grew up in a home where there was a lot of polite social drinking, the the refreshments were offered to the youngsters (you'd think we were an Italian peasant's home, but I guess WASP drinking habits are such a part of the social convention that children join the group with impunity.  At any rate, I quickly seized on the virtue of liquor to dull pain, and from then on I was a happy imbiber, now perhaps twelve or so in age.  The constant pain made me an exceptionally jittery person; all I wanted was to calm down, but that was not for me, alas.  Masturbation was another way to soothe me, and I took that up with almost mad enthusiasm, although I don't know many boys who maintained a take it or leave it position when they discovered the delights and imperatives of puberty.  Although by the time I was in graduate school I was quite a toper, but not a hopeless drunk, since I took to heart my mother's admonition pointing out to me army veteran friends of my sister in college, men visibly still healing their wounds, soaking their serious pains in booze.  My situation was not improved when my wife suddenly died, and the attending physician gave me a prescription for secanol.  It was years later when I had sufficient clarity one day actually while traveling in Europe to ask myself why I was preparing to take a secanol pill as a kind of pick me up at ten in the morning, and I threw the rest down the toilet.  A similar moment of revelation came to me at dinner one night after I had moved to Brookline with my family from Palo Alto, this was not even a decade later, when I under the care of a Palo Alto physician who had prescribed for me Valium.  I don't know how I managed to renew the prescription but I was always well supplied even on the East Coast and then one night while dining with friends at home after I had consumed a quart of whiskey which the Valium seemed to demand of me I began to hallucinate that giant scissors were coming toward me to slice off my nipples, and I leapt from my chair and ran out into the night and to the MassMentalHealth building nearby where in my student days I had been a guinea pig for LSD experimentation.  That nighttime run seemed to clear my head and I threw the rest of the Valium down the toilet.  It was around this time that the pain in my back which had grown intermittent once my skeleton had become full grown and I could discard my brace, altogether ceased.  The fusion which the orthopedic surgeon had declined to do saying the operation was in its infancy and too dangerous had happened of its own accord apparently.  At eighty four I have no back pains of any sort, but the legacy of all those years is fearful insomnia, so I am happy that I have discovered Ambien, or its generic equivalent zolpidem, to which I am clearly mildly addicted, but which has given me  a good night's uninterrupted sleep for the past fifteen twenty years.  It is maddening, however, that the medical insurance and the doctor's office combine to see that I do not get a thirty day refill (all the state will allow) until almost the day, so that planned trips out of town have to be accompanied by the most obscene wheedling bowing and scraping--all metaphorical of course--if I am to get my prescription early.  And then I choose to cut each pill in two so as to get the maximum effect, taking the second half at my urine break middle of the night.  Oh, the self pity I can generate for myself sitting at the dining room table using the pill cutter, making sure that these tiny bits do not escape my clumpsy unfeeling arthritic fingers, since then I might be A PILL SHORT1

Knifing Someone Somehow Doesn't Work When I Am Eating My Popcorn In A Darkened Theater

Recently we have been watching "The Honorable Woman," an English miniseries made for television which features relentless murder and other forms of savage maltreatment by Israelis, Arabs, and anyone else who seems fated to enter the plot.  My husband is enchanted, but then he loved "Dexter," and a host of other made for TV dramas that feature the lavish shedding of blood.  In the absence of our customary diet of Netflix fllms of my choice--high minded, sometimes stupefyingly boring films of major critical importance, where more often than not you have to read the subtitles to get the dialogue--he has filled the gap with some of his recent purchases.  He promised to start us on "West Wing" tonight but confessed to immense fatigue and so went off to bed early.  I liked "West Wing" a lot when we first watched it, at least until that preposterous plot turn involving the kidnapping of the president's daughter as I remember it, at which point I stopped.  I sort of don't mind looking at the early episodes again, it's just that I yearn for the aesthetics of a ninety minute narrative.  I can't seem to get that message through to him; we are looking for different things in our evening's entertainment, he and I, that's clear enough.  He loves episodes of series, I am dissecting the narrative arc.  I don't understand why he loves blood and guts so much, or people in space ships, or action based on situations entirely fantastical.  I know that I derive from nineteenth century psychological/sociological novels, that I want to witness family relations, class relations, sexual relations set into towns, estates, or on steamships, or colonial East Asian rubber plantations.  I want history, geography, and society that I know parsed for me in a new way toward a new understanding or substantiation of what I had already believed.  Watching persons strangled, shot messily, mangled corpses dumped, all the  paraphernalia of the crime films requires me to participate in, assent to that behavior as an acceptable mode of action.  My husband heartily disagrees; it's entertainment.  I well remember the hideous, brutal rape scene toward the end of "Boys Don't Cry" when the true sex of the girl, Tina Brandon, disguised as a male teenager, calling himself Brandon Teena, was discovered  by some would be male friends who in their betrayal took it upon themselves to strip her and rape her savagely.  I was sick, but stayed in my seat as others left the theater, because I felt I had to bear witness to the historical truth of the agony--I think of it almost as the word associated with saints--of this tragic teenaged person.

Getting Along

A recent essay on race relations relevant to the tragic catastrophe in Ferguson MO quoted anew Rodney King's famous question "Can't we just get along?"  King had been the victim of police brutality in Los Angeles many years ago, and the question poignant and tragic then still hangs in the air of distrust, hatred, confusion, and disdain which mark so much of the interaction of American blacks and whites.  One of the major factors is social unfamiliarity.  How many Americans have reasonably close personal friends of the other color?  Where would they meet?  Where would they interact? Although I have known a few African-Americans relatively intimately in my lifetime, the opportunities are rare.  In my teaching career, black colleagues were almost non-existent, in the neighborhoods to which we moved to improve our children's chances for college admission, there were no black neighbors.  The black students I have befriended often were suspicious of my motives, especially if they were male.  I am so conscious of the iniquities that whites have historically made blacks suffer that every even chance encounter is fraught with my assumption that the black person with whom I am talking hates whites on principle, remembering reading somewhere Harvard's Professor Gates quoting approvingly his mother's "I hate whites," a not unreasonable response but again not calculated to ease the dialogue.  (Makes me think of what a Jewish friend of mine recently said about his father's childhood home in the Bronx where, according to him, his father said the thing he mostly learned was "kill the goyim," spoken in jest, but on another level, uttering a very important truth.)  When I was a teenager living in Manhattan I was picked up and taken home by a young black male who lived with three other young black fellows.  The circumstances for this pickup is unclear in my mind, the details of the evening at their apartment in Harlem altogether hazy, except for the odd sartorial choice of all four of them of boxer shorts with polka dots as household lounge outfits.  We sat about playing poker, then all four prepared for bed in their large one room  apartment with cots set along the wall.  Somehow my friend and I gathered ourselves together in his cot, had sex in a quiet sort of way, and drifted off to sleep (it was a long ago era when the sex supplied a need, and did not inspire a reaction).  In the morning I woke early and since there had been talk of needing provisions the night before, slipped out for the paper and something to eat. The early morning walk to a nearby store was an extraordinary shock to me: all the people I encountered on the street were black!  My midwestern naivete stuns me to this day.  I brought back eggs and bacon and bread, and when my new friends awakened we sat down to a delightful breakfast, and then they had to think of going off to Wall Street, as I remember it, where they worked as couriers.  I never felt the slightest racial tension, either in my repressed self, or in the room.  Ships that passed in the night.  We got along just fine.

The Great Vacuum Or Holding On To The Log While Being Swept Downstream

At night when I lie down to sleep I begin a furious interior monologue in which I construct a series of notions all of which I realize would make wonderful blog subjects.  In the morning I can remember none of them.  Why do I not then sit up in bed, take pen and paper and write these ideas down?  A) I am lazy, and B) I do not want to make myself that alert when I am lying, zolpidem-filled, ready for sleep, and C) I do not want to break the spell, nor the chain of creation that stopping to write down one of those thoughts would induce.  So I sigh, hope I will remember, always forget, forget even that I had that late night conversation with myself until it is dimly recalled as I am busy with reading The New York Times.  When I am out and about I sometimes have a conversation with someone in which a worthwhile bit of information is given me verbally.  More often than not I will not remember the slightest detail nor, indeed, the person who imparted whatever it was to me.  I cannot ever keep in my head any set of numbers beyond my cellphone number and my "social" as they nowadays call it.  Even my husband's cellphone number which he has had for as long as I have had mine eludes me.  I live in terror that I will not have my cellphone with me, or that it will suddenly run out of power, or that I will lose the capacity for pressing the requisite buttons.  Oddly enough, I do remember what I read in the paper each morning, remember the narratives of the novels I read, remember the gist of the non-fiction books I read, the articles in journals, well, pretty much, although I have to admit sometimes I read an issue of a journal only to realize dimly as I go along that I have read this all before.  But this forgetfulness, some part of it is really that I am distracted by the anxiety of living, by the necessity of paying such close attention to the process, watching how I go down stairs, how I step off curbs, walk along sidewalks, drive the car, carry dishes to the sink.  More and more nothing is routine, but requires a self-conscious application of technique.  I am content enough to live so furiously in the here and now, which is, I suppose, why it is such a temptation every so often to slip into the memories of decades ago which unlike the events of yesterday appear easily to me, crystal clear, firmly etched, supremely true.

A Second Birthday Post For Today

Fifty seven years ago my oldest child was born.  His mother went into labor in the late evening and we timed the contractions, following the advise of our obstetrician to hold off arriving at the hospital until twelve midnight and thus save on the cost of a day in the hospital midnight bed census being the basis for billing.  So we set off at eleven from our house outside of New Haven up in the hills of neighboring Woodbridge, and as we descended and the valley lay before us we noted the glorious display of fireworks signaling a long drawn out celebration by the local Italian-American Catholic population of the Feast of the Assumption which must have begun on August 15.  It was indeed a celebration for us two novice parents, since the little boy who came into the world was such a splendid physical specimen, although when we brought him home from the hospital and laid him on the counter in the bathroom we were both terrified.  Neither of us had ever baby sat, never seen a baby before.  My mother-in-law who was visiting, supposedly in the guise of the ever helpful grandmother, stared dubiously at the little tyke with his little cut off umbilical cord, and opined in the navy she had always had some native person in the nursery and really was not the help she had imagined she would be!  Well, we mastered cloth diapers, piling them up in a bucket outside the front door for the diaper service after performing the vomit-making maneuver of washing off the shit they contained in the toilet, provoking more often than not my wife's morning sickness, since despite the old wife's tale that you cannot conceive when you are nursing, she was soon pregnant again.  We learned all about safety pins, making sure not to stick the little tyke in the stomach with them.  We learned you had to be a bit careful where you were when removing the diaper since a penis when coming into contact with cold air more often than not will start pissing out its contents.  I will never forget the first giant arc made by this tiny little thing!  Well, the baby child became a gentle giant, a sweet playmate to his new baby brother, a kind of honorary golden retriever to our two loving affectionate dogs; true enough he snacked on kibbles from the fifty pound bag that stood in the kitchen, prompting applause from our pediatrician who opined that there was not a commercial baby food as good for one as dog kibbles.  The simple dog food could stand in for the fundamental no fuss life which this charming gentleman chose for himself through the years, always a source of torment for his over elaborated, artifice loving, culture vulture queeny old father.  Happy Birthday, Sweet Child

You Never Stand In The Same River Twice

Goethe once wrote: "What, have I become 80 years old in order to think the same thing all the time?  On the contrary, I strive to something different, something new every day, in order not to become boring.  One has to change continuously, renew oneself, rejuvenate not to get stuck." I've hung around with the fashion crowd in Manhattan enough to know you can overdose on novelty, that's true enough.  It is the job of Anna Wintour, to spot trends before they become trends; you can watch her doing it in the revealing documentary "September Issue."  Ezra Pound used to tell his acolytes "Only make it new."  Surprising how young everyone old seems in Sarasota.  We were just out do dinner in a jazz restaurant, a place that welcomes musicians to sit in with the house trio, and heard some incredible renditions of oldies, and I mean oldies from the grand days of jazz, the forties and fifties, maybe--I really don't have a temporal memory of musical hits of the last seventy or eighty years.  The first vocalist to take the mike had been playing on a sax, and then something else, the lights were low and my musical knowledge is weak, a blonde in a very slinky dress that was transparent enough to show her legs when they were not available for inspection through the slit that ran up from the floor to somewhere ill defined.  She came around to the tables later on to welcome everyone, and I was surprised to see that her face had the wear and tear of many years, many of them, that her upper arms were redefined by a mosaic of tattoos.  She was not your standard grandmother going gently into some night or another.  Another musician played jazz clarinet, bowing and bending over his instrument weaving to a rhythm, his natty white straw hat pressed down on his luxuriant mane of white hair, sort of like the bouncing ball, there in the darkening room, identifying him as much as the plaid shirt with the tails out, just and barely managing, stretching desperately over the giant gu--that of an old man not a fat man--he had before him.  But am I saying that these people are reinventing themselves?  Well, I guess not, they're reliving an era in jazz music, and as I listened to them, I was transforming my self, sort of thought I was fifteen again illicitly brought into Nick's in Greenwich Village by my older sister whose constant amusement was to introduce me to things that would shock our mother.  And I thought how this sister encouraged me to shed my midwestern bourgeois habit of manners, how hard it had been, how my first wife took up the task, and maybe now, some sixty going on seventy years later, maybe I can say that I have been iconoclastic, that's what my former students and colleagues would say.  And yet, tonight in the restaurant there was a little boy who kept running out the side door of the restaurant past the tables al fresco around to the front door down through the tables and then repeating the circuit until I, the Great Killjoy, said to him as he was about to sail past yet again "Stop running," and that was that.  Old man, grandfather, fountain of rectitude, but, you know what? this was indeed new--me as public police of manners.

Merrily We Roll Along

In a few weeks I will be arriving at Logan airport from Canada after participating in my granddaughter's wedding celebration.  The schedule says shortly after 5pm, I don't think coming from Canada entails elaborate custom delays, and there is an Amtrak train for New York at maybe six thirty.  So I will try for that, not, I think, by waiting for that bus to thread its way through the airport traffic, called the Silver Line, I believe, and on to South Station.  Maybe hailing a taxi would be better. Why when they remodeled Logan Airport did the office of Governor Dukakdis, great train lover put rails from there to town, instead having to use cars? Will there be lines?  Will a taxi get stuck in traffic?  The airfare to New York seems absurdly high, although there is something for $45 to Newark.  Google is such a joke, a whore in the pay of all the various airlines; you have to read through so much verbiage of the shill to try to find what used to be called "information"  In the real world a single list of every plane taking off from Logan and landing at one of NYC's airports and the time of departure would be both logical and very helpful.   I guess there are buses if there is no later train.  I am thinking of my granddaughter (not the one getting married) starting college this fall in the Midwest.  She will have her own car so that she can come back for a visit and, as they all say, "do her laundry."  I can't help but wonder if it were not a lot cheaper to put a bunch of quarters in a machine in the dorm than pay for gasoline to come home.  My heart goes out to all these suburban families who are counting every penny as grown up children eat into the income more vigorously every year.  The first big bite they took was when they got a car.  Not the charming rite du passage one imagines from overdosing on films with Mickey and Judy, no, but an absolute necessity where what passes for a town has no sidewalks and getting from place to place is either at the convenience of a parent or the youngster when old enough for a driver's license.  A recent neighbor of mine, on a very low income, and pretty desperate, had four cars and a pickup truck out in front of his exceedingly modest dwelling where three sons set out each morning to their jobs.  How do you move up the ladder when you first of all have to shell out for wheels, then gas all the time for your commute, and maybe pay off the car in time to buy another five or so years down the line.  Having grown up in a Midwestern village in the Depression I thought most everyone walked, and I was not disabused of that notion when I moved to Boston and then to New York.  It was California where I first learned at age thirty the true horror of the American dream, the freeway, the absence of public transportation, although I once spent time at a cocktail party with a very cool young gentleman who when I commiserated with him on his very very lengthy commute on the traffic laden Santa Ana Freeway, allowed as how the constant and lengthy pauses gave him time to himself--no wife, no kids, no boss--, time for his favorite kind of music, time for smoking good dope, time for jerking off if the mood overcame him. The cellphone has put paid to that kind of bliss of privacy, drivers on every side of me down here in Florida are moving along in the most incredible varieties of stop and start and slow and fast as I see them bent over their text messages, occasionally  darting a glance at the road ahead.  Since the Florida drivers have an unlimited right to turn right on red, the pedestrian, poor fellow, is even more the deer caught in the headlights. God bless them, they deserved better, I think.

It's All In What You Wear

My remarks today will be offensive to many of my readers, I am sure of that, but they are heartfelt, and represent an interesting perspective on social tensions in our time.  Like everyone else I have been following the horrendous news emanating out of Ferguson MO, grieving for yet another young African-American male victimized for being black essentially, the focus of suspicions and fears that have nothing to do with the youngster in question.  I remember years ago when I taught an undergraduate class up in the Bronx and in a discussion on social relations a group of young black men in my class remarked on how if they were in high spirits and ran forward as a group to board the subway the other riders, they could clearly see, shrank from them.  And their fellow passengers were mostly dark hued.  From my upper middle class white perspective I unthinkingly said: "It's the clothes."  And this is an idea that has never left me.  There is a popular image of young black loser and dangerous teenagers wearing hoodies, pants that extend to mid calf, and sneakers.  What if a nice looking young man were to come along in chinos, loafers, and a button down collar dress shirt?  I can hear the howls of outrage from my readers.  Yet, I myself know, that as a gay male who has a powerful urge to wear necklaces, bracelets, rings, sometimes a flashy little scarf wrapped around my wrist, I would be branding myself in the larger society.  I know for a fact, because I well remember people with their pained smiles moving very subtly away from me in the eighties, not saying a word of course, but not wanting their children "to catch AIDS from me."  I remember at Harvard we loafer and chino garbed students were always menaced by muggers from the Irish Catholic parts of Cambridge.  Our clothes gave us away, something I knew well, since I had to walk through dicey parts of town every night to my job as a night watchman.  The clothes were not suitable for a nightwatchman but it was before the era when the gentry could wear levi work pants ubiquitiously.  Recently I hired a young white working class male, aged twenty three or four, to help me pack up my house.  He was as handsome, soft spoken, courteous, hardworking, gentlemanly as you could ask for (although a director on the set would have ordered: "Lose the accent!")  We talked of possible futures for someone with only a high school education.  I didn't know how to tell him that pants with a mid calf cut off says ghetto or imitation ghetto.  I offered him suits that were on their way to Goodwill, beautiful, some from Brooks Brothers.  Even after I said in an avuncular fashion befitting the old queen who was his neighbor how important clothing of this sort could be in certain human interactions, social situations, he declined.  I was sorry for him, and for all the young males, black particularly, that the insidious social painter that is television has devised their immediate personal identification in clothes that they will not shed at their peril.
An addendum two hours later, as I realize how utterly simpleminded I am in my analysis, depending as it does upon the notion that "clothes makes the man," that there is a badge of gentility all men assume by dressing in a certain fashion.  This dictum of course utterly denies the experience of hundreds of persons of color in this country who have been dressed as the New York fashion dictates for middle and upper middle class males who are still routinely subject to harassing search and interrogate procedures unknown to the rest of us.  In my own life I am so conscious that I have no occasion to talk seriously with an African-American after a life in which a high school buddy was black, a sister dated a black in college, my first wife's best friend was a black woman who introduced us to her circle of friends, most of them African-American, and my eldest sister's marriage in all but name to a black gentleman for the last ten or so years of his life.  Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, it makes assumptions flakier, insecurities more pronounced.  So what I have written in the first paragraphs let them stand as the instinctive remarks of a very elderly person who just doesn't "get it."

Getting The News

I read The New York Times every morning, always have, since I acquired the habit from my mother of whom I have the strongest memory of her sitting in the living room every morning reading The Des Moines Register and Tribune.  I notice, however, in my dotage that I seem to be less well equipped to handle the extravagance of the prose that the copy editors routinely allow into the published pages.  Here is the opening of the fourth paragraph taken from a background article on Gertrude Bell found on page A7 of the national edition published August 15.
     "Today though, her legacy which has always been fragile, is at risk of being undone amid the renewed sectarian violence that has already seen Sunni militants effectively erase the border she drew between Iraq and Syria and raised the possibility that Iraq will fracture into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish territories. Seen through the experience of Iraq's tumultuous recent past, the decisions made by Miss Bell, as she is still affectionately referred to by Iraqis, and others working for the British and French to reorder the Middle East after the Ottoman Empire collapsed nearly a century ago, hold cautionary lessons for those seeking to bring stability or seek advantage in the region now." (I think there is a little problem with the verb "is" doing duty for the clause beginning "and others," but we'll let that pass.)
It is always remarkable to go from the Times to television's morning news which I do when I walk the treadmill at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club somewhat later.  Apart from the fact that those stereotype glamorous women with the long hair drooping over their face would never in a million years go near a topic like Gertrude Bell, intent as they are in offering over and over again the miniscule sound bites about the day's catastrophe whether the destruction of a whole people or a little child in some American suburb who fell off his tricycle in front of moving van, I doubt that they could read sentences of this complexity.  What a refreshing difference in intelligence Rachel Maddow and her short hair offers in the evening.  I know, I know she's a dyke, and it's just like the pansy males know about books and the arts while real male announcers know about the Red Sox and Tiger Woods (but I am forgetting suave, elegant, handsome Anderson Cooper always at the center of a newsworthy disaster).  Those were asides, back to the real issue, which is that I find myself nowadays struggling to get through those high minded long winded long sentences, there is so little time left, and I am not sure I want to spend it parsing complexities, verbal ones, that is.  The malaise has spread to my reading of The London Review and The Times Literary Supplement. I read the paragraphs over and over struggling to prop up my concentration, and at the same time reaching for my correcting pencil to write as I did so long ago on student essays "wordy, wordy."  Maybe I need to switch to the Post or the Daily News.

Life With Father

The current film "Boyhood" presents the years of six through eighteen in the life of a young American male, an extraordinary feat of filming in real time in which the youngster, his sibling, parents, and associates age physically in the process of filming over this great span of time.  Although most persons find the film charming in varying degrees, I sat through much of it with dread, anguishing at the behaviors of the boy's father and two step-fathers. The dramatic situation is that of a young woman who gets pregnant by mistake, marries, and after two children are born to the couple the husband leaves, a recipe for a life of disaster--she is the dread national statistic, the single mother. But she pulls herself up, gets an education, and a secure job, a tenured teaching position at the junior college, an incredible feat (I know from a lifetime in higher education).  Meanwhile her former husband, drifts along, from one job to another, wanting to be a professional musician, hindered, it is hard to say because he has not the talent or the dedication.By the end of the film I knew that I had grown to loathe the mother for her stupid choices in male partners, first of all the boy's biological father, a part played by Ethan Hawke, who reappears in the kid's life from time to time, just infrequently enough to dramatize thoroughly how indifferent he is.  His attempts at fatherhood on weekends are painful for their bluster, their contrivance, as is his male territoriality, particularly the scene where he reacts with the crudest expression of amused astonishment to his son's anguish at the sale of an antique car which the boy quite ridiculously had always assumed would come to him when he reached sixteen.  The mother's second husband, a college professor whom she meets in his class, turns out to be an abusive drunk, but she seems not to have noticed his rigid compulsive authoritarianism on the early dates, needless to say, evolving into a nightmare father for the two kids, from whom she and they finally flee.  When she seems about to hook up with a tough, aggressive veteran of three of four tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, you look into her face for some sign of wariness, but there is only a needy sexual readiness.  So the kid gets brutalized, this time psychologically by dad number three, while all the while having weekends from time to time with the slacker who is biologically his.  Is this just a happenstance slice of American life?  Is this what awaits the single mother?  Is this what boyhood is for most medium to low income white males with a succession of male authority figures imposing themselves?  I don't know.  My father died when I was six, and I was raised in the protection of a well to do mother who presided over her six children with the same iron rule that the surrogate fathers in the film achieved but with the upper class Wasp means of voice tone, verbal indirection, veiled threats and hints.  I never talked to another adult male seriously, until a cousin in his twenties, a veteran, stopped by, took pity on me now a soft, effeminate nineteen year old, took me on a brief trip to Colorado where he was off to do is Army reserve summer maneuvers.  My memory of this experience is not of "becoming a man," so to speak, but of secretly falling in love with this handsome, sexy, caring guy whose naked body in our daily showers is an icon of my youth that I can readily summon up still sixty odd years later.

Trying Some Teaching Again

A friend has encouraged me to offer a course in a local program offerings for senior citizens.  This is a volunteer operation: the instructors offer their services, the local university offers some classrooms, the students pay a minimal fee for the mechanics of the instruction without testing or papers or final certification.  And hugely popular.  I have enrolled in several in the last four years, and dropped all but one, since I miss the more rigid form of instruction with which I am familiar from my days on the lecture platform.  Yesterday I met with two administrators to discuss how I might fashion the description of a projected course in ancient Greek tragedy. As they say, it was a learning experience for me.  One of the objections that I have had in the courses I attended was the freedom with which the students offered their opinions on the announced subject matter of the course.  It was clear to me that most frequently their questions and their observations were completely ill informed so that the instructor had gently to engage in either a quiet refutation or a lengthy clarification out of the student's obfuscation.  I found this so frustrating and time consuming and ultimately unproductive that I always dropped the course.  And I determined if I were to take on a course, I would guard against this manner of pedagogy.  I was coming from a model where in introductory lecture courses students were engaged in the acquisition of knowledge, and they would through testing and paper writing demonstrate their success in that acquisition. Student participation came only later in senior seminars or tutorials.  I had not realized that this is of course not the model nor the goal of these senior learning courses.  There is nothing to work for in that sense, no certification, no grade.  The persons interviewing me were saying "so, then, what you want us to indicate in the course book is that this is a lecture course, no class participation.  Would you be willing to entertain questions at the last five or ten minutes?"  Suddenly it sounded so cold, so factory model efficient.  Somehow I wanted to have my long polished lecture style, witty and engaged, and yet keep the students at some distance so that the participation could be controlled.  But I was all wrong, I suddenly realized.  These courses had nothing to do with an undergraduate course.  These were mature, accomplished people who were in their seventies and eighties, who felt they were bringing as much to the room as the instructor, even if it were not specialized knowledge of the subject advertised.  I would somehow have to give them participation and correction without taking up too much classroom time nor make them feel excluded.  Aha!  3X5 cards handed out at each meeting where questions could be written down, collected by me, reviewed and the more thoughtful, productive addressed in subsequent classes, as well as a ten minute Q & A session at the end of every class meeting.  I hope this will work!

Tidying Up

My husband and I are putting things away.  The moving van arrived last Thursday, the movers carried our possessions up to the third floor, gallantly accepting that some very heavy items would not fit onto the elevator. When I arrived from New York passageways had been created through the boxes of books piled high, the fifty paintings in their bubble wrap stacked carefully against walls and other boxes, boxes of kitchen utensils, . . . I could go on.  Why did we bring so many things? And yet all we seemed to be doing in the last two months was making daily trips to Goodwill or inviting our neighbors to help themselves to stacks of unwanted stuff on the porch.  Nothing is more obvious at my advanced age that I will not need or use most of the things I felt I just had to have with me, those little pouches, for instance, I always used to travel with, well, now I guess it was forty years ago.  What do you suppose I put into them?  Some very special books, Cavafey's poems in Greek, for instance, that I used to haltingly translate in the company of a Greek friend each of us lying full length on two sofas in my living room, talk about sybaritic learning!, but could I even begin to do that now?  Poems go on the shelf next to a very special anthropological study of the Maya I was so enthusiastic about when I was in Mexico learning Spanish and promised myself that I would devour.  Let's see that was in 2000. Why was, is, damn it!, this book so important to me?  I am growing afraid to bring out the successive volumes from these boxes, so many dreams, so many hopes.  Why when packing did I anticipate this bright future whereas in the unpacking I have the more than sinking feeling that it is all an exercise in futility.  The bright spot of the last two days has been hanging the paintings, both for the pleasure of the new arrangements, and for the extraordinarily harmonious way in which my husband and I have each played our parts, he using his level, the hammer and nails, me standing back and squinting, making those minute aesthetic adjustments that I alone seem to notice.  Now I have to find a place for the fifty or so framed photographs of everyone who has meant something to me.  There must be some wall space left . . . my bathroom, for instance.  Do I want to stare at my parents when they were in their twenties while I am brushing my teeth, or, no, not that?  My husband is taking me to Europe when this is all done.  He promises we will be completely unpacked in another week.  He recently handed me approximately one hundred large size envelopes to set in my desk drawer. He who does the books for our household, and was once a school assistant superintendent buys office supplies in gross lots. I use maybe perhaps five envelopes a year. 

Fear And Trembling On The Journey

For the past few years I have spent time in Boston's South Station waiting for either the commuter train home or an Amtrak train to New York.  Hanging out in the grand space that has been created from the original train station used to have a kind of festival atmosphere until the authorities who manage Amtrak decided to get in on the trend to reposition post 9/11 America as a place fraught with incipient terrorism just waiting to be unmasked and apprehended.  While high up in the station are giant screens used by advertisers to make one tiresome shill after another, much lower down and more immediately connecting with the waiting throng are screens showing variations on the now ubiquitous "If you see something, say something."  There are scenes of non suspecting waiting passengers having their luggage stolen from them, and someone just like you alerting them to their loss.  There is a young girl on the train noting a man entering and putting a package overhead and then leaving the train, whereupon she puts two and two together and talks to a "uniformed member of the staff."  In an effort to cozy up to us there are interviews with security officers emphasizing the unseen threats that lurk around the train system, there are interviews with canine officers, showing how dogs are sniffing out the dangers in the luggage, warnings not to pet them.   At one point there is a shot of a young man nonchalantly walking down the center of a railroad track with his buds in his ears, either suicidely stupid or genuinely wanting to end it all--can't imagine a rational person embarking upon that path.  To my surprise as I waited in Penn Station to go to Washington I encountered the same dread and forboding, and coming back Union Station offered the same entertainment.  What a way to sit at and wait for a train, bombarded by views played endless of treachery, mayhem, sinister designs.  It is in such an amusing contrast with air travel where the waiting space has every dreary daytime television talk show imaginable.  Can you imagine sitting waiting for your plane to be called and watching a show of sinister people carrying unlikely luggage, or police apprehending someone doing something questionable.  The airline flying public would freak out.  For some reason riding the rails is for sterner folk who can countenance the prospect of desperate people boarding the train or can well imagine a proper young man walking along ahead of a twenty ton locomotive streaming along at one hundred miles an hour.

The Arrival

While my husband came down to Sarasota ahead of the van and was here to supervise the unloading and tentative placement of its contents I was lolling about in Manhattan getting "culture," seeing friends, and as my inner voice proclaimed firmly "not pulling your oar."  But my spouse was adamant that I had done my bit in packing all the paintings, sort of crating them actually, and more to the point,  as he did indeed insist, I was "frail," and would be in the way.  Okay.  So I had fun in New York and even took a side trip to Washington to see the galleries and dine with old friends.  As one of those fun ironic tricks that fate employs to liven up things I hurt my knee while demonstrating to a very elderly neighbor in our building in New York that I could rise from a chair without needing the support of arm rests and on one occasion of this supreme braggadocio pulled something or other, so that throughout my stay I tended to totter, very much the "frail" person I had been designated.  I arrived in Sarasota yesterday morning early, and when the friend who had picked me up brought me to the apartment he joined my husband and me in immediately setting to and hanging paintings.  Hitting the ground running is my and my husband's managerial style so it was only after a few hours of this nailing and positioning and using the level that I noticed my surroundings.  My, my we brought a lot of stuff down from up North.  Yes, yes, it's all going to fit just fine, we knew what we were doing, but my, my there is a lot to set away, sorted out, thought through, and very quietly I understood that it would take a week or so.  I am not at my best in disorganization, neither is he, so we are drawing deep breaths and keeping a "this too shall pass" mood of utter disengagement from the proceedings.  It is the morning of day two and I had a very good sleep after having treated that darling spouse to a giant steak dinner at a way way high end upscale steak joint which brought the end of the day into a delightful focus as we yet again realized how much we loved being able to walk across the street well, maybe two and one part is walking through a mall parking lot--not quite the bliss I paint!--and of course the temperature was ninety something and the humidity maybe sixty five so it was not sylvan bliss or balmy moments, but, hey, to walk to walk to urban destinations, and find a huge steak at the end of the journey.  We smiled and laughed and joked throughout the dinner.  I have to say that both of us have been so happy and pleased from the moment we conceived this mad cap scheme of moving permanently to Sarasota and our good mood prevails through all the boxes, and litter that is everywhere.