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.