God Commands

The newspapers are full of stories of youthful Muslims from European countries who have gone to join jihad in Syria and other war torn spots.  They are as depressing as accounts of various knee jerk reactions among the evangelicals in our own country toward behaviors that their version of God and the Bible will not tolerate even for other people let alone themselves.  And I list in the same category the believers in a newly created religion, couldn't be more than a hundred and fifty years old, who are convinced of the sort of unverifiable mythological nonsense that in the ancient religions is let by because long time spans make everything fuzzy.  Maybe a human really could walk on water thousands of years ago.  And then there are countries dictated by one variant of a religion while all others walk on borrowed territory, so to speak.  When I was sixteen I left the Christian faith because their authority figures insisted that they had the proof that I was an enemy of their god for being gay.  Hey, I won't stay where I am not wanted.  And the distance thereby obtained gave me the chance to study the atrocities committed by various Christian sects over the centuries and still continuing.  I felt glad to be out of it.  So it is,  I do not understand how modern day moderate Muslims can remain within a faith system that produces such violence and terrorism the world over.  Disaffected youth is not an answer; if the same disaffected youth had grown up on "Mary Poppins" and "Ivanhoe" there orientation would be entirely different.  I think of the complicity of the Christian churches with the Holocaust and I don't want to be part of Christian churches anymore, even if down the block is the sweetest dearest old rector, his bald pate shining in the morning sun as he welcomes parishioners.  In the same way if I were a Muslim I would not want to be part a religious system that has created the inferno in the Middle East.  The only thing to say for Orthodox Jews is they keep their mishigas to themselves and if Israel is willing to tolerate their growth to the point that they bankrupt the state with their welfare needs, so be it.  To all of these intolerant and rigid religious people, let me say firmly I don't believe in any kind of god that you are espousing nor in any of the dictates that your god seems to be demanding.  I pass on all of this.

The Homosexual

We have just seen the story of Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game," and I am still seething with rage.  At the very end the story of Turing's life is tied up in a series of on-screen statements about what happened to all the principals.  In the course of the film we are treated to the investigation of Turing as a practicing homosexual and his accepting "chemical castration," as they called it in England, instead of a two year prison sentence, when he is found out as having been involved with a male.  However, we learn in the final statements that he committed suicide one year into this treatment, and also the information that 49,000 men were convicted of sodomy under the law of gross indecency from the mid-nineteenth century until the law was changed in the twentieth, and that Queen Elizabeth II a few years ago publicly pardoned Turing.  My rage was that she did not publicly and officially repudiate the beastly legal attacks on these other 48,999 homosexuals (what about Oscar Wilde, for starters?).  It's as if one person spared from Auschwitz makes it alright--  grotesque!  The English hatred of homosexuals fueled by those hideous strictures in the monotheistic Abrahamic religions is tragic, bad enough with the Christians but now they have the Muslims, too.  On another level, the film was especially amusing and ironic, since the man was obviously a total nutter, misfit, and weirdo, not to mention narcissist par excellence, but what was entirely mundane about him, seen from the perspective of the twenty first century, was taking some guy's cock into the mouth or up the bum, acts so routine and commonplace that the idea of his being hunted and destroyed for it was amusing in a wry, ironic tragic way, when all along he was in fact seriously hated by almost everyone who came into contact with him, despised, really by everyone because he was a totally hateful person, arrogant, self-involved, anti-social, out of contact, incapable of human relationships. I guess we could murmur Asberger's nowadays and let him off the hook.  Amusing, I thought, and altogether a beautiful story.  Great filming, too.

The Nicene Creed

Reading the daily accounts of the conflicts among the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, added to commotion generated by the various competing sects of aggressive Christians and Jews, one grows nostalgic for Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in the third century CE.  The emperor convened a council to settle on Christian faith that would cut through the competing doctrines afloat in his empire which were making for trouble, dissension, all the things a busy emperor does not need.  The consensus of belief established at that Council was finally the product of Emperor Constantine himself, who like every aggressive manager was quickly tired of the nit picking of doctrine that persons of religious faith always produce and were producing at the Council.  He cobbled together what we call today The Nicene Creed or its variant The Apostles Creed and imposed it upon the mass of his imperial subjects to give everyone an imperial identity, with the aim of making everyone 'orthodox'; it was the passport into participation political or otherwise in the empire.  I used to know it by heart, having recited it every Sunday in the early years of my life, as well as sung it in amateur choruses in some pieces such as Schubert's "Mass In G." On the odd occasion I am attending a Christian service, weddings, funerals, and what not, I find myself enthusiastically mouthing the words of the Creed without the slightest sense of what I mean by doing so.  Constantine is venerated for having converted to the Christian faith, indeed he and his mother have achieved the status of saints in the Byzantine Christian Church, only getting the appellation "great," bestowed by Rome.  The motive for his conversion is tied up with a great story, maybe entirely apocryphal.  On the night before the battle for the Milvian Bridge on the north side of Rome he had a dream in which a cross appeared with someone saying or it was written in Greek, the Latin translation of which has become famous "In Hoc Signo Vinces," in this sign you will conquer [the Latin version even made it onto the Pall Mall cigarette package].   I have a suspicion that he saw conversion as a great way to rein in the crazies, placate his mother Helena, renowned for her devotion to Christianity, and give himself an identity that would make his imperial subjects sit up and take notice.  I doubt that the Emperor was too deeply imbued with the faith.  Someone who punishes a lying wife by having her boiled alive, not to mention killing his son on the suspicion (later proved false) of having slept with the lady does not, to my mind, qualify as having studied the doctrines of Jesus too carefully.  I omit his many other acts of imperial murder; maybe that was why Rome never made him a saint.  One of the sadder features of his legacy is that citizenship or a person's national identity remained tied to a Christian faith, as evidenced by the creed.  For a time citizenship in Greece was tied to belief in Orthodoxy.  Throughout Europe over the centuries Jewish persons were denied their legitimate place simply for their presumed failure of faith, making it all too easy to try to eliminate them, as essentially non-persons.  God rest your soul, Constantine.  You have a lot to answer for.

The Grandchildren

Here it is, another Christmas season, and our mailbox is stuffed with Christmas cards, well, stuffed is a relative term, let's say we get quite a few, actually more Christmas cards than circular and other junk mail.  There used to be quite a few persons who composed Christmas letters which I glanced at in a desultory fashion, just to note the emphases and omissions.  Now, when they are far fewer, I would welcome them, just because I don't get around much anymore, as the song goes, and see a smaller and smaller number of those whom I think of as friends, not to mention, their ranks having been much diminished by death and dementia.  The Christmas letters are far fewer, the cards with photos are fewer; it's the influence of Facebook where family news is broadcast far and wide, leaving the non-subscriber outside the pale of family or friends.  There have always been those who send on photos, but there is a new and disturbing trend of sending on as surrogates photos of the grandchildren.  In many instances persons of whom I have the most affectionate memory from forty or so years ago include only representations of their grandchildren.  Forget that I have not even met their children often since they were teeny tots, but the grandchildren are no more to me than the family pet.  I want photos of my friends, now beyond the hope of serious facial surgery, just as they are, just for the fun of trying to decipher their faces of yesteryear in today's lineaments. My own grandchildren are indifferent to the sending of cards, as indifferent to life beyond Facebook as their parents, my children.  I recognize that there is something more involved than Facebook, however. My children from an early age were encouraged to develop themselves independently of each other and their parents, and they have done so.  My wife came from a family she did not much care to spend time with with whom she however spent almost all major holidays, and summer visits, bringing us all along in tow.  I came from a large family that dissolved more or less in the years of moving about in the Second World War, the impetus to reunite having been lost in the death of our mother.  We had a wonderful Sunday dinner in 1940 when the oldest two went east to college; we six siblings met again in 1954 at our mother's funeral (father had died in an accident in the thirties), and in 1973 worried that we would never meet again I invited all five to my home in Brookline MA for a weekend.  And that has been it.  Three of them are now dead so the next family reunion will have to be in Heaven.  My wife and I divorced when the children were in their teens, so  they no longer sensed any place as "home" except for their grandparents' (their mother's parents) ancestral farm in New Hampshire.  Unfortunately the grandparents were not grandparently so it was not an emotional and spiritual refuge.  They all married into secure strong families which gave them the attachment they needed, but deprived me more or less of any position of meaningful focus in their lives.  Funny to have four children and six grandchildren, delightful people; whenever I get together with one or all of them we truly have nonestop fun,  but none of whom would consider initiating a meeting, and I have more or less accepted disappearing from their lives.  I guess Christmas brings out these thoughts.

Nostalgia

We were recently with friends of my husbands at a restaurant in New York when the woman of the other couple said to me in amazement: "You're really quite nostalgic.  I wouldn't have thought you went in for nostalgia, thought you would always be looking to the future."  How strange, I thought.  First of all, when you are in your mid-eighties the future does not seem like so large and inviting a subject to explore. Ever since I have been examining my attitudes.  Yes, I am very much a person who lives with nostalgia.  I guess growing up in a house  with a mother who looked back with nostalgia to the days of her Edwardian girlhood, to the courtship of her husband who died in the First World War, of the fun and games she had with her second husband, my father, who died when he was just fifty in a car crash, a woman who looked back to the world of servants and money and genial ease.  Well, none of that inspired me to look to the future.  Here I am at eighty five, and as I sit in my chair reading all the literary periodicals, I am always fascinated with news about Gerald and Sarah Murphy on Cap d'Antibe, about Marcel Proust and the boulevards of Paris where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas entertained the artists of the day, about everything that made the twenties and thirties so fascinating and repellent.  I look back with horror and fascination at the events unfolding throughout Europe in the thirties, that peculiar ardor, that lassitude.  And then I can not stop thinking back to peculiar enthusiasm and hope that the Second World War inspired, of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again," of all the GI's in my classes at university, rough, hardy, enthusiastic, optimistic, sprung loose by the GI Bill, embarked on an entirely new road.  Oh, the wonderful simple minded optimism of those years!  I think back to the parties, the dance hops, when I was a teenager, and then I remember the years of my late teens in Manhattan, whoring around, remember so well the marvelous sensation of getting sloshed, not fall down drunk, but not sober either, the movies, the art exhibitions, the strange people I ran into, the refugees, the weird veterans, it was all so much fun, and whether that was true or not, that's the memory of it.  Yes, I want to go back to Bette Davis asking "Why do we need the moon when we have the stars?"  I want things to be corny again, and I want the exquisite thrill of discovery when first I read ancient epic in the original Greek.  I'm tired of canned laughter and recorded applause. Jon Stewart bores me to tears; can't stand that face he puts on.  How awful it is that I must confess I am indeed nostalgic.  I don't seem to notice the here and now of the twenty first century.  My gaze is elsewhere.

Christmas Day 2014

According to the Greek historian Plutarch in his essay "The Obsolescence of Oracles,"  during the reign of the emperor Tiberius the news of Pan's death came to one Thamus, a sailor on his way to Italy on a boat out in the Mediterranean. A divine voice hailed him across the salt water, "Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes be sure to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."  Which Thamus did, and the news was greeted from shore with groans and laments.  The adult life of Jesus is conventionally dated in the early decades of the Common Era during the reign of the emperor Tiberius.  So it was that a great religious system came into existence as another collapsed.  As the distinguished classicist Hermann Fraenkel argued in his Sather lectures "Ovid, A Poet Between Two Worlds," it was at this moment in time that the idea of love entered the world.  The pagan poet Ovid hinted at this new sentiment in his poetry, which became incarnate in the person of Jesus whose preaching focused on love more than anything else.  For many it defines Christianity. For all its many virtues classical antiquity never really discovered the idea of love, either romantic or ethical.  The ancient poets sang of men and women burning with desire, that's about as far as they got toward love. And of course they never really got their minds around the idea of heaven or redemption.  Friederich Nietzsche in his long essay "The Birth of Tragedy" identifies what is the salient feature of pagan antiquity, an abiding sense of irony, a deep suspicion of hope, an instinctive understanding of the futility of all things, the calm acceptance of death as the end of life, death that in turn informs everything that is life.  At the same time the ancients had the imagination to quicken everything in their existence, every tree, rock, blade of grass, with the spirit of something beyond the immediately experienced world.  In this way they sensed themselves to be part of a greater whole to which they owed a debt in some way or another.  They peopled this larger world with a community of superior beings, their gods, a group of thoroughly egotistical beings who, like any aristocratic, self-obsessed group, rode roughshod over the feelings and needs of their underlings; they sometimes picked them up and loved them, sometimes it was rape, sometimes more sympathetic, or in a fit of pique slapped them down, or even killed them. The ancients never had to cry out "Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" because frankly, my dear, the gods never cared.  No, the humans were happy if they escaped notice, and most of the time their gods left them alone to live their human lives with energy, intelligence, dignity, and grace.  Look at the sculpture, read the writings, they were in love with beauty, with the moment, able to let the shadow of death cross their path and not flinch nor moan, yes, curse, rage, and cry, but never flinch nor moan.

Abraham, Isaac, and the lamb

I have a gay friend who was raised in a strict Southern Baptist family, and consequently had the hardest time coming to grips with his sexuality once he reached adulthood.  It is a common enough sad story, more so for me, because I know him, and am well aware of what repression, the perversion of lying to himself and others, cost him.  The years of his adulthood were first marred by the violently negative reaction of his parents when he told them the truth, and, as time goes by, he has has been blighted by his widowed mother's continuing disapproval, condemnation, really, of a fellow who I can testify from years of acquaintance is the kindest, most gentle, most generous person imaginable. I am not a religious person but I know the stories of the bible.  I think of Abraham and Isaac, how the Lord told Abraham to make of Isaac a human sacrifice.  Two things about this story always fascinate me, one is that the narrator stresses at some length the reaction of Isaac to the circumstance that as he and his father proceed to the location where the sacrifice is to take place the youngster keeps asking his father where the sacrificial lamb is, what is going to happen.  And the father lies to the boy insisting that there will be a lamb at the appointed time.  And, of course, Isaac is readied for sacrifice, and indeed the Lord does substitute the sacrificial animal.  Ever since I was a boy I have been repelled by this story, imagining what must have been the aftermath, how Isaac could never ever have trusted his father again, thinking of how he led him on.  Sure, strong faith and all that, but what must the boy have been thinking in those last few moments?  Happy ending?  Yes, but what was the psychological scar?  The other side of this is of course the substitution of the lamb, and I always read this as a prophecy of what was to come.  Abraham, the stern old Hebrew father, versed in fire and brimstone, of a piece with the harsh god of the Old Testament, whereas the lamb which the Lord found as a substitute for the boy, seems to augur for the coming revelation of divine love brought into the world by the Prince of Peace.  And in that spirit I tell my friend to explain to his mother that she must dismiss Abraham from her thinking and accept the lamb of love into her heart and embrace her son.  Open her heart and let herself be saved.  Even Pope Francis would recommend it, but perhaps telling that to a southern Baptist does not have the hortatory power I imagine.

O Tannenbaum

I am always amused by the controversies aroused by Christmas celebrations.  I was born into a family of very nominally practicing Christians, well, my father was a Unitarian, and not a Christian at all, and since he died when I was six, I guess we can't even count him.  Mother was an aesthetic Episcopalian which is to say that she enjoyed the drama and lights of the major holy days.  Christmas dinner was big with her, which had been preceded by Midnight Mass and lots of carol singing, and invitations to her Easter dinners were always a prize at which time she reminded us children that it was the herald of spring, good cheer, and hope.  I don't remember lingering much on the Crucifixion, the Descent and the Resurrection.  My second wife and I raised our four children in a home devoid of religious instruction; I don't think she had ever been to church, and I who was once a devout altar boy and crucifer, left religion completely at the age of sixteen although I was happy when I married my first wife to discover that she shared my mother's love of the Episcopal church as an occasion to experience ritual, drama, good lights and music.  There was always a wonderful Christmas tree in my life, the decorating of which was a joyous ritual, the eventual removal a pain in the ass.  In all the years of my association with it I never thought of it in connection with the story of the birth of the Christian god.  Early on I had studied history and comparative cultures enough to know that the so-called Christmas tree was simply an add-on, implying nothing about Christian faith, and enjoyed it as such.  Christmas carols which I sang lustily every chance I got were more obviously depicting that event but telling someone, for instance, the story that unfolds in "Gone With The Wind" does not require my believing it.  I remember when living in Brookline Massachusetts that it was largely the Jewish parents of my children's friends who complained to the school administration when it decreed that there would be no more singing of carols, insisting on keeping them on the grounds that they were beautiful, a traditional part of the season, and one could mouth the words and intone the music as a joyous aesthetic communal experience without a commitment of belief.  But then of course most everyone in Brookline in those days was a liberal, instinctively ecumenical.  Anyone who has stepped into a public space between Thanksgiving and Christmas has certainly suffered the assault of aggressive commercialism, of elevator music swing--even hip hop--versions of those hymns I remember singing in candlelight processions on the Eve.  There is nothing that brings to mind the story of the Angel of the Lord revealing to that frightened poor girl that she is going to achieve instant stardom, bothersome celebrity, that her quiet pleasant marriage to that unassuming Joseph is going to be upended with agents, reporters, television cameras, total misery.  I love the lights, the tinsel, the smell of a pine trees, wishing people Merry Christmas.  Sappy as this may sound, I don't think it's anything more than the Season of Feeling Friendly, Cheerful, and maybe, even, --for a grouch like me--a teeny bit happy, once I learned to stay out of the stores, and have gone through rehab and no longer give presents.

Health Care

In the long ago days of my graduate school career at Harvard, I was dramatically helped by my first wife, Mary, who worked as a clerk in Harvard's alumni records office for 99 cents an hour.  We lived on this, since my scholarship money went to pay the tuition in that first year.  Apart from the benefit of the learned faculty and ultimately the rewards of sporting a Harvard PhD at the end of the game, I was also provided with medical care for free.  When once I had an evening in the company of a Wasp grandee of the Harvard establishment, I ventured that it was very hard on a young fellow such as myself with a wife who did not receive free medical care as what I thought was a natural benefit.  He drew back in astonishment:  "Free? For her?  No even a student? But that would be socialism!"  Since Mary was a juvenile diabetic she had naturally more need of medical attention than I did, and we were very pleased as time went by that she did not need anything.  Yet there came the day, when something went wrong, and she was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital.  As was the case in those long ago days, there was no talk of payment upon admission, no frantic demand for insurance documents.  And she was there maybe four days, one longer than necessary since the staff neglected to restore her insulin injections after whatever they had done to her, so she threatened to go into a coma and that required extra bedtime.  I guess a good lawyer would have sniffed out a classic malpractice suit there, but we were naifs from Iowa, plus my father had been a doctor who asked only that people pay what they could, so East coast ethics and practices were far from our thinking.  We checked out with a whopping bill for these four days, and within a week a bill collector rang our front door with all kinds of threats.  We had no money.  Not a penny.  I was frantic, and in my delirium walked into the Cambridge Savings Bank and met with a young man, now today I cannot remember the name of this blessed saint, but he later became president of that bank, this I remember.  I murmured and stumbled, he held out a pad and pen and helped me through the figures, and then with no further ado, no guarantees, no security, he had the bank teller type out a check made out to me for one hundred dollars.  I paid the hospital, we worked and scraped and saved the money over a year's time.  The bank never came after us, never uttered a peep; we breathed a sigh of relief, however, when the last penny was paid back.  I remember this in the context of our next door neighbor in the local apartment building, a working class single mom with two small children, who was desperately working two jobs and just managing the rent.  One month her resources failed her and she was evicted.  I in my sweet simple Iowa way had never encountered something like this nor her animus toward her economic tormentor our landlord,who saw fit to forget about boiler repairs and eliminate hot water for months on end which simpleton that I was, I endured.  She was angry and I well remember the day she and the kids pulled out.  She took a heavy chair and smashed in the plaster of every wall in the apartment.  I didn't know that this was what you were supposed to do, stupid sweet Iowa boy that I was, and indeed I have never understood about protests, demonstrations, Stonewall, and on and on, having been content to live off the protests of others.

Twenty Five Years--A Second Blog for Sunday

Twenty five years ago, it was a Friday night in Manhattan and the Graduate Classics Program at the City University had just had its annual pre -Christmas get together, rather much of a joke in so intensely a Jewish setting as the 52nd floor of the Grace Building on 42nd street fronting on Bryant Park.  It was there I met the man with whom I have spent the last quarter century.  He was 46, in a mid life crisis slump which saw him leave full-time teaching in New Jersey and enroll in graduate school in Classics; I was 59, a divorcé father of four grown children, and executive officer of the CUNY grad program in Classics coordinating it with the Programs of Fordham and NYU. In the ordinary world one would be suspicious that the student was sucking up to the professor, but our relatively mature ages put paid to that hackneyed old suspicion.  We were both invited to the same dinner by two other students in the program who in fact had maneuvered this meeting.  As I stood to leave after the dinner our male host, a Greek, followed his country's custom and kissed me on both cheeks; the other male, the dinner guest invited along with me, stood and did the same, although he was just a Staten Island boy.  That was a tentative beginning.  In January he picked me up at my Manhattan apartment to drive me to a cocktail party at the home of his fellow teachers in New Jersey.  A meeting of minds was demonstrated when I arrived at the curb five minutes early and he was already waiting.  His colleagues in New Jersey took me one by one to a side room to tell me what a marvelous spouse, partner, you name it, this gentleman would be.  Reminded me of all the church ladies in Iowa, the yentas the world over.  Later we went dancing at a gay-lesbian benefit, and found were born to dance, to lead and to follow, seamlessly and effortless, Fred and Fred (forget about Ginger!) And we have been dancing around the world ever since, Rome, Berlin,London, Paris, St Petersburg, Tokyo, Kyoto, Mexico City apartments in New York, houses in Cambridge, beach property in Hull Ma, condos in Florida.  Twenty five years that started with me doing most of the cooking while my man got up, shoveled out the car, drove to his high school worked all day and came home beaten.  After twenty years, he retired, we moved to Florida, I grew feeble, he has taken over the cooking most of it in any case.  He has always done the repairs and remodeling, big things, a deck in Cambridge, a terrace and pergola in Hull, less here in Sarasota except for the heroic month of August 2014 when he patiently stood with hammer in hand, nails in the mouth, and me at his back every few minutes, murmuring, "no, move it maybe an inch to the right and just a little lower, yes, there!" for four,count 'em four hours.  He takes my hand now to steady me when I step off a curb, I cook him scrambled eggs and capers or poached eggs on toast for Sunday breakfast  I irritate him by having been raised in the belief that there will always be money in my checking account and that someone will come by to do the dishes and dust the rooms, all true or not, the instinct cannot be erased.  He believes that effort, hard work and attention to details got him out of the economic and social milieu in which he was born.  Despite everything we are constantly amusing one another and our many habitations ring with laughter.  Oh, yes, we can yell and pout, too.  On the whole, however, it has been a pretty good run.

Prejudice

Texas legislator Jason Vilalba has recently introduced legislation to permit businesses to refuse service to those whose ideas and behaviors violate the religious beliefs of the proprietors.  While it is clear that Vilalba had in mind discrimination toward gays, etc. (I can never manage to remember all the initials of that acronym), I feel that were I still employed as a professor I would make every effort to use the new law to protect myself in my classes from a variety of religious beliefs that when enunciated by various of my students are so disruptive of serious thought and contemplation, not to mention violating every canon of intellectual good taste.  I mean try explaining to some of those Christians out there that Zeus is the father of the gods, and renowned for his sexual athletics whereby he demonstrates the essential fecundity of Nature which in the Greek view of things is an absolute Good.  Try explaining the fundamental role an erect penis plays in Dionysian spring festival parades contrasting it with a corpse on a cross, and talk about the death of the year god, and the birth of spring, and so on and so forth.  I mean I have no objection to students entertaining any idea they choose or into which they have been indoctrinated by their local mind police, but, hey, keep the shrill outrage and vituperation to themselves,  okay?  We are trying to talk seriously about alternative cultures; we are not out waving our banners and carrying our shields and swords against the infidels.  Knee jerk religious believers, because they have taken on the baggage of belief so mindlessly, are like pack mules always swaying dangerously as their load slides perilously from one side to the other, always about to fall off.  My heart goes out to them but their ängst is none of my concern nor the rest of the class.  And then we get to the Credo, i.e., "I believe in one God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and in Jesus Christ, his only son, begotten not made, conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, who for our sins and our salvation"   ... . ... .... and so on and so forth, well, just having them get their minds around it's being something imposed by a Roman emperor, tired of all the squabbling Christian believers who would split the strength of the empire asunder with their tiresome squabbling whether Jesus was son of god, flesh of god, a human being like a god,  and on and on, sounds like our own Muslims, Catholics, evangelical Christians, Mormons, not to mention Jews who won't even go near the damn notion.  The emperor was right.  This is the belief; put up or shut up, ot's the only only guarantee of citizenship.  We've sort of gone the other way around here, believe what you like, but not in public, and don't shoot the school children,  save your energies for the Great God Mammon and go shopping.

Christmas In New York

It was in the mid seventies, I had just come back from a year living in Rome, and had not yet recovered a memory of the rhythms of New York City.  I was on East 57th Street, between Fifth and Madison, intent on going to the Midtown Gallery, which was on the second floor, on the north side of the street.  I entered a smallish door with the number I was searching for, walked down a corridor to an elevator at the end.  I could see someone waiting for the elevator, and absentmindedly noted that the elevator was available and the  gentleman waiting in his trench coat did not seem to go aboard.  And then he was in front of me turned in my direction and pointing a gun at my belly.  "Shut up, turn around."  I am not Mr. Brave Heart and nearly fainted, spun around, my heart in my mouth.  He nudged me over to a stair out of a line of vision from the street.  He pressed the gun against my back "Give me your money."  All I could think of was the gun going off shattering my spine.  I reached into my pocket which unfortunately held a lot of cash in a money clip, pulled the dollar bills out of the clip and passed it over my shoulder.  I realized that by mistake I had given him my driver's license, too, and in an automatic reaction asked for it back.  There was silence, and then "Take it."  I turned around to find his face up close to mine and the drivers license in his teeth.  "Take it," he repeated, and I almost put my mouth up to his and took the license in my teeth before I suddenly had the presence of mind to use my fingers.  I had had a moment of erotic confusion and sort of thought maybe we were playing some exotic form of Spin The Bottle.  He was young and black and very good looking, there in his natty trench coat.  But very, very nervous.  He pocketed the money and disappeared down the corridor up which I had come.  I got on the elevator and made it to the gallery, whereupon I almost fainted from the fear of it all.  "Oh, dear," the two ladies in the gallery exclaimed, when I had explained my immediate need to sit down, "and just last week somebody got knifed on that elevator."  They called the detectives, and I spent the next half hour with them from which I learned that passing things with the teeth avoids finger prints (I have yet to have that useful information come in handy), rolling their eyes when I brought up Spin the Bottle.  Mugging at Christmas time was endemic, they said, as young  impoverished parents were desperate for money for toys. Jesus, what those Magi started! The gallery ladies gave me ten dollars so that I could get a cab downtown.  I was in a mental fog but resolutely determined to make my lunch date in Soho.  My lunch partner was one of those extraordinarily rich people who in those days never carried money, and neither did he have credit cards.  So it was that I used my own to pay for the lunch and lurched to an ATM to get money for the rest of my stay in New York City.  Whenever I see televised shots of the fabulous store windows in Midtown decorated for Christmas, I think back to my own moment of Noël in Tinsel Town.

My New Stove

When I bought the condo in Florida the previous owner had put in a beautiful tile floor in the living room, glassed in the lanai (what Floridians call the screened in porch that runs the length of the unit), and made various other attractive improvements, but left the rather elderly electric stove in the kitchen.  It worked perfectly well, as my economically prudent husband kept insisting while I viewed it with disdain and suspicion.  The kitchen was small; so was the stove, but still it had four burners and one oven capacious enough for two elderly gents who ate out a good deal.  I hated it, hated the seriously baked-on crap in the oven that even the oven cleaning mechanism could not remove completely, hated th crazy  tilt of the electric units on top of the stove, even if you could push them down and make things more or less level when you cooked, hated that the wells beneath them had been lined with aluminum foil by the previous owner, and there were baked on drippings here and there.  I HATED THE STOVE!  One day, enough was enough, and I set out to replace it, and discovered that so idiosyncratic was the arrangement of the cabinets and stove in this tiny kitchen, that either I would have to remodel the cabinets or have a custom made stove built for its one and only possible location.  Eighteen months later I have a glistening stove, a considerably diminished bank account, but I am happy.  We seem to be eating out even more so that it is seldom used.  My husband has taken over more of the cooking and he is quite good at it, but surprisingly enough his quite compulsive personality (he balances check books to the penny, the second spouse of mine to commit to this practice), he does not think to clean up the stove after using it.  There are drips and spills thither and yon, well, I exaggerate, but nonetheless, there are spots.  I bought this stove spotless and spotless it must continue to be. I have discovered the new joy of my life, which is cleaning the stove.  Yesterday, for instance, I took all the metal spill cups out from under the burners, washed them, dried them, lovingly put them back in all their shiny beauty.  The polished metal surround of the burners is polished by me every day, sometimes twice a day.  I take a wet cloth to the white baked enamel top surface whenever I near the stove, eagle eyed as well, to spot any spill that might have fallen on a bit of horizontal trim above the oven, and, of course, speaking of oven, that mechanism of automatic oven clean is ever on my mind.  You have to cut back here and there as you advance in age, no doubt about it, but maybe I have given up a lot of projects as old age comes on me, maybe I grow frailer, yes, and maybe less imaginative, but I still have my shiny new stove to clean.

Dinner Parties

I grew up in a home where Sunday dinner at one in the afternoon was always an occasion for us six children still dressed in the clothes we had worn to church joined our widowed mother and a number of adult guests to sit around our large dining table outfitted with the requisite linens and sterling silver cutlery that betoken the social behaviors of the upper middle class where we were served by a staff moving silently and efficiently with plates and platters all of which we children had somehow learned to manage and still carry on conversation.  When I was in my late thirties, early forties, a father of a family living in a large house adjacent to Boston, I was in the habit of inviting my friends and any friend of the children who were on hand to join me and usually five or six adults, and their mother if she had made it home from her architectural practice, to sit at our large dining room table, ornamented just as that in my childhood home, where I served up lavish feasts for which I was routinely praised by one and all.  We had no help and I did this all myself fueled by a lavish supply of martinis as I hummed to myself and moved the pots around in the kitchen.  Sometimes twice a week, too.  I remember all this as I confront my having invited a young woman and her fiancé to dinner Saturday.  She is vegetarian so I suggested spinach lasagna an easy dish which I remember having made a million times in the years past.  But truth to tell I am panicking.  After twenty years of preparing the evening meal for my husband, then my partner, who was still working whilst I was retired, I have got in the habit in the last five of letting him do an awful lot, because he was grateful and wanted to pay me back, and he is a damn good cook, and, well, let's face it, I have grown rather tired of cooking.  It is supposed to be bad for the elderly to eat out a lot because restaurant food is so heavily salted, but it's all so easy, and, yes, we do eat out a lot.  And the fact of the matter is, I really have somehow let the discipline of preparing a meal to escape me, and, now, confronted with a dinner for four on Saturday night, the drinks, the hors d'oeuvres, the lasagna, the salad, well, she is bringing the dessert, thank god, but still, my hands are shaking at the prospect.  I have been studying recipes on the internet.  Easy as pie, but will it turn out alright?  Frantic.  My husband says smiling that it will be a good experience, that I will love it once I get into it.  I don't know.

Do You Believe In Fairies?

The Gay and Lesbian Review recently focused on the last century's most important gay and lesbian novels.  And this got into the discussion of what is gay.  Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, has a main character who despite the narrator's insistence that he has had affairs with women, seems to many gays an inherently gay character, and the idea is reinforced with the historical fact that its author was prosecuted for violating England's sodomy laws.  But a lot of people are not sure that Wilde constitutes a gay person, and that's because there's so much debate and confusion over how such a person is categorized.  The same problem was rehearsed in the discussions of the other novels selected until they got to Gore Vidal's first novel in which the protagonist is comfortably or uncomfortably homosexual in his inclinations throughout the narrative.  Vidal himself always insisted that there were no such thing as gays, only homosexual acts.  The authors of the various articles in the Review were all insistent that there is such a phenomenon as a gay person, themselves being as one felt from the reading all self-identified as gay.  As an old man who sex life is definitely a thing of the past I am more or less outside of a need for definition which turns on one's sexual behavior, so I don't have the sense of being "gay" or "straight" or "bi."  I just don't think about it, but I should say that something that used to mark homosexual males was their self-hatred by which they managed to acculturate themselves to the larger heterosexual world.  I always imagined that lay behind Oscar Wilde's surrender to the authorities who judged him and destroyed his life.  Unlike African-American and Jewish children who have a defense against the larger world's hatred of their demographic in their loving accepting families, homosexual boys used to have no such protections.  Now the acceptance and or indifference of the larger world protects them as they were never before.  As to myself, having been in heterosexual marriage relationships for a total of forty five years, I present myself to the world as a conflicted person.  But I wonder now that it is all over if the conflict lies not more in the world than in me.  I am a great believer in the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the so called "normal" world determines the manner and degree that the so called "abnormal" is different.  So it is that I believe that homosexually inclined males as soon as they were perceived as violating the norm had to be categorized and eventually the negotiation settled on the term "gay" associated with certain behaviors, habits of mind, psychological traits, and so on.  Some homosexuals retreated into a "safe" zone where most of their associates were gay, and this aggressive mutual reassurance made for the development of a "gay" sensibility.  But I am not sure that it is really necessary to identify with Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce" as the gay theorist David Halperin insists in his strange book How To Be Gay, just as I think it is a welcome thing and perfectly "normal" that young homosexual males nowadays at least in the United States go out dating before settling into a carnal relationship with another fellow.  I meet a lot of young men who I am told are gay who act and talk exactly like any other guy.  Because I am so old and clearly hors de concours no homosexual male needs to "come on" to me in any sense of the word.  I could be his father or grandfather, more likely.  So more and more gays are guys.  And because it is no big deal in our culture except among seriously religious people and they can be avoided, the Unmarked are not out there Marking.  So, yes, there are fairies and we can enjoy them in our midst whenever they alight near at hand.

The Police

Years ago I once had a student in a night class who was older, already the graduate of a police academy who wanted to get an academic degree as well while working full time in a nearby precinct.  We struck up a friendship when in the course of a student-teacher conference he and I indicated to each other that we were gay.  Nothing important, just a bond, a chance when alone together, to relax the guard that we both maintained constantly around other people.  He often drove me home from the campus into downtown Manhattan where I lived, a very kind gesture on his part, and a time when we could chat.  He was a mild mannered fellow, and although a big guy with broad shoulders and an air of strength and determination, and he came to class in uniform, I had a hard time thinking of him as a cop.  I remember once on the way home in his car, I brought up the subject of security as we idled at a stop light in the inky darkness of Central Park, and was amazed when he opened his glove compartment to reveal to loaded revolvers.  Well, of course, dummy, he was a police officer.  He was one of the gentlest males I have known.  Once when driving through a neighborhood, a little black child darted out into the street, and my officer friend screeched to a halt.  The boy stood paralyzed with fear, and this big, big guy in his uniform got out, knelt down, put his hand on the boy's shoulder and proceeded to give a soft gentle paternal admonitory talk.  We sometimes did things together socially, and one night we were down near Sheridan Square sitting in an outdoor cafe when  an enormous roar went up in the air, male voices in extreme emotion.  Because we had just passed a storefront where I had seen a bunch of guys massed before a television screen, I knew instinctively they were cheering a touchdown or something similar.  My friend who had not happened to witness that jumped up at the sound, crouched down, his hand on his back hip, then relaxed, smiled apologetically.  "It's hard not to react," he said.  I once asked him if he ever thought of explaining his sexual orientation to his colleagues in the precinct house, and he replied that bonding is all important among police officers, and a lot of male bonding took place as the men horsed around semi-clothed in the shower room and dressing room at work, and he had noticed the strong homoerotic tinge to their horsing around, something essential to heterosexual bonding that homosexual men always notice and straight men would die to learn they practiced.  So, no, he said, because it would ruin all the comradery if he were to do so.

Staying Out Of View

Facebook is like gum on the bottom of your shoe--very, very hard to shed.  A long time ago I went on to Facebook, realized instantly it was not for me, but leaving was too hard to figure out for this naif, so I just let the thing go dormant.  In the years since then there have come Twitter of which I know nothing but the name, and a host of others, which I cannot even identify let alone describe.  My children and grandchildren all use Facebook and the rest of the so-called "social media," and I am thus barred from the family news, since it would never occur to most of them to enter into a personal one-on-one electronic conversation with someone.  It is actually extraordinary but I have almost no knowledge of my family's doing, compounded by the fact that we live all over the continent, and thus have no occasion to meet for lunch or coffee.  Recently a daughter emailed me to tell me of the pregnancy of my grandson's wife, and thus the birth of what will be my first great grandchild, a milestone of some note in the life of an elderly gent.  Interestingly enough, neither the grandson, nor his wife, nor his father, my son, thought to send me the news, that's how disconnected we are as a family. A granddaughter from another family whom I am helping by paying her college tuition sends me cheerful brief, oh, so very brief notes on her academic progress once a semester, never in any  way augmented by either her mother or father.  The background to her life at college is entirely opaque to me.  But in a way, my isolation is all my own doing. I do not want to present myself as a public profile, partly because I was raised to believe so strongly in the privacy of one's family.  We were, for instance, not supposed to visit with friends nor even telephone them on Sunday, not so much for religious reasons, but that one day a week was sacred for the family, and our privacy within our house, was not to be invaded.  Today in the press we read again and again about the dangers of public exposure on these electronic forms of communication, about the rants, the ugly epithets, the terrorizing hate, all from unidentifiable sources.  I suppose that I sensed this way back when I first encountered Facebook and recoiled from it.  I remember so well when I was a twenty five year old and my first wife died suddenly.  We were living in a small Massachusetts town to which we had moved only two days previous to her sudden death where the local newspaper routinely printed obituaries with information obtained from the local funeral homes.  One of the most agonizing and never to be forgotten consequences of this, as one might say, public exposure, was--in addition to the many, many letters of sympathy from my friends (yes, there was a time when pen and ink were the only thing available to the general public) and strangers moved by the plight of so young a fellow--were the incredible hate letter writers, psychopaths all, blaming me for the death, talking of hell, talking of just deserts, invoking every kind of imaginary sin and perversion to which I was imagined to be subject.  I have never forgotten this, my first and only inadvertent exposure to the general public.  "Le peuple, Madame," Necker was alleged to have said to Marie Antoinette, "c'est une bete."

Making Nice

It took me years to come to understand that the etiquette of entering a small shop in France requires that the customer first greet the owner or salesperson ("Bonjour") before embarking upon whatever brought one into the place.  As an American shopper I am in the habit of entering a store expecting that my anonymity will be respected as I go about my business.  I note increasingly, however, that it seems employees are now instructed to make verbal contact instantly. This morning I read in the Times of some man who was let go by a box store because he failed to respond with a greeting when approached by a shopper (who was actually a store employee in disguise set up to do this kind of sting operation).  And think of all the employees wandering around in those box stores!  It is not just that one employee greets you, everyone you come across as you move through the place sings out a greeting.  I noticed this and commented upon it the other day when walking through the Ringling Museum.  I must have been greeted, encouraged to have "A Nice Day" maybe ten, fifteen times during my walk through the institution.  I do not want to interact with persons unknown to me in settings where personal contact is uncalled for.  I was raised to be polite, but I am by nature someone who is psyched up by human contact, and if while out shopping or worse while examining art works, I have to summon the psychic resources to "be nice" out loud, then I am overextended, maybe even being bullied.  The incessant pursuit of the customer in the matter of niceness comes in the constant emails one receives after any restaurant outing in which one is supposed to rate the experience.  And the rating system is checking boxes in a one to ten series of evaluations that tell nothing.  If something was awful enough to warrant remarking on it I would tell the manager when I was in the restaurant, for god's sake.  The other day a friend and I were the only two dining out of doors at a restaurant and the waitress who served us never came back so finally I took my cell phone to call the maitre d' at the desk inside to summon service outdoors.  And I complained, right then and there.  No need to wait around to fill out a chart of numbers!  I will not fill out the emailed evaluation forms because I consider them nonsense.  So they send more.  I once wrote to some outfit whose website allowed for "contact us," complaining of the form evaluations.  Never got a response.  A lot they care about customer satisfaction.

Happy Happy Old Folks

When I read the Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks I am always reminded of some of my students' essays, back in the days when I was a professor and graded papers.  There were always those special few who had some extravagant idea which in their good will and enthusiasm came written up in their weekly or monthly writing assignment.  Recently Brooks devoted a column to the proposition that the elderly in the USA are happier than they have been at any other time of their lives.  He statistics to prove it.  I was mildly outraged when I read the piece, just for the presumption of a younger male to speak for a group of people with whom he could not personally identify.  In a way, he's just like a white man telling us how blacks feel.  My outrage was nothing compared to the strong temper displayed by the writers of letters to the editor which the Times published.  Well, I am eighty four, and I pass time in the company of a great number of the elderly.  Yes, they certainly are lucky to have Medicare and Social Security, and a lot of them have pensions, too.  But, of course, as statistics show, there are a lot of poor seniors in this country as well.  But let's get beyond the material.  The statistics David Brooks displays in his column are true in an interesting sense.  My experience of the elderly as a whole is that they are polite and friendly and would try to say positive things to an interviewer or on a questionnaire.  But this does not tell the truth as it really is.  Elderly are quiet, partly because they are resigned, partly because if they have any sense they know it is useless to complain about the inevitable.  They mostly have cut way back on their drinking, and the fun times that went with it, few of them are getting laid, and certainly at best only once in a great while.  The wonderful friends they used to pal around with are most of them dead or demented.  Their spouse has died or is lying in a bed and everyone is praying for the end.  The walk down the street is a perilous balancing act that could end up in a serious fracture, double pneumonia, and, well, there's the thing, if you are lucky and they don't get too much medication in you, the pneumonia will kill you like it used to do all the time.  "The old man's friend" wasn't just a cute saying when they were talking about pneumonia.  It's not a total disaster, this being old. It's a chronic thing that one doesn't really want to talk much about, it's just not really much fun.

My Bed

Originally my husband and I slept together on a kingsize mattress that was so thick and thus high off the ground that we, like my daughter and her husband, who had introduced us to this giant called it "Mount Bed."  As you can imagine it was something to get into the thing, running jump, and all that.  Waking up and stepping out groggily for a pee in the middle of the night was no casual affair.  Times went by, hubby retired and preferred to read into the wee hours, I thus abandoned ship, or bed, rather.  Well, we ended up entirely happily in two separate rooms decorated to our own devising.  He is in a giant bed covered in one of those quilted coverlets that Germans use in lieu of top sheet and blanket; we bought it for him last year in Wiesbaden and it was costly.  But, my god, that was what he wanted more than anything.  Every time we had gone traveling in Germany he luxuriated in it, whereas I cannot stand so much heat retaining fabric upon me in anything but truly cold weather.  But he is more like a mole, his room darkened day and night like an underground tunnel.  The bedding suits, and he has it arranged together with six pillows elegantly stacked up behind his head.  Several years ago I gave Mount Bed away to our trainer who is a handsome young sexual athlete who needs an attractive playing field.  In exchange I got myself a chaste single bed that is lower to the ground, easy to slip in and out of. At the end I have folded an elegant old car rug from the 1920's which a dear old friend of mine had saved from the days of her father's opulent chauffeur driven days.  At the other end fronting the two pillows upon which I rest my head I have set two pillows retrieved from the furnishing we bought along with the second condo next door.  They belonged, as the expression always goes, to a "little old lady."  I never met her but her insistent kitsch instantly endeared her to me, I mean a small glass bowl with plastic poinsettia--you can't get better than that.  We imported that into our living room, along with a number of home made occasional pillows that are hand made and trimmed in lace, but without question the true delight are the two pillows that I took to front my night pillows.  These are square, white, edged in white lace, covered with little blue shining dots in patterns, loose and light, and interspersed here and there in seriously, thought out design relationships are pink silk hearts laboriously cut out and appliqued onto the fabric of the pillow covering.  I am not about to analyze this element of bedroom design.  My second wife instructed me in Bauhaus, Minimalism, clean surfaces, the emptying out of all sentimentality, ideas to which I eagerly subscribed after growing up in fifties Eisenhower Iowa.  And that is the aesthetic with which my husband and I have lived in our public rooms.  I have often teased him for his love of kitsch, acquired perhaps from his time spent in Berlin in the early sixties.  He yearns to cover surfaces in his room with a scarf or other decorated cloth upon which he puts at sensitive distances photographs on stands or a vase or small statue.  My room screams "Spare, spare, spare."  (although if he were writing this he would inevitably say "Messy, messy, messy."  Into this minimal space I have my two pillows from the old lady and my limousine rug.  Just the touch it needed.  I could not be happier.

Pulling Yourself Up By Your Own Bootstraps

Last night I was in the company of a man who boasted of the accomplishment of having been the CEO of a corporation before he retired, a position to which he rose, as he hinted, by dint of extraordinary industry and intelligence.  At one point the talk turned to the large number of homeless in Sarasota, a city that enjoys a climate that not only favors the elderly with their constant aches and pains but also those who need to sleep outdoors without shelter.  I deplored the fact that Florida alone of the fifty states had passed a law making feeding the poor from soup kitchens illegal (a law recently overturned by a Federal court).  When he countered that there were a number of Community Pantries that distributed food, I pointed out that most homeless people hardly had the resources to prepare what they might get from a pantry let alone a can opener to open a tin of food.  He responded vehemently that he was happy to help people who were lifting themselves up, but he had no interest in the homeless who were shiftless and unable to do anything for themselves.  Like other successful people he seemed to me to ignore that not all people had the same drive or ability, while they were still somehow members of the human race.  Someone else I know has always prided himself on having moved far away from a family of parents who never finished high school and sisters who disappeared into marriage the minute they graduated high school.  But the parents were of a generation that never knew any different, and his sisters were victims of the Roman Catholic Church which dictated the tyranny and oblivion of marriage and children from which there was no escape, whereas he, a gay male, had to escape from the provincial homophobic world into which he was born, whether he liked it or not, thus gaining a purchase on the larger urban world in which he advanced through resolve and education to prestige and economic security.  This morning I read in the paper of a young woman connected by birth and relationship to most of the power elites of South Korea who had such clout that when a stewardess in first class on Korean Airlines offered her a bag of peanuts in a way that she woman considered inelegant she caused the plane to be returned to the berth from which it had just departed so this employee could be summarily sacked and forced off the plane.  In another paper I read about a young man who was a graduate of Harvard College and the Law School now a professor at the Business School, no doubt secure in his tenure, whose emailed order of a take out dinner from a distinguished and popular diner, which was founded and made to flourish by an immigrant from Asia, was billed for four more dollars than the online menu listed, for which oversight (the owner claimed that they had not got around to updating the online menu) this young man demanded damages of large sums of money, threats to take the fellow to court, to get him for violating a national truth in advertising law, in effect, to destroy him.  His business was to police the market for major American electronics and technology corporations, and into this maw his was planning to sweep this simple but successful ("the food was delicious," he was willing to claim) neighborhood entrepreneur.  This is how the world operates.  Many of the homeless on the streets are drug addicted and thus as we would say if they were a blood relative "ill," or they are mentally damaged and left to wander because the state does not like to pick up the costs of unattractive and usually incurable illness, but so, so many have from childhood been left to the vagaries of care provided by parents, family, school, and, yes, charities.  If we claim to be such a Christian nation, we might at least as Pope Francis is now directing us to give some thought to his teaching on love or as the Greek word is, charity.

Heliotrope

Today is a cold morning, only 46, but the sun is shining brightly in clear blue sky.  Yesterday as I set out on my walk to the gym it was overcast, a very grey sky, and cold enough to wear a light jacket, maybe low sixties.  But, for some reason I rejoiced.  I guess it was the nostalgia of walking briskly, freshly in chilly air, under grim skies.  So Boston!  I remember a student of mine years ago, an import from London, who complained of the excessive number of sunny days in New England, confiding that he truly yearned for a week or so of leaden skies.  I must say when I lived in Palo Alto I never grew to love the incessant morning fog, which seemed often to soften the image of everything sufficiently as to make the breakfast hour into a cozy time, only at ten in the morning inevitably as the fog lifted that damned California sun was there aggressively imposing itself on us yet again.  I am essentially someone who loves the sun, loves light.  The sliding glass doors of my bedroom look out onto a terrace and only the flimsiest gauze drapes can be drawn to prevent intrusive stares, certainly little light is held back.  At night, lights from the courtyard seep through this fabric, competing with the electronic face of my bedside clock, the clock on my Bose radio nearby, the light on the airpurifier that functions as a noise machine nearby, not to mention the light emanating from my bathroom where an illuminated figure of a medieval saint does duty as a night light.  My husband sleeps on the other side of the apartment in a room so heavily masked against the ambient light, sunshine, anything that he must turn lights on whenever he uses the room. A cave, I say.  A normal man's way of living, he says.  Breakfast can be a trial as he will not sit to table until all the requisite blinds have been lowered against the morning sun.  I must agree that his place at the table is facing into the sun, so who am I to object?  I get up very early without an alarm clock, in complete darkness, and hate it, yearning for the days when as I step forth to get the Times on the mat I can luxuriate in the gorgeous, pink, orange, and in between shades of color on the gauzy clouds making their way over the building across from us.  We are on the third floor and what some might find atrocious is the roof of the middle school across the way which to my mind is the perfect aesthetic detail to establish shape and form to the sky view.  Tiepolo could not have done better, ditto with the sunset clouds, from my deck across the roof of the adjoining wing of our condo complex.  How I love the third floor!  How I love looking across the roofs of buildings!  It makes me think of the terrazzo of our apartment in Rome, or the Ionic columned terrace attached to our house in Athens.  How I love the sun!  How I love daylight!  Happy, happy, happy to be in sunny Sarasota.

The Recluse

i read the obituary this morning of a Russian ballerina who came to the West leaving a son behind in St. Petersburg.  When later in life he died in a boating accident she returned to Russia, and as it turns out permanently, despite entreaties from former friends and colleagues abroad.  For the rest of her life she was a recluse.  I am always fascinated when I read that: "became a recluse."  It seems like such a great idea, so restful, sort of like meditation, maybe.  I like to think that it means the end of all anxiety.  First off, you don't have to plan spend hours on your calendar.  I see the recluse as having a large window box to which she devotes time, taking the dead leaves off the geranium plants for one, debudding things.  If you do it with care, that can take time.  If you read The New York Times carefully that will eat up an hour--but already I have the wrong perspective, thinking only of filling time.  No, the recluse will read the Times only if she really wants to.  She can go shopping once a day and not speak to others enroute.  Actually I have plenty of models for this in our building in Manhattan.  Lots of the residents of the studio apartments were, when I bought a coop there, living in the studios, alone, retired, many of them enfeebled.  You didn't hear lots of television sets in action so I guess they must have been reading, or had the sound off, or were staring into space.  I choose to believe that i am on my road to recluse-dom because it pleases me to sit on the porch (Floridians would never never use that word; it's lanai, of all things) and stare off into the clouds scudding over my head, the tops of palm trees in the immediate distance waving and watch the sunset light dissolve the outlines of the roofs of buildings in the greater distance.  I have lived a life of frenetic socializing twice with reluctant spouses who were born to a solitary existence for whom marriage to me was a detour into madness.  Why put that in the past tense?  I am describing my husband whose idea of happiness is to study the Iliad in the original Greek or lie on the sofa reading a murder mystery without saying a word.  Here in Sarasota the people we meet seem nice enough, but they are conservative, not viciously or tiresomely so, it's just that their belief is in god, or in a world in which everything is getting better and better, and their remarkable financial successes strike them as the obvious and inevitable result of a life of industry, thoughtful strategy. Their cheerful take on life's rocky road always reminds me of the Eisenhower era, so I have trouble relating, as they say.  Another help on my road to reclusivity is learning to live with the notion of the empty hours, or  I guess recluses can still go out to the theater, opera, chamber music, symphony, or does that violate the pledge of aloneness?  Becoming a recluse is a spiritual exercise like meditation, an act of renunciation which---is the idea to make me into a finer person?  I guess the Russian ballerina knew that she was too old to dance, her son was dead, she wasn't going to live all that much longer, why make all the effort.  If you can do that with a positive step, a firm grip, an energetic forward motion mentally and physically, then why not.  The distractions of this world are no more than distractions.

No Time For Blogging

The cleaning lady will be here in an hour.  She is a good looking blonde ex-Marine who knows from spit and polish.  I have been up since five thirty--my normal hour for arising--busy, busy cleaning "my" area of the condo.  It is ever thus, since first I reached the sufficiently middle class status to hire someone to "do" for us, that is, my then family of wife and four children.  There was no hope that we would get the place in shape, but then she came most afternoons, lots to do with that brood.  Now in my dotage living with a man who looks askance if I leave a dirty dish for more than ten minutes on the kitchen counter, the cleaning lady arrives to place clearly organized around spit and polish.  Well, go to it, pretty lass, it's almost ready, huff, puff, I don't see a thing out of place, nor nary a speck of dust.  You have your work cut out for you!

Peter Pan

My husband was on his computer when he caught a glimpse of Christopher Walken tap dancing in a scene from the made-for-tv "Peter Pan."  From that moment on he could not rest until we saw the entire show.  Well, I was listening to Wagner's "Siegfried" on my cd machine, but true hearted guy, generous hubby, or total wimp and doormat that I am, turned that off and sat down before the television.  We never watch commercial television or maybe I guess it is called network television, only once in a great while, so it is always a shock to me to discover that for every few moments of entertainment the viewer must sit through incredible amounts of mindless advertising.  Thus it is and always has been, and yet again I thank the Lord that I came to maturity before television, and thus never became addicted.  I am always surprised to meet mature persons who unashamedly and happily report that they have spent several daytime hours watching the screen.  So extraordinary when you consider that most of this time is staring at commercials.  When I am on the treadmill at the gym I am forcibly given one of the so-called news networks which invariable display some bimbo with shoulder length hair and a remake of her face who purports to be the new Walter Cronkhite as she offers up the latest piece of heartbreaking nothing in lieu of honest reportage.  But I digress.  Back to "Peter Pan."  The first delight was to discover Marnie from Lena Dunham's tv show whose character I always despised on display here as a very lovely and talented Peter Pan.  Who knew that Marnie could be this sweet, serious dear girl going on woman?  Yeah!  Obviously I have a problem separating an actor from her dramatic persona.  And then I became entranced as Marnie as Peter asked over and over again "Do you believe in fairies?"  Yes, I said, stop all this nonsense of being one of the guys.  Yes, world, believe in fairies.  We have finer sensibilities.  Believe in us as we are, for heaven's sake.  It was completely taken with this thought, and imagined all the aging racist bully thugs on the bicycle machines at the gym to whom I should like to ask sweetly next week "Sir, do you believe in fairies?"  It's going to be fabulous!  After awhile those advertisements got to me so I went back to "Siegfried" somewhere in the middle I guess, and I don't know somehow it sounded like a continuation of "Peter Pan."

An Alernative Life Style

Arizona prohibits instruction that “portrays homosexuality as a positive alternative life-style” according to Lambda.  I have always wondered how homosexuals are supposedly pursuing an alternative life style.  It seems to me that the basis of life is eating sleeping going to work and pursuing a relationship.  The first two are essential to physical survival, and as far as I know we all of us, straight, gay, bisexual, confused, or repressed, eat and sleep.  Most of us however we approach the erotics of life have to go to work.  The Lord Granthams among us are few and far between, especially in America where inherited privilege and wealth are not so conspicuous as in the world from which the fictive Downton Abby is located.  So there we are off to work every day, all of us.  That leaves pursuing a relationship.  I will admit that once upon a time when homosexual acts were illegal and a genius like Alan Turing whose work decoding the Nazi war machine perhaps more than most saved the Western world accepted castration to escape prison after being discovered in flagrante with another male made pursuing a relationship a journey into fear, danger, and persecution.  Nowadays, however, boys can date, and girls can date, even if in many neighborhoods one must do this at least in part cautiously.  I am talking about the Western world, of course, not downtown Teheran.  So I don't know what Arizona state law means by "alternative life-style," since the style of lives here in the United States seem to me to be pretty much drearily ordinary and uniform.  Maybe I am missing something.

Bedbugs And Leeches

I went to Greece and stayed in a fabulous hotel and took a trip with a marvelous taxi service.  Upon my return the two businesses asked me to write about them on TripAdvisor.  I was happy to do so. Since then TripAdvisor writes me every couple of days telling me how many hits my reviews have had, and urging me to review other venues and institutions.  There is no shaking them.  The device of Unsubscribe is meaningless to them.  Ditto London Direct a hideous outfit from whom I once upon a time ordered two tickets when I was going to be in London and mistook their website for the theater box office.  They deluge me every week or twice a week with what's going on in London as though I gave a flying fuck.  Their Unsubcribe is again a meaningless item on their website.  I could continue with a host of other sites, but instead will turn to this morning's visit to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.  As members we must sign in at a special desk rather than the general entry desk where today there was not one person buying passes to enter whereas at the members desk was one volunteer helping out and one entirely befuddled member or would be member who needed everything spelled out in time consuming detail.  Maybe she was lonely, and so the virtue of the members desk was important to her.  Clearly the passage of time was not.  Once ticketed, which in this case means wearing a bracelet so that you can be clearly identified wherever you go on the grounds--sort of like San Quentin--, we entered the museum.  At the door at the inner door at the entrance to every gallery there was someone stationed to greet us, and as we left the museum in the quiet of an exit hall there was yet again someone to break the silence and our concentration with cheery words of farewell.  Today I was checking my emails and there were all those from Amazon asking me to review books I have purchased from them.  I know, I know, guilty as charged.  Amazon is the Whore of Babylon and Destroyer of Neighborhood Bookstores and the Enemy of Publishing Houses, all true, Holy Father, and I have sinned, but now I am paying paying paying by getting these emails asking me to evaluate every damn thing I bought like most recently the fifth volume of the Loeb Classical Library Euripides.  I'm supposed to review this for the Amazon readership?  Might as well send it out to those ninnies of the book club world who read Goodreads!  Or is it Goodread?

Party Time

Today's Times has an article on the designer Valentino, who in his retirement moves between his five residences in various parts of the world, maintaining a daily schedule of social engagements in every one of them.  I envy him, not that I was ever endowed with his brilliance, fame, sense of self, nor money for that matter, but I miss the life of constant social activity.  When I was in my fifties and no longer involved in keeping house for children, nothing stopped me from going out to lunches with friends every day and to dinners and events with others every evening.  Some people grow exhausted on that schedule; I thrive.  Well, now I am in my mid eighties, and no longer bopping around Cambridge Massachusetts or New York City.  Having removed to Sarasota Florida, I dared myself to take on a very different life.  Of course, my decisions were not mine alone since my husband has been along for the planning and executing all along.  We know very few people here, and do not have the money or inclination to enter the social scene which has more to do with very rich people working on philanthropic projects in common than academics sitting around dishing one another.  My husband does not suffer small talk gladly and is absolutely happy holed up in his room sitting at his desk all day and all evening.  Whether he really likes to or not, he genially accompanies me to the theater, the symphony, the opera, the chamber music concert, all of which are very much in abundance when "the season" begins down here.  But I have a lot of what they call down-time, so I have had to learn the life of a recluse.  It suits me at this age; getting around is sometimes enough of a chore that staying put has maximum allure.  Maybe if I had a car and driver, as a New York friend does, I would seek the bright lights and loud conversations of years ago.  It's like disco; I hear that beat on the radio and I want to dance, but, hey, as my trainer at the gym tells me, disco is dead.  Most of the time I live in my head, and actually seem to myself to be fumbling when I am called upon to engage in conversation.  Yesterday I went the "date" to a fancy lunch when a woman friend's partner was unavailable to take her.  I had not been so animated for a long time, could scarcely hold the knife and fork at the table, or so it seemed to me.  It was exhausting.  I guess I really am ready to live largely in a life of my mind.  Let's just hope it continues to function.

The Sunny Bedroom

Yesterday I sat in my bedroom reading and listening to a cd of a historic performance of "Tristan und Isolde" sung by the great stars of the thirties, Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior.  Although this recording is of a live broadcast from Covent Garden in 1936, I felt as though I were back in my mother's bedroom listening to her radio of something broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, an event which defined her every Saturday afternoon.  Flagstad and Melchior were two of her favorites,  "Tristan und Isolde," something that she truly swooned over.  Many were the Saturday afternoons she beguiled some of her six children to sit and listen along with her.  It was a room that faced south and the winter sun streamed in bringing its extra warmth to a cold, cold Iowa day. More often than not the listening was preceded by her washing the hair of those who were attending this musical event, that in itself a very special occasion since our mother generally left our care in the hands of the hired help.  Sitting in her bedroom in our bathrobes, no less, before that sloshing about in her very own tub, and having her hands running over our heads,  these were delicious moments of serenity and security.  Even her tears at hearing the Wagnerian strains of music were comforting, I guess, because it was a good feeling to experience mother's warm emotion at this moment.  Odd that the only other opera I specifically remember hearing with her is "Madame Butterfly," a memory that somehow is painful and and brings up feelings of loss, because it was her violent sobs that I can recall, induced by the desolation of the heroine at her abandonment by Lt. Pinkerton.  It seemed to bring back her own bitter despair at being a war widow, the woman in my mother I of course never knew, all so long ago, years before my birth.  But yet, the very fact that we children were lounging about in my mother's bedroom, adjacent as it was to my father's, meant that it must all have been after September 1936  (he never would have allowed this invasion of tots, I feel) when mother became a widow again, and relived the terrible abandonment she no doubt had felt in 1917 when her first husband died of flu while serving in the army.  The warmth and pleasure of the sunny bedroom is a memory that is always challenged by her inherent bitterness and desolation scarcely ever well masked, even though she was always so witty, gracious, the woman entrapped in the cage of her widowhood and motherhood.  "Having children took all the curl out of my hair," she used to claim, or then again "Having so many children took all the calcium out of my teeth," neither statement an accusation but a calm truth of life.  Well, doctor, my stream of consciousness has taken me a long way from the opening strains of that great Wagnerian opera.

Women's Shoulders

The November 21st online edition of Writers Almanac features a poem by Jeffrey Harrison called "White Shoulders."  I think it is a great illustration of the fundamental erotics of the human male, and something to ponder.  The poem describes a male at a fundraising banquet who diverts himself from the boring speeches by gazing at all the bare shoulders of the women in the crowd before him, and the poem is an amusing riff on the quasi or should I say semi erotic gaze and appreciation of various shoulders, one after the other, which gives him great pleasure to the point that he ends by saying that when he stood with the others to applaud, it was not in appreciation of what had been said, but "for the shoulders they [the women] have so generously given."  I read this as a statement of the fact that men are always on the prowl. I know that if a male speaker stands before an gathering in tight trousers every gay person in the audience will say to each other at the reception later "Wow, did you check out his crotch?" Same thing.  An entirely different biological or psychological dynamic is the horrific incidents of male gang rape of some female victim at drunken fraternity party.  I think along with Eve Sedgwick that this is essentially male homoerotics in action, males who can't get it on with each other-- out of inhibition first of all--live together in frat houses and then have sex together by raping a woman. It's two men screwing each other except in fact.   Moral idiots would call it bonding.  Somewhere in the range of homoerotics is the urge for a violent collision of bodies which is football.  The fans want it more and more violent, and the half time entertainment more and more the vision of women just this side short of pole dancing acting as sexy cheerleaders.  It's strange that with all the current talk of brain damage, the American moms and pops continue to want their boys to have their brains bashed in.  And those Little League events, adult males and their surrogates playing, the fathers yelling harshly and obscenely barking commands out to the kids. Strange the way that newspapers segregate into the sports page section the details of the wife beatings, the drunken misbehaviors, and then grossly, worst of all, the coach who sexually mishandles his youthful athlete charges.  So these are key to what sports is all about?  I would think it was more like criminal human living and misbehaving, hence stuff for the paper's front section.   As someone who was a crippled child and never has played sports, and was gay to boot, the world of "men" is alien to me.  On the plane coming to Florida I sat next to an extremely affable, and very witty fellow, maybe fifty, with whom I struck up a great conversation. He had been a firefighter whose career ended early when he survived a heroic action with extremely damaged lungs; it was a fire in which five colleagues perished.  As we separated on arrival, I reached out to shake his hand, and was startled to be taken into a giant hand with incredible strength.  That hand!  He was a real guy.  It made me think back to another revelation of maleness.  I was lying in post coital repose staring at the ceiling of a room underneath a giant of a man, a professional basketball player, who had fallen into a deep momentary post orgasmic sleep, and for a brief time, unwittingly relaxed all of his weight on to me.  And I realized then that I had no way to get out from under him, except with his permission and good will, and I thought for the first time what it must be like to be a woman in such a situation, and about power, and the dangerous temptation to abuse it, and the threat of not noticing its potential. This Sunday November 30th New York Times Magazine describes military officers convicted in a courts martial of raping fellow soldiers who were women, and then having the commanding officer dismiss these charges and return them to active service.  Same thing all over again.

The Girl On The Bus. This Is Too Long, But Here Goes

I was raised in a world where African-Americans and white persons did not mingle, taught to be unfailingly polite if ever I encountered one, but to know that there was no way that we would interact socially.  I was exceptionally friendly with the woman who worked off and on for my mother, but then we knew our boundaries.  I had a peculiar friendship with one black kid in my high school, a hero of the football team, whose sexual needs I satisfied on a regular basis for years, but with whom I would never do more than nod at school, for me because of his race and for him, because knowing me in any way would be a scandal amongst his fellow athletes (years later at college a black student who enjoyed me sexually wanted to become friends, and I sadly resisted not understandng that a straight athletic male might think a gay male  was his social equal).  When my older sister started college in my hometown and rebelliously, dangerously, adventurously started dating a Negro, as such a fellow would have been called then, my mother insisted that a black girl join them on any public outing so that the situation would not be so obvious.  When my sister pushed the envelope and insisted that Mother invite him to Sunday dinner, the black girl came along as well.  When the black woman who also cooked for us entered with the first course and saw the couple she set the tray down, and left the room, and the house. I remember being terrified, of mother crying and leaving the room (as it turned out she later went to Elizabeth's house in the other part of town, and the two of them sat crying, according to her, over the misbehavior of the new generation.)  My oldest sister, broke my mother's heart by aggressively dating Jewish boys while in college, and then marrying into that demographic, as they say.  Much later on, as a divorced woman, when Mother was safely in her grave,  she took up with, although never married, a black fellow who rose from privation to be a minor executive at IBM.  In the years I knew them as a couple I never knew him to have one black friend or associate, and certainly at his funeral the only blacks in attendance were his family.  By this time I was familiar enough with African-Americans, if only because my first wife's best friend was a black woman, not to mention the number of black males I have encountered as sexual partners through the years, familiar through the telling of their constant humiliations in the job market, on the street. Having been hounded by the police myself for suspicious public homosexual behavior, I knew to be on the lookout for them, rather than imagining they were my friend.  All this is prelude to last Saturday when I boarded the bus in Manhattan, and I frantically looked for a seat near the front, reserved indeed for the elderly and incapacitated, because I am always terrified of losing my balance when the driver resumes his forward motion.  Luckily some middle aged person was quick to vacate a seat, and I sank down grateful.  And then I noticed that next to me sat a very young, very hip black girl, perhaps all of nineteen, in one of the seats reserved for the elderly and moreover the bus had stopped again and the aged and the infirm seemed to be pouring on, while all the time she sat immobile.  No one said anything, the tottering folk, nervously held on, I said nothing though I was enraged.  Usually I am not above asking people to give people seats, I know that in Manhattan lots of people are able to do that, particularly where we were, on the Upper West Side.  No one said a word.  Never have I had such a powerful expression of what? the immense fear? or distaste? or  hatred? that whites feel for blacks.  I remember when I taught at Lehman College a group of male black students almost tearfully described to me running as a group to catch a subway and the riders already aboard shrinking in obvious terror.  I thought of Cambridge Massachusetts when I was a graduate student and my fear of the teenaged working class Irish boys out to beat up any effete Harvard student who crossed their paths, and I thought of how I would not hold my seminar at the CUNY graduate center if it fell on St. Patricks day when the boroughs' toughs descended on Manhattan to beat up what they presumed were gays.  I told those black guys at Lehman that if a crowd of African-American teenagers were coming down one side of the street and Irish-American teenagers on the other, I would instinctively and immediately cross over to the blacks, such was my acculturated fear and loathing of the other group.  And I think now of the Cambridge Massachusetts cop of Irish descent who  asked the African-American Harvard Professor Gates to step away from his front door when he saw him fumbling his keys and trying the door in the dark of the night.  Was this racial? was the officer doing his duty? was the very haughty Professor Gates over reacting?  was it Cambridge near Harvard Square where to be of Irish descent does not have the cachet that being black has? That moment will always be a parable of uncertain meaning for me about black/white relations, about class distinctions, about doing your duty, about fighting back, which just gets me back to the black girl on the bus.