The Real Thing

Once upon a time I lived in the provinces, a boyhood spent in Iowa.  And I learned from the serious attention we paid to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, not to mention the Sunday New York Philharmonic coming over the airwaves at dinner after church, that Manhattan was where one was meant to be.  My oldest sister went there after college and never came home; a second sister went back and forth, and I spent half a year there when I was eighteen.  It has always saddened me that I did not stay on, that I did not get into the gay culture forming and growing stronger at that time, that I was too timid essentially to take up the challenge of a New York existence.  Later on I was based in Cambridge Massachusetts, definitely the timid man's place to try out culture, and  I was in New York a lot, trying to make up for the fact that years before when I was teaching in New Haven, only an hour and a half away, so immersed in young parenthood and my career was I, that I never once made it to the city to hear Maria Callas sing.  When I was in my mid-fifties and I moved down from Cambridge to teach in New York, I developed an obsession to see and hear everything, already formed and exercised in the previous decades of sporadic visits.  I think it was some kind of Iowa complex.  For several years I did manage to get to what everyone was talking about, out every night, afternoon museum visits, no stone left unturned.  Friends always remarked on this, strangers marveled that whatever they brought up, I already "knew" about it.  One day, and I remember it well--I was riding down an escalator in a department store--, it suddenly occurred to me that sooner or later I would die and then I would not "know" anything of the cultural scene.  What a relief!  I was free to ignore, forget, or dismiss anything and everything, just so that I remembered that what was important and first-rate was only to be found in Manhattan.  And then I grew old, and getting around was more of a chore than I had anticipated;  luckily I was now retired and had more time.  I still walked through the Park to the Metropolitan from my apartment, but it took longer and longer, and I grew less inclined, once I had gained the Upper East Side, to expend the extra effort in going to the other museums located nearby.  And then I grew older, and fearful of the ice and snow.  I remember one particularly vicious winter week when I was afraid to walk out onto Fifty Seventh Street for Carnegie Hall or down Broadway to the theater district,  just as I would not walk up Ninth Avenue to get to Lincoln Center.  I was a prisoner of the winter, so I moved to Sarasota, which I knew to be a place for the arts, theater, dance, symphony, opera, chamber music.  Still it is an interesting change.  Quite a lot to see and hear, but never or rarely, contemporary, certainly not avant garde nor even much to shake one up.  The Asolo Repertory Theater for instance is about to put on "The Matchmaker" and then some saucy W.S. Maugham comedy from the twenties; it's the culture of the fifties redux (well, look at the audience one might rejoin).  But then, I think to myself, just as existence when one is eighty five is more or less going through the motions of living, so Sarasota's cultural surround preserves the form if not the content of what we want to call culture.