Sarasota

I am now finishing my second summer in Sarasota, having abandoned our large garden by the seashore in Massachusetts as the work of gardening finally became too taxing and the garden lovingly built up over ten years was too ravishingly beautiful to consider demolishing so as to make life easier.  No, it had to be given one last kiss, then turn the head away, just like all those tearjerker lovers' partings in the black and white films of my youth.  Life down here is lived indoors much of the year with central air.  My doctor cautions me against prolonged exposure to the extreme heat and humidity but I see old geezers hobble out onto the courts at the tennis and exercise club we belong to, so I don't quite understand.  My walking is done on a treadmill, however, in air conditioned settings which is just as well as I can get up some steam by holding on to the side rails, whereas otherwise I am too tipsy to keep erect whilst walking.  Walking near our condo is not really a safe option even if one is erect and stable since the intersection of what are laughably called streets down here actually merge two super highways with nominal pedestrian crosswalks, a hazard at best considering that turn right on red is the law and half the people doing so are texting or otherwise electronically engaged. Not to mention that half the drivers are, I assume. southerners out in pickup trucks with a loaded revolver on the seat next to them---this is all surmise, but nothing about their looks, political attitudes expressed in the paper, would lead me to imagine otherwise.  I could set up the regime of walking the two or three city blocks through a parking lot to an adjacent shopping mall and arrive at an air conditioned concourse where I could walk daily for half an hour, what the docs say we all must do. Well, we chose to live in an area that is scruffy, close to shops, near an urban bus network, but it wasn't exactly urban in our sense.  Still, I have become rather old and tipsy, and get most of my exercise, my so called "work out" with a trainer at the gym and a balance instructor at a balance clinic.  Now if I could just hit that mall twice a week I would be the latter day Jack LaLaine or whatever his name was.  Florida, land of sunshine.  Ahem, you will note that I never go out of doors, but if you would study the medical records of my dermatologist you would see why this skin cancer ridden old carcass is strictly enjoined from taking in the sun.

Your Password, Please

Everywhere I read they are writing about Pokemon.  What is Pokemon?  Our nation's political figures are all sending out messages on Twitter.  What is Twitter?  I never signed up for Facebook, which I gather is a big thing.  All my grandchildren, well, everybody, really are on Facebook, and this, according to my son, is why there is complete silence from all of them. They assume I am "following them on Facebook."  There's a site for sending everyone photos.  I was with one of my sons the other night when his son sent an image of the young man and his wife all dressed up and out on the town at a concert.  What fun to know that your progeny can get dressed up of a Saturday night, hire a baby sitter, and take in the theater.  I am completely out of it.  There are several other entries to communication I haven't even mentioned names like Snapchat and Instagram because I don't know their names, but sometimes catch a syllable or two when overhearing conversations at lunch or dinner. The bigger social problem for me is that I have the most horrible memories of evenings at the house of friends when they brought our their slides of photo albums of recent trips, a distant friend's wedding. These new sites,  I might as well be deaf and dumb, sitting in the corner.  Don't mind grandpa, he's harmless.  It's much the same with the television.  I just cannot master those various sticks with all the buttons, the open sesame to all the images in that big screen sitting in our living room. The times my husband has gone out of town and left me elaborate handwritten instructions I have almost immediately summoned up nothing but snow. Well, at least, as my husband observes condescendingly "you handle the new IPhone very well."  Hey, I have had a Mac product since 1984, written books and articles with it.  I am not dummy. But I do see the slippage.  The other day when trying to open up the message site to send a text off to my granddaughter, my efforts were blocked by a bar appearing on the screen which said something like Googlechat or something like that demanding that I enter a password.  Well, that's the end of texting, at least on the computer, I murmured.  But somehow it has never reappeared, but I will not be lulled into false security.  I realize that this is the way my world will end not with a bang or a whimper but with my inability to come up with a password for my every action.  Texting today, farting tomorrow. You just wait!

Sin And Error

It is interesting, (a neutral word, more fitted to the cocktail hour perhaps than serious discussion) that the ancient Hebrews just as the ancient Greeks found a similar concept at the heart of wrong doing.  The words are chet or chait in the Hebrew and hamartia in the Greek.  These words both evoke the scene of shooting at a target and missing the mark.  We who are raised in the Christian tradition, whether believers or not, have embedded into out thinking the notion of sin.  The English language word very specifically refers to ego action of one sort or another, its root cognate with that for "to be."  In other words sin defines the act of someone willful, demanding recognition, "here I am, " so to speak.  Some translate sin as the knowing transgression of the laws of god, probably a pretty powerful rendition of knowing transgression, just as putting out a cigarette on the White House upholstery before being ushered into the Oval Office to meet the President is, too.  In any case, the Greek word hamartia describes someone aiming at a goal and missing it, in other words, a mistake, an error.  This is a very different construct posing a frail person not altogether in control of his actions.  Missing the mark is tragic.  Oedipus moved heaven and earth to escape the oracular pronouncement that he was doomed to murder his father and marry his mother, but in the end as he was trying to escape his doom and flee Corinth and went on the road, killed this old guy at the crossroads after which he went on into Thebes and married the newly widowed queen.  We the onlookers put two and two together and you have to ask why didn't Oedipus.  And we have to cry out in sympathy for a guy trying so hard to escape his doom to the extent that it came up and hit him in the face.  The target hit him in the face, really.  Altogether different from Adam and Eve who were specifically told to avoid the fruit of the Tree in the Garden of Eden and then followed the seductive advice of the serpent and ate the apple.  They were told not to, and then they did it anyway.  That is the delicious thrill of sin; it's not a mistake, it's a deliberate act.  There is something so exciting and sexy about the willful disobedience of the laws of god that those who surrender to the fatal intoxication of a misreading of the signs on the ground will never know.

Life Is Hard

I have lost the capacity for walking easily and what that means when I travel is wheelchairs at the airport.  It makes a lot of sense particularly at a place like Atlanta which is huge, has underground shuttle systems and on the departure level the corridors are thronged with people moving urgently with their luggage and not for a minute walking politely on the left or on the right.  I never thought I would come to this, but there is a lot I didn't foresee which is now part of my everyday life.  One of the positives of the new me is the great group of people I have met, if only superficially, who push the wheelchairs.  It is hard work, a thankless task, and they almost invariably are caring people, quick to be sure their client has a chance to use a restroom and pointing out good places to grab a sandwich within the terminal.  I couldn't figure out a tip system, and sort of worked out that given the horrible wages that unskilled labor can expect, I give a five dollar bill for each segment from gate to gate on my trip.  They always seem surprised and grateful and I am happy to do this.  The disparity of our situations is mind boggling, as I perceive it.  In keeping with this perception, I have also decided to tip thirty percent as a minimum in a restaurant; my son who is in the restaurant business says thirty five when I am dining with non drinkers who bring the bill of the table way down.  I wish there were some systematic way to get money for lunch into the lives of the legion of famished youngsters in this country who have no food at home and no school lunches over the summer.  And why can't the USA fund some kind of housing for the homeless?  Yes, there will always be moochers and losers out there, but there are millions of abandoned mothers, children, shell shocked vets, damaged persons trying to deal with a drug  problem, and they all need help.  I was about to say legitimate, but, hey, the moochers do, too.  Living on the dole is a desperate measure, and as a Christian, even if I do not believe in the literal truth of the Christian story,  I know that redemption for one and all comes through charity (the word means "love," by the way, for those whose knowledge of Greek is shaky).  Not from developers building more tower condos in downtown Sarasota where I live and despair of the city's future.  Last Thanksgiving I was seated next to a property developer at dinner; I almost choked, although as someone born to privilege I guess I have no right to take a position--pampered whore from birth, as many would note.

Remembering Sydney Nova Scotia

Lying in bed this morning suddenly overcome with the unwelcome dark of the approaching winter months at six, clearly at six in Florida, I cast my mind back to sunnier memories, not even later in the day, hence the sun closer to the arctic circle in Nova Scotia.  Sydney is a small town with a demonstrable downtown of shops, especially agreeable to me who grew up eighty years ago walking the streets of such a town holding on to my mother's hand, darting into one storefront after another, always being greeted by my first name.  The grotesque strip malls of Florida well, half of America, are unknown here, downtown life is not lived in parking lots driving to stores that are ten feet from one another.  Sydney's mode of shopping encourages intimacy, people on the street say hello, there isn't that steel reserve of meeting where men are all carrying loaded guns.  Makes you realize how unfriendly and isolated Americans are.  And there is abundant chance to meet and greet on the streets of Sydney; people are all out walking also obviously for their exercise, they have the practice of a gym routine when they get down onto the boardwalk that fronts the water, a body of water that is a large divide, a lake as it were for the community.   Folks are walking on the boardwalk all day,, what is more, middle aged, fully constructed and padded older couples march along vigorously hand in hand as they have been doing since they dated in high school.  Charming!  My imagination, of course, wishing to endow the people of Sydney with all things sweet.  Sydney, land of enchantment..  And an extraordinary Lebanese restaurant with truly authentic cuisine is just above the boardwalk.  The proprietor are two young men of such stunning physical beauty as to make my daughters and me gasp.  Ah, the men of the Near East!  My grandson in law tells me that the Lebanese not French speakers as you might expect constitute the second largest ethnic class after the Anglophones in Nova Scotia.  There are charming early twentieth century houses sitting looking out onto the bay, newly restored, their hardwood floors gleaming, the old wooden door frames glistening with polish, new kitchens, and so on and so forth.  One of my daughters and I were momentarily aroused by my son to buy a house for sale and thus have a large family home where we could all visit in the summer.  I guess the new baby was a psychological draw, our hearts jumped but then stopped and lay still when we thought of the winter and draining the pipes, and the furnace going off, real life intruded.

Daddy, Dad, Father, Pops

I know, I know, it's a bore when a parent goes on and on about his or her special wonderful offspring, but I cannot help it.  I so rarely get to spend--what do they call it? ah, yes,--quality time with my children, some of them almost never.  Especially my oldest boy--boy?,--well a gentleman about to turn sixty in another year.  We had a hard time when he was a teenager, being the eldest and thus having to take the strong opposition as he and his siblings fought to establish their push back against demanding parents.  Now all these years later, he is a grandfather twice over, and the same gentle person who at the age of fifteen, sixteen and up until he left home at nineteen, was resolute in his opposition to me and my values, or so I read it then, and not altogether incorrectly, but the opposition was not hostile, but thoughtful and deliberate and now I see him as a principled person who inwardly decried the ambition that fueled his parents workaholic behaviors, what is more I almost burst into tears as he gently reminisced and spoke of all the wonderful things he had learned over the years from me, yes, by god from me!  I am closer to my second son who is a professional chef, having learned cooking first of all from me, and we are in weekly telephone contact over the slight shifts in intensity and accent in whatever dish I am planning to cook up.  But I see him rarely, and miss him at lot, if for no other reason than his love for me is so transparent, and like everyone else I need that.  My daughters I see more frequently, geography being what it is, and also they have no children, so they are more free, a choice I always feel they made contemplating the extraordinary prison their mother unwittingly created with her chance but relentless motherhood--four children in five years.  We all of us marveled over the government of Nova Scotia awarding my granddaughter a year of maternal leave to tend to her new baby boy, coupled with four months of full pay and I forget what follows that.  The two daughters came specifically to help the new mother, the one of them out in the kitchen helping her brother chop, cut, and stir, the other taking over the baby care when my step great-grandson had done his share and more.  These darling daughters surprised me by their intense attention to my failing powers, helping me in and out of cars, up stairs, through complicated thresholds.  How funny it is, indeed, as one reads in novels and short stories, to find how gradually and innocently familial roles reverse and the commander figure becomes the one in constant need.  Not quite yet the baby in his nappies, but, yes, moving in that direction.

A Vacation From Real Life

Every day I sat by the side of my granddaughter who lay back in an old fashioned over-stuffed comfy velveteen chair with a view out the window to the sparkling waters of an inlet of the coast of Cape Breton.  She was mostly nursing her six weeks old first baby and my second great grandchild.  The house was alive with visitors, my two daughters, and one of my sons, the grandfather of the new baby, who had come to help out since his ex-wife was busy tending to her dying mother.  It was my first extended exposure to him in many many years and one of the most pleasing surprises of the visit. Apart from his continued great good looks, he was the most agreeable kindly father figure, cooking up meals for his daughter and her family as well as his siblings, not just pick me up either, but successful efforts at cuisine, night after night, assisted ably by his sisters and his son-in-law.  Other times he spelled his daughter's fourteen year old stepson in rocking the baby, singing a variety of made for the moment lullabies.  What could be nicer than to see two males of the family tending so assiduously to baby details?  While my granddaughter rested between the incessant breast feeding, she often had the baby across her belly, and I thus had ample opportunity to gaze at the infant.  I don't remember studying one so intently although having been father to four such tiny creatures I must have. This baby upon constant and close inspection grew upon me, I noted every detail of his physiognomy, the darling little face, the mouth, the eyes, the way his hair grew, his tiny toes, and on and on and on.  I was filled with equal amounts of love and, what can I say?, generational joy, I, the patriarch, sitting in a room filled with my progeny.  My parents who died so young never knew the satisfaction of surveying their brood of six expanded to over a score or more, scattered thither and yon over the North American continent.  And for me the days were filled with discussions of the fat content of mother's milk, did the baby have the hiccups, was the diaper filled with poop, why did the diaper leak urine, was the baby smiling at me or was this reflex, and on and on, and never once did I give thought to Donald and Hillary, except when my exceedingly intelligent step-great grandson at fourteen astounded me with a detailed astonished Canadian's assessment of some of the loonier aspects of the American political scene.

Packing For My Trip

I am having a new sensation as I get ready to leave tomorrow for my trip to Canada: trepidation.  I am what they always call an "inveterate traveler."  Starting with trips to boarding school at fourteen alone from Iowa to Massachusetts, preceded by train rides with my sister and some of the family help from Iowa to New England to our summer home, and then off to Puerto Rico at seventeen for the summer, well, you get the idea.  Intrepid.  But now fearful in the extreme.  I think I have the unsteadiness issue well in hand.  My roller suitcase I will check straight through to Boston where I am meeting my daughters.  The transfer in Atlanta will be accomplished from a wheelchair, really the only way to get through that monstrous place, when everything has become so much more confusing.  One daughter will be at the baggage carousel at Logan Airport and we will go to an airport hotel.  Next morning we will be joined by her sister and off we go to Canada to see the new great grandson and his parents and indeed his grandfather, my son, who will be celebrating a birthday while we are there.  So far so good, and during our stay we will visit with the tiny babe and his parents, and try to stay clear of them most of the time.  I vividly remember well meaning visiting parents when my wife and I were dealing with new borns.  Cape Breton is beautiful and one of my daughters and I will sight see while the other helps out.  I anticipate staying in the hotel much of the time.  I just cannot walk anymore, even with a cane.  I am at my best on a treadmill holding on to the railings.  A dismal thought but true.  Was this a foolish plan?  I so much wanted to see the baby boy, after having enjoyed the first birthday of his cousin, my great granddaughter down here in Florida.  I used to flit off to New York City all the time.  I see it through a scrim.  Is the feebleness real or a projection of inner uncertainty about my ability at mastery?  Well, we'll see.  I am signing off for the next week.  Ciao!

The Feast of the Assumption

August 15th is a big, big holiday in Italy, called Fer' Agosto, and the start of an exodus of the populations of the bigger cities for seaside resorts where whoever is so fortunate finds a place to spend the next six weeks.  Stores, pharmacies, restaurants (before the days of high tourism), everything imaginable, is closed down during this period.  It is one of my favorite moments in the calendar, and I toyed with the idea of having a dinner party at a nearby steak restaurant and inviting my favorite trainers from the gym along with my husband.  They, resolute escapees from the Roman Catholicism of their youth, were appalled and could not fathom my motive.  Well, I happen to like calendars studded with events which recall us to the great mythologies of western history.  The Christian story is such a narrative, rich in imagination and image.  It rivals the great mythologies of the Greeks and the Romans and deserves the same respect.  That does not mean belief necessarily, and since I am by conviction an atheist or agnostic I do not credit the story of the Virgin Birth and her later departure body and all into Heaven as anything bordering on reality, but nonetheless I like the story.  Some people are so literal minded alongside the most striking credulity.  I remember teaching a course to some Bronx born Hispanic girls who literally erupted in class when I brought up the notion of Zeus, the father of the Gods, as also a progenitor of many heroes of legend by virtue of his frequent love-making with the girls of the immediate human world.  If you go on Google, I pointed out, there is quite a strikingly long list.  "No," they shrieked, God cannot have sexual relations!"  "Says who?"I replied.  "It's just as likely as the Holy Spirit being able to impregnate a mortal woman.  Welcome to the world of mythology!" These offspring of Zeus are like the people who claim that their ancestors came on the Mayflower, it seems to me.  In any case, I have been to the coast of Turkey and seen the spot where Mary's corporal ascent into Heaven is said to have taken place.  I have seen the place in Delphi where the god Apollo is said to have slain the snake guarding the navel of the earth.  Few sites on earth visited by me have the natural sense of the presence of a god as Delphi has or had I should say before half the world's tourists on their fume spewing buses descended upon the place.  Once upon a time it was quiet, holy, and filled with the presence of a god, the entire town.

Town and Gown

The middle western town in which I grew up had a state university as it major employer.  My mother was a faculty widow, her late husband, my father, having been chair of a major department of the School of Medicine.  She had an onlooking outsider's vivid concern for the workings of the university and taught me from an early age about the gradations in rank from instructor to dean to college president, the last of whom was a good friend who invited her to all the major receptions to which I was often dragooned to go as her escort; she would have been a great success at the court of Louis XIV.  She also reinforced constantly the notion of the superiority of academics who did not work for profit over those in the town like store owners who worked hard to build up their business.  That made me into the snob I am as one who shudders when at social gatherings I overhear my husband asking questions about salaries or sale prices of real estate.  My mother turned my older sister, on the other hand, into a fellow traveler as they used to call persons of leftist sympathies during the forties, who disdained the idea of profit taking and personal gain as opposed to the common good. She could not bear the endless discussions of rank and hierarchy that animate academic conversations. The town was divided by a river and a novelist might have used that as the great divide between those who worked for the university for relatively modest salaries and those who labored for profits.  The latter tended to live in much grander houses and a lot of them drove Buicks, although interestingly enough, everyone seemed to agree that driving a Cadillac was pretentious and bad taste.  Mother's elitist attitude toward academics and her disdain for moneymakers made deep impressions on my psyche, and I find it comic that here in Sarasota we are sometimes invited to gatherings of donors for the very splendid Asolo Repertory Theater to which we give our characteristically tiny mite and there I am chatting it up with a real estate developer or retired financial services figure, in sum, people who used to be "in business."  My instinct to consider their life work utterly pointless is amusingly blunted by the obvious mystification and disparagement which they visit upon me when learning that I am "a retired professor."  That revelation usually ends our attempts at conversation.  A quizzical look rearranges their features that often dissolves into active repugnance or at least that is my sense of it.  But underneath it all, is perhaps the sickly kid who could not catch a ball, never was chosen early one when teams were being formed at prep school.  A little learning is a dangerous thing, I guess, but on the other hand it certainly does a job on your perceptions.  

A Mistake

I have recently published a review of a new and celebrated translation of Homer's Iliad in a small but elegant and fancy journal.  I wrote my review in some haste right after the immediate recovery from my heart surgery.  My husband read it in draft, the editor of the journal, did as well, and enthusiastically accepted it.  A short time later it was set in type and I read it again in this state, as did my husband, and I don't know who else.  I now have the published version, which is indeed very handsome to look at, which I, somewhat fixated on myself, and conscious that this piece will very likely be my last hurrah, leave out on the coffee table, not that we have that many visitors, but so that my hungry ego will be satiated on a daily basis just in the sighting.  Last night as we were leaving for the theater I received an email from a friend and I offered to send him a copy of this review.  As I was glancing over it ever so casually in yet another mental masturbatory mode my eye caught the sentence where I mention a certain conversation between Hektor and his wife Andromache as it occurs, wrote I, in the third book of the poem.  In a lightening flash it came to me that this occurred in the sixth book of the poem.  I have known that fact well oh for the past fifty or sixty years.  I never caught the error, my friends and critics did not either.  I could scarcely set off for the theater so devastated was I.  First thing this morning I consulted the Greek text, yes, there is is, for all to see: in the sixth book Homer describes Hektor speaking to Andromache.  oimoi! as the Greek tragedians would have introduced the exclamation of deep lamentation.  Too bad, Charlie, you're old, you made a mistake, you're forgetting.  The play we saw last night was the relationship between a young caregiver who is emotionally needy and an old woman keeping her at bay who is sinking into dementia.  Hard to watch at any age and for anyone, but I, as they say, really related.  I intend to spend the day whining quietly by myself. Maybe curled up in foetal position.  I will not mention my monumental error.  Thing is, they're not going to notice it.

Oh, What A Lovely Day

The exclamation is true enough in some ways, even if the temperature is very high and the humidity stifling, and one of the news items in the local paper this morning describes a motorist shooting dead another fellow who attacked him in rage who as it turns out had just been released from prison for a road rage shooting.  Riding in cars is not for the faint of heart in Florida where the rate of pedestrian deaths and fatalities in automobile accidents is second in the nation.  No, best to stay inside, and stay cool, and think pretty thoughts, as I am who at the moment is contemplating my journey to Canada next week where I will have the thrill of meeting my one month old great grandson.  A month or so ago we journeyed south of here to celebrate the first birthday of his cousin,  my great granddaughter.  Such a bubbly sweet child who warmed my heart who am not by nature drawn to very small children preferring to carry on conversation rather than making faces, squeezing rubber balls, and saying "goo-goo."  The trip to Canada will provide me with a visit as well with my granddaughter, her charming husband, both as pleasing and attractive as the parents of the great granddaughter south of us here in Florida.  And an added bonus will be my companions on this trip my two daughters who will join me after my lay-over at Logan airport in Boston, in fact one will come out to the airport upon my arrival to help me get my suitcase off the baggage carousel.  I don't think my seriously impaired balance could manage it alone.  So I will have a pleasant intimate evening at the hotel first in the restaurant and then sleeping over with one daughter and in Canada whilst that lady turns to helping out the new mother, the other daughter and I will tour some museums and other sites which will only glanced at on a previous visit.  On Friday week the big treat will be that my son the twice over grandfather will be on hand so that we can celebrate his 59th birthday.  He rarely surfaces in my life so this will definitely be a great treat.  We are staying in a hotel which promises that every room has a view of the ocean so that in turn will make the trip delightful.  One daughter warns that the temperature will fall into the sixties at night which is winter weather for us down here in Florida, so I must remember to bring garments in which I can "bundle up."  I must stop to ask rhetorically once again "who ever thought that  Charlie Beye, the class wit and dance queen of Iowa City High School, would end up not only a retired professor with a pompous title and a string of publications but a father of four, grandfather of six, and now great grandfather of two (and it's just the beginning!)?"  It's one of those days that as I look back on my association with my four children I glow with pleasure, remembering the good times and the so so times and reflecting that my wife and I were lucky that our four children were fundamentally good and noble persons who never brought on the bad times which we are always hearing about from the press and in novels.  I am fundamentally a pessimistic person so perhaps I should not end even  facetiously "God's in Heaven, all's right with the world," especially as that is such a cruel irony and so untrue when one contemplates world affairs today.

Helen Gurley Brown again

As I wrote the other day Helen Gurley Brown described in one of her books how to give a good blow job.  That set me to thinking, to reminiscing. In my youth I don't think that young ladies, girls, or women, take your favorite appellation, for the most part were given to performing fellatio--to be polite about it--on their gentlemen friends.  Certainly not in Iowa City, certainly not the girls of Iowa City Public High School.  I would have heard of it somehow.  After all it was I who was consecrated as the great blow job artist, and although they probably joked about it enough in their locker rooms, the town jocks who were eager for my ministrations did not address the matter publicly, and certainly not to their girl friends.  Or so I have always imagined.  I remember once double dating with a local stud whose girl friend was best friends with my date for the evening, hardly a "girl friend."  We had deposited my date at her home and now sitting out front of the other girl's house, I sat in the car watching the guy plaster himself against his date up by the front door, grinding into her really, in a decorous Eisenhower era way, although I guess this was back when Truman was president.  In any case, eventually he tore himself away, jumped into the car, and we sped off.  Moments later as we were passing the city park, he shouted: "Turn in here," and within minutes he was unzipping his pants and urgently breathlessly saying. "You gotta help me out!"  He was a star athlete, a senior, I scarcely knew him, but there he was, a glittering prize, all for me.  Helen Gurley Brown's advice to her female readership in this matter comes from her consummate desire to furnish women with every device conceivable to make males accessible, especially for good sex, a far more important objective than the traditional Kinder, Kirche, und Küche that was still being peddled at the time.  I of course have a different take on this, being a gay male, for whom the experience engenders the highest sexual excitement; I wasn't doing it "to help some guy out," or to make myself more attractive.  Since I am a male I can participate sympathetically in every nuance of the heightening sensual arousal.  Because I am attracted to the males I can appreciate their strength, their largeness, their normal every day macho dominance, their total masculine command, and thus can also derive the maximum pseudo sexual sadistic pleasure in experiencing their physical surrender in an orgasm of which I was the impresario. My high school years were great fun, oh, for the obvious reasons, for instance, like I was a great dancer and all the girls wanted me for a partner--the boys as a rule, were so shy and clumsy--, but no one can ever take away the memory of those guys from my high school with me in the back seat of a car, one on one, a real relationships of a very special sort.  I wish I could have had a discussion with Helen Gurley Brown about it all, because I am sure she would have got a kick out of it.

Africa

Uganda is just one of many states in the continent of Africa which has relenltessly demonized and punished persons who admit to being homosexual or demonstrate it.  From my perspective much of the continent is a wrecked place, still evidencing the wounds of the horrible exploitative invasion of European nations.  So I cut them some slack.  But there is a limit; the aggressive attacks on homosexual persons and their pursuit of sexual and social happiness are to my mind the far greater perversion, and when coupled with the dubious and neurotic fixation on the authority of the Judaeo-Christian Bible allows a community to surrender to a false prophet of seriously sinister proportions.  I do not want these people to immigrate into my country and I make no hesitation in saying so.  It is the same with Muslims who will attack the homosexuals; I do not want them here.  I am a male, and as such I recognize that the Christian and Muslim religions in Africa are in the possession of male heterosexuals who use these religions to bind ever more closely the people of the continent who are prisoners of the males.  The Abrahamic religions have used the dictates of the Book to set women into chains and keep them there.  Women can only be free when they understand how they are slaves of their menfolk in a Judaeo-Christian-Muslim context.  If only they recognize that every rape committed essentially derives from that Book.  Heterosexual males fear homosexuals because they do not commit to the utter supremacy of the male.  Contrary to popular understanding, heterosexual males submit to the embrace of their fellow males at a statistical level which is slightly astounding.  This truth is the undoing of the quasi fascist control of heterosexual males over their females.  Any male traveler in Arab lands may enjoy carnal relations with males easily enough, in fact far more so than in, say, the American middle west.  Partly that is the lack of imagination and desire on the part of American males, but it is also a result of the curious combination of repression and restraint which evolved from the holy texts.

The Population Darkens

My trainer at the gym and I have been wasting (my) exercise time engaged in an interesting conversation about Americans.  He is from my perspective absolutely no different than I, educated, savvy about our inherited culture, articulate, but, as he insists he is Puerto Rican, brown skinned and thus inherently different than I.  True enough he grew up with a big Afro  and as a boy was already dancing on large pieces of cardboard for money.  He was a child of the Bronx and I grew up pink cheeked and clueless in the cultural wastes of the American Middle West.  Except of course not really true as ours was a university town, I was preternaturally intellectually curious and took advantage that everything the university had on offer from an early age. Mike may not have had the extensive university education I had but having lived in New York and been part of the professional theatre and dance scene, Jose Quintero as a mentor, he is no rube from the island.  So our conversation was interesting; whenever I insisted upon our likeness, he would remind me that he was always the last to be brought into a casting call--he wasn't white enough.  The statisticians say that soon the population will be minority white.  As a longtime professor of the humanities I wondered aloud with Mike how the narrative of the West--Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc. will now be presented.  It is essentially a story of the white man's increasingly complicated and subtle definition of himself.  For many its crowning achievement was the Age of Enlightenment when the irrational bonds of religious belief were cast off and exchanged for scientific inquiry.  We both of us one a lapsed Catholic, the other a former Episcopalian, fear the new immigrant movements of peoples untouched by skepticism  and scientific inquiry.  We wondered how to encourage peoples who formerly have been excluded to participate.  I think of the students I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx once upon a time, mostly people of color, who traditionally had been excluded from the city's cultural institutions, the museums, the opera houses, who were all very reluctant or indifferent to visit.  Was this great heritage essentially a narrative of white people to be discarded?  We talked of the musical "Hamilton" where the cast is largely African American, many of Puerto Rican heritage, as is its composer.  I remember my inherent sense of disconnect even though I knew what I was going to be seeing when the  opening scene presented a group of men and women in eighteenth century dress, purporting to be friends, family and indeed some of the Founding Fathers, all them clearly identifiable as "Negroes," to use the term with which I was raised.  Down at the Public Theater where the musical originated the audience was largely white.  How do people of color see this show?  I think of my students over the years to whom I lectured on ancient Greek epic poetry.  As more and more of the class by virtue of this change in ethnicity become the descendants of the oppressed, enslaved, the dispossessed how will they identify with Achilles and Agamemnon and Odysseus, war heroes, slave owners, rapacious winners in life's game of chance, although eventually losers in terms of the ancient Greek tragic sense of life, itself at odds with the optimistic world view offered by the religions of the book which will be dominant among these new Americans.  Well, I will be dead soon enough, not to worry, Charlie.  History will sort itself out, always has, if it doesn't sink under the waves.

Helen Gurley Brown

Somehow In browsing through the copious reading material that lay on my reading table I uncovered more than the usual fare of atrocities.  There was the New Yorker story of tribes in the Amazon basin who are being decimated from their contact with Europeans, the LRB account of the Chilicot report summarized by Chilicot himself in an uncompromising speech in London in which he laid out Blair's extraordinary culpability for leading the UK into the Iraq war, and in the New York Times a special section devoted to a sampling of the new novel by Colson Whitehead detailing the sufferings of enslaved Africans trying to escape the antebellum South.  I can just barely get through Holocaust stories, and am completely paralyzed by the complicity of my ancestors, in general rather than particularly so, in the racial brutalities of this country that I started it and set it down for another day.  Then the Book Review described an account of the murderous rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi, and I had had it, since of course the news sections of the paper had been filled with news reports of the ongoing trauma of the Middle East.  I set this down to turn to a biography of Helen Gurley Brown of which I had read a review.  Aggressive women, monstres sacrées. the Diana Vreelands of this world, have always fascinated me perhaps because I grew up in a household of a mother whose widowhood in prosperous circumstances made her more active than average in a middle western setting of the thirties, plus I had four sisters who were determined to strike out for independent lives, and then, of course, as any one would be quick to point out I am gay, and hence by definition in the opinion of the world attracted to powerful or seemingly powerful women.  The bio was rather tedious, being overwritten with too much detail, but by judicious skimming I managed to make my way through a great story.  Helen Gurley Brown came from hardscrabble poverty in the rural south to the Beresford on Central Park West. She stayed single into her late thirties, then married David Brown, producer of Jaws among other things, and most important edited for decades Cosmopolitan which she devoted to the protofeminist project of educating women into being aggressive in their pursuit of good sex. Before this women were supposed to stand like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, waiting for the gaze of an erotically transfixed male to take hold of them, and of course lead them to the altar after which lay bed, kitchen, and baby bottle.  Brown taught women to go out and find good sex and forget about marriage, and , very important, also to maintain good friendships with other women.  If marriage arrived, good, if not, then living as a single woman was just fine, so long as the woman in question got laid.  Dress up, have good hair, do your face over, be sexy, and most of all have a good time in bed, think orgasm.  I remember the polite middle class middle western society of the Eisenhower years, and then along came Helen Gurley Brown.  There was Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, others, but no one had the bead on personal feminine freedom which Brown endorsed.  She lived a long time, she was not beautiful, nor particularly glamorous, but she had incredible style, and a powerful message; in one of her books she even described detail by detail how to give the perfect blow job.  Reading the bio made my day.

Dreams

For the first time in my life at age eighty  six I have sometimes waked in the morning from a dream which is so compelling that it take me time so situate myself into the reality of the darkened bedroom I sleep in here in Florida.  Previously I almost never dreamed except very occasionally in a cold fear of some imaginary pursuers in my desperate flight from -- what?  Now--must have been the heart surgery-- at least once a week I arise in a fantasy that seems to cling to me as a kind of cloud--like a movie set as I walk through the door to the espresso machine, the touch of which establishes my reality.  The dreams are all of a piece, portraying me as a boy of ten or eleven, sometimes when they are a little edgy I wake in flight from some unidentifiable menace but since the scene is a classroom of the sort one remembers from schools sixty or so years ago, I suppose I am dramatizing schoolhouse fears of my youth.  But I am quite clear on that; having already spilled the beans that I was attracted to other boys (I can't quite describe that with the dignified "I had identified myself" mainly because it was by groping that I committed to self advertisement.) the source of fear was something else.  More frequently I awake running, or moving fast, and then I am standing by my bed, trying to slow down.  This morning I was a newsboy, clearly of the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, I felt the cap on my head, and the lace up shoes on my feet.  Happy go lucky newsboy, but rushed.  No time for breakfast I was late, had to get to the corner where the news company dropped the piles of papers, and as I opened the front door, the dream evaporated into eighty six year old me bending over to pick up The New York Times neatly rolled up and enclosed in blue plastic.  I like being this carefree boy, albeit today with pressing concerns.  Some days he and I are running--me experiencing it from within the body, he looking ahead at the road--and it is a street without traffic, not necessarily early in the morning, but a normal day at the height of the Great Depression when there were long stretches of time when no car passed on the streets.  The boy, the quiet, the serenity.  I shall not look at the paper this morning, cannot bear another word about the wars, the killings, the insecurities, the projections of the possibility of insanity in the White House before too many more months.  But I was never this newsboy, I rose at the ring of a bell and descended to breakfast with my siblings presided over by my mother and served by ah, to use the phrase "an elderly retainer."  From this vantage in time equally dream-like, since I am one of the very actors still above ground who performed in that real life drama .

Have A Nice Weekend

"Have a nice weekend!"  Today, Friday, I had my two sessions with balance trainers, and each of the two young men asked in the course of the exercises "What are your plans for the weekend?" and I had to reply that I had not even noticed that today was Friday and that we were as they say embarking on a weekend.  I could tell from their facial expression that they were sympathizing with an old geezer who had nothing but emptiness and loneliness in the two days looming ahead.  I began to feel sorry for myself, but then I recalled that my husband mentioned how happy he was that Friday had arrived and he could do absolutely nothing on Saturday, the day upon which he liked to sleep in, and rest.  And I began to recall the week.  Monday night we had a young couple to dinner, several time consuming courses designed for their exacting palates, and which wore me out.  Tuesday I spent recovering from Monday night.  Wednesday I had two balance training sessions which left me scarcely able to walk, but satisfied with some kind of progress, and then we ordered in pizza and a professor friend of ours came to dinner and we talked about his coming trip thither and yon.  Thursday I was so crippled from the training sessions on Wednesday that I was happy to lie about and then hobble over to the nearby mall for a pedi-mani, as they call it.  Friday back to the torture of the balance sessions and having to endure the two  young studs asking me my plans for the weekend. Then of course we were scheduled to go to an art opening and meet a friend and then the three of us went out to dinner.  Everyone relishes in the televisiion show "Downton Abbey" when the Dowager Countess of Grantham asked the question "What is a weekend?" when the idea had not been invented. I remember when I first had a job as an office boy in 1948 in New York City at an office of West Coast film directors they were pleased to tell me that the work week ended at twelve noon on Saturday.  I have been retired for twenty years and quite forgotten how it was in those days when I went out Friday evening and got drunk and with any luck scored with some guy.  I grew up in a home where the breadwinner my surgeon father died when I was six and left enough money that my mother neither had to take a job outside the home nor dismiss the servants who waited on her, and thus breakfast for seven days of the week were of the same texture.  The only mark to the seven days was that Sundays a large formal dinner with invited guests was served at one o'clock in the broad light of day.  This was after the communion service in the Episcopal Church downtown and before the staff filed out for an afternoon of freedom after they had served us. We by the way made our own popcorn which served as Sunday evening repast, eaten before the large radio broadcasting our favorites.  Well, I guess we had what passed for a "nice weekend."

Tomorrow

Who is it that is always coming but never here?  That old riddle was posed to me two days ago and I have spent all too many minutes wrestling with the answer until finally I cut to the chase and went on to Google.  Tomorrow, of course.  Tomorrow is when I go to bed, and I think that before too long I will wake up after a good night's sleep, turn on the espresso machine and pick The New York Times off the doormat.  And then I am immersed in today;  The Times does its duty to bring "all the news that's fit to print," but I am getting so I can't take the political news.  It's a "Punch and Judy" show that is going on too long, grown stale, and I yearn for a change in election laws where candidates can electioneer for one month tops.  So many authorities, so many back stories, and not only the American presidential election, but the implications of Brexit, and then there is the maneuvers in the MidEast.  Too much to think about, all of it grim, scarcely even room in the Times for a pleasing human interest story.  I know that I need a project.  It used to puzzle me when a friend of mine when she got to her late eighties and into her nineties used to say "I need a project."  But now I see it clearly.  My husband is on the last pages of a year old project to read Homer's Iliad through in the original Greek.  He intends to go on to the Odyssey or the Latin poet Ovid's Metamorphoses when he's done.  As I have said or whined--take your pick--before, I truly want to write a novel, but although two decades ago I churned out four, none of them very good, I cannot seem to manage it now.  Painting?  Music?  There is always going to the gym, my husband's other great project, and indeed I do that with some regularity if not the least enthusiasm.  Right now I have trainers, at two places working on my balance, and I now see them the same day for a few weeks because of scheduling conflicts, one in the morning one in the afternoon.  I came home Wednesday, the first of this new exercise regime, and I could hardly walk I was so stiff, and we had a guest for dinner.  The next thing I knew it was eleven o'clock at night and I awoke in my big chair in front of the television, the room was dark, silent, no one was about.  That was the evening that never came and I limped to bed, tomorrow was almost already here.

Life In The Fast Lane

I used to walk with a neighbor in Cambridge every morning for an hour or more and we covered several miles in our perambulations.  That was a twenty or thirty year sojourn in my life in which earlier I had taken up swimming daily for one hour in whatever university Olympic-sized pool I had access to by virtue of my professorship.  In the last six months I have lost the ability to walk seriously because of what they call "balance issues."  I can do it on a treadmill at the gym although here I am compromised by my poorly healing broken wrist which makes holding on to the side rails painful after ten or fifteen minutes.  I can take the car and go over to the nearby mall and walk around endlessly looking at the display windows of Talbots, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc. and wonder if I should slit my wrists from boredom.  I was just in New York City where I walked through countless museums with my cane, and my friend and hostess said I had certainly done the equivalent of serious treadmill exercise.  A couple of days ago I woke up after a very poor night of sleeping and did not go to the gym with my husband.  I suffered agonies of guilt and stress because I did not get exercise.  I sat in a chair this morning reading The Times and later a history of the Mitford family.  What is to become of me?  I am not exercising enough.  How is it that I am supposed to walk my butt off when my mother-in-law who lived to 98 never did more than walk from the back door to the garage door?  And what about Queen Victoria who never budged from her chair in all her umpteen years of widowhood?  (Don't you love the image of her on a treadmill, widows weeds and cape and all?)  I am beside myself with anxiety over a failure to exercise properly, and, of course, always conscious of the fact that the treadmill was invented to require prisoners to suffer from walking on it many hours of the day.  Think of Oscar Wilde in the play "Gross Indecency," and I have to say to my shame that when I saw the piece in the theater, my ever compulsively ameliorating mind, could only concentrate on the health benefits accruing to tubby Oscar as he suffered through the induced walking.  Now it is time for a nap.  Shall I starve myself to compensate for lack of physical exercise?  But then there are the glasses of wine with lunch.  Certainly does not help.  Maybe I will just fade away and die.  Isn't that what's supposed to happen?  Slowly giving up on exercise and then just expiring?

Oh, Happy News!

I have scarcely been able to open the morning's Times, so horrifying are the accounts of the antics and remarks made by the Republican candidate for president.  Just the things he says are mind blowing, ranging from absurdities to out right frightening contraventions of everything this nation has traditionally stood for.  And dodging back and forth suggestive of an inconstancy of mind that leaves me paralyzed with fear when I realize that he is soon to be given daily briefing along with the other candidate, information he should never be privy to.  And then this morning, for a brief moment of pure joy I could turn away from the projections of one grim scenario after another to revel in the news that flossing one's teeth has probably been an exercise in futility all along.  "Studies show . . ." those happy words.  Free at last, free of the guilt.  Because I must tell you, gentle reader, I have almost never flossed.  No, my chubby, awkward, arthritic fingers tried and tried to get the string between the teeth, yes, I even went the route of torture and got a little implement that set some floss on a tension like a high wire.  Never could master it, no way, clumsy, awkward.  Gave it up years ago, straightened my shoulders, and faced another future.  I took up dental stimulators, remembering so well those early days staring moodily out of the plate glass picture window of the third floor bathroom working my gums by the hours staring down at my neighbors hustling off to work.  "You retired?" people would ask.  "What are you doing now?" Stimulating my gums most of the time," was my reply.  Those were my retirement plans.  Then I took up plastic toothpicks with feathers, and by this time my husband was retired and we sat in our lounge chairs and watched a movie both of us vigorously working those toothpick.  And then we moved to Florida and a new dentist, and although he did not detect any serious plaque he clearly was disappointed that I did not floss.  Oh, the guilt!  I took up a water pick, and he was mildly pleased with that alternative.  But today, yes, today I throw off my shackles!  No more guilt!  Gums, home free!

Politics

I must have pressed something somewhere on my computer since I now receive a couple of weekly briefings from the Brookings Institute alongside something every couple of days it seems from a online magazine called The Week and constant notices of short essays from something called the Kos.  I must have assented to these, just don't know how or where or . . . .I have never been all that much interested in politics having cut my teeth on the subject reading Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in the original Greek and the Roman historian Tacitus' account of the reigns of various of the emperors, especially the hilarious--in a mordant sort of way--story of Nero and his mother.  With that as a background I tend to take a dim view of the possibility of truth being reached in any account.  I guess that is why I tend to favor Herodotos whose story telling technique is first rate, and who, it seems to me, understands that the minute you starting shaping your facts in obedience to abstract ideas you are straying from what might be called "reality."  Professional ancient historians always favor Thucydides but I think he really does just that.  In any case, these latter day commentators make no bones about partiality, although of course the Republican candidate does, it seems to me, lay himself open to almost parody at every turn.  I was told to watch an interview with Roger Stone, the Republican strategist speaking to Charlie Rose, and his straight faced endorsement of all the tics of Mr. Trump's personality and style made me wonder if we were operating in the same universe. But this is just to say that there are days when I suffer from an overload of political analysis, too many pundits, too many theories tossed at facts, too many statistics quoted, and I really do believe that I am growing suffocated.  Was it ever thus?  I have never paid attention to the details of an election before, or that is how I remember it.  Of course, we have never had in my memory two candidates so starkly opposed in personality or ideology.  I cannot imagine how my brain would be fried if I had to add television into the mix.  I see it enough three morning a week when I am on the treadmill at the gym, lucky if someone has not already set the channel to Fox News and we are watching one of the more neutral channels.  Why are the men in suits? and the women in long, long hair dos.  Thank God for Rachel Madoff who looks like she is operating with brains.  As I may have mentioned before, an old friend who has spent time on the White House staff says "Veep" is the most realistic representation of what goes on in there.  It is satisfying to think that this might be the case, because then one is relieved of the obligation of trying to make sense.