Silence

Agnes Martin whose work is being seen right now at LACMA is the subject of several review articles here and abroad.  Her art which is a combination of hand penciled grid lines and the subtle use of color in and out of these lineal restrictions produces a calm, a peace of god that passeth all understanding, as the good book says.  Nothing much to look at, my husband says, but yet I can look for hours, gaze, wordlessly, speechless, slowly surrendering tot her spell.  She was known to be a woman who pursued a silent and lonely life by choice.  Silence is, as they say, golden.  I have trouble with it having been raised in a household where polite conversation was routinely imposed upon us whenever we children were together or with grownup.  I was one of that kids who commandeered the best lunch table at school with my ferocious chatter.  I married a woman for whom talking was an effort, an architect, like Agnes Martin more at home with grids and planes, silent reminders.  She sat with a drink at parties in our house with her slight smile and generally saying nothing.  I sometimes grew angry "at her lack of cooperation."  Now she is dead but first we were divorced.  Her mother said to me "You took your laughter away."  I used to feel  triumphant at that observation but later on I wondered if my ex-wife cared.  She must have blissed out in all that quiet.  Later I joined forces with a man who as I slowly perceived disliked company and talking as much as she.  We have been together twenty six years now, actually married in a church when it became legal.  We live in Sarasota where we have almost no friends--we just don't seem to have anything in common.  I mean we are culture vultures, me pretentious high culture, Richard middlebrow culture, but those we meet don't seem to expand their horizons o reading and writing and playing going and music listening so we don't connect.  Richard is in ecstacy at that thought of another day without speaking to anyone when I go up to Manhattan where I have lots of friends and we talk and talk.  When I am in Sarasota I am trying to learn the peace of god that comes with monastic silence.  It is a great revelation to see that French documentary film about the monks of Chartreuse I believe who have taken a vow of silence.  It is a kind of wilful experience of living death.  Blessed Quiet, a new way for me.

I will be extra special wordless until the First of July as we fly off this morning and return the end of June.

Pope Francis and the Gays

I read in the Times  this morning that Pope Francis in one of his informal off the cuff interviews on board a plane, clearly not speaking from the papal throne, said that the Catholic Church should apologize to gays.  This astounding statement merited no more than page four or five below the centerfold; granted the world is still weaving in shock from the effects of the Brexit vote, and last Sunday was Gay Pride Day and its parade in Manhattan, so the compositors of the front section had their work cut out for  them.  I have been thinking about an apology from the Catholic Church.  No,  I don't expect a priest to appear at my front door.  I wonder if I were to read local papers I would read a report of a sermon given in a local Catholic Church announcing come kind of apology.  I will sort of keep tuned, but I am not expecting too much.  It's a little late in the day for me, having been vigorously demonized by that institution for the past seventy years ever since I reached puberty and acted on my homosexual instincts.  I was not a Catholic communicant, but used to be an Episcopalian, a  church with similar pretensions.  It produces an interesting warp of the mind and soul to have adult authority figures unanimously telling you consistently that you are fundamentally evil, that your acts are evil, that the emotions residing in your libidinal psyche are deranged evil, evil, evil.  That's a lot for a teen aged kid to take in year in and year out, and then to go on into adulthood, shedding the childhood fears and certainties but knowing that somehow you are flawed, at fault, unwholesome, to be shunned.  Oh, not ever day, not every person, and indeed one can fashion a pretty good life, in my case, improbably marry, father children, become a reasonably successful academician with a career of creative authority, and in the course of this life in academe meet up with a lot of other gay males performing more or less like normal human beings.  But you knew and they knew: yup, damaged goods.  There's always the hint, the shadow, the taint, the moral weakness, the dirt of your desire.  Maybe you finally become strong and positive, and walk out the front door, proud and tall, but then sad to say you're a little too shrill, you know how to camp it up a little too much, to hide your rage, your fear, your social confusion.  Thank god, for strong martinis.  And then it really didn't matter anymore, too late for my generation.  I once remembered interviewing a newly arrived graduate student and in my capacity of chair of the department asked him how he was getting along, new to the department, new to Manhattan, and he enthusiastically described his courses, and then added: "And I've met a wonderful guy and we've started dating."  Just like that.  I wanted to start crying, crying for all the hate, the anger, the fear that this kid was not going to experience or allow himself to experience.  I want to believe that the massacre of Orlando is just that--a night of murder by a madman.  Once upon a time I would have said it is the whole world and maybe it is among some religions, maybe in Uganda and other exotic places.  The hate will not end because Pope Francis suggests an institutional apology from a major historical gay hater, but it's a step, thank the Lord, it is a step.

Detritus

As I drove out of the parking area at our condo yesterday morning I spotted a plastic drinks container still with its lid in place, some liquid inside,  and the straw protruding, lying on its side in one of the empty numbered spaces.  Someone must have tossed it.  Our parking area is bounded by the condo building on the west and the fence separating us from the Sarasota public middle school on the east and the entrance and egress to this parking area do not lead to any through streets so that itdoes not form a natural short cut for drivers.  It is a senior citizens condo and I would be hard put to remember when last I had seen someone under the age of forty or forty five on its premises.  So where did the container come from?  It suggested to me that act of an impetuous, impatient and indifferent person, in sum, a teenager.  I am always suspicious of teenagers, imagining them alert to all the possibilities available to litter and destroy.  But why would a teenager have been in this parking lot?  Did some youth come with friends to the deserted middle school property to hang out and create mayhem ending in throwing the container over the fence?  He or she would have to have had a good throwing arm to get it so far.  Did some adult guest come and in leaving casually drop his container on the ground?  The thought sent me into a tailspin.  Anarchy!  On the public streets of America there are all kind of disposed articles which should be in bins.  But this is not an American public street but a private property parking lot.  A homeless person?  There, that is a more likely answer.  The city of Sarasota is teeming with homeless.  You can hardly get into the Selby Public Library downtown so crowded are its porches with the homeless.  But what would a homeless person be doing in our parking lot? There is no place to shelter, although legend has it that someone presumably homeless once camped out in the public toilet next to our clubhouse.  I live on the top floor at the end and can sit on my lanai (what they quaintly call a screened in porch) and view the palm trees waving in the distance and the clouds over head turning pink in the evening sunset.  I cannot bear to think that the container is down there on the macadam, just in the middle of nowhere and at the same time somewhere.  By now I was at the grocery store but still think back to that bit of detritus.  Then it occurred to me that someone of the older (and by that I mean really ancient) residents of the building had dropped the container without realizing it.  Don't snicker, reader.  You get to a certain age, and things just start eluding you.  These are my thoughts and clearly enough a mind overly active with nothing to think about.  But, Gentle Reader will notice that I did not think to retrace my steps to retrieve the offending piece and toss it into the trash.

Family Music

In the long ago days of my childhood music was often made in the home at the piano. This, of course, was a commonplace of family life back then in the very infancy of commercial entertainments from radio, and television had not been invented. My brother was an accomplished amateur pianist whose specialty was Chopin, and many is the night we children and our mother drew chairs into a semi circle around the grand piano to form an audience for his concerts.  On other occasions he would accompany my oldest sister who fancied that she could sing Sgimund Romburg tunes."Softly As In A Morning Sunrise" was something she would offer again and again in her affected musical comedy voice, (and I never knew until many years when I heard Chet Baker on trumpet solo with xylophone doing that song how very great it could be.)  The evening changed tenor completely when mother took it into her head to sit at the piano and play.  Her selection was so maudlin that even we stern hearted and happy youngsters were reduced to sniffles.  She sang in a beautiful soprano in no particular order  "There's A  Long, Long Road A-Winding,"  "It's A Long Road To Tipperary," "Keep The Home Fires Burning," all of which celebrated or rather lamented the emotional privations of couples separated by The Great War, as the First World War was commonly known in her day before the ruinous events of 1939 made clear that it was only the first of a series.  We children knew that the death toll was exceedingly high, that a whole generation of young men had perished in England, and we knew this because she often told us so, when reminding us as well that she had lost a husband in that war, and that indeed our very own father had been gassed at the front in France.  It was all so sad and once in that vein her mourning streak went on to her rendering in a quavering voice close to tears Daddy's supposed favorite song (not too long before he died) "You Are My Lucky Star" from the film Broadway Melody of 1936 which came out in 1935 a year before he died in an automobile accident.  Those were grim songfests, and I thought of them last night when I was looking at Youtube which offered for my delectation Gloria Gaynor well along in years at the Mandela Celebration at Lincoln Center, and Ms Gaynor quite well padded by this time and in a flowing evening robe belted out her signature "I Will Survive."  The camera panned the audience of middle aged people there to hear an icon of their youth, black and whites all standing, swaying and clapping to the disco beat, everyone mouthing the words as she delivered the goods. My mother was about forty five going on for fifty those evenings of our family musicales.  Oh, disco, where were you then?  It would have been such a tonic for that poor woman!

England and Europe

I never really felt the dramatic separation of England from Europe; of course, I guess I look at culture and aesthetics first rather than politics or economics.  And, having trained as a classicist I am always looking for the fons et origo, and that of course is going to be Greece and Rome.  From that perspective England will always be one of the provinces, and late to join the constellation of civilized states at that.  My mother's people were all from England, coming to the Western Hemisphere in the early seventeenth century; my father's mother had a similar pedigree, but she married a man who had  come from Germany  just before the Civil War, but whose baptismal records  in the church in Halle an der Weser  trace him back a century earlier.  I was raised to foreground Anglo Saxon and Episcopalian in my cultural heritage.  But then I studied Latin and Greek and spent years in Italy and Greece and was caught up in the intoxication of ancient Greek art and architecture, and the literature of Greece and Rome, the drama of the spread of that civilization everywhere, it rebirth in the culture of the Renaissance.  Although I was raised to be staunchly anti Catholic, an inheritance of my Episcopalian mother and atheist father, I could appreciate the remarkable allure of a universal religion and rite ensuring continuity and identity wherever one trod.  I remember once participating as a distinctly non believing but highly enthusiastic spectator in a  Mass of Thanksgiving for the New Year in Paris in Notre Dame Cathedral, and sensing it as part of a greater whole.  I lived in the United States in the German, Scandinavian, Czech, Polish, and Irish Middle West where the German Catholic Church stood on the central square with the Methodist Church, and down the block was the Scotch Presbyterian Church, and not too far away rose the spires of St. Patrick's as well as St. Wenceslaus.  In its own way it was polyglot, preparing me as a teenager for living in Manhattan where the ethnicities were more various and more sharply defined, especially leavened by the dominant mass of Jews.  So when I traveled from London to Rome I felt I was part of a civilization and culture that transcended petty borders, and I rejoiced when after the Second World War there was a movement for unification after the fashion of the USA.  I guess I understand the fatal flaw that the European Union did not take on the debt of the individual countries at the time of union, which was Alexander Hamilton's abiding gift for union to the unifying colonies here in the Western Hemisphere, and I do understand the English repugnance for government by bureaucratic dictat rather than the vote of parlement, and having lived in Athens and Rome, I am always shocked by the indifference to law and order watching acceptable procedure replaced by bribery.  So I should not allow my romantic view of things to blind me to honest grievance; I can only hope that the vase now shattered can somehow be glued back together.  The money men over there as here will call the shots, and I am too ignorant to understand

Gay Bars

The Orlando massacre has put the gay bar into the spotlight.  This morning's Times, for instance, has reminiscences of celebrity gays of their first visits to a gay bar.  For the most part, although they were somewhat timid, they were sufficiently conversant with an existant gay culture to know what they might expect.  In 1948 fresh from Iowa, 18 years old, I went into a gay bar on MacDougal Street, and never really found a home there.  The males I met were older, but also had a style, an implicit agreement of expectations and behaviors, a seriously developed irony that so intimidated me that I did not form any relationships in all the time I went there other than to go home with one or another guy for sex. I dropped gay bars from my list of to-do activities.  Fast forward to many many years later when I hosted a speaker at Boston University whom I knew to be gay, and so I took him to what I had heard was a gay bar in the back side of Beacon Hill, as I remember.  I was considerably older than the self assured uniformly good looking males in this place, but one horrible thing I witnessed was a really old male, perhaps sixty--that's old for gay--sitting at the bar and the bar crowd shunning him by a space of maybe two feet all around him.  That was so true then.  Old was a disease, everyone was afraid of catching it.  I remember volunteering at a gay organization which disseminated information about AIDS to the community.  At the end of the evening encouragements to join others at a bar were shouted out but also always studiously directed so as avoid including me--I was fifty by this time.  Flash forward.  A much younger colleague in New York who wanted to treat me to a drink to make up for being late for something other took me after a concert to a gay bar in Chelsea.  It was a sports bar, for god's sake.  I could not imagine such a thing, and there were the requisite television screens lining the walls over the bar and lo and behold demonstrably straight males for bartenders, one more hunky than the next.  And there was a dance floor below the room we were in, very crowded with males of all ages and sizes and some with female friends, quite a wild selection of people.  I could have brought my mother to this place, it occurred to me

Pater Familias

Last Saturday we journeyed forty or so miles south of Sarasota to a vacation home of the parents of my grandson's wife.  It was the occasion of the first birthday of the baby girl which this delightful woman had borne to my grandson, and we were invited to join in celebrating the occasion.  I am not a big baby fancier but still I had met this child three or four times previously and found her even tempered and was prepared to enjoy myself.  Reader, we had a marvelous time!  As the afternoon progressed and I could sit quietly by analyzing the people, I came to recognize that my grandson and his wife are themselves persons of extraordinary good will and charm, and that they have given this happy disposition to the baby.  She was all smiles and gurgles, walking on her own already, independent and yet knowing that there was love all around her.  Her mother's family are partly of an Italian background and I so love Italy that I am always disposed to surrender to the charms of people of that culture.  The baby's maternal grandfather is the most delightful man, and it was a great pleasure to talk with him.  Somehow I projected the distinction "grandfather" onto some wrinkled old gent with white side whiskers, when of course he was more or less the same age as my son, the father of the young man whose wife had produced the baby.  I was the wrinkled old timer.  I was the relict of another era.  I was the great grandfather.  Here in this Italianate beach villa in Florida I suddenly felt myself as the patriarch, head of "la familia,' leaning back in the serenity of a life lived well and now awaiting heaven's confirmation of my earthly role.  There is just no way that someone raised in America can live up to something like that, however, and so I stopped trying, ate my food, drank my wine, smiled on one and all, so far removed from the preoccupations, joys, delights, and sorrows of persons of the present day.  In the haze of goodwill I looked at them all, and found them good, kind, and caring, everyone centered on the youngsters going in and out of the pool, and most of all giving space to the darling tot who was--believe it or not--my great granddaughter.  I think back to the nervous, over-sexed (and not very good at hiding it), brainy youngster of sixteen and hey, kid! would you, could you ever imagine that you would be sitting in this scene seventy years later?

Hard Times

Like most young people I grew up oblivious to the social and economic realities around me.  A few days ago I was reading the Boston Globe online about some young woman who had won a scholarship to college after having graduated with high honors from high school while all the while living with her mother on and off in a homeless shelter after the family was reduced to poverty when the father sickened and died leaving them nothing but medical bills.  I thought again how I knew nothing of poverty or want ever since the day I was born, something I finally came to understand when I met the man who was to become my husband.  I innocently asked him in the early days of our relationship where his family spent the summer to which he snorted and shouted with laughter:  "In the same little hole in the wall where I spent the rest of the year.  'Spent the summer'!  We were poor!"  In our family we never mentioned money, seemed to have lived in an economic vacuum, but in fact from mother's perspective ours was a riches to rags story, although most people might be inclined to say "load of crap."  My father died in a car accident when he was fifty leaving her with six children ages four to fourteen and fortunately an annuity that paid an annual income for the rest of her life.  We continued in the large house with four in service and two coming in by the day and so on and so forth until the Second World War by which time the staff decamped to better paying jobs in the war industry.  She made do with a former inmate out on parole--now there was a tough lady!--who left when it was discovered she was a little too light fingered.  And replaced by a very large African American lady whose consort was a handsome guy at least half her age, at best a son, who slept in her room and whom she passed off as "the Reverend."  They were immediately hired away by the local restaurant for its kitchen, and mother began to cook. The incidents were turned into marvelous comic pieces by her--never complain, never explain being her motto. If I had been observant I might have noticed that she also was setting the table and washing the dishes.  And soon she was making the beds and doing the laundry.  The cleaning lady had given her notice announcing that her son-in-law did not want her to work anymore.  He ran a filling station and I can still remember mother driving down there and crying out to him "How could you do this to me?" It was the closest she got to anguish. Then abruptly she chose to move us into a dramatically smaller house; the older kids were had more or less permanently left for the East or the army. I actually noticed this decline in standard and tried to help out a little.  She never ceased to be pleasant, WASP to the end.  I was not much help to her; as a teenager I was more interested in my story and it did not include housekeeping.  Then when I was twenty, and she sold that place and moved into a one bedroom apartment for god's sake, still smiling though, and had a carpenter wall off an alcove for a sofa bed room for me. She had been shedding furniture since our first move, ever accommodating to smaller digs, but now she decided to buy a new chest of drawers for my alcove as a place for my clothes.  "It will spruce up things," she explained cheerfully as we drove to the quality furniture store in Cedar Rapids.  On the way home she was silent and solemn until she burst into tears. "Three hundred fifty dollars!" she exclaimed.  "How could I?  What has become of me?"  She continued sobbing and I was terrified.  This was the first and last time I saw the real person coming through all at once. It wasn't the crying so much, but she had mentioned money.

June 16

For most people who think about dates this is the day that Bloom walked around Dublin finally coming home to his wife Molly, James Joyce's imaginative retelling of the plot of Homer's Odyssey.  In 2016 it was also the sixtieth anniversary of the day I married the woman who bore me four children.  I might have said my soul mate but that was not really true and we divorced with equal amounts of sorrow and relief after twenty years.  She remains probably the most important fixture in my imagination, being the partner par excellence in a marriage that was a powerful emotional, intellectual, sexual adventure until it wasn't anymore.  She taught me so much about design, aesthetics, taste, being as she was an architect and an apostle of the Bauhaus aesthetic of which I, child of the upper middle (tasteless) class of Midwesterners, had no notion.  We met and got along famously in the sack, as they used to say, as well as over quite a few martinis at one sitting or should I say drinking? At twenty five I had never tried much hard liquor so that was definitely a novelty, more than that, she was only the second woman with whom I had ever had sexual experience, my first wife of four years having died just two months previous--before I and the second lady embarked upon a steady diet of mad sexual congress.  What is more, I had spent the past six or so years since I became pubescent aggressively getting into the pants of every male whose path I crossed.  So it was an interesting meeting of bodies and minds and we got along famously and often of course also were quite estranged, and eventually tired of one another, engrossed in our careers and other relationships.  But the most important thing is that we parented four fabulous children in five years, and to be honest, none of them by choice or eagerly anticipated.  She was just stupid about how to use a diaphragm and I was just ignorant, and lazy; and then there were all those martinis.  These four children were an enormous burden; we had to work really hard parenting them.  She gave up her career for ten years, we both drank ourselves silly to keep a happy face on parenting.  But life was a lot of fun if a lot of work.  Oh, the children in those teenage years!  I couldn't believe this was happening to us!  We were an interesting twosome.  Growing more and more estranged in the Sturm und Drang of it all, but not throwing the dishes or punching each other out nor even shouting.  Being upper class WASP has its virtues, even if repression is supposedly a bad thing.  Out of it all came four of the most amazing fantastic youngsters, fully realized individuals, bright, witty, nasty, oh, all those things.  And now they are in their fifties. Can you believe it?  I sometimes can't, nor can I share this exclamatory question with my ex-wife because she is dead now for the past decade.  I would like to say to her, even if I know she would scrunch up her face in a contemptuous disbelief, that the marriage and these children were the greatest thing that ever happened to me.  It's Father's Day, I would shout out, and she would snort and snicker and mutter "Hallmark Card idiot!"

Fathers Day 2016

I have been remiss in writing my  blog.  The events in Orlando still make me sluggish with depression.  In addition a dermatologist spend an hour digging cancer out of my face on Monday, and Tuesday the dental hygienist did his semi annual thing and then my daughter arrived  for Saturday's birthday party for my first great grandchild forty miles south of here where her maternal grandparents were vacationing with the family.  And into the mix my husband had brought a van load of paintings out of our New York apartment reuniting for the first time in twenty years the collection I began in 1945 (some having been sold off over the years as new purchases were made and we downsized for our reduced living space.)  The rehang was done over two days, he absolutely fearless in his good nature and tolerance of my "just a half inch over"  "no, that's doesn't work."  The stress was enormous; either that or something else made my balance even worse than usual.  Thursday the mounting pain in my lower left rib cage made me finally break down and go to the doctor who pointed out that I was like any old witch in a Grimm fairy tale bent over spine curving and thus pressing down on my rib cage unnaturally.  So I must get to my exercises.  Saturday was delightful once we survived the heart in the mouth drive south to the baby's birthday party.  She is adorable!  So full of smiles, good nature, reaching out, walking already by herself.  I am not a baby fancier at all.  I am here to say this child is blessed with a disposition of great goodness.  And you know what?  So are the parents.  My grandson has inherited the easy going ways of his incredibly goofy father, with a more strenuous work ethic.  And his wife is so pleasant, and so are her adorable parents.  I know that I am now gushing.  But, hey, these have been difficult days.  It's nice to celebrate something really wonderful.  And on June 16 was the sixtieth anniversary of our marriage to my children's mother.  That was what I set out to blog about the other day when I just could not go on.  Today the Times is full of Orlando again.  I will save it til later.  Husband with hammer and nails is putting up the last five works in the guest apartment.  And we are done.  And for those who had died in violence here and the politician in England, requiescant in pace.

I'm taking a day off.

The news just in from England, the shooting of the politician, is just so sickeningly familiar that I am horror struck.

The House In Brookline

My daughter sent me a photo an old high school chum had taken of the house we lived in back in the late sixties early seventies in Brookline.  What was dramatically different was that the linden trees which I had planted along the sidewalk shortly after we moved in had grown to their full splendor and the house was somewhat hidden in the leafy greenery of springtime.  It is a noble house generously proportioned and we all lived there quite comfortably for about a decade.  Of course the photo generated so many memories.  The house had a large kitchen in the center of which we had an old fashioned farm table at which eight or more could easily sit.  It was our ground floor gathering place from which the servants staircase went up to the bedrooms and down to the laundry.  Our children were the modern servants; since early on they had learned to take on the responsibility of laundry and kitchen wash-up.  My wife and I did the cooking.  What I was remembering today was the fun and laughter filling the kitchen.  My children are exceptionally witty and back in the day they were trying out their verbal styles, all of them delightfully idiosyncratic.  As a family we laughed a lot.  We had constant company, and they laughed a lot as well.  I have to say that my wife was a little bit glum, at least to my taste which runs to flamboyant, loud, and vulgar.  I remember one of the last really great family get togethers by which time she had died several years earlier, so it was even louder and more hysterical than ever.  The boys were scheduled to drive a truck load of stuff to Richard's and my new condo in Sarasota and we would follow in the car.  The girls joined us the night before in Cambridge and we had dinner near the apartment (the house had long since been sold).  Oh, such merriment! How the four of them--by this time well into their forties I should imagine--carried on with so many risible memories!  We have all survived the divorce and the death, the teenaged complaints of damaged childhoods and parental criticisms, my intense guilt for having been a bad father, even though some part of my brain knows that wasn't true, even if another part says that yes it was.  I have only warm memories of those years, encapsulated in the beautiful house with its magnificent lindens.  And what was so thrilling was they are now moving into middle age just as delightful as when we were all at the kitchen table together.  Recently I journeyed up to New Hampshire to be present as my minister daughter conducted a Trinity Sunday service and afterward her sister and I and her husband had a delightful Sunday dinner.  How nice to enjoy one's children as one enters his dotage.   I dimly remember when some of them came down to assist Richard when I had my surgery, the same kindness and fun.  They are so beautiful,  Richard and I are so beautiful, the old house in Brookline is so beautiful.  The linden trees are magnificent.

Flags At Halfmast

It is Tuesday afternoon after the shootings, and I cannot seem, as they say, to move on.  I am supposed to be tolerant, but it does not escape me that Muslims are acculturated by their religious  upbringing to hate gay persons and no doubt delight in their killing.  I am not trying to express a special prejudice against Muslims. All the Abrahamic religions have formally indicted homosexuality. There is hateful prejudice everywhere; I think back to the Holocaust and the pronouncements of  various leaders of the Church railing against the Jews and calling for their extermination, and as the evidence shows the extravagant glee with which Catholics brought out their machine guns and mowed the Jews down. (My lurid imaginings keep seeing the inside of that club in Orlando as a kind of concentration camp extermination site.) Right here in our condo a very pious Episcopalian who read my memoir of growing up gay wrote a review for Amazon excoriating the book, its author, and railing against its contents (her comments have recently been seconded by another reviewer who has left a detailed letter on the Amazon site branding me and my evil ways).  She even once wrote my husband an email suggesting that it was only consulting the Bible that she felt that she could continue to know him.  I remember once traveling in Turkey with Richard and a store owner asked if we were cousins, persisting in the face of my various evasions, until the truth dawned on him as I realized from the hard, poisonous look of hatred that contorted his features.  Yet I have traveled in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, and in each place I have met males who in their sweetness of spirit always astounded me who am habituated to the much harsher more "masculine" Clint Eastwood behaviors of American men.  Masculine sweetness seemed to be the mode in those Arab countries twenty or thirty years ago.  I remember two Moroccan soldiers wanting to show me some tower in Rabat, and each one taking one of my hands and we walked along hand in hand for blocks on end.  But I also remember a young man with whom I dined one evening in Tangier in 1970, I as the host for him and his wife, and he had been showing me around the city in the morning, culminating in a visit to the archaic but still functioning public baths where he engaged a private room where we had sex for a couple of hours. On that trip I met a great number of males who were very much available and in my judgement fundamentally heterosexual.  Years ago before "gay" became a commonplace term in the USA I often had relations with males here in America who were clearly not committed nor on the other hand averse to libidinous contact with another male.  A man's masculinity was not at stake when he found himself naked in bed with another man.  How sad it is to see such fear and anger culminating in murderous rage.  I am old now, no longer an object of suspicion, fear, and hostility; I do not represent an invitation nor a rejection. I mourn for all those young men cut down.  What will the murderer's child have to think about when he grows up to learn his grandfather's rationale for his father and to realize his part in this enormity?  Yes, so much fear and self-hatred pollute our atmosphere today.

Stuff

Several weeks ago Richard and I determined that it was time to sell the New York piede a terre.  Mounting maintenance fees, declining use made the decision obvious.  Yesterday he and a friend drove a van from New York to Sarasota filled with what we deemed salvageable, mostly paintings, a few clothes (mine), and unaccountably a small dining room table which as I look at it here, I am not so sure.  But then I have yet to open the eight or so black plastic bags I filled with what I thought were essentials, not mention what Richard must have swept up, governed by his family's reluctance to throw anything away in his impoverished youth.  There they sit in the living room of the guest apartment while his fellow driver sleeps peacefully in the room next.  I haven't had a chance to assess the projected changes to the hang of the art collection in the two units.  We have a lot of art on the walls. In the last moves from Cambridge to Hull to Sarasota we deaccessioned is what I believe they say an awful lot of stuff.  Richard has time and again stood manfully with nails and hammer as I slowly, painfully create a wall arrangement that requires him to make tiresome adjustments a little here a little there and this most impatient of men never complains.  That is true love and devotion!  Looming further along the summer's calendar is the arrival every Thursday of a professional organizer who will finally help me pare down for the end days.  After eighty five I read over and over again--but, hey, I haven't read Jane Brody on the subject so can it be true?--anyway, after eighty five a person is off the charts, and should I guess be winding down.  Anyway, I have engaged a most engaging young woman who will come on Thursdays during July and go through my closets, my drawers, my bookcases, my desk and we will make the final choices.  For instance, I could not somehow bear to throw out my favorite ten sport jackets, an item of clothing I rarely put on down here and especially because most despite being thin have synthetic fabric linings which hold the body heat and in Florida are more or less useless.  Always in search of the perfect shoe for my crippled feet I have amassed a stockpile of them.  Well, I could go on and on, but that is what I am now processing, as they say, the hard choices that lie ahead, to which I will be forced by a charming, intelligent young woman with no skin in the game.  Perfect!  But first my daughter arrives for the weekend, we go south for a half hour to the first birthday celebration of my great granddaughter and I assume patriarch mode for a few hours, then we're off to Pittsburgh to visit newly resident old friends there and see Falling Water and the Andy Warhol museum.  We are looking forward to this.  We hope it will lift the gloom into which the events in Orlando have plunged us all, the outright sorrow for all those dead young people, so atrociously killed, the obscene political use Trump and others will make of this human tragedy, the shockingly brutal remark of the father that his son lost his mind at the sight of his infant child witnessing two men romantically kissing, as though that were just exactly the normal motive anyone would need to shoot up a room full of gay males.

Orlando

There are so many atrocities every day it seems, but this gay nightclub shooting in Orlando has left me deeply saddened in a way some others do not.  Of course, partly because I am gay and witnessing such powerful hatred of gays, by an individual male, by an adherent to a religious system that certain teaches vilification of gay persons, by the son of a father who can say that it was not a reaction to his religious teaching but because his had seen two men kissing in public and feared for his own baby son who witnessed this.  But I am deeply saddened at the horror of those last moments of shooting and violence in a place, one of the few places, where gays might think they are safe.  But then I suppose those African-Americans at worship in their church in South Carolina must have imagined that their place was a sanctuary.  I am sad for the denatured life I have led where I have walked on the edge of a gay identity, spent unnecessary hours of companionship with uncomprehending straight people for the sake of my career, my children, my wife, oh, yes, all the complications I brought on myself made me a hider not someone who walked in the light.  Yesterday by some kind of cosmic coincidence because my husband was out of town and I had the car all to myself I went to the major Episcopalian Church in Sarasota as a kind of eerie misty remembrance of things past.  When I was a boy I carried the cross, a position known as the crucifer, in the Sunday service, I forget which one, and at another, I guess, the eleven o'clock Communion service, I was the acolyte, almost every Sunday.  I mouthed along yesterday knowing the entire service by heart, and coming up short at the Prayer of General Confession. I could not do it back then in a private meeting with our pastor after he had told my mother that I was a "homosexual" and notorious in the small town for being one.  He wanted me to get down on my knees to pray to god for forgiveness.  But even at sixteen, often mocked and reviled by the tough boys of the town who on the other hand were keen to sample what I could offer them, I knew that I was not committing a sin, I didn't care who thought otherwise.  I left the pastor's study and left the church and that was that, except for my two weddings, my first wife's funeral, and so on and so forth.  Now in my dotage I have the great pleasure and satisfaction following along as my reverend daughter delivers her sermons and conducts her services and reminds me of the goodness of God.  The minister yesterday in Sarasota preached a sermon on our need to have faith that God will forgive us our sins, the true meaning of Christ on the Cross. I am not so sure that I have sinned, or that I need forgiveness.   The Orlando episode reminded me of why the organized religions of the world are forces for evil, threats to the common good, for their very source of power derives from hate--Catholics for Jews being an obvious historical fact, Muslims for infidels certainly a powerful active force in our own time; one could go on and on.  Love is in pretty short supply in religion.

Songs For The End Of The Road

And then sooner or later, one of these days I am going to die, and so I have been thinking of the music I would like to accompany me out of this world.  Not celestial choirs, but really great performers in the here and now, or maybe recently here and now, because I am not sure they are still all with us.  I vote first and foremost for Freddie Mercury singing "Those Were The Days Of Our Lives."  His voice is superb, there so much love and compassion in his rendition of the song, and to watch on the Youtube video the band backing him is to realize so much love and artistry combined.  The song itself recorded with Freddie's knowledge of imminent death and only days before the event is punctuated again and again by the refrain "I still love you."  Oh, god, what an ache of the heart, but yet with his mischievous smile, a kind of gentle goodbye to us all.  An inspiration.  Another candidate for consoling end of the road music is Joan Baez singing "Gracias a la vida." (Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto=thank you to life that has given me so much.}  Of course, it has her extraordinary rich voice that enobles the word, but the sentiments ring true throughout,  It is a song that defies lamentation, instead reminds us all that life is a gift and whatever its complications, we should always be grateful for the exsperience of living.  Then for a real tear jerker let me offer Linda Ronstadt, EmmyLou Harris, and Dolly Parton singing "The Sweetest Gift", all about a mother's smile shining on a convict in prison.  It's a song to me about the ineffable sadness of how life does not work and how the bonds of affection are so frail and easily lost.  Mournful is the word, I guess.  But wait, maybe the end is not that nigh, come to think of it.  So let's get back up on the dance floor.  Get Gloria Gaynor to sing for us "I will survive" and accelerate to the disco beat.  Can there be anything more exhilarating than disco?  As an old man I can look back to swing, to jitterbugging, to country western swing dance, to rhythm and blues and shaking my tush, and the disco.  What enchantment!  I could have danced all night, but not to the insipid music which Julie Andrews is singing about, but no, the disco beat.  Forget about dying.

A Lovely Spinach Quiche

Although I once cooked dinner every night for my husband for the last seventeen years of his career until he retired and in the years before that I made dinner many nights for my four children, I rarely cook nowadays.  In fact, if I had my way, we would go out to eat every night, except of course since my heart surgery I have been told to lay off the salt which means staying out of restaurants. In my increasing senectitude and indifference to household tasks I fear that out of underlying moral laziness I have ceded too much of the grocery shopping to Richard.  He does not care about "farm fresh," "range free," and I can live with that, but I do cringe when he comes home from his favorite store, Costco, laden with food for a growing family of six.  I know the proportions and measurements; when I was father to four that is how we shopped.  Since he does not regard the sell-by date printed on the side of any container as anything more than the manufacturer's attempt at some spurious respectability, he never feels in any way bound by it.  Throwing out food for whatever reason is akin to bayoneting babies in the imagination of this child of great poverty, who cannot quite grasp that our combined incomes put us very near the top of the economic pyramid where we shall no longer ever know want.  Unless, of course, there is direct hit of a hurricane and we have not stockpiled enough provisions.  There is the irony.  Shop at Costco because it's cheap, never mind that the container of fresh lettuce will supply two weeks of salads.  But don't buy twenty tins of salmon against the day of the hurricane because that's just crazy spending.  Recently a house guest friend of his was my ally in telling him the unrealistic amounts that shopping at a box store produces for two old men.  Grudgingly he admitted that the box of fresh spinach which clogged one entire shelf of our refrigerator was perhaps "a little over the top," and since he and the lady were flying off to  New York later today an inappropriate purchase--something he never would have admitted to me.  That done, I graciously offered to make a spinach quiche, something I remembered doing with elan or eclat or one of those words often enough in days gone by.  We trooped to the local grocery store where items in normal proportions were on the shelf and got whatever else the quiche recipe called for.  Home again, I occupied the kitchen while the old friends sat on his bed dreaming of real estate deals (her profession).  In the next hour I discovered that the simple quiche was in fact like scaling Kilimanjaro.  I was shaking, grumpy, frantic that I would not get those ingredients together on time.  Dicing the onion, the garlic, slicing the red pepper in thin strips, sauteeing these items just so and then adding the damn spinach, finally getting out another fry pan or I would have been there all night.  God, spinach sinks down awfully slowly!  Then the eggs.  Use two whole, and add two yolks.  As I approached the bowl,  and held egg number one in my hand, I couldn't remember which part was the yolk.  Oh, senior moment!  But the hand knoweth what the brain does not and I managed to separate out two yolks, but not without spilling another one down the sink.  I had more or less forgotten the trick of separating eggs.  And last the parmigiano and the grueyre.  The one too old and hard and moldy to grate with any ease, the latter left out on the counter after our shopping too soft to submit a rough edge to the grater.  The custardy cheesy filling was a mess.  I was panting.  Into the oven it went looking like something my kids might have made back in their kindergarten class. All I wanted was a stiff drink.

The Culture Vulture

Yesterday we took our houseguest around town to see the sights, ending up at a hall for a concert of chamber music, the opening performance of an organization that comes to Sarasota for a few weeks in June to teach a selection of music students.  The selections were various movements of composition of the Romantic era, Schubert and Brahms and the like, with a rousing performance in its entirety of a Beethoven violin concerto.  Our houseguest who plays the cello, although very much the amateur, like anyone from New York, was an instant critic, noting that the performers seemed singularly unprepared.  I had been basking in the pleasure of all these sad sounding Adagios, one after another, and could not have cared less.  It just sounded "real purty" to me.  A few years a very gifted amateur pianist was visiting us and I took him to the Philadelphia Orchestra advertised as being conducted by Segun.  But of course it was the road show and as my friend observed not only lacking Segun but also sporting a pianist who held back for sheer laziness from some of the well known pyrotechnics of the various pieces played. I guess, like the more commonplace lacklustre performance of theater down here, it's all about getting culture-lite for an audience that really doesn't care that much.  You can't escape the fact that people in the halls of culture don't resemble New Yorkers, but elderly retirees from the Midwest, and I guess that's just the way it is.  You're not going to get the stars of Broadway working a nursing home audience.  I can enjoy classical music without fretting over the performance.  I well remember going to the Met with my opera queen friends who dissected every bar of the program once we were on the way out, whereas I was basking in the spectacle and the sound and thoroughly pleased not to have noticed what they perceived as glaring imperfections.  Theater is much more of a challenge for me: stupid, boring, or inept verbalizations set my teeth on edge, the dullness drives me to leave at intermission.  Thankfully there is one young oufit here that has started their second season building on the reputation of a brilliant string of startling and challenging plays last season.  We've taken up watching a lot of television series, Downton Abbey obviously even if it is sooooo bad, and more recently another from Julian Fellows, Trollope's Dr Thorne.  And we went through The Good Wife loving the legal wrangling, and I put off by the emotionally unavailable Alicia Floreck and yearning of the oh so sexy Will, her law partner and potential lover.  Done with that, we picked up West Wing, and we've looked at Veep,  I scarcely check to see what reviews are in the Times anymore.  And it's all to the good, I tell myself.  I can't afford New York City theater tickets, I have more than once been seriously threatened by Times Square crowds toppling me to the ground.  Safety and serenity resides in the museums along Fifth Avenue and its hinterlands and on down to Murray Hill and the Battery.  Safe and sound and oh, so old.

A Day On Hold Is A Day To Slit Your Wrists

You have to wonder who does the hires for Expedia and these other companies which rely on foreign operatives to handle costumer concerns (perhaps more truthfully, complaints.)  I have spent several days circling Expedia trying to learn more about an arbitrary change of flight plans for a segment of a journey into Canada.  It was complicated by the fact that my itinerary was also set up for one of my daughters, but that another who had decided to join us on this expedition elected to book her flight independently.  It was she who alerted us to the change since AirCanada notified her directly whilst our notification had to go through the cumbersome machinery of  Expedia.  And it was she who was able to point out that in addition to the nine am departure AirCanada improbably selected  (in place of the origiinal 11:00 am departure)for a fifty or so minute trip to Halifax where we would sit in the airport until the Boston flight at 4:15. Intrepid me, however, launched into getting us on the 2:00 PM and this required voice contact with Expedia staff which their company policy is clearly to avoid at all costs.  The first three persons who called me in response to my asking for voice contact were one who, although speaking a kind of English that  I could dimly make out, abruptly turned from her microphone into which she was speaking to me but left the audio surround on, I guess to indicate that we were still in contact, because I could not satisfactorily verify to her my email address nor my telephone number.  She refused to investigate the odd fact that I had emails from Expedia coming in on those addresses that she said did not exist in my account.  The next two operatives could not speak English clearly enough to proceed, then to make the frustration complete, the next was inaudible because of a background hum in the line.  Through all of this I was getting bits and pieces of data which I put together to suggest a scenario in which somehow the Expedia data base had put together for my account my daughter's email address, a botched version of her telephone number, and my husband's telephone number as an alternative. Despite repeated attempts to change my password and the other data for my account--the fact that the itinerary number remained stable seemed to impress none of them--I was getting nowhere until on still another attempt I got a young man in India whose English was proficient enough that he was not defensive and thus willing to explore all possibilities. Forty five minutes of staying on the line with the loudspeaker on so that I was not tied to my phone this young man got us on the two o'clock flight, and I emailed my other daughter who booked herself on it.  It was all because he somehow overlooked the fact that I did not have the qualifying indicators (email address identification, telephone number) and went with the fact that I had the Expedia itinerary number.  Now we are all on the same plane, everything is right, but how am I ever going to be able to make contact with Expedia to get their data base on me correct?  Write them a letter?  I don't think they know about these ancient modes of communication.  I am sure that this nightmare occurred because of various senile inadvertences on my part.  By chance I was talking by phone with a ninety two year old sister earlier in the day.  She is in excellent health but fears and loathes the thought of living on so long.  After my Expedia experience I sort of agree; if the experience of technology must be what it is, then it's time to go.

Ambien (posted hours late)

Two decades ago I was stumbling through life with extreme insomnia.  Sleeplessness had been a part of my life since my early twenties when the comfortable easy pattern of night time sleep was deranged by a job I took whilst at graduate school.  In my second year the Harvard classics faculty voted to cancel my tuition scholarship--I had really performed badly--and I found a full time employment to replace the money lost with a night watchman's job in a local department store warehouse from midnight to eight.  This had the advantage that I would be free to attend seminars, and, since a watchman makes rounds once an hour, I had a lot of time for studying during the night.  My sleep was sandwiched in between the class meetings, and as a consequence I became subject to uneasy sleep--dramatically increased by the tragic and sudden death of my first wife--which translated over the next thirty years into on again off again insomnia.  I tried handling this with valium until I seemed to go mad one night, and threw the rest of the prescription bottle into the trash.  Then my simple home remedy was heavy drinking in the evening which helped as anodyne against the anxieties of fatherhood, teaching, getting tenure by writing scholarly bullshit, managing the life of a father and husband, while occasionally looking for a male to satisfy other carnal urges.  By the time I was sixty sleeplessness was my cross to bear until one day my new primary care physician to whom I had been summoned because I complained of extreme dizziness prescribed for me something called Ambien.  Could that really have been twenty odd years ago?  I have been addicted ever since.  And, it is also true, that I have enjoyed decades of uninterrupted sleep at night, the joy of waking refreshed every day, the strength to write during this period of time three books, numerous articles, and book reviews, not to mention continuing with my teaching career.  I do not for a moment think that Ambien has dulled my brain; on the other hand, I assign to the passage of years the obvious deterioration of my short term memory---I think of my poor long suffering husband's frequent admonition: "You've already told me that."  Readers of this blog will know, as I just noticed in looking back through earlier posts, that the anecdote of falling on 57th street appears at least twice.  Several years ago the newspapers reported on the danger of Ambien users being subject to hallucinations and nighttime journeys, even driving cars while asleep or semi awake.  It all seemed fanciful until it happened to me.  After my surgery I was distinctly told not to take Ambien for the first few days when I was, as it was not described to me but in retrospect I know it to be true, still under the influence of the powerful anesthesia that four to six hours of surgery had required.  I irrationally disobeyed, and in the night in my sleep I hallucinated the arrival of two beautiful girls who insisted that we were in Los Angeles and must go to "the Sunset Strip" where all the dance clubs were.  So I got up from bed, took my car keys down from the hook and proceeded downstairs three flights to our car, and then everything is hazy, clearly I did move the car in the numbered parking spot since it is a little crookedly parked, but on the other hand I don't think I actually left the spot other than to turn the engine on, and indeed leave the lights on.  The next thing I know was I had awakened my husband thinking I was in some attic filled with familiar furniture which for some reason I thought was stacked and stored.  He quickly woke up completely, took charge, turned off the car lights, took the car keys away for the next two weeks, and hid the Ambien for the next ten days.  That was March.  Life now is back in the placid trough of gentle untroubled repose.

A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned

At dinner Saturday night our host was remarking on his reluctance to spend time in Manhattan hotels when his wife interrupted to say that since he had all the money in the world (a gross exaggeration but nonetheless having a certain factual economic underpinning) he was just stingy in not wanting to put up at one of the many pricey establishments in that city.  He countered with the observation that he had been raised by low income immigrants in a distinctly poor neighborhood whereupon my husband chimed in with the well rehearsed anecdotes of his childhood of want.  The man's wife and I had to confess that we neither of us had known anything but material comfort and relative prosperity, and indeed we both shared the habit of never inquiring of price when we bought things.  Our dinner companions shuddered with disgust at such a lack of fiscal responsibility.  I have to say other than occasionally going shopping with my mother--to the butcher, the greengrocer, the bookseller--who liked to keep in contact with the community, I never heard anything to do with dollars and cents cross her lips.  Since my father's death meant that there was no so called breadwinner in the household, we were spared observations on pay rises, and other commonplace economic chitchat.  It never occurred to me even when I was the breadwinner of my own household that one was meant to oversee income and outlay, and adjust accordingly, so just as I cooked (and with excellent results) by guess and by golly, my wife and I did more or less the same with our household economy.  In my present life my husband grows testy when I cannot tell him even an approximate number for the price of whatever I have brought home from the store.  Twenty dollars, fifteen dollars, seven fifty, these numbers are not in my mind connected to material goods.  They float in space, not to be mentioned, trained as I was by registering the frown on my mother's face if the questions "How much did that cost?" "What do you suppose he earns?" were introduced.  Although I do my own income tax, I do not retain in my head the sums involved, and thus I cannot tell when reading in the papers something about economic policy whether I am in the one percent, the ten percent, or whatever.  I have been strenuously conditioned not to think of such things.   We live very simply in a couple of condos of less than two thousand square feet (I believe hubby said; actually I have no idea), rarely eat out because of the salt issue, not to mention the way restaurants inflate the wine prices so as to pad out the food bill.  I am a big drinker and it offends me to pay so much for your basic sludge.  The point is that we just don't have the impulse to run out of money.  There is plenty left over to give to philanthropy and to my family.  How much?  Well, who knows?  Next February I will look in a drawer where all the thank you notes from symphony, opera, food banks, etc are stored and set them against check stubs.  That will give me an idea.

Sunday Morning In Selby Garden

The past four or five days I have by coincidence been immersed in the history of such violence and suffering that it has put me into a really down mood.  I read a review of Nicholas Stargart's history of civilian Germany from 1939 to 1945 and got it from the library, and at the same time read a review of Svetlana Slexeivich"s compilation of recollections by her countrymen of the years of dramatic change going from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin.  For some reason I also checked out of the library Montefiore's history of the Romanovs thinking it would provide some interesting "background."  Well, it wasn't for some reason actually; I read a review.  It was reviews in fact that brought me to reading these three in concert on the same weekend.  Add to this the effect from several years ago of seeing multiple times in London and New York City the two great productions of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia after which I have been intrigued with the story of  the Russian intelligentsia  in the nineteenth century.  Alexeivich's Secondhand Time was a revelation to me of a large body of Russians who bemoaned the loss of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Communist ideals, the emergence of a money economy, a rising bourgeoisie, consumerism.  Again and again the respondents to her questions talked about life without ideals, a public obsessed with making money, rather than promoting equality for all.  I have to imagine that there is some selectivity going on here, and she is trying to highlight the unpleasant shock of the new.  That democratic ideals came into existence and then faded with the onset of a cutthroat capitalist competition, replete with large scale fraud and executive level robbery, and ending with the loss of political freedom and the return to what I can now see was three centuries of tzarist repression--the Russian "norm," so to speak.  Over in Germany I read about the mass enthusiasm for Hitler, the celebration of German-ness, the eager dispersal and destruction of elements identified as not German, principally the Jews, over the early years of the war, and then the mass depression of 1943 after the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin, and a wave of thinking that Germans could expect nothing but reprisals; there did not seem to be guilt, but an awareness that they had done something collectively for which they were being punished.  So far I am only at the early years of the Romanov dynasty, Peter the Great and that crowd, but already the  alist of beheadings, impalings, brutalities of every kind, constantly imposed to maintain power and discipline, behaviors that of course I associate with the Stalinist years as do many of Alexeivich's respondents, curiously not critically but as a necessary feature of building and imposing a new system, and I suppose this would be the way adherents to Christianity would justify the monstrosities of the Inquisition.  All of these books speak to the horror of system.  Sunday morning I set my reading down and went with a photographer friend to the Selby Garden here in Sarasota.  He takes that time every week to photograph butterflies for aesthetic pleasure.  There is a special section of this Garden where flowering plants and shrubs that attract butterflies are made to grow, and in the center of it is a glass enclosed stand where the larvae grow and hatch, and where the new butterflies can stretch their wings and dry out.  And then volunteers release them to the world of the flowers.  I sat on a bench and watched butterflies for maybe three quarters of an hour, fluttering, alighting, making an exquisite aesthetic blend of their coloration and wing patterns with the many exotic flowers in this part of the garden.  And then it was I felt the peace of God that passeth all understanding descend upon me.

Another Morning Of Hope and Promise

It's one of those Sunday mornings.  As I was reading the New York Times from my comfy chair in my bedroom, I picked up the coffee cup from off its wooden coaster on the nearby table, and the coaster adhered as I brought the cup to my lips, then fell down, rolled somewhere onto the floor, no longer visible from where I was sitting.  I set the cup down on the outer covering of my Ipad which happened to be nearby, happy with the thought that its surface probably would not absorb coffee stains and thus could become a permanent, convenient coaster.  But I would have to kneel down and find the coaster, deal with the clutter, deal with my clumsy effort to make it down to the floor and up again.  And that led me to notice that there was a metal gum stimulator sitting on the side table, left over from last evening's use and that ought to be put away in the drawer in the bathroom. With that my eye swept the rest of the surface of the table and caught the Boze speakers sitting out on top of their case and attached to an Ipod which I listened to whilst on the treadmill downstairs yesterday in the clubhouse.  Messy, it needed to be rolled up and packed away.  I don't use it every minute and it is clutter.  Clutter, there is was, and now I am looking at the top of the midsize book case next to my desk on top of which are three sets of glasses cases, various glasses that belong in those cases, special cloths that clean eyeglasses scattered across the surface, some under and some on top of the cases, two belts, a protective device for my weak wrist, some other Ipods which are dead, at least i can never get anything out of them, two small blue two pound barbells that the hospital staff gave me right after my heart surgery to begin my home chest exercises, and that reminded me I should get out the exercise instructions and run through them which meant a little bit of rustling through some manila folders in a pile of folders on my desk to find the one with the exercises together with instructions from the balance clinic of things I could do while I was out for the heart surgery. And that reminded me how my balance had declined over the past month or so, and prompted me to look for my cane which was indeed leaning against my desk, but perhaps not at the best angle in case I might knock it to the ground. I guess I shall stop all this and go eat a piece of toast smeared with peanut butter, take all my vitamins washed down with kefer, eat a mango, and forget about the  bedroom.  Then I have a date with a friend to walk or hobble, take your pick, through the butterfly garden at a local public park.  My friend is a photographer who takes brilliant shots of butterflies of very sort of hue and design as they alight to feed on all the flowers imaginable.  That seems a lot better than dealing with clutter

As If We Never Said Goodbye

Watching Glenn Close sing this song as she impersonates the once upon a time star film actress Norma Desmond in the musical "Sunset Boulevard" always cuts too close to home.  Set aside the oft repeated notion that elderly gays instinctively identify with the legendary female has-beens of Hollywood.  It's the instinct--the need?--whatever, to perform that makes for the identification.  For most of forty five years I gave a lecture course for two hundred students, once as a favor to the college dean, taught it twice a day for two semesters.  For most of that time I had my material so thoroughly internalized both verbally and intellectually that I walked up to a podium with only the briefest notes, sometimes not even that, walked back and forth, held the audience in my passion.  It was thrilling, it was not exactly intercourse, but it was very interactive.  I was a ham, a performer, with a voice that carried to the back of the auditorium without benefit of amplification so that I could walk about on the platform looking out at the students, catching the eye of this one and that one, giving the illusion over time to each and every one of them that this was an utterly personal communication. I never failed to get applause at the end of the semester, one year a startlingly emotional standing ovation. Anyone who has ever done this kind of teaching and knows that it is successful, and I don't mean just as entertainment, but as a real form of communication and indoctrination, recognizes that despite the manifold objections to the lecture system, it works when the speaker is a performer.  The word lecture means a reading, and that was what it was once upon a time before the invention of the printing press made book reading an inexpensive way to communicate information.  The teacher read aloud, as the French call it, made a dictée, and the students took it down.  The system did not die as it should have because the academic enterprise is always slow to change, and in the age of electronics, they are still giving lectures, hundreds of years later.  But, if the lecturer is a very good speaker, a powerful interpreter and communicator of ideas and sensations, then the audience is getting everything they could possibly want.  If the speaker is lousy, well, nowadays the students come with their laptops and while the old geezer drones on, they are busy looking at their Facebook account and every other distracting feature they can get to.  Since I retired twenty years ago I have had the occasion to give the occasional lecture, even once taught a mini course, done it twice as a matter of fact and signed up for another one this winter.  The intoxication, the narcotic pull of the platform, the audience, all of it is there in that song in "Sunset Boulevard" as Norma Desmond, the aging actress, herself a star of the silent films, and thus absolutely obsolete in the new era, envisions her comeback, as she sees it, as though she had never left.  A few years ago at the annual meeting of the profession of classics which on that occasion was held in Seattle a friend on the program committee arranged that I would speak about a new book I had written at one of the sessions.  She was startled to discover that I could not fill the room, but although my ego was bruised I was not surprised.  Out of the action for fifteen years at that point, not a super star to begin with, I was certainly a has been.  I had definitely said goodbye.

Dixie

When the controversy erupted over the symbolism of the public display of the Confederate flag at the time of the tragic murder of the black churchgoers by that white supremacist lunatic, I was surprised that no one brought up the possibility that the flag of the Old South might best be equated with flying a flag with the Nazi swastika.  After all when one thinks of the Confederate states, at least when I do, thoughts turn immediately to the horror and brutality and human sacrifice of the enslaved African.  It took me a long time to get to that understanding.  When I was a student in school no one ever mentioned slavery except in the most general terms.  In 1939 I saw Gone With The Wind when it first came out, and it formed my notion of life in the antebellum south,  It wasn't until I read Bullwhip Days as a mature man that I had any idea at all about the truth of the South.  The book is a compilation of testimony taken from elderly men and women who had once been enslaved in which a wide range of attitudes is explored, but among them is the reminiscence of the cruelest of tortures, whippings, and the maltreatment of human beings that made me cringe.  It was roughly the same time that the newsreel films about the concentration camps were coming out with the same sickening attention to human depravity. Recently I read The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which is a detailed account of what the civilian population in Germany were up to from 1939 to 1945 in which among other things the author describes the mood of 1943 after the defeats at Stalingrad, Tunisia, the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and the intense bombing of Berlin.  Everywhere the people were talking of retribution, how the dreadful bombings were their retribution for the killing of the Jews; everybody knew perfectly well what had happened to the Jews.  In none of their lamentations, I might note, was there any suggestion of guilt.  In the American South white persons were able to see enslaved persons in the fields, enslaved people chained together on roads being moved from one place to another often hundreds of miles a constant visual reminder of cruelty, torture, and intimidation.  After the civil war the aggressive repression of the newly freed black people, the constant reduction of them to poverty, the rapes, the lynchings, made the entire southern countryside one giant concentration camp for black people. One constant both in the South and in Germany was the constant attempts to humiliate Jews and blacks, to make them feel less than persons. Despite some amelioration of their condition, nothing has ever been done to redress the basic wrong, no sums of money have been paid out to the black population of this country as Germany has paid reparations to the few surviving Jews in this world; no consideration of the fact of their immense contribution of their slave labor to the growth and prosperity of this country in the early centuries for which they were paid nothing.  No testimony has been put in place as for instance one finds throughout Europe, I am thinking of the plaques marking places where partisans were shot or hanged.  One could imagine the same where lynchings took place over the south.  How ironic it is that members of the Walton family have erected a museum of American art at Bentonville Arkansas, ironic because what has been the contribution to American culture from the former slave states? or why is Walton money used to build this entity when their major money making enterprise, Walmarts, is notorious for paying such low wages that workers must look to food stamps for a supplement to their wages, one might almost say slave wages.

Minding The Children

I read Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi's reminiscence about losing track of her children in response to the killing of the gorilla in the zoo, and it made me think of my own such experiences.  Years ago with my two sons in New York City, walking along 42nd Street, we somehow got separated as they went in a store and walked out a different door while my sister and I stood outside chatting and waiting for them.  Well, I will spare you the details of the next anguished half hour, ending up with the police being summoned, and just as they prepared to take me to the station since the boys seemed truly lost, I saw them from my back seat in the  squad car walking along, hand in hand.  They were maybe four and five, and had walked on from the other door assuming we were ahead of them.  They crossed Fifth Avenue, then went to the New York Public Library and sat on a high wall to get the big view, according to their account of the event.  They then decided to retrace their steps and so it was came along just as I was about to leave.  My heart pounds when I remember this.  My sister had gone back to where we were staying in case they somehow turned up there.  I took them down to the subway and we rode uptown.  As we went along, I remarked to the younger what sang froid they seemed to possess to which he replied "We knew everything would come out alright.  It always does on television."  Where we lived in Brookline Massachusetts my children hung out with an ever changing crowd of seventeen or so children of all ages from the neighborhood who left their homes and joined their friends the minute they got home from school and threw their school bags down on the kitchen table.  We never saw them again until dinner time.  We learned later that the gang or parts of it at various times had gone on the subway system to explore all over the city.  When we lived in Rome my youngest child who was then six went home with a school chum on Friday night on a different school bus to a village down by the ocean, and on Saturday or Sunday took a city bus up the Stazioni Termini, the central train station, and transferred to the bus which would bring her to a stop near out apartment.  I never thought to worry about her even when once she made a mistake and ended up across the Tiber on top of a hill where stood the Hilton.  Meanwhile my boys, it turns out, who were in their early teens at this point confessed to me years later that they snuck out at night, climbed the villa walls, and went to a jazz club not too far distant. And then there was the time that my other daughter at this point a college freshman in Athens, Greece, went for a long weekend to visit her boyfriend's mother who lived in Madrid, and since he had already booked his flight got her something different.  In the ways of the young he did not notice that her flight brought her to an evening arrival and morning departure from Bucharest, then in deepest Iron Curtain territory just as it was beginning to liberalize.  He rushed frantically to tell me this upon his own arrival, and was aghast and disgusted when I said ever so calmly which indeed reflected my true feelings:  "Well, then I guess we'll see her about ten tomorrow morning."  I was sorry that she would have this anguish, but I did not think that the entire passenger list of this flight would be hustled off to the gulag.

My Own Kind

This has been a tough year for college administrators as the so-called minority students on a number of campuses have agitated often very aggressively and sometimes downright rudely about issues of exclusion, inclusion, social class, gender distinctions. The  June 9th issue of The New York Review contains an interesting interview with the president of Yale University in which he discusses the issues that have exercised the students and faculty on that campus during the academic year now behind us.  I have spent my life in academia, and I know that the problems and solutions are a lot more complex than the outside observer might imagine.  And as someone whose field is Latin and Greek I have trouble getting my head around the idea that students and faculty at Yale, as reported in this interview, immediately think of southern plantation owners with whip in hand when they hear the heads of the residential colleges addressed as "master," when of course as "everyone" knows it comes from the Latin magister,  or "teacher."  Well, of course, everyone doesn't know, but it's one of those twee things like a restaurant owner calling his pub Ye Olde something or other.  I am a professor of classics, so of course, I know.  Once upon a time in the English speaking world, classical studies were essential, then they migrated to being very popular with upper class students, who would not think of majoring in something that smacked of "business."  This derived from the fact that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century a college education was by and large only for upper class males, and classical studies were the prize intellectual pursuit along with philosophy and theology.  The one exception were the products of Catholic schools who had often started their Latin and Greek in their early teens.  A number of fierce working class boys went on to become college professors by virtue of this early training.  Minority students were not in my classes because their schools generally did not provide exposure to this culture and they had no impetus to take up classics.  My first experience of teaching African-American, Latino, Caribbean students came when I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx, and the experience was a delight.  Probably not for the students in my night class, however, who were working all day and had to take what they could get in the evening and if it was Tuesday that was me for three solid hours. If they were intelligent, and hardworking and ambitious, they set to and worked hard to understand something which had no intrinsic interest for them.  It was a delight to discover inspiration and ideas and intellectual development among these students, men and women who never in a million years would have thought to study such a subject, let alone even know of it.  Those years were rich and fulfilling for me; my students were universally from a background utterly foreign to me, and we got along famously. But I began to ask myself if perhaps ancient literature was not a negative experience  I came to realize that most literature of classical antiquity, the Homeric epics, for instance, are depictions of the life and problems of the ruling, exploiting, oppressing class, valorizing their struggle to control, and for that reason, although they are brilliant depictions of the life of royalty and aristocracy, the poets utterly exclude the struggles of ordinary people.  And what is more, ancient literature was meant for the free born male population in a society that granted almost no rights to women.  By the time I retired I had begun to question whether this exquisite literature was not altogether wrong for the student population of today.  I bequeath the question to my successors.  I am out of it now.