My Social Scene

I grew up in an academic town.  I became a professor.  Most people I knew in childhood, friends of my mother and my late father, since they were academics, had "fields."  Dr. Thompson who always came to Sunday dinner was a professor of English, Kate Daum, Professor of Nutrition, and so on and forth.  People held forth at our table on subjects that often included citation.  After a free and easy social life in high school I began to study classical antiquity seriously at university, and therefore I, too, acquired "a field."  In graduate school, the focus narrowed considerably, but I was saved from total pedantry by my wife, as intelligent and well read as could be, but a free spirit who had dropped out of college and whose best friend in Cambridge was a woman whose interest was theater.  But when I embarked upon my teaching career, that wife had died, and my second wife, immersed in child bearing and rearing, simply followed my lead in social events.  All our friends were young faculty, the husbands would-be professors, the wives reluctant homemakers with unused PhDs.  Everyone had a "field."  Conversation, therefore, had an authority to it.  Being in the humanities business, for the most part, our friends has an attitude on every new film, novel, art exhibition, etc. mentioned in The New York Times or similar publications.  This was true in New Haven, Palo Alto, Boston, and finally Manhattan.  When I moved to Cambridge after a divorce my neighbors were to a one working class middle aged persons of Irish descent; we nodded, sometimes made feeble conversation about the weather and its attendant problems (shoveling snow); we had nothing else in common.  Then I had a second house at the beach in Hull.  My neighbors were all working class Catholics, either Irish, or Italian, and proud of it, suspicious of my presumed "queerness," and affronted by my educated accent.  We existed side by side, sometimes we mentioned an item flourishing in a garden if we chanced to meet on the street where everyone walked.  Fast forward and now I am in Sarasota, have lived her for five years , the last two as a full time resident.  Yesterday we were at a celebration luncheon for the graduating students at the Asolo Conservatory, along with all the proud parents and the sponsors and donors.  As I surveyed the room I felt at a loss.  We have never made friends with anyone amongst this crowd.  Yes, we say hello, but that's about it.  What is wrong.  Well, for one, they don't have "fields," they are all retired people from the world of making money; they are business men, developers, retired hedge fund people.  They don't follow trends in theater, surprisingly enough, nor art, music, nor literature.  There is no conversation about the latest of anything or where crazy new developments are heading in the more bohemian parts of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.  Experimental theater, experimental anything, it is far far under their radar.  Call me an intellectual snob, (you might as well: my husband does, my children do) or, okay, better yet call me socially inadequate, clutching nervously for those markers that will allow me to navigate the shoals of social intercourse.