Au Courant

As I think I mentioned a day or so ago, the people who organize this blog site have introduced various mechanisms to "improve" things for those using it.  As usual I freeze, not exactly in terror, but with the knowledge that I do not understand and indeed will not understand if instructions were made available to me.  Somewhere along the line of the evolution of new technology I dropped out, and I guess it was when universal symbols were introduced to eliminate the potential confusion of a national language.  Since that language usually had been English I was not the least inconvenienced and merrily read "Delete," "Try Again," "Next Page" etc with grace and ease which is not the case when I am confronted by little symbols, the little man holding up his hand, so stylized that I did not even realize it was a little man until it had been laboriously explained to me more than once and yes, still today, I have forgotten.  I own the latest IPhone, IMac, IPad, you name it, and can barely do more than turn the instrument on, always amazed when with others who excitedly describe the intellectual and technical maneuvers available to them with these devices.  I was once comfortable in my space, recognizing like old friends the knobs and switches and routines associated with all the gadgets of my life.  I wander now amidst what I do not recognize as old friendly faces; I still cannot turn on the television or Roku or whatever, since one needs to manipulate three wands or tuning sticks or whatever they are called. I am terrified of rental cars since their various electronic features are not always instantly comprehensible nor the symbols that direct the driver to their use.  Ah, terror, terror--the world grows too unknown too fast for me.  As a soothing idea I think I will make my guests for Monday night southern fried chicken.  There were instructions in the Times with photographs; everything seemed so simple if you just watched out for the hot, hot fat and didn't let it splatter. No advanced technology here, although I know that my daughter if it were she making the platter of southern fried chicken would then "post it on Facebook," something else I have not come to grips with.  "You wouldn't want to, Dad," she once warned me, "the posts are too simple-minded for you."  What do you suppose that means?

Reveille

After my open heart surgery this March I have oftentimes awakened in a dream state.  I once had a friend who dreamed every night in which he was participant in elaborate narratives so intriguing that he was loathe to awake.  I envied him that, but these were no match.  In my dreams I am always fleeing pursuers and in escaping them I take the last desperate maneuver of waking up, and dissolving the narrative plane in which they are embedded, a cheap trick of narrative which always embarrasses me when I realize that I am no longer in the dream.  The angry pursuit and my frightened flight often seems somehow connected with the male companions with whom I went to high school or maybe junior high--they seem younger.  That saddens me when i reflect on it when once awake.  I thought I had successfully mastered that crowd back in the day, becoming quite the popular lad in my class, indeed, in my school.  Quite rationally I know that I was a natural object of hate for fourteen year old males whose normal instincts were being challenged by my insinuating homosexual vibes and whose priests and parents no doubt thundered out a message of damnation for the likes of me.  Still over those months of 1945 and 1946 I brought an energetic magic to making myself attractive and entertaining, and succeeded utterly.  So it is interesting to know that the fun and laughter and camaraderie inspired by my wit and glamor had this underpinning of fear, flight, and desperation. A half hour ago I woke unaccountably in a refugee camp, a Jewish boy, with a big cap on my head, such as one saw in Life magazine articles devoted to the plight of European Jews back in the late thirties, early forties.  I was leaning against a hill, exhausted, surrounded by others who were cooking food over an open fire, repacking satchels, while still others leaned against the edge of the hill peeking over the top as watchmen, I suppose.  I felt desperate, and looked to my left which I always did when I was caught in nightmare circumstances and dimly perceived the white frame of the door that went into my bathroom where the figure of Botticelli's Primavera glowed on the painted shade of a night light. Safe!  When I finish typing this I am going back to bed, turn off my bedside light, try for a bit more sleep, so as to dispel, the deeply unsettling mood that has attended me from my dream state into this darkened early morn

Summer In The City

I come back from New York and read that the blog people have "enabled automatic spam detection for comments," and I have no idea what that might mean so I shall plunge blindly on in my weary and unknowing senectitude.  I did, however, learn to put my boarding pass into my telephone, a giant step forward since previously I have always feared that when the moment came to show the electronic version to some official, the power would fail or in some other way the "system" would falter; electronic technology is not my strong forte. In another way I scored a triumph on this trip: I took taxis everywhere.  This was I admit a triumph of necessity rather than the final defeat of a life long aversion to taxis as being too expensive a means of locomotion.  There is a subset of those surviving from the days of the Great Depression who share this aberrant view of spending money.When in the past I have mentioned my extreme reluctance to hail a cab because of the expense friends and acquaintances will laughingly bring up eccentrics in their families with a similar aversion.  Well, it is gone, all gone.  My walking with a cane precluded long patches on foot, the crowded subways made entry there entirely perilous.  Cabs it was.  Of course, the thrill of adventure was dulled by my regretting the utter lack of exercise crisscrossing Manhattan in this manner imposed.  Ah, well, temperatures were in the high eighties and low nineties the entire time: stroke weather for elderly walkers.  I had made a list of museum shows I wanted to see, and pretty well covered this.  As a friend who lives in Manhattan remarked "The nice thing about New York is that there is always something to see or do."  And I thought how true, and as I began to regret not living there full time I heard my mother's stern admonition "Inner resources! Use your inner resources." when I as a child complained that I had nothing to do when we summered in Vermont. I must confess I am not bored in Sarasota, a proposition few New Yorkers can believe. My hostess who is entering her eighties and still takes the subway complains of being crushed down on the platforms, sometimes unable to board as the throngs thrust her aside exiting and entering.  We drove up the West Side Highway passing a score of giant towers and shuddered at all the people who will soon be pouring out of them to join their fellows on the crowded streets.  And my mind turned to recent attempts to cross through Times Square for an evening of theater.  I guess I should be thankful for the heat dome over the city which sent more people out to the Hamptons or kept folks indoors, and made the streets empty for me.

New york

Well, here I am in the big city and its so hard for my arthritis fingers to type and the script is so small that I think I will call a halt till I get home next Friday.

The Cookies

Remember in 1969 when those guys walked on the moon?  We, my wife and I, and our eldest child were on the Vineyard with friends who had a friend who invited us to watch the event on television.  Our hosts did not have a television set so this seemed ideal.  The woman who invited us was an imperious self important rich, and I mean rich, person whose marital career included among others a European titled gentleman.  This was the real McCoy.  As we were seated before the screen a maid brought in a large scotch cooler container filled with freshly baked cookies which she passed around to our oohs and aahs of delight, and then set down on the carpet next to the mistress of the house.  After a certain length of time my son, who was 12, I believe, got up from his seat and went over to the container and took out a second cookie.  Our hostess sharply reprimanded him in the way no thinking adult would do, no polite hostess would do, and in my mind only a colossal bitch would have managed to pull off.  Still we had to preserve the amenities.  To her remonstrance my son, without visibly seeming to be shaken by her words, replied calmly and coolly:  "Well, I thought that the lady had brought them out here for us to eat and enjoy, so I just helped myself to another."  No apology because he clearly did not see that one was called for.  No acknowledgement of a hierarchy where adults call the shots, where hostesses most particularly do so.  A clear understanding that a large container filled with cookies brought into a room, unless intended to be consumed is nothing but weirdo display and delayed gratification in the power of a dominatrix hostess.  I saw this charming, genial, kindly young man in a new light ever after.  He is a gentle soul, father to two, now grandfather to two, who has always followed as they say his own drummer.  My wife once bought him a used Boy Scouts uniform at the Goodwill Store in Palo Alto, and his fellow Scouts all quickly noted that his was "used," and asked him why, in a sneering tone, to which he genially and comfortably replied: "Well, when you get yours washed, then they'll be used, too, so I just wanted to get a jump on you guys."  That was more or less at the same age, maybe a year or two earlier, since we were still in Palo Alto.  Sticks and stones may break your bones,  and all that stuff; he was a remarkably self possessed child, remains so now.  A peculiar kind of constant good will flows through his veins.  He is not in competition with anyone.  When he was maybe a junior in a very high end  public high school where the best of the Ivy Leagues was supposed to be everyone's target he once quietly said to his mother and me that he really did not like aggression and the competition that went with it, that he was turned off by trying to succeed and that he would never like to live life as his professor father and architect mother did, searching for success, anxious to achieve, proud of our endeavors.  Well, that was that, and he never has.  He is, as the expression goes, laid back, works odd jobs, and remains genial, incredibly intelligent as he always has been, well read, ready to take another cookie if the chance presents itself, but not really caring one way or the other.

The Local Newspaper

For twenty or so years I had a house down by the seashore in a small town south of Boston.  The population was a mix of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and Jews; once a fishing village on a spit of land jutting out into the sea, it now housed a working class community who left town at six or so in the morning for their various commutes. There were two large Catholic churches and a very grand and ornate synagogue.  Everyone was committed to an ethnicity, and had come from other parts of Boston, the Italians from East Boston, forced out of their space when the airport was enlarged, the Jews leaving Roxbury when the southern black migration came to land there.  The town was proud of itself, of its children who played well on the high school sports teams, of the ones who went on to college or professional schools.  The Garden Club beautified the major intersections, there was a very well maintained and supported charitable agency offering clothes and services for those in need, and the town's elderly had a building just for their activities; every year the Catholic Church staged a parade when the priest blessed the sea or the fishing boats or one of those Old World routines that made for cozy headlines nowadays..  Yes, it was cozy, everyone nodded to passersby, the traffic moved slowly except when "the summer people" arrived to open their houses and crowd the streets, although actually everyone took it in good part since these folks brought considerable money into the town.  My being a professor kept people at a distance, afraid they would be embarrassed into saying something stupid.  That was okay with me since I was truly afraid of having to respond brightly to some of the banalities in conversations I overheard in the stores.  Although you could see that there was a lot of financial hardship, it was a lazy kindly mindless life in that town, and I liked gardening and keeping to myself.  Since I am a reader and researcher of chronicles I instinctively subscribed to the weekly local newspaper, providing me with verbal testimony of what I might have experienced by simply walking around and engaging.  I loved reading the paper, the police blotter's amazing record of bizarre crimes and misdemeanors, not to mention sheer craziness, like the woman who called in to report seeing a kangaroo in her backyard!  The photos of the youngsters who won awards, the look of pride and joy on their faces, the wedding announcements, the photos of fiancee and future groom, simple and grand, the planning board, the selectmens meetings, the letters to the editors; I was living social existence vicariously. And most of all, the obituaries.  I am a great devotee of obituaries, surveying the passing parade of American humanity, from the Harvard Magazine's review of our greatest over-achievers, who generally had three careers before going to meet their Maker to those in the Times and finally to those in this little local rag.  So many eighty five, ninety year old women, "a homemaker, whose greatest joy were her grandchildren, who took pleasure in crocheting, and attending church."  I could not part from this experience when I moved out, and now six years later I still subscribe and every week in the relative isolation of Sarasota Florida where the news is all of the condos which developers are putting to block the sun, ruin the traffic patterns, destroy whatever vestiges existed of small town life, where the local newspaper's accounts of local traffic fatalities, stabbings, breaking and entering, and the endless list of persons slain by guns accidentally or on purpose, make me remark to myself "We're not in Kansas anymore Toto," and I turn and pick up the little weekly newspaper at my side for spiritual refreshment and reassurance.

The Footstool

Where I sit and read here in Sarasota I have a footstool, a firm sturdy well built piece which I had covered in wine velvet.  This I did when I had it in my house in Massachusetts, and here it goes very admirably with the wine carpet I recently purchased for the room and a covering of the same color for my bed.  I never look at the footstool but I think back to the circumstance of its arrival in my house.  One upon a time--and, yes, dear reader,  it has assumed a kind of mythical or legendary quality for me--there was a young man who lived in my house.  He had a been a student of mine, a kind of tough guy or, as they say, "a diamond in the rough,"  He came from Colorado, and was on some level unsophisticated and but in some way incredibly subtle and knowing.  His relationship with me was so multi-valiant I would be hard put to dissect it at all easily.  Needless to say, I fell in love with him, and after a year when he was no longer a student, but still in the vicinity, we became lovers.  It was of course a ridiculous coupling, the fifty year old gay professor and the twenty one year old straight student who was passionate, tender, and committed and would never admit to our having a relationship.  He could not demonstrate his feelings and we lived with that and I understood.  But then one day he appeared at the front door with a footstool he had found on the street in someone's trash put out for the dump truck.  "You need this," he said in his serious and determined way.  "You don't have anything to put your feet on when you read."  He cleared his throat as he always did when he had to say something that was costing him emotion.  It was a shabby piece; the fabric covering the frame was early twentieth century bad rooming house ugly which had long since suffered kicks and shoves and who knows what other abrasions.  But I loved him for it, his earnest expression as he told me how I was to use it.  He has long since gone from my life, on to the fatherhood and grown up life that he was meant for.  But I have the footstool and have covered it in velvet a little remembrance of times gone by but not forgotten

The Farm

My daughter who inherited her mother's family's ancestral farm has finally managed to sell it.  It has been pretty much an albatross for her over the past decade, ever since her mother died, at which time she inherited.  Previously she had been part owner, as a way of helping her mother finance buying the property from the estate of her grandmother. who had laid an emotional charge on her daughter in asking that the property stay in the family without leaving any money for its upkeep.  By this time divorce had removed me from the scene, but I kept up with all the details, since I had remained friendly with my former mother-in-law.  Truth to tell, I was emotionally bound to the property; the divorce and the prospect of being separated from it hit me hard.  I grew up in a small Midwestern town, and when my mother sold the large house in which I spent my first sixteen years to move our considerably diminished family to a small property in the newer section of town I not only missed my siblings long gone onto Eastern colleges and the Army, but I could never relate to my new physical circumstances; it was another psychological betrayal like my father's death when I was six.  Fast forward to a twenty five year old widower--that's me--who is courting a fellow graduate student at Harvard who invites him "to the farm" for a weekend.  Two hundred fifty acres of forest in New Hampshire, a large pond, a field, an early eighteenth century farmhouse, a giant barn, this was what I beheld when the car went around the last curve.  It had been in my fiancee's family ever since built; the owner had led the boys from that town to the charge at Bunker Hill. I immediately fell in love--with the setting, the history--and I yearned to belong.  From that moment forward I always thought of the place as my homestead; "going up to the farm" whether my parents-in-law were in residence or not was an exercise in fausse nostalgie that grew with time.  Eventually my ex wife inherited and my daughter lived there so I continued to visit and feed my fantasies.  Walks through the woods, swimming in the pond, chatting up the neighbors at Sunday church services, oh, my God, was I "home!"  A marriage for my daughter, employment in the Boston, a disinclination to worry about freezing pipes and the attendant problems of an intermittently visited property made a sale imperative.  Most of the land was put into conservation, so there are trails for the animals and the neighbors for miles and miles.  We will all miss it.  I choked up the last time I visited, standing on the rise of land, looking down at the pond, remembering my kids and their friends swimming like tadpoles all day long.  I guess if I had let my fantasies carry me on and on in this vein, the sound track of "Gone With The Wind" might have come up in my brain.  I can still remember the sound of Gerald O'Hara in a voice over saying "Some day this will all be yours, Katie Scarlett.  Land, it's the only thing."  or something like that.  I sometimes fantasized winning the lottery and buying the place, where in reality I would only spend a very few months, I mean, the mosquitoes, the ice and snow.  But October and November, autumn in New England, beautiful!, and I would have gone "home."

Immigrants

In a very odd way I can sympathize with the workers in England who fear the arrival of competition in the work place from immigrants.  As a professor of classical languages I am not only supposed to know the Latin and Greek languages, and to read the literary texts composed in them, but also be conversant with and read in the scholarship of Germany, France, and Italy.  I began Latin at fourteen, Greek at nineteen, and did a sketchy survey of German, French, and learned Italian later while living in the country.  At the time of the Second World War the country became a home to numerous refugees, some of them indeed professional classicists.  We have the testimony of Professor Werner Jaeger who came from Germany because his wife was Jewish to the effect that no one who had not taught in the USA can imagine how soulless and intellectually vacuous the universities of this country are--I am not quoting him exactly but words to that effect.  He was once my seminar professor and his disengagement from the students in that class had all the marks of a man of great learning and abilities who thought he would soon go mad with the class he had before him.  Well, he bored me, too, so there! I never heard such vacuous nonsense delivered in a monotone for two hours non stop.  When I got out into the profession I was quickly made aware of the extraordinary difference between us folks and the Germans and Brits who had come here to look for jobs since in the 1960's university education was being heavily funded by federal government.  Congress was thinking of us beating the Russian Sputnik, but some smart guys got appropriations for classics into the budget as well.  Americans with their anemic educations were competing with English and German professionals who started their Latin and Greek at nine or ten and then went on to all the modern languages and if diligent could read the ancient texts with some proficiency.  And the rest of their rigorous educational preparation was of the same high caliber and dedication.  We were blown out of the ball park for the most part.  Plus we did not have those plummy accents acquired at Eton or Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge nor were we endowed with an elegant European accent either that called up notions of reservoirs of culture and history.  We were rednecks, even for the most part the graduates of our Eastern schools, and we feared the competition: the immigrants.  That has of course changed as American educational goals have diverged ever more sharply from the models laid down for us by European universities.  The emphases are elsewhere now, much more about women, about slaves, about, the various acts of empire building seen from the standpoint of the native peoples.  When I was a student the field of classics was still the property of the American WASP well born, and the subject was taught from the perspective of the ruling classes.  But things separated out when the moneyed  classes realized that making money was the first priority and gravitated to Harvard Law School and Business School and their counterparts across the country.  Now there is a new kind of immigrant class, ironically enough, the refugees from the uneducated working classes across America who have been seduced by the life of the mind to accept the less than perfect working conditions that college teaching offers or imposes, I guess is a better word.  You get a real mix, not so many WASPs, lots of women, men who are openly gay, some persons of color--still a hard sell for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Nationals from elsewhere often find us American classicists quite bizarre, as much for our strange academic interests as our showbiz classroom personalities.  But, hey, most of those old time immigrants into our academic scene, the competitors from the days of my youth, would not make it through an interview today.

Ingredients Revisited

A few days ago I was going on about Marcella Hazan's last book, a description of all the ingredients the aspiring cook might encounter in performing that task..  I was enchanted, told my husband that I wanted to go to Sarasota's weekly Saturday morning fresh vegetable market to find "ingredients," well, for what?  her famous tomato sauce and then a large salad of cooked vegetables as the second course.  Our dinner guest was a vegetarian which was why I made this selection.  The tomato sauce was even easier that I had anticipated since I just pulled a box of Pome, marvelous tomatoes canned in a box, fresh as can be, flavorful, imported from Italy, and agreeable to the dictates of the Hazan recipe.  For the vegetable salad I got onions, asparagus instead of green beans (didn't seem to find any at the market), beets already cooked and sealed in plastic, red peppers, zucchinis--my invention--, and then instead of potatoes I went with garbanzo beans from Goya because I had read about them in Hazan's latest disquisition on ingredients.  A friend said I might sautée them a bit to brown them up and give them more character. What an afternoon I had!  And all I have to say is: Never Again!  I searched my memory to try to recall: did I really go to all that effort back in the days when I was a daily cook and housekeeper?  Of course, then I was so much younger, now the fingers are so bent and stiff, standing in the kitchen exhausts me, and I can't remember what I am doing from moment to moment.  Each one of the vegetables seemed to require a different baking or broiling situation, not to mention cutting them up or peeling them, like flattening the peppers, getting the seeds out, getting all under the broiler then skinning them.  It is a miracle I did not burn my fingers taking things in and out of the stove's one oven, my wrists can suddenly go so limp.  And I congratulated myself that I managed to get the lids off the high end olive oil and vinegar I bought for this extravaganza.  I can rarely manage to open anything anymore.  I started at three, our guest was coming at six.  Ten to six it was all ready even the table set, and I jumped into a quick shower and shave.  Through it all I was in constant communication with my family since the day was also given over to the news of the birth of my second great grandchild, a little boy, in Canada.  The door bell rang, I adjusted my clothes, marched into the living room called out to my husband to present himself.  And the dinner was on.  I sank into a chair poured us wine and in a short while my husband was kind enough to serve the potato gnocchi over the famous tomato sauce, and then on to plates of salad.  Our guest brought home made biscotti, and good time was had by all, but, no, never again.  But then again, just as my granddaughter was probably thinking "never again," who knows in a year or so?  Who knows if I won't get another insane urge to check out ingredients?

My Brother And His Wife

I was never close to my brother growing up, he was too much older, too butch, too athletic, but when he came back for a surgery residency after his army duty, and married with a small child, and I was nineteen, we became friends through the medium of his wife, younger and closer to my age, and at first needing help in setting up living in the university student dwelling, a sort of Quonset hut affair.  He had met her in his hospital sojourn in Cleveland; she was a nurse on the floor.  Our mother sniffed at her plebeian origins, her father worked in a factory, as I remember.  She met my mother far more than half way, taking mother's lording it over her with instructions on how to set the table, and on and on, with sincere gratitude since she recognized that as the wife of a surgeon wherever they finally settled she would have to inhabit the world my mother knew full well.  She learned recipes from mother as well, bringing along in her own repertory jello salad with marshmallows--how mother shivered in horror!  Years passed and she was the mother of four, retired from helping out with private duty nursing when my brother became almost immediately a big shot surgeon in a medium sized Iowa town, and they had a big house on the edge of the golf course.  She always answered the phone with "Dr. Beye's residence" as though she were the office nurse and it was a professional call.  She was devoted to his position and understood medical hierarchy.  I rarely saw them since I lived in the East, a part of the country my brother loathed, "too snobbish," "too many Jews,""nothing but foreigners ."  He found me mysterious having heard of all my teenaged gay shenanigans, and then standing in the church when I married my wife.  Shortly thereafter a tremor in his arm caused him to retire at 57. Very happily as his son told me, since he had taken up surgery to placate my mother, who wanted him to replicate our father, and much preferred sailing.  After retirement they sold the house on the golf course, bought a two or three masted sail boat and cruised the Caribbean, putting the boat in dry dock for the summer and coming back to a house and a smaller boat on a kind of lake formed from a damned up section of the Mississippi.  They both loved to sail, and when they were not doing that they watched football on television.  She had been a cheer leader in high school and knew all the moves of what I have always considered one of the world's most boring games.  Later on when a heart attack precluded all that sailing and they settled down in a house in Florida, they had a television room where they cheered and rooted and argued over strategy.  Sailing was in their blood, and they went out on a small diesel powered boat and then came home to martinis and football.  She did needlepoint and he often sat on a footstool at her side as she demonstrated what she was doing.  They were truly in love, you couldn't miss it.  And then her mind began to go.  Clear eyed, and straight forward and ever the nurse, she told us the  tentative diagnosis of Altzheimers when we came down to visit.  By the next year she would come into a room, laugh and say "This damn disease!  Who knows why I came into this room?"  Another year and my brother stood behind her when she emptied the dishwasher and told her where the cleaned items were to be put.  She wanted to keep in the game as best she could.  They went out on the boat and she performed simple tasks, they went for walks, they had fun, he told his jokes, and she got a little hazy much of the time (I remember a plate of hors d'oeuvres at a Super Bowl party that looked like a child of two had put the stuff together but their friends loved her and loved the dish she had brought to the potluck).  Then she had trouble with her digestive juices when she slept so my brother made their bed rise up at an angle sharp enough to prevent that.  He cooked the food and told her what she was eating.  They watched more football, and she was silent as she watched the game.  My daughter and I went out to visit once and while at dinner, she sat next to me, and was silent, only to say, eventually "I think you are Charlie," and when we left to go back to the car, she asked us quietly how she was to get into it.  A couple of years later she fell and got pneumonia and died.  Although I said nothing I considered it a blessing.  My brother was devastated.  He loved her so much, they had done everything together, even now when the lights had gone out for her, they were still inseparable.  And now she was gone.

Reconciliation Day

It is so difficult, heart breaking to learn about all the wild angry vicious responses time and again to people of another race, mostly white on black, and all the time escalating when I know no person of color with whom I can commiserate, try to understand what can be done to ameliorate the horrendous situation of suspicion and hostility between the races.  There are no persons of color in my life, no way that I might meet someone down here in Sarasota Florida where the black population is minimal and for whatever reason no person of color ever seems to frequent or work in places I go, like Publix Supermarket.  And if I were to meet such a person would we immediately talk of problems?  I went to a high school where there was one black person in the whole school population of possibly five or six hundred students  He was a very handsome successful athlete, but also smart.  His mother was an educated woman who kept a home in which black students from the University could find a sanctuary off campus.  Larry, my high school acquaintance had to keep his distance from the girls in school, although the athlete boys liked him.  No one invited him to their home.  He and I had a clandestine intimate experience in the back seat of cars because I was gay and he was horny, as those things have gone on since the beginning of time.  We sat in post coital repose often and for some time over a period of ten years, talked of many things but never about what it was we were doing nor about the black and white of our social situation. When I was in college my sister was dating a black guy from Des Moines, whose father was a very successful lawyer in that city.  My sister wanted to invite him to dinner, my mother, though horrified, assented as long as a black woman accompanied him to our house.  When our cook brought in the roast--it was Sunday midday--she took one look at the dark faces at the table, set the platter down and announced "I ain't servin' no niggers," and left the room  All of mother's worst fears were realized, but everyone after laughing a bit, acted as if nothing had happened.  A few years later Mother who was president of the school board had occasion to meet with Larry's mother about an issue of interest to the meager black community of the town. She asked the woman to join her for dinner at the most prominent restaurant in the town.  Never had a black woman been seated in that restaurant, but never had one been invited to dine there by one of the most formidably prominent town figures.  Thus did mother "integrate," as they say, this first class restaurant, but no relationship developed between the two women.  My oldest sister who had put a finger in mother's eye by marrying a Bronx Jew whose parents were more comfortable in Yiddish than English, later on took up with a black lover.  He was a Xerox business executive all ties and suits, self made on the GI Bill, who had decided he needed to be true to his race and picket at a local rally and met my sister--an old hand at rallies and protests.  They lived together for ten or fifteen years until his death.  He had a little problem with a homosexual as a sort of brother in law, but overall, he was tolerant and friendly and like most males totally impersonal in our relationship.  His guy-guy life was going bowling with his friends every Thursday, all of whom, curiously enough, were white.  I think about South Africa's "Reconciliation Day" and what it would mean here. I shudder at a class I taught to a largely Latino and African American group the theme of which was the plot line of the collapse of power from the Iliad and War and Peace to Gone With the Wind, and my students remarking that there was another context in this last beside Scarlett's family's collapse, that the slaves suddenly free would have another take on the story even if the author did not highlight them.  It was a very belated beginning of my study of the horror of the postwar south from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act.  I am a firm believer in massive recompense for black suffering and deprivation all those years, just as the Germans made payments to Jewish communities after the war. Henry Louis Gates cites approvingly his mother's dictum "I hate whites."  Fair enough, I say, but where do we go from here?

Ingredients

Marcella Hazan has left us one last treat, a survey of all the ingredients she has used in the cooking she has done.  (Ingredienti translated by her husband Victor for Scribners).  It is worth reading at this moment in time when most Americans have only a minimal connection with the foodstuffs that go in their mouths.  Between eating out in fast food joints and importing frozen prepared meals home from the supermarket, fewer people really know what cooking and preparing meals from scratch is all about.  This book is such a treat, even if it just for the reading.  Her chapter on herbs, everyone of them detailed in such a sensuous way for smell, for looks, for a projection of their life in a window box on a terrace.  You will rush out to get them all even if you are too otherwise occupied or too lazy to ever cook with them.  Of course, she is an advocate of these fresh vegetable markets springing up everywhere.  Her husband at the book signing I went to here in Sarasota described her horror at the first experience of a super market in the USA.  Instantly I thought of my mother and our first trek into an A & P which had appeared in our small Iowa town; it must have been in the late thirties or early forties. "Never again," she exclaimed as we left after touring the aisles.  Alas, poor thing, she was not to know that in ten years all the small greengrocers, bakeries, butchers, and all the rest would have surrendered to supermarkets.  I lived that first experience a second time in early seventies Rome with its delightful small shops everywhere at a time when they were just facing up to the arrival of the supermercati.  With four children  thoughts of leisurely cooking and cuisine had more or less disappeared except for my time in Rome.  My second wife, who had grown up shopping with her mother on military bases, was inoculated against the horror of food in bulk.  At first she did the cooking and so determined the shopping.  We had four children, she bought in bulk.  I remember in California buying day old bread sliced and in cellophane wrappers, good old white bread which we brought home in loads in our Volkswagen Microbus, and shoved into our freezer.  When she was desperate to get back to work I undertook the household management, but she, anxious to keep her oar in the water, insisted upon shopping, so the PX days of her memory took over, and she arrived home every Friday night with enough food to stock the army, and left me to cook it for the week.  The menus I proposed were  pretty basic, and teenagers are not very creative eaters although they can be ferociously picky.  Nowadays my husband has taken over most of the cooking, and, having grown up in a home where Dole canned fruit was what passed for fresh,  he loves BJ's and CostCo and I am too feeble and finally too indifferent to resist.  So, it is a delight to read Ingredienti and remember for a bit what it's really all about.  One of my sons is a chef, he once opened a very high end restaurant in London, and as they say he knows from great cuisine and fine ingredients. In London he was up at five to go over the days catch with the fishmongers, for God's sake! You want to keep your recipes simple enough that each ingredient lingers for a second on your tongue taste and texture--that was always Signora Hazan's advice.  Maybe I shall make a habit again of going to Saturday's fresh food market here in Sarasota, get out Hazan's book of classic Italian cooking, study Ingredienti and relive it all.  How delightful those years were!  Thank you, Marcella, for bringing the joy of cooking (sorry, Irma!) back to me.

A Political Education

Apart from the brief moment when Sarasota has a film festival what is on offer the rest of the year is pretty much studio dreck.  So my husband and I have gravitated into yet another feature of the years of senectitude: the television series.  And I have found it highly instructive in teaching me about politics and the legal profession.  I mean The Good Wife, West Wing, and Veep.  We got on to The Good Wife first and at the moment are watching the final season, I believe.  As a human drama we are divided in our opinion in this house.  I think Alicia Floreck is a pill, that slightly opened mouth suggesting shock and discomfort whether her companion is asking her to commit perjury or pass the mayonnaise, shows a woman I would never want to know.  And indeed she seems to have no friends, and scarcely communicates with her children, not to mention her dismal on again off again relationship with her husband. But then she is scarcely off her cellphone long enough to talk to anyone actually in her presence.   But that's beside the point.  I love watching her and her partners and their opponents in court.  The way in which everyone maneuvers, their valiant attempts to catch people in legal corners from which there is no escape is fascinating.  But is the judges!  The judges in this show are played by a variety of great character actors who display temperamental dictatorship that would send me around the bend, but not Alicia  or her colleagues who suffer the rulings from the bench with incredible serenity. If you have not learned to suck it up before, this show will teach you. I can see now why retired people flock to courtrooms as to theater;  the former is free and twice as much fun.  And it's good to remember, as this show emphasizes, that the legal profession is a revenue enhancing activity.   These guys may do their pro bono stuff, but they never cease to concern themselves with the revenue.  And, God love them, they deserve the big dollars.  A quite kind of entertainment is The West Wing which is also winding down, I believe, but it's been great all along, and allowed me to read the new Bush biography with considerably greater sophistication.  I never knew life in the Oval Office was so hectic, everyone darting in and out all day long, everyone with a dozen people at their side giving them messages, handing them phones to answer.  The drama has two great bromances, one between President Bartlett and  Leo, his chief of staff, long time friends whose evident concern for each other is tonic in what seems to be a Washington of cut throat egos.  Two younger figures Sam Seaborn and Josh Whitborn, college friends who came to Washington together are amazingly handsome, intelligent, devoted to each other, flirt with each other constantly and remain heterosexual, and true to the peculiar indifference to women in the series, they are without any serious romance in their lives.  Only the press secretary (Alyson Jenning) manages to intrude into the sacred circle of guys, and she is six feet tall.  A friend of mine who has worked in the West Wing says the series is realistic but overly idealistic and romanticized.  I guess bromance does that to the atmosphere.  So it is a relief to turn to Veep which my Washington informant says is the more realistic.  I remember watching this from the start and growing immediately fond of every one of the characters who appeared in the story until I suddenly realized that every last one of them from the Veep on down were soulless, selfish, narcissistic, ego mad, political operatives whose major skills were in promoting a scenario, an image, an idea of what might be the truth, without for a moment worrying about its proximity to the actual reality staring the world in the fact.  I've never seen spin done so well, nor laughed so much at such marvelously witty dialogue--such awful people, but so funny!  And now I am deep into Jean Edward Smith's biography; President Bush has long since given up the bottle and is drinking deep from the well of the ideas of Paul Wolfowitz and the USA is off to the races.

A Death In The Family

They sent me the obituary of my first cousin, once removed, a member of the generation younger than I who had succumbed to cancer. I scarcely knew her but was close to two of her sisters, and was pleased that at the end she, a single woman, had her four siblings on hand to share her last days.  It made me think of the deaths in my own family, a group of people much more disparate and spread out than this crew.  Of my siblings the first to go was my little sister, at sixty five or so, of aggressive cancer which she chose not to have treated.  She lived in our home town of Iowa City, far from me in Massachusetts, and I had seen her the year before or maybe two when one of my daughters and I drove out to see family and paid her a visit.  She was a great wit, a marvelous impersonator of corn pone middle western people, or maybe later in life she had actually become one.  Those things are hard to determine.  When I knew she was dying I wrote her a letter, of farewell which was, I fear, a little stiff, and true to her no nonsense style, she never answered.  This sorrowful sibling event called for parchment and quill pens, and I was no more up for that than the florid eighteenth century remarks that came I must admit unbidden to mind.  But I did not go back to see her, to say goodbye in person, to kiss her brow, no none of those things.  Then my oldest sister, by ten years older than the sister who had died,  suffered a fall for which there was no solution than that she enter a nursing home.  It was a four hour drive from my home, who was the nearest sibling by many many miles.  So for one year I commuted weekends to her house, stayed with her obnoxious cat and went over many times to see her, and  I forced all our siblings to pay a visit or two at some time during the year.  I manufactured family feeling, said they, just like Mother.   It became clear that my sister was never coming out of a nursing since, among other things,  she had no children and her consort had died a few years back.  I told her if she remained near where she had lived I could not come to see her week after week, and she would be better off moving near me.  No, she said.  Okay.  Five years later she began to bleed internally and asked to let the bleeding continue so that she could die a gentle quiet death.  I was on my way to Florida with my husband, so with a certain amount of guilt I said goodbye.  She lingered for three weeks, but, hey, I was not going to stay on in the town-- I had no place to stay any longer--and I had told her the facts when she went in to the home.  My older brother at ninety fell down the stairs while visiting his daughter and that was that.  Two siblings ninety and ninety two are still going strong, and as the younger said the other day on the phone "I just hope I have a strong stroke soon, both us of us two sisters, we are so strong."  I don't plan to go to their death bed; one is in San Diego and the other in North Carolina.  The former I visited two years ago to say goodbye as I had a decade earlier visiting a woman who was a make believe mother wife and sister, but mainly confidante and now at ninety seven fading away..  We had three wonderful days at her house in California.  That was really and truly and blissfully saying goodbye.  I have four children, six grandchildren, two great grandchildren spread all over the North American continent.  I've got a box in the closet that is supposed to go to the National Cremation Society to collect my ashes when the time comes.  I have made no plans beyond that.  My first wife is buried in Ames Iowa beside her mother in a rather large plot meant for her extended family that migrated out across the country.  My second wife is in one of the ancestral burying grounds of her family.  I wish I could see my children at the end of the road, but unlike my two living siblings I don't live anywhere near them and they have their own lives to lead.  Makes me think of my mother who died one afternoon lying on her sofa watching the McCarthy-Army hearings on television.  She lived alone, we all lived quite far away.  But her funeral a week later was a chance for us six siblings to get together for one of the last two times in our long lifetimes, all together, as a family.  Too bad she couldn't have joined us.

Racism

A dear friend, just returned from London and France, came to dinner.  We argued over Brexit among other things.  "These peasants up in the hills, they have to get used to it, foreign accents, strangers, the world is changing."  I countered with experiences I have had that left me cold about integration.  A New York City taxi driver, an Arab, who turned around in the seat to tell me that gay males should be castrated or better yet killed.  I told my friend I was not so keen on the guy's residence in the United States. "Oh, that's prejudice," my friend blustered.  "Yes, absolutely right.  I don't like people who threaten my existence."  A corner store near my house in Cambridge Massachusetts talking with the owners, two Greek persons newly arrived in the USA, speaking with heavy accents, and complaining about African-American school students who came into the store early in the morning before going to middle school nearby to buy something to eat.  "I don't trust them, they don't belong here and I don't like them in here."  Me to them.  "Wait a minute, you're just arrived in this country, can scarcely speak the language.  Those students have ancestors who came at the same time my family did--in the seventeenth century.  So don't pass judgement."  I see those photographs of rows of males standing at the railing of the ships transporting them across the Mediterranean to Europe.  Muslim males, acculturated to dominate their womenfolk and maybe worse, acculturated to a mosque experience requiring segregation of sexes and prayer five times a day.  I believe absolutely in the equality of the sexes and think obsessive religious observance is a denial of personhood and what the United States is all about.  And they hate gays.  This is not about racism.  It's about cultural survival.

What It Means To Be A Man

A few years back the Leopold Museum in Vienna had an exhibition entitled in German "Naked Men," which was a review of the ways in which the male body has been treated in art and photography over time.  The poster for the show was a replica of one of the exhibits, a photograph of three naked males standing clothed solely in the stockings and shoes worn by soccer players.  As if to emphasize this, each had a soccer ball between his feet, and straight up above this, dangling down (pointing down?) from their torsos in each case was a respectably large penis. And that is interesting, of course, since male genitalia are considered by some aesthetes to mar the symmetry of the male torso, deform it perhaps, although I have a woman friend who insists that it is a "marvelous punctuation to the plane of the torso." The ancient Greeks uniformly portrayed the penis in their statuary as small, a kind of aesthetic embarrassment, I should say, and indeed although the satyrs in comic theater are hugely endowed, that's just the point:  A big prick is a joke.  (Ancient Greek athletes who contested in the nude were said to strap their penis to their thigh to keep it out of the way.)  Christian art tended to limit the male nude to tubby little babies.  As for the adult male it was mostly the naked Christ on the cross with a skimpy loin cloth; Leo Steinberg wrote an interesting article on the variation in the rendering of the size of Jesus's penis in centuries of Crucifixion paintings, responsive to the changing theological argument of whether he is more god than man.  In any case, the history of the female nude in art is a consistent and well established convention, whereas a painting that involves the penis makes for a difficult sense of focus; as in real life it is difficult to take one's eyes off it. Just go into men's locker rooms and watch the rolling of the evasive eye making its way back surreptitiously to what it had been drawn to at the beginning.  No wonder that more often than not naked males tend to be portrayed from their backside.  A penis is a promise.  It delivers the goods which makes the baby.  The male who owns the penis is charged with a job.  As Karen Horney the great psychiatrist once said "In the sex act a male must perform."  No erection, no penetration, no ejaculation, no baby.  Which makes for male performance anxiety. Which brings me to consider the contemporary fixation on gender fluidity.  I don't understand it.  Some things you can't get away from, one being, I have been told over and over again all my life from my four sisters, is menstruation.   In the same way I don't understand how any person who has a piece of flesh which of its own accord hardens up at all the wrong moments (oh, those early teen dancing classes!), and in the same way softens when the demand is for solidity ("Sorry, honey, I guess I've just had too much to drink"). Think of the current controversy over men spreading their legs on crowded subway seats!  What could be more uncomfortable than to sit as one must in crowded places with one's legs squeezed, squashing the testicles in the process?  I could go on and on but the point I am making is that while a good deal of the time I am a sexless creature, just living my life ignoring my body, responsive instead to sight and sound and ratiocination, there are enough of those moments when my penis demands immediate and complete attention to remind me that I am a male and nothing else. (Except of course at my age when it is not much more than a lifeless piece of flesh as I move closer to eunuch category.) All those trans women who have had no surgery, I'm sorry, they can say they feel like a woman, think like a woman, but I say the penis says otherwise.

Babies

My older son and eldest offspring will be 59 in August.  We, the family are right now awaiting the arrival of a baby to his daughter predicted some time next week.  This child, said to be a boy, will join his cousin, the daughter of my son's son, born slightly over a year ago.  My son, the grandfather, and twice over!  Persons close to the family have brought up more than once their regret and imagine the regret of my late ex-wife, who never lived to experience becoming a great grandmother.  I have to chuckle a little bit, as I remember her on the telephone talking to our son when he called her with the news that his wife was expecting a baby.  Her mother-in-law complained somewhat bitterly into the phone to her son, that at 49 she was too young to be a grandmother.  I laughed to think that this woman whose mind was always trained on her architectural practice, on household management, "practical matters," as well as good martinis, could possibly care that she was to be labeled "granny" even before she turned fifty.  And granny was what they called her.  I always laughed to myself when I heard one of the grandchildren calling her that.  She never struck me as the grandmother type.  But then I was certainly not at all meant to be grampa.  She was the one who went to the stores and bought them all presents on all those appropriate occasions, and wrapped them up herself, too, concocting clever papers and ribbons.  She turned out to be in her very quiet and understated way a "doting"grandmother.  As she often said, in a favorite expression, "who woulda thunk it?"  I on the other hand was quite indifferent to the niceties and obligations of the position.  I did not even see my first born grandchild until she was two which actually scandalized all my friends.  Well, hell, the family lived in western Canada and my son had enough on his plate not to have to endure the complicated psychological upheaval that a visit from Dad would provoke. And Lord knows, the baby wouldn't care! She and her brother are grownups now and becoming parents, and we have a dynastic relationship, and quite a good time when we do get together, but I think they can take it or leave it alone.  I and my two daughters, the newly minted great-aunts, will be journeying up to Canada in August to see the new tyke in his bassinet.  How strange it all is, the visit will coincide with the new baby's grandfather's 59th birthday.  I remember the day he was born, moreover I remember the day we brought him home from the hospital, in a kind of stupor and terror.  Neither of us had ever baby sat and as we looked at this wee lump wrapped in his swaddling clothes and lying on the bathroom counter we trembled.  And thus began a life I never had imagined, a role of pater familias--insane, but wonderful, the greatest experience of my life.

Order

Yesterday my "organizer" arrived for the first time, and we spent four hours on the closet in my bedroom.  Hitherto I have had closets in Cambridge and Hull Massachusetts and New York City which I had the silly notion I could collapse into one rather large space here in Sarasota.  In the process I did little or no winnowing out, well, a little obvious bit, but still ending up with maybe twenty suit jackets, seven identical pairs of kakhi pants, shoes, and more shoes that upon the fifth wearing proved improper for my feet and were discarded.  But not given away.  That is key to understanding the dynamics of yesterday.  I am as rational as the next guy, but somehow when it comes to discarding clothing, I always think in the back of my mind, that there will come a time when obscure items relegated to the dusty corners of the closet will once again reassert their primacy, their importance, and I will feel regret.  My organizer was therefore meant to be an umpire.  She arrived with a wonderful impartiality, but still a surprising sympathy.  First off, she advised me to feel the fabric of anything I was thinking of tossing and consider how it "speaks" to me.  Funnily enough, it was a marvelous way to get in touch with my real feelings and thereafter I moved with confidence in my rejections and acceptances. But she also stayed my hand as I was about to discard a jacket in an improbable green.  "You'll never see that color again.  Worth  keeping just for that reason," said she. Most of all she got me to understand that living in Florida in an informal resort area was a challenge to my traditional wardrobe.  We filled something like five large plastic bags for Goodwill.  As I went through the maneuver of the discarding, she stood by my side, actually performing for me, and over riding my welling regret as I watched one after another of recognized "favorites" (which truth be told had not been on my body in easily a decade) slipped into the waiting plastic bag. She gave me permission.   Next week we will tackle the contents of all the drawers in the large vanity in my bathroom--bottles and tubes of so many different creams and lotions that various women friends have told me would "work" for me, too. And then we'll have a go at the dog eared dust covered "scholarly" books out of which I taught for forty two years.  My husband, the retired chair of a high school language department, has sharpened his wits in retirement reading mostly recently almost all twenty four books--sixteen thousand lines--of the Iliad in the original Greek. More power to him! Me, I doubt I could do more than the opening lines at this date.  I had the good sense to throw out all my lecture notes twenty years ago when I quit.  Now it's time for the books to go.

Balance

It is all so hard to describe, this business of feeling tipsy without having touched a drop.  More than anything else I am staggered--a choice expression here, I see!--when in the morning i open the sliding glass doors to the open air collection of potted plants that constitute "my garden, " and of a sudden, as they used to say in the eighteenth century, I lurch forward as some kind of ballast in my body gives, and the internal mechanisms fail and I am in danger of plummeting down to the ground.  My, my, how I struggle to avoid the fall!  It has happened more often than not, but then again, not as frequently as one might imagine in the case of an eighty six year old.  I have a thing about falling and maybe that's because I remember all too vividly falling from a balcony down a flight onto some stairs.  Then again I have a thing about automobile accidents, imagining much too often the fatal collision of my father's car in 1936 and my husband's probable crash with me in the passenger seat in 2016.  I am all too aware of the insubstantial in my life, whether it is Daddy's car being suddenly crushed by an oncoming truck or the slippery edge of the balcony railing on which I was perched to enact some juvenile mischief. Four years old!  What a little devil!  I started up with my balance classes today after a hiatus of months due to the heart surgery.  The teacher had me stand from my chair and walk to a given point circle and go back.  He said it took 24 seconds and before my surgery I had it down to fifteen.  Okay, back to square one, as they say.  I guess I am more concerned about flying to New York and lugging my suitcase around.  I know that I cannot do this, cannot get it into proper balance with my weight and stance, even have real nightmares of imagination trying to take the damned thing off the luggage carousel and being suddenly sucked up into its maw.  Had the genius idea of sending clothes and such by UPS in a box a day or so in advance to the apartment of my friend.  I saw myself arriving from LaGuardia with car and driver at the address on the Upper West Side, absolutely free of any impediment, balance perfect, but for the nagging image trying to compete in my brain, me trying to go to the subway stop and falling on the stair.  I can take a cab, I can take Uber, everyone does it nowadays.  I wish I felt more secure about the trip.  Going to Manhattan and visiting all the museums is what life is all about, isn't is?  I can live without fine restaurants, yes, even live without most of the theatrical productions on offer.  I used to say "Hey, just walking around the streets of Manhattan is enough for me!"  But, then, you see, I have to think about balance.

Here it is, six o'clock in the evening and this morning I had to rush out to have blood tests a day late because the doctor's office forgot to send in the forms.  Ah, well, here we go.

Male Friendships

The Times ran an article on the insubstantial nature of male friendships, hardly a new topic, but worth reminding ourselves from time to time.  Certainly not true for all males all the time.  Just the very next day my trainer had an amusing anecdote which told of how a fellow trainer and side kick came by under cover of twilight and scattered artificial butterflies around this guy's house because it has been his ambition all spring and now summer to attract butterflies to his new garden so he can photograph them.  The jokesters who are two tall muscled guy-guys were accosted by a neighbor who wanted to know what they were up to, and they had a hard time balancing the sprinkling of artificial butterflies with their hetero normative--to use a big phrase---definition. I am also in awe and admiration of the trainers at this club, every one of them, as masculine and muscled as could be possible, yet soft spoken, thoughtful, caring, exuding a genuine sensitivity that one or at least me does not associate with muscles--in fact, just the kind of guys who would be out sprinkling paper butterflies around a friend's house of a summer evening. This spring I went to a memorial service for an old friend and was amused to note that almost half the speakers described their relationship with the deceased completely in terms of having faced off against him at handball, squash, tennis, etc. over the years.  And that put me in mind of the play March of the Falsettos where two couples split up and the wife joins up with another woman and the man with another man.  And we see the new relationships playing out: the lesbians are sitting cosily and lovingly ensconced in their home whereas the two males show their love relationship out on the squash court running around after the ball. I guess aggression and testosterone are central to male bonding, even these two gay males in Falsettos.  I have written of the tenderness with which I was picked up off the ground when I fell on 57th street.  My rescuers were burly muscled construction workers.  A couple of days ago when landing in Charlotte the airline announced we would descend by stair since no ramp was available which made me erupt in dismay since I had balance problems and was using a cane.  Not to worry said the stew and leaned out of the plane door and whistled to two guys standing below; they were baggage handlers who instantly mounted the steps, told me to grasp their upper arms, and brought me off to terra firma gently and immediately.  I felt I was holding on to hewn logs, their muscles were so strong and large.  I must say I am beginning to like being disabled.

Falling Water

When visiting Pittsburgh one must go to see Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece house that he designed for the Kaufman family as a country retreat, located an hour and half drive southeast of the city in a large forest of trees situated next to and cantilevered over a running stream.  It is the goodness and generosity of the Kaufman family, whose fortune came from a department store in Pittsburgh, that led them to donate the property to the Pennsylvania Trust for the public to visit in perpetuity, and for that organization to take up a much needed restoration a few years back when as is often the case with Wright's designs and in this particular instance the cantilevering needed serious redress in terms of stress and ballast.  Funds have been provided--maybe from entrance fees which are not cheap--for decent amenities, parking lot, entrance pavilion, splendid docents, the works.  I encountered one oddity typical of the often quirky detail in Wright's thinking, namely, in the men's room at the visitors pavilion the one stall is located first and then there are two urinals which are, however, obscured from view by a bend in the structure.  Any fellow entering and encountering as will more often than not be the case a guy or two waiting to sit down will think there are only stalls and all are filled and join the queue, and it requires men standing to explain the arrangements, a very unusual provocation as males have extreme difficulty communicating in a situation like that. The house is several stories high, including a wading pool at the stream's edge, a glorious terrace off the living room, another off the master bedroom and on and on, all the rooms being small, and with minimal windows but opening always onto striking and dramatic vistas. The wall at the edge of the terraces, is like the wall of the ramp at the Guggenheim slightly unnervingly low--maybe mid thigh--, more of an indication of barrier than an actual protection against throwing oneself or falling off the edge.  The terraces are splendid; Wright wants you to get outside, not linger and look out as is the case with the other great American architectural domestic work, Philip Johnson's Glass House where outside is inside, true to the Bauhaus tradition.  And Wright wants you to have the experience of working through elevations; there are something like one hundred stairs to climb to get to the highest elevation of the house.  I was particularly aware of this as there are no railings to accommodate the elderly and infirm, and as the docent kept reminding us "no touching" although I surreptitiously reached out to grasp at the lengths of stone jutting out every so often from the walls made up of layers of local stone laid one piece atop another.  Spending time in this house must have been a powerful sensual experience, although I do not think that "cozy" would have applied.  There are large fireplaces in every room and the Kaufman family was fortunate have staff to keep the fires burning.  I kept thinking that the stone and concrete vertical support of the building must have been a very cold element in winter although the fact that the flues of every fireplace went through it do doubt was a warming element as in the eighteenth century central chimney stack in New England farmhouses.  And of course there was also central heating at Falling Water.  The place is beautiful in its setting, there is no way but to constantly participate in the design of the rooms, the terraces, the sound of the rushing water, always you are thrust into the natural setting, but the emphasis is upon "thrust," as opposed to The Glass House, where the inside/outside dichotomy does not exist.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is a strange experience of a city.  The topography is obedient to the two great rivers that merge to form the mighty Ohio River, so that the streets do not seem to have an apparent logic or design or concept which in other cities makes driving more instinctive.  Of course, we did all our driving listening to the lady inside the IPhone so that is a passivity which inclines one to ignore the larger experience for the particularities of "in a quarter mile turn right on Fifth Street," and similar gentle admonitions.  Pittsburgh was built on several industries that faltered in the second half of the twentieth century an economic devastation from which the place is now making a comeback.  There are sections of small red brick nineteenth century housing which are glorious in their original fenestration and other details, coming out of their deterioration and when the entire section is restored how beautiful it will be!  That is the section where the AndyWarhol Museum is located and thus a destination for anyone interested in the man who changed utterly the direction of American fine art.  Another much smaller institution, The Mattress Factory, has sprung up in the same area, devoted, if I can guess after one visit, more to concept art than anything else, and the day we visited, surprisingly active in attendance.  It is really worth the visit, just for its kookiness.  On the streets around here one senses the emergence of a community; twenty years from now, maybe even ten this will be the place to live.  Over on some of the wooded hills there are the palatial homes of the nineteenth century robber barons, Heinz, Frick, and so on and so forth, which makes me think mutatis mutandis of some of the oversize newly built houses in Sarasota in our own age of grotesque excess.  Driving through the city provided an insight into another way of road life, most spectacularly in the way which so many drivers treated red lights as just a suggestion, blithely moving along streets which were breath-taking in their narrowness, lined with the oversize present day automobiles.  I guess for this reason I absolutely fell in love with the cars and buggies on display in a museum at the Frick mansion, every one of them, even the pretentiously oversized, seemed so in tune with the proportions of a human being.  The hills, the forests of large trees in their summer greenery, the pomposity of the public architecture, everything hinting at Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals, set into a network of streets and bridges (hundreds of them!) that defied intuition made me leave after four days with the sensation that, yes, I have been to Pittsburgh, but even despite going to dinner on the top of Mt. Washington, and surveying the whole through the restaurant's plate glass windows, I did not in any way at all "know" Philadelphia.