The party's over

A month ago we sat at table with the student we support at the conservatory--it was his graduation ceremony--,together with his parents, and his brother, and I was again struck with the obvious love that was bestowed upon these two young men by their parents, mostly the mother, whose glance and demeanor showed her strong feelings.  I said to her as I had last year when first we met that I cannot imagine such love from a parent, having never experienced it myself.  With that remark I went into a kind of blue funk, reviewing the last maybe five decades of my life.  I started back with my high school days, a whirl, as I remember it, of parties and dancing, and sitting in a booth of a drug store after school and going duck pin bowling.  Then there was college, and of course I got married and we hung out at the student intellectual bar, also a kind of gay bar although gays were too repressed back then to make obvious distinctions.  And then we went to Cambridge and Mary continued her social progress and I came along at the tail end with various and sundry of my fellow students.  And then she died, and I remarried, and I became a father, you'd think it rather cut into our for socializing but in fact my colleagues at the university were lots of fun and we laughed a lot with them.  So there was New Haven and Palo Alto and Brookline with Rome and Athens thrown in and there were lots and lots of academic parties, and maybe the women were all bitter for being cut off from their careers but before they had so much to drink that their bitterness overcame them, there was a lot of great conversation; thwarted ambition is actually a great goad to wit, repartee, good conversation, and everybody at the table had put their time in reading up on something or another. The thing was I kept changing the case of characters in our social life  the Iowa City crowd, the friends Mary had made, the other Cambridge people, ditto in New Haven and Palo Alto, then Brookline, different universities and faculty lunches, When the kids were in their teens,  my wife had gone back to work as an architect, I was the housekeeper and I sometimes used to invite twenty for sit down dinners twice a week; there was a friend who often came and sat at the baby grand and pounded out show tunes to which we all brayed in our various outrageous registers. Somehow the children joined in or yelled down from upstairs to shut up so they could do their homework.  And then we divorced and I went to live in Cambridge as a gay male so the social scene changed rather sharply and many of the old friends didn't know what to do--husband and wife, now boyfriends?-- so they avoided me. I was offered a job in New York City, the chance to re invent myself, new friends, new lodgings, goodbye to all that.  Then I met my husband to be and he took a job in Massachusetts and I retired a few years later.  Back we went to the house in Cambridge and at sixty five I started a new social life with a man who was  genial enough but basically anti social, so not much help at all in the social scene.  Then he retired, we went to the sea shore, then on to Florida with a pied a terre in New York.  Last week I flew to Manhattan for a week of museum and theater going and various and sundry to see, then on to Providence for a memorial service of someone I started out knowing in graduate school in 1953.  There were lots of ghosts in my life there, the luminaries of a profession. faces and voice I could finally make out after minutes of conversation.  It left me with the terrible sense that I really don't belong anywhere anymore, and I know that at eighty six I am too tired or jaded to try for a social life in Sarasota. As the song says:  Now you must wake up, all dreams must end/Take off your makeup, the party's over/It's all over, my friend