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.