An Addition To Thie Morning's Blog

In a few hours my husband and I are leaving for Rome, via Atlanta.  As I guess I have written recently, this is his treat, and a grand one, first class on  Air France to Fiumicino Airport outside of Rome where we will be met by a car and driver from our hotel, the Hassler Villa Medici, located at the top of the Spanish Steps on a small piazza to the side of the celebrated Trinita dei Monti.  We are excited, me particularly, because we both love Rome.  I lived there for two years so I have strong memories.  I saw the city first in September of 1962, walking aggressively form morning to night, intoxicated by the sights, the architecture, the people--the typical Roman experience.  This trip will be far quieter; we neither of us can walk well, so going from the hotel to the Borgheese Gardens will not be a stroll but a struggle.  This is a wordy introduction to the announcement that I will be silent at least for the next ten days.  Beyond that I am thinking of shutting up for good or for the foreseeable future.  I don't feel that I have that much to say, and would be better served by holding "in brain" conversations with myself.  It is my habit, has been all my life, to talk to myself, forming the words in my brain where they sound, or so it seems, but are not audible outside my head. I guess everyone does that, although how folks with those ubiquitous buds in their ears manage to hear themselves talk is beyond me.  Anyway, I am going to have a great time. 

Lost In The Selva Oscura

Yesterday I telephoned a credit card company to tell them of my whereabouts in the next few weeks.  The very pleasant voiced young lady with whom I attempted to speak asked me to begin with "what is your user name?"  I had no idea what she meant, nor could I subsequently recall for that particular name a "passcode" associated with it for which she also asked.  Somewhat rattled I called out to my husband to look on my computer, at the same time reassuring her that I would get the information she needed.  You may not have someone helping you with this," she said severely, but by then too late, he had called out the names and numbers and they clicked in recognition in my brain, and we were back in business.  And also yesterday I went online to find out some information from another account which just as the screen was coming into view was blocked by a legend telling me that it was a law or a federal regulation that I be told the inner mysteries of the financial system or something like that.  Why in heaven's name would I want to know this?  The box informed me that I could hit the "later" button five times and then I would have to stop and submit to this information.  Hey ,why can't I make a date?  I am always busy doing something when the command comes.  Google Plus has taken to sending me messages suggesting things I might do, places to go, and so forth.  What is this?  I am perfectly capable of amusing myself as well as informing myself.  Last evening I was talking with a friend in Vermont when the cellphone in my hand suddenly went dead.  Up in the left hand corner where it was supposed to say AT&T and other things it read, instead, "no service."  Now, what did that mean?  My first thought was old fashioned "oh, the telephone lines are down."  Nothing on the cellphone indicated the nature of the problem.  Was it me, the phone, telephone central, the end of the western world?  I put the phone down as I tried to wrestle with the issue.  A moment later I noticed that the AT&T sign had reappeared, and I called my son to see if his world were still intact.  "Dad," he said to me, "your phone got overheated.  Turn it off, and wait awhile."  I turned it off and went to bed.  Today it seems happy, works just fine.  Is temperamental the name of the game for the Iphone whatever number it is? the one before the one they are all jumping up and down about right now?  This is the one that still has some gizmo that the new one does not.  One feature it definitely does have, in addition to being oversized, is that the perfect place to set my fingers when holding the phone is also the place for the finger to lower the sound, so almost always I do not hear my calls and then if by chance I answer cannot hear the caller.  Perhaps it is time to switch to the old folks cellphone advertised in the AARP magazine.

You Can Take The Boy Out Of Iowa But You Can'T Take Iowa Out Of The Boy

I have been reading Jane Smiley's three volume epic history of Iowa people, one extended family through the twentieth century.  When I encountered the first volume I glowed with a kind of enthusiasm, since I was born in Iowa City in 1930, and I was to discover, a principal character grows up and leaves the farm and in 1954 comes the State University of Iowa, and is even described as taking medieval English courses with a Professor John McCalliard.  Here was a moment when reality came into the fiction.  I, Charles Beye, flesh and blood creature, took that very course, had to be a few years earlier, because I graduated in '52and went on to Harvard.  I was the son of citified persons from Oak Park Illinois, my father was a surgeon, professor of surgery, really, a far cry from these hardy farming people, descendants of the laconic direct Scandinavian immigrant men and women.  Still I read on.  I recognized many types from my high school classes, my university classes, people I delivered papers to.  They were all pretty much bland and good, and none seemed to be going through the tortured life of an early teenaged boy wanting a scandalous promiscuous life of sex with my male classmates who were at an age where instant arousal trumped the gender of the sexual partner.  But I read on enjoying a kind of sentimental deja vu of the rocks and rills, the fields of corn, the horses, those mild people.  But now I am reading the second volume, the next generation is spreading out; still they do not lose their unflappability, and in this portion I discovered why it was that I had to get out of Iowa, as did the majority of my siblings:  the people had no affect. Too much time with them and you would die of boredom.  My youngest sister who never left, raised three daughters, in a fundamentally loveless marriage, made the pies, wrapped the christmas packages, brought covered dishes to church suppers, grew to be immensely obese, had to have canes to get around, and in a moment of mournful candor confessed to me out on a visit that she guessed it was boredom that kept her hand in the cookie jar.  I went back to all my high school reunions and everyone was so nice, even when trying to express strong opposition to some national policy.  It was scary, Smiley's book is scary.  But what is even more disturbing is here in Sarasota there are the retirees from the Middle West, my age cohorts, come to maturity in the Eisenhower years, all of them nice, careful with their language, evidently so easily disturbed that the directors of the Asolo Repertory Theater have to advertise in this day and age--get that image in your mind--warning of "mature themes, mature language."  This is a major American professional repertory theater and it thinks Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness" is daring!  God forbid they try Tennessee Williams.Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Albee, or a host of others who have prodded Americans to rethink the simpleminded pieties they learned on the farm.  So Smiley's trilogy is affording me a wonderful look back, but also a closer inspection of the backstories of the people I meet  down here at the theater wine receptions where we exchange the blandest of platitudes in lieu of thinking about the plays.  I cannot imagine what they might have to say about Hillary and the Donald, and don't intend to inquire.

A Rivverderci Roma

Twenty five years ago my spouse, then a newly acquired boyfriend, was encouraged to buy a vacant studio for sale in the coop where I had a one bedroom.  This way, I explained, we would have living quarters in the one and a study (both of us were academics) in the other.  He, who had grown up in an impecunious circumstance, was a little nervous about committing himself to paying over the years what seemed like a lot of money, but I reassured him that this was the way of the world and rental left you with nothing at the end.  And so it came to pass, and the years rolled by, and the unit is now in the process of being sold, long after I sold mine, and we have moved successively to Massachusetts and now to Florida.  My husband could not get over the shock of the rise in price in the last years.  His gratitude to me was charming, the expression of it, dazzling: Tuesday he is flying me first class to Rome where we will be staying at the Hassler Hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps.  This trip has so much meaning for me.  Rome was almost my first experience of Europe, simple Iowa provincial that I was, in time it became my most profound as I lived there on two separate sabbatical years, thereby giving my children a chance to reside in a foreign land two years at different moments of their lives. We, my wife and I, were joined the first year by an English au pair, who went on to live and work in Rome for her entire life, and with whom I often stayed when in Rome to use the library of the American Academy.  I have walked the streets of Rome time and again, and to this day can see in my mind's  eye most of the consequential streets and plazas as though my brain were a Google map.  I certainly would find my way around Rome far more easily than almost any American city other than New York.  Richard for whom traveling has long since lost its charm, and who had the daring and enterprise as a young man to hitch hike all over Europe, and who speaks fluently all the major European languages, is doing this for me, and I am overwhelmed.  This, we both understand, is our farewell to Europe; more to the point, we realize that neither of us is physically able to walk very much, sometimes we both of us use canes.  From the Hassler to the Pincio for the view, or down the Via Sistina to the Palazzo Barberini museum.  The hotel provides a car to drive its clients to the base of the Spanish Steps so we will try to make it on foot to the Piazza del Popolo and take a look at the Caravaggios in the church there, sit at the open air restaurant that used to be so chic, maybe walk to the Piazza Navona, look at the Bernini Fountain, risk being knocked down by the tourist crowd around the Trevi Fountain--it will be like walking through Times Square before curtain time.  When I was in college and graduate school I was a young married man, and I never thought I would get to Europe.  I was too late!  But that is not how it turned out.  I am very, very lucky.  And now, yet again with an escort showering me with love.

Digging In The Old Garden

I've taken to sorting through the files that contain copies of every published speech, review, or essay that I wrote during my years of activity as a professor of classics, beginning with an interpretation of Euripides' Alcestis in 1959 and ending with an essay that began as an endowed lecture devoted to the Homeric representation of the character of Odysseus in 2012.  Some of them, well most of them I like a lot, and I am getting quite a narcissistic buzz on.  There seem to be thirty eight by my count, plus twenty five review essays published in the cyberjournal greekworks.com.  Then there are eleven books depending on the counting, which is to say, I could have counted translations into other languages as a separate book, but do not, sometimes do count a reprint with major editorial changes, and so on and so forth.  On the shelf and in the file cabinet it is a pitiful amount when you compare it to some of the guys--gals, too--I knew in graduate school.  Every book that I have written except for the first has been commissioned from me, so I am basically a passive scholar.  The funny thing is that the first book on Homer came about because I wrote out a specimen chapter of the sort of thing I had been saying about Homeric epic in a lecture class and sent it off out of the blue to Doubleday, just thinking to myself and very arrogantly, too, that this would make a nice Anchor Book, a new series just coming along at the time--this was sixty two or so--.  I sent it, as they say, "over the transom," that is, I had no agent, no request from the press, made no inquiry, just sent it, and lo and behold got a letter back and we went back and forth a bit about what I had in mind, and they sent me a contract.  This doesn't happen much anymore; I was extremely lucky.  Luck has shadowed me all the way, in fact.  The next two Doubleday books were commissioned when their original author, my friend Adam Parry, died in a motorcycle accident.  A friend took me to lunch with John Gardner who was editing a series at Southern Illinois and wanted a book on Apollonios.  I had just written a--if I do say so myself--super article on the Argonautica which my friend had read and wanted to get Gardner to read.  And so on and so forth.  For instance, my once upon a time student Robert Miller, became publisher of Hyperion and commissioned Odysseus A Life.  The grand coup was the last: Jonathan Galassi, the star dream publisher of the super publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux  personally asked me for my memoirs, edited them himself and FSG published them.  Now I sit in Sarasota Florida where no one I meet has ever heard of the details of Greek or Roman Literature, has only the dimmest understanding of that world of publishing beyond Danielle Steele and Dan Brown.  It keeps me honest, less the fatuous pompous ass of many former colleagues who just can't seem to leave the academic scene where the spotlights shown so bright for so long.  It's very cleaning, this odd understanding that that to which you have given your heart and soul, your aesthetic and philosophical propensities, ever since you were old enough to make serious choices, is utterly unknown and meaningless to almost every person in the country.

Ah, Music To Soothe The Savage Breast

Yesterday we went to the first chamber music concert of the symphony season.  The hall for these concerts is relatively small, certainly in comparison to the space in which the symphony orchestra plays in.  And ordinarily it is sold out; getting tickets to these performances is always a struggle, best done by subscription a year in advance.  To advance to a superior seat, that is with improved visual access requires the death of a long term ticket holder.  So it was remarkable to arrive to find empty seats in the choice rows. Of course, we reckoned "contemporary music," even though Anton Webern was not exactly that since he at his height one hundred years ago.  A speaker for the musicians who were to play, a fellow member of the orchestra, came out to introduce his colleagues, and he praised the audience for coming out, telling them how much it meant to the musicians to share this music with them. My husband and  I were there because I find it interesting to listen to all styles of music and he wants to see me get home safely in the late afternoon light, another act of selflessness which I fear is an ever increasing list.  The music itself was interesting and to my naive ear very hard to listen to.  To be frank, it was a two hour torture.  It says something about the attitude toward this music that the symphony orchestra does not schedule one or another of these pieces among other more familiar pieces on a regular winter concert evening.  They ghettoize the music, demonstrating its potential for alienating, when it seems to me they need to integrate it into the regular programs, pairing pieces that draw out similarities.  But what do I know?  Well, one thing: we are not going back to the second companion piece on Sunday with another all "contemporary" program.  Even I could not take it.

Different Strokes For Different Folks, As The Saying Goes

If you live in an open society, as we do, where its citizens are free to think what they choose about all of the weighty subjects and question that come up or are posed in various religious texts, churches, and traditions, then we should welcome newcomers of demonstrably different faiths and traditions because that is a feature of the American way of life.  I know that this open generosity of spirit seems trying in small towns where the varieties of faith and thought are few and far between.  But it should be a goal in any community.  It is easier for me to say this because I spent my life as teacher where discussion groups are the foundation of the classroom and for all kinds of reasons one hears the wackiest ideas put forth that deserve attention and discussion.  So we must always welcome it. But at the same time reject persons who grow angry when confronted with objections or alternatives to what they have to say.  I will always treasure Pope Francis responding to a question on homosexuals with"Who am I to judge?"  I am sure his handlers blanched, and if you look on the internet there are all kinds of explanations ("it was the devil speaking through him"), although what came to my mind immediately was Jesus saying "Judge not that ye be not judged," something I have always tried to live by, and very often failed miserably, as I have been judged and reviled again and again since my youth.  Those who believe inflexibly in the utter inerrancy of their religious texts need to develop the psychologically healing power of faith to counteract the inevitable arguments against the truths they hold.  I do not welcome into my community persons who cannot accept living among others holding alternative views   I will always be suspicious of aggressively religious persons, but at the same time, struggle to offer them love and trust and ask for that in return.  The current tensions over receiving religious Muslim refugees in our midst makes me think of the Book of Acts where Peter and Paul are described as being like young Mormons out on the road doing their preaching of the new truth, and the villagers rejecting them and saying "shut up," and often driving them out of town.  T'was ever thus.

Shopping

I like peanut butter on toast for my breakfast.  This morning I was wrestling with a 40oz jar of the stuff working with a strong knife to get up the goo at the bottom so as to blend it into a not too too creamy spread for my daily bread.  Oh, what a struggle.  At eighty six just lifting the jar off the shelf is a struggle, moving the knife around in the sludge to create even a modest fluidity exhausts me and puts terrible pressure on my wrist which is always in pain in any case from a fall a few years back. "Why is this happening to me,"  I wail in my interior dialogue that I keep up most of the day.  Well, it's because my husband loves box stores, and he does almost all the shopping.  As a poor boy who has never gotten over it, he wants bargains, coupons, advertised lower prices, in sum cheap food.  On the other hand, he spends dollars and dollars a week buying DVDs he may never watch again.  That was not part of the poor boy scenario of his childhood so he is free to spend.  Twenty four eggs in a plastic container that again I can scarcely lift out of the refrigerator, always tilting dangerously, with a plastic lid that I am terrified will burst open and spill its contents.  Two or three giant English cucumbers in one large plastic wrap, that he makes into bread and butter pickles, enough for an army, I thought I would puke, and even he at last threw the remnants out .  I remember in another life when I was a young father and my wife and I were shopping for six or eight at a time.  Box stores had not been invented but they would have been great, although I do remember day old bread we bought and froze, maybe fifty loaves at a pop.  Today in my kitchen we have twenty four apples in their plastic container in the kitchen.  He doesn't even eat apples, fifteen avocados all ripe which he distributes on every salad every day.  I have grown very very tired of apples and avocados.  Ah, well, it is true that he never notices the state of nor the amount of food once it is brought home, and I can freely throw things out, but then my childhood prejudice comes into play.  "Do not waste, there is a depression on, people are starving."  No, not exactly heard at my mother's knee, but certainly in the air everywhere.  We have had a showdown about the peanut butter, pleasantly enough.  My infirmities have been acknowledged, we will go to the local supermarket for a realistically--my word--sized jar of peanut butter next time.  And next time is going to be soon because I'll be damned if I am going to break my wrist again stirring up the peanut butter.

Religion In Our American Life

This country was first settled by people at variance with the official religion of England.  The first colonies were agitated by varieties of religious belief which were in competition with one another.  Time passed and religious issues quieted down.  Our founding fathers most of whom were none too favorable to the forces agitating for an established religion came out strongly against one in the writing of the Constitution.  People confused a belief in God with a casual notion of the omnipresence of deity.  "Oh, God our hope in ages past," as opposed to "for god's sake will you turn the television off!"  I was raised in the faith of the Episcopalian Church by a mother who was married to a man who was an atheist and attended when he was in the mood the Unitarian Church which does not accept the orthodoxy of the Confessional Code put in place as a political act by the second century emperor Constantine.  My faith in the Christian God as enunciated by the Episcopalian Church was tempered by years of study of Greece and Rome, and the understanding I gained thereby of their systems of deities which along with the belief systems of the early pagans such as Plato which came together in the early years of the so-called Christian era to function alongside of the stories of the Christ and his efforts to form a political league with his assistants, known to the world as his disciples.  I have never stopped believing in Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite,  Athena and all the rest alongside Jesus of Nazareth, Mary, Joseph, Saul who became Paul and all the other saints of the Church.  It is one of the richest conceptions of humanity, and the human dilemma and only a fool would want to dismiss if from their spiritual growth and development.  I have hesitation in accepting into my personal life anyone who believes he or she has a direct line to god, and thus knows all the answers.  I used to feel this way about Roman Catholics until they quieted down and accepted that their insistence was un-American and unseemly.  Now I have a problem with Muslims.  They claim that their religious text, the Koran, is the inerrant word of their god or spiritual leader.  Sorry, I'm just not buying that.  It's a belief not a truth, and has no greater claim to my subscribing to the idea than the notion that the poor deserve charity or that the rich will go directly to Hell when they die. This country grows more hate filled every day, and everyone is more and more intransigent.  As a once upon a time Christian I still subscribe to charity, tolerance, peace and love.  I know to many Christians that makes me sound like a fatuous goof, but I can live with that.  Rather a fatuous goof than a man corrupted by hatred and intransigence.

Africcan Americans

The history of enslaved persons from the continent of Africa is one of the oldest and most prominent pieces of the fabric which goes to make up "American history."  This historical narrative, however, has long been obscured and denatured by the attempts of white politicians and not a few white  historians to minimalize and make insignificant the black presence in our society.  When I read "Huckelberry Finn" as a youngster I had no real sense of what a runaway slave was, what Nigger Jim was up against, and what Huck was getting himself involved with. The south first became concrete to me when I saw the film "Gone With The Wind" in 1939, where there was almost no hint of the folks whose life was one of involuntary servitude; even Scarlett's slapping Prissy across the face could be explained away as an adult's annoyance with a pesky child.  I was 9 then, and nothing was said about slavery or Reconstruction or what today we call "the black experience."  And I was not about to learn anything from talking with blacks; I lived in a university town with very few black residents.  What we were coping with in those long ago days were the arrival of European Jews into the university faculty, bringing with them tales of horror, acts of hideous violence done by Christians, no less.  So by my mid teens I understood roundups, forced marches, trains to camps, gassing, crematoria.  But I never knew anything about shackles, lashings, forced marches, the mid passage, lynchings, being sold down river.  That came to me later when I discovered a book of reminiscences of enslaved persons still alive in the 1930's to tell their story; it's called "Bullwhip Days, and was an eye opener to me.  Saddest of all, I never learned nor studied about Reconstruction, a period of such cruel oppression of backs folks on the one hand, and the exercise of such communal cruelty by whites as to leave an entire culture deranged and perverted;  listen to Billie Holiday sing "Strange Fruit," and study the lyrics.  When I was sixteen I became friendly with a black 14 year old youngster, really the only one, in my high school with whom I had an intimacy for maybe eight years which extended from the sexual to philosophical conversations typical of teenagers. He was a big strong no nonsense athlete with a mother who was incredibly saavy about the social truth of whites and blacks who opened his eyes to the world in which he lived, popular as he was for being a football star but ostracized for being black. He was never invited to any of the parties of his high school, what can I call them? friends?, although in the locker room he was their best buddy.  Knowing him was a first for me, but ironically enough, he shunned me publicly since I was a pariah in our high school world, someone a big butch football star was not to know.  And then my sister began to date a black guy at the university--to everyone's consternation, and years later my oldest sister in an ironic twist met a black guy on a picket line back east, first time for him--a total Oreo--, she a longtime militant, and they became a couple no less for the remaining decade of his life. But when he died, his family came up from Philadelphia for the funeral, but no single black friend attended.  He had moved into a white world.  So many questions, on the tip of my tongue, never asked, so many observations attempted and stopped.  I hope this new Museum of the African American experience opening on the Mall on September 24 will finally bring out the answers.  At least for me.

Doom And Gloom On Sunday

It is six thirty in the morning on Sunday, and I get the espresso machine heated up and make myself a cup of coffee.  While it settles I open the front door half hoping that the paper will have arrived, but knowing that it is the weekend the Sunday Times is, as one delivery person once remarked, "a bitch to assemble," but, lo, there indeed it is on my mat.  God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world, I intoned to my inner self.  As I bent to pick it up, I instinctively tensed my calf muscles to counteract the tendency to topple over which is a common plight of the elderly, only to discover upon closer inspection that the paper was an enormous heavy mass in its blue plastic weatherproof wrapper.  It was indeed very heavy to lift; my stance was only just able to manage this and return to an erect position. Could they have packed two papers in here by mistake?  Once back into air conditioned heaven I tore off the wrapper.  No, there were the customary front section, travel, business, style, magazine, but, aha, five heavy special sections of all the arts and leisure of the upcoming "season."  Yes, the season, something one really misses down here in faraway Sarasota, where not even movies worth seeing manage to penetrate into the dread monolith of cineplex culture.  I take my coffee to my comfy chair where I have already deposited what is surely enough paper to constitute one whole tree.  I read the front page.  Mrs.Clinton in struggling in Florida, Mr. Trump made his fortune through manipulating tax breaks, a Harlem girl lies in a hospital bed on life support from having been randomly shot. "Assad smiles while Syria burns" and the back story of the two prison escapees and how they survived fill out the front page.  The deep foreboding which fills me night and day wells up.  I set the paper aside, something I almost never do. I am not sure that I can make it through until Election Day. Luckily I am exposed to television only at the gym when I am on the treadmill.  But my beloved Times!  I know that it always peddles pessimism a legacy of its history as a New York paper of record created by Jewish mothers who are always expecting the worst, but still . . . . .I pick up a novel I was reading yesterday.

Murder

Here in Florida we live in a garden setting where the sidewalks show the furious activity of tiny lizards who are constantly presenting themselves on the pavement, lifting their heads, staring about, then darting on.  I suppose they live in the great outdoors somewhere, near water I would imagine, although I only see them as they stand on their four legs, look about, and dart away off the sidewalk into oblivion.  One time I was sitting on my lanai (Floridian for screened in porch) reading and noted that one of these tiny creatures had made it up to the third floor, how I cannot imagine, and as I stared at it idly, wishing it would disappear it obliged me by doing so.  Where did it go? I never saw it on my lanai again.  There was something creepy about the lizard, remnant of a dinosaur, I thought, tiny, and baby like in its flesh tones and tiny feet.  I hoped it went down the way it came up.  People kept telling me the lizards come up the sewer system, I can't quite imagine it, so I don't think about it.  No budding research scientist was I in my youth.  The other night, a year or so later, another tiny lizard crossed my view, this time in the kitchen, stood in that characteristic way looking about then scurried off, a week later the lizard or his brother scurried to my attention across the floor of my bathroom when I turned the light on, then darted into the shadows.  I wished the lizard to be gone, but was not about to pursue it.  Yesterday I boiled myself an egg for breakfast and when I determined it had reached the proper temperature in the correct length of time, I lifted the small cast iron sauce pan with the egg boiling in it and brought it to the sink in order to tip the boiling water out.  As I refocused my tired old eyes for this maneuver and lifted the pan and started to pour I noted the little lizard standing on his forelegs near the edge of the sink looking up at me, and saying, as my imagination played it, "I want out of here."  The scalding water had already set its course into the sink and onto the body of the lizard, and as I saw this, I deliberately vigorously poured the steaming deluge down on the little naked white vulnerable childlike body, so innocent, lying now silent in instant death.  What had I done?  Devastated, I tore off a paper towel, retrieved the lifeless creature, laid him out on this burying clothe, carefully folded it symmetrically, and placed it in the kitchen trash barrel. I will never forget my hesitation when first I saw him in the sink, me with the pan of boiling water in my right hand, the murder weapon to be deployed or no, as the human consciousness debated.  "Die," the voice within me seemed to say, and the pan tipped into the sink.  I can still recall every moment.

Ruminations Before My First Cup Of Coffee

I wake up late; it is eight o'clock in the morning, the sun streams through all the windows, I am disoriented.  Denying with a gulp that I have balance issues, carefully putting one foot in front of the other I manage to walk a straight line to the front door, open it, and step out into the brightness and  humidity of a Florida morning in search of the New York Times in its blue plastic wrapper.  There is none on the corridor.  Happens about three times in 365 days.  A neighbor stole it, suggested my inner Paranoia, although the two obvious candidates for that theft are a middle aged sullen shop supervisor who always takes the elevator and thus would never walk in front of our door, and a very kindly middle aged bartender who habitually walks past on his way once a week with a bag of trash for the dumpster.  No, there was no delivery today and by now it is too late to email the Times to send out a replacement.  How easy it all was when you knew the delivery guy and had his number and called to say he'd missed you, and one of his family arrived on their bicycle, you heard the thud on the front porch, easy as pie.  Now I will go by CVS, Walgreens, Publix, oh, the choices are endless, but require me to drive across the dread Tamiami Trail, a super highway that the locals, oppressed by a local planning board obsessed with driving and using Los Angeles for their model, must engage almost every day.  The obscene car culture down here and the humidity are the two impediments to life lived in Paradise, as the advertisements always show--the old folks here swooning about on the golf course and tennis court.  When you're ninety, yes, it does seem true, I have seen many of them at our club, playing good tennis is still an option, but driving, although a necessity is not so promising.  The local paper is a daily record of old folks causing accidents, many times fatalities, ah, well, must not dwell on this at eighty six going on seven.  Uber is the answer.  I need never drive again.  Like the teenager eyeing his or her date nervously in the shadows where they have parked after the high school dance I just have to summon my courage: okay it's now or never, Uber drivers can't be that scary.  How did I get to this from opening the front door for the Times?

Walkn' Down The Avenue

One of the pleasures of my life has always been walking.  I grew up in a small mid western town where few people who could walk waited for the infrequent buses, and where a large percentage of the people did not own cars; it was the middle of the great depression and car ownership was not all that common.  In my early twenties I moved to Cambridge Massachusetts where pedestrians were a commonplace and there was good  public transportation, but eventually I had to have a car, a brand new Volkswagen Beetle, a novelty back then, to drive to my first teaching job, an hour south of Cambridge.  For the next decade I had a car to commute to work from outside New Haven and then from the edges of Palo Alto, plus we had four small children who needed to be ferried about.  Then I lived in Brookline Massachusetts and although we owned a Volkswagen Microbus for the children and dogs and grocery shopping, I walked to work at Boston University a couple of miles away, in fact even turned down a much better job at Brandeis because it would entail driving out to Waltham, and  I wanted to walk to work. At intervals I lived in Rome, and walked from my apartment on the east side of Rome outside the old gates across and down across the Tiber, up the Gianiculo to the American Academy Library, a glorious walk that took me forty five minutes to an hour in the glorious dawn of another Roman day. Somewhere along the line in my forties I gave my car to my older son and commuted all over Boston by bicycle, not the hazard it would be nowadays when the traffic has grown so, my one considerable concern was coming home slightly squiffy on my bike from a fun cocktail party. Then I moved to New York City and was a true pedestrian.  Never once did I not prefer walking to anything else.  In fact even in Palo Alto when I came back from an extended trip to Greece and got the rhythm of walking in Greek villages, I left my car at home and walked down the many miles of Embarcadero Road to the Stanford campus, smiling and nodding and declining the offers of rides as I went from persons who could not comprehend a grown man with a brief case walking.  When we moved to Sarasota we were delighted to find a condo in an area that promised easy walking to shops, to the gym,  and what is more access to a network sketchy though it may be of public buses.  But now six or seven years later I cannot walk, my balance is shot, and although I work at this problem with two different trainers, I am making very little progress.  I saw an orthopedic surgeon when I fell and broke my wrist; he said "give it up and use a cane, you're eighty six."  The trainers roll their eyes and intone as a mantra: "Cane today, walker tomorrow, wheelchair the next day."  When I was a child I fell off a balcony.  One of the trainers says I have got to resolve a fear of falling resulting from that episode lodged deep in my unconscious.  Well, I am an anxiety ridden person who used to love to walk and I don't think that is the answer.  I am going to go with a cane.  My older brother fell down the stairs at ninety and died.  My older sister's femur shattered one day when she was walking across her kitchen and she spent the last six years of her life in a wheel chair in a nursing home. Another sister at ninety uses a walker and somehow manages to work in her garden and enjoy a daily swim in her pond. One other sister at ninety two walks to meet her daughter five or six streets from her condo; she uses a cane.  Way to go, sis.

Ruminations Whilst Sick Abed

I have been lying abed sick for three days, a slight stomach upset, which I take to be my intestinal tract fighting off some virus or other.  The experience was not at all that different from other days, except that I did not go to my balance class or to the gym to work out with my trainer, and when reading lay back with my head propped up with pillows rather than sitting in a chair.  It gave me time to think about what I was reading, and I tentatively decided that I really don't like The Great Gatsby; there is something so phony about the characters, and maybe that is a failure on my part to register their dialogue as honest for the period in which it was written.  Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy continues to fascinate me; just yesterday I was preoccupied with his reference to the poor boys in his community having paper routes so as to earn money to help out at home.  And I remembered getting a paper route when I was fifteen which I held for a year or so, riding around on my bicycle after school, first picking the papers up at the offices of the Iowa City Press Citizen, and then folding and putting them into the large canvas bag slung over my shoulder.  I had a relatively large route, and it took me a couple of hours or so, as I remember it, when I could ride the bicycle before the snow and ice came, and then I had to walk and it took much longer.  The winds off the Dakotas sometimes made the chill factor go well below zero.  It was hard work meant "to make a man of me," according to my mother, and it did indeed accustom me to hardship and endurance, but since I was also in the process of realizing my capacity for sexual relations with other boys, I am not so sure that "the man" my mother had envisioned was emerging.  But as I lay there in bed I considered that my paper route was something I must have taken away from some much more deserving, poorer kid, surely by virtue of my name giving me preference at the paper when I applied for a route, or Mother had put in a call, who knows?  And that led me to think of the splendid English bike I had, with its--in those days--exotic thin tires, bought off a university exchange student going home to fight the war.  Which led me to think of the job I had in the summer working for the maintenance department of the public school system, again unwittingly taking work away from a teenager economically disadvantaged.  I wonder now how many low income parents and kids noticed the son of the president of the school board holding a plum summer job.  I mentioned the guilt I felt to my husband yesterday who stopped me cold by pointing out that I worked hard all summer long, that I had no idea of these possible maneuvers behind the scene and anyway we are talking about the summers of 1945 and 1946.  As many say "Give it a rest!"

Education

In the New York Times this morning there is a news article about the struggles of the Bridgeport CT school system comparing it to an adjacent upper middle class school system.  Both schools have roughly the same state budget, but as the article pointed out the inferior system is marked by rampant student absenteeism which of course makes for impossible discontinuities in the programs.  It made me think of the program set in place by Eva Moskowitz whose Success charter schools in upper Manhattan offer to my mind a paradigm of dealing with serious academic deficiencies.  A key feature of her system is a certain relentless determination on the part of the institution.  For instance, the parents or guardian of any student recorded as absent is immediately contacted and the circumstances of the absence are analyzed.  Moskowitz is determined that the students in her schools will succeed.  Of course, her system although akin to a public school is not public in every sense of the word so this kind of severe program is possible.  I thought to myself "but the children of Bridgeport should somehow be forced to go to school also."  One thinks of the enormous financial cost and misery resulting from student absenteeism which is inflicted upon the general public in the forms of failing incomes, ill health, crime and all the other ills attendant upon a demographic who from the start have developed a mind set for failure.  "Forced" in my mind became the operative word.  What is another word that begins with "F"?  Fascist.  How could we have so regimented a system?  The low income student becomes a victim of the society in yet another way.  I am currently reading Richard Hoggart's brilliant "Uses of Literacy," an account of growing up in a lower class family near Leeds England, whose father died in the war, and his mother when he was eight.  Through the encouragement of his grandmother and his aunt he succeeded in going to school and on to college and university, becoming in the end a university professor.  This book is an account of the economically marginal life his family and neighbors lived and he calls it good because it was an authentic culture.  What  he decries is the collapse of culture among these people when television, mass marketing, cheap capitalism made their lives completely ersatz.  My instinct was to see the same thing at work among the students of Bridgeport who unlike the boys and girls Hoggart describes have almost no chance for work without advanced education, and whose points of reference are only reactions to the common ersatz culture they see on television.  Fifty years ago working class people could rely on muscle and enterprise.  And they knew who they were and were comfortable with that. Not anymore

The Survivor

Out of curiosity I got onto Humans of New York to catch an interview with Secretary Clinton which was reported to reveal her personality more clearly than she oftentimes comes across.  But I came away from this site after perhaps an hour scrolling through all the interviews with ordinary men and women almost all of them who had been in the military.  It has left me shaken in a way little else has in a long time.  Boys and girls, really, although of course they are in their twenties, but from the vantage of eighty six years of age they seem like such vulnerable youngsters.  And they are indeed such wounded persons; everyone interviewed seems to have had an incredibly traumatic experience mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they lost so many colleagues to bombs, rifle fire, all the normal experiences of war, all completely foreign to my own sheltered life experience.  Their losses, their shock in the terrible battles, post traumatic stress syndrome they call it nowadays, it was there in their faces, in the language they used, groping for phraseology that would encompass the monstrous experiences they had had, trying to formulate their thoughts on suicide.  Boys and girls, there were photographs of them all, when the interviewer had been with them, boys and girls at rest in New York City, sitting on a park bench, on a stone wall, the picture of rest and relaxation, but the words tell another story.  The loss that came from their words, their memories etched into their souls never to be forgotten, the wounds, and all so young.  So many gone from their lives, friends and relatives, such violent ends has been their experience of life.  Yes, I know that war does this; the twentieth century brought it almost daily to the mass of humankind.  It is just that I have lived my life almost free of anything like that.  Yes, once I was held up at gunpoint, but the man turned away when I gave him my money.  Now I am so old that I am more likely than not to be past the age of daring and courage and choices and assaults and loud noises and cries and screams.  At the moment as I type this I have headphones on from which is coming waltz music from the Edwardian era. The Edwardian era, prelude to the First World War, the Battle of the Somme and other atrocities, well, that says it all, the Edwardian Era a confection, a dream, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

The Erotic Imagination Active And At Rest

It is all too profoundly depressing when Facebook pulled a representation of the iconic photo of the little naked Vietnamese girl fleeing the napalm because it was pornographic or rather appealed, or so Facebook imagined, to pornographic sensibilities, thus denying to the American public the right to read the photo another way.  My son took his newly minted pre-teen nephew-in-law to the St Louis Museum in effort to bond with the lad, who immediately upon entering the building where incidentally he had never been before, shied and covered his eyes, shouting out Uncle Willis: "there's statue of a naked man."  So much for the  teachings of his brand of Christian church, no reproductions of Renaissance paintings of Christ on the Cross, or Saints in Agony, no Mothers baring their breasts to feed the Holy Infant in his nakedness.  When I was a kid, we boys all swam naked at the municipal pool or the school gym.  Masculine nudity was a normal event of my young life, causing only the natural interest and anxiety that any small boy would feel in a gym with grown up men who were able to brandish considerably larger equipment than what I saw attached to me and my friends.  Later on as a teenager self consciously aware of my sexual desire for males, I did not confound casual public masculine nudity with sexual provocation . My son's children got used to the disparity because he habitually took a bath with the four of them, two boys and two girls, in which sessions his extraordinary wit and their responses had them in gales of laughter which made the waves of bath water ever higher in the tub into the good woman of the house intervened to stop the flood.  So for several years the children grew used to the notion that boys had wieners and girls had slits, and Daddy had a much bigger wiener, and nudity in the bathtub was a time for high hilarity not nervous titters.  When I swam at Harvard's Blodgett Pool in the seventies I marveled at the insouciance of the students and faculty who moved around from locker room to shower room in the company of friends without the least self consciousness, but what was more impressive was the clear eyes awareness of the many, many knockout looking guys in that setting that there were eyes fastened upon them of men who found them sexually attractive.  They knew it and did not care.  it was a natural phenomenon in that setting.  I cannot end this walk down memory lane without a glance back to my first year at Andover where, when we boys lined up for a doctor's examination of whatever sort, and one penis faced a rosy cheeked ass as the line stood and moved, and the masculine imagination in that kind of proximity set off erections, there was a school nurse monitoring us, shiny in the starched white uniform, who wielded a pencil, and brought it down sharply on the extending length of the offending member, the pain of which gesture caused it to sink down, shrivel, and ignominiously become limp again.

Art And Life Which Is The More Vivid?

My husband and I have taken up television series because going out in the evening becomes less attractive with advancing age.  So we have worked our way through The Good Wife and now are approaching the end of The West Wing. Of course along the way we watched The Sopranos and The Wire although the violence of the latter made me have such bad dreams that I stopped watching.  There are several others we have watched as well, all of them introducing us to an imaginary society and circle of friends which compensate for the emptiness of our social life here in Sarasota.  We haven't really met many people whom we like a lot or are age compatible but when you can spend evenings with Kalinda Sharma or Will Gardner or Diane Lockhart or Josh, Toby, CJ or the rest of the gang in the White House who needs to go to church suppers, mah jong parties and their like?  The people we encounter on these programs have become so much the furniture of my mind that I often identify one or another of them as someone in my personal circle.  What would Josh think of this?, for instance.  This identification reached a crescendo for me last year when a friend and I were strolling toward an art exhibit in Chelsea when we came abreast of a young couple with their child advancing upon us.  The young woman was so immediately and completely familiar to me that I instinctively made eye contact so I could smile and nod in her direction.  She followed suit although clearly mystified.  This went on back and forth until she paused, and I said: "Forgive me, but don't I know you?  You seem so familiar to me."  Smiling, she identified herself as a character on a series I had been watching for some time, and indeed I had in my imagination adopted her into the circle of my companions, although and this was amusing, I did not like her character at all, nor did she, the actress, much like her character, but in real life she was personable, attractive, and compelling.  After a round of smiles and salutations we parted, and reality impinged and her character left the social group I had created in my brain.

The "N" Word

This morning's Times reported some college administrator's admonition to a white student that it was not okay to sing along with the lyrics to some some song on the radio where the singer uses the "n" word.  It becomes a racial slur when she does so even if the song she hears, the singer, everything in the production of the "n" word, is from black persons, arriving invisibly over the airwaves.  It just seems to me that this goes too far.  Nigger as a derogatory term employed by bigoted whites has a long history.  It is a great example of the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the Unmarked represents the majority group who control the culture, in our own country, this being or used to be white Anglo Saxon Protestant persons,  and the Marked were persons outside of that marking, for instance, African-Americans, Jews, Irish Catholics, etc etc whose identity was imposed upon them by the Unmarked group.  That in fact extends to male and female where the male gender dominates and determines the definition of woman.  Black persons have taken back "nigger" and made it their own word, although from my own experience it is not a word that one hears passing the lips of middle and upper middle class African Americans.  But they have taken the word back ferociously and are so insistent upon controlling its meaning and use that they have made white afraid to say the word, while at the same time provocatively using it themselves.  I dare you to define me, is what is being said by this prohibition.  As a gay person I have dealt all my life with straight persons, straight males, particularly, wanting to determine my personality, my sexual habits, my ethos, so I can well understand why some gays like to identify as "fairies" and other more derogatory terms so as to control them, and impose their own meaning and context on them.  Life gets really complicated for the young when they cannot sing along with something they hear on the radio.  I always told my daughters when they were teenagers that they should seek out cute black boys and date them so that they could become comfortable around another body, another thought process, another projected identity, as girls of the great Unmarked, surrender to a relationship with a Marked person and surrender your impulse to create identity.

I Hate Tuesday Mornings

when the cleaning lady arrives, not really of course, but we feel such pressure to present a relatively neat space that the night before is a fury of organizing, hiding items in cupboards.  I get up very early almost every day so that I have plenty of time to organize the incredible mess of pill bottles, lotions, razors, tubes, and more tubes that litter what ought to be a spacious and modern counter surrounding my bathroom sink with its oversize over the top Hollywood of the thirties  huge mirror that the previous owner left behind.  And all the while in my frantic rearrangements my brain is whirling with ideas, suggestions, all kinds of improvements that I feel we should make in our lives.  My husband is an introvert who spends hours of his time by himself.  Cocktail parties, any gathering is a torture for him; although he can be charming, his heart is not into it. I am variously described as bubbly and charming or an over the top manic threatening to sink into deep depression.  I prefer the Mary Tyler Moore version of me.  In any case, in the early hours of the morning I think of all the improvements I need to make in my life.  I guess the symbolism of the cleaning lady moves me into high gear since I always have so many things, ideas, suggestions, I want to share the minute hubby comes out into the dining area.  It is a terrible moment, and I have to hold my tongue.  Today I just needed to tell him right away of my brilliant idea of exchanging the door mats in front of the doors of our live in condo and guest residence condo.  Ours is too high, if I feel, and I am afraid of tripping.  He loves it because it is beautiful even if poorly proportioned.  I suddenly feel today that I must, I must, I must make this switch, and so I must talk to him directly.  Still, even I realize this is not the propitious moment as I see him scowling and uttering imprecations when he notices that his bag of dried apricots has got some mold or mildew or whatever.  The cleaning lady will be here in a matter of seconds.  Best to go next door and hold my tongue.

What To Do With Poor Old Roger Brooke Taney?

Once the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1836-1884), he is famous or notorious for handing down what is known as the Dred Scott decision in which he declared and thus made authoritative the ruling that African slaves because they were not free at the time the Constitution was created could not be considered then or ever citizens of the United States.  Thus people of African descent had no legal standing in this country, a ruling from which untold misery and privation.  The 13th and14th Amendments overturned the Dred Scott decision, but could only be enacted after several years of bloody Civil War. The 13th Amendment simply bans slavery in the U.S. The 14th amendment states inter alia, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."  A bust of Justice Taney is now up for debate, whether it deserves to be part of the landscape where it sits or should be relegated to a back closet.  I say keep these things our and polished, the same with Calhoun College at Yale University, and in fact I would add more, plaques, for instance, to designate known sites of historic lynchings, plaques in public squares where slave auctions took place, better yet bronze statuary groups a la Rodin's Burghers of Calais.  Somewhere on a roadway there should be similar bronze groupings or some kind of commemoration of the slaves chained together in bands and force marched hundreds of miles as though they were no different than the building materials transhipped across the country creating an economic boom.  I admire the plaques thither and yon in Europe which designate a site where a Partisans was shot or a band of Jews were machine gunned to their deaths.  Europe's suffering is there to see.  History is not necessarily a happy story, and the United States cannot present itself forever as a television commercial where everyone is smiling and everything is coming up roses.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt has statues everywhere commemorating his great role in American life; Chief Justice Taney was also a great mover and shaker who from the bottom of his heart and intellect believed people of African descent could not be citizens.  Millions agreed with him; a war was fought over the idea.  Millions in Nazi Germany believed that all Jews should be exterminated.  Extermination factories still stand to preserve the horror of this perversion that seemed normal to many people at the time.  A people that acknowledges their horrible deeds are closer to cleansing themselves of them than those who hide or deny them

Watching Films On Rainy Days

As the hurricane passed by about seventy or eighty miles north of us it spread a wide arc of torrential rains and flooding coupled with gusts of high wind that at one point threatened to knock imprudent me to the ground when I had journeyed out with a friend for lunch.  These were the days to stay at home, and this we did for the most part, and saw three films where otherwise we might have been out of doors.  Our house guest who was from the parched lands of California literally reveled in being drenched in rain, we said, "good for you," but otherwise the out of doors had nothing to offer other than stupefying tropical humidity.  The three films were "White Mischief" a twenty year old drama based on a true story of a decadent group of English settlers, young sons of the aristocracy and so on, who had to make a living out in the colonies, in this case Kenya, in the so called Happy Valley, where they farmed.  It was the story of two sexual adventurers, male and female, and the disruption their behavior brought to the group, ending in scandalous murders.  The fascination of the film lay principally in the accomplished cast of actors who acted out the hurts, the angers, fascinations, and sexual attractions racing through the group of men and women whose fundamental decadence acted as the perfect catalyst to the monumental boredom the area engendered.  It makes you think about Isaak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" in a new light.  Another we watched was the documentary of Vivian Maier, the Chicago based nanny who managed to take over one hundred thousand photos during her off hours, which she secreted in a rented storage facility, just as she kept herself a secret from her employers through the years.  The effort to build a character from the reminiscences of her now grown up charges and their parents is only partially successful; she was aggressively private.  Much more revealing was a selection of her photos showing an astonishing capacity to frame the happenstance and unexpected, and the humanity of her direct vision into the subjects who came before her camera.  Here was revealed a woman who surrendered all of herself to the vision outside of herself, from which Mr. Maloof, who somewhat discovered her, promoted her photos,  tries to assemble a person (although at the end of the film it is not clear that she has really emerged from behind the assiduously locked doors of the rooms she inhabited in her employers homes),  The third film we watched was about the American pilot of the U2 that was shot down over Russia and the efforts of an American lawyer (Tom Hanks) to arrange a deal with the Russians for the return of one of their spies (Mark Rylance) captured by the Americans.  The acting was exceptionally strong in this film, but it is not a kind of film I enjoy.  Everything happened to the various protagonists of this story; the makers of the film never went into how they felt as the story unfolded.  I tried to explain that I always come away from films like this thinking that I had read the account in The New York Times and no closer to the persons who were the protagonists than what the printed word allowed me.  My husband and our house guest were united in their disgust exclaiming that I was a fool.

Sunshine Again

I looked out the window when I got up happy to see the early morning's bright sun glancing off the walls of the building opposite me.  Instinctively I sensed that I could walk out into the fresh cool dawn of the aftermath of the last two days of high winds and torrents of rain.  But that, of course, was nonsense.  We are not in New England anymore, Toto.  The air as I bent to pick up the Times from the mat was as dense, moist, and claustrophobic as ever.  The only change was the rain had stopped and the wind had died down and the hot morning sun was back in business.  Living in Florida is a challenge that I am happy to accept so that I do not have to do battle with ice and snow.  But the later summer months are always a challenge.  Heat and humidity start in early May and by late August has long since overstayed.  But September, they say, is the big hurricane month.  Ah, well, we have the gym schedule, the balance clinic treatments for me, all the books from the library to read, television series from lists compiled from all our recommendations, swimming in the condo pool which I love to do except I am afraid I will get a stroke, and am not sure that drowning is a fun way  to die.  No one else goes out to the pool and I hate to ask my husband to sit in the heat and humidity and read out there although he has more than once offered to do so.  It seems strange to be the only one in the pool but then I am sure that is the life of the very rich, so I should suck it up and jump in.

The Lunacy of Modern Life

Wireless Diagnostics is the title of some boxes that have started popping up on my Mac computer screen, and I have systematically ignored them.  But today we had a hurricane, or should I say that one was scheduled to descend on the land some two hours driving time north of here which dramatically made our electricity go on and off.  So I became a little interested. I clicked on one of these sites so impressively entitled.  The text I uncovered was extraordinary.  One has to assume or at least I did that what was there to read would be comprehensible to the lay person who routinely uses computers, me, for instance, a college educated professor humanities, long since retired, author of several books composed on just such a computer as I was now perusing.  An average Joe.  But indeed the diagnoses of Wireless Diagnostics were couched in a technical language utterly incomprehensible to me, not one word, nothing available for my understanding.  It made me recall the biography of Steve Jobs which highlighted his arrogance and indifference to his fellow human beings.  Take or Leave it is the Motto of Apple.  Well, I will do what I can.  As a kind of psychic or thematic embroidery to the text page were the underwear ads.  Recently I discovered while reading the Huffington Post on line an outfit which made very stylishly designed mens boxer briefs.  The colors and patterns were startling and pleasing, and although I am a shapeless and unattractive eighty six year old I knew it would bring me pleasure to have colors and patterns next to my skin, not to mention the delightful fantasy that the male models in the advertisements might in some way turn into me, or rather me into them.  So I clicked on this advertisement and was led into their online shop and immediately bought some of their wares.  Curiosity sent me into a search of their competitors wares.  And now amazingly enough as I struggle with brow furrowed to comprehend the technological language of the Wireless Diagnostic people, the page before my eyes contains images of the crotches of men in their stylish and so carefully engineered ("everything is the pouch for your junk these days") underpants.  Technology at its very best!

All The News That's Fit To Print

As an assiduous, nay compulsive reader of The New York Times for the past four or five decades, I was amazed to turn to the Arts section this morning and discover that I did not know about any of the persons mentioned in its three or four pages.  I have long realized that various activities and personages were slipping beyond my grasp--I never quite managed even a tiny interest in rap music or the performers of it--but there it is, from Boyancé to oh, you name it, anyone of the people cited today, names and personalities and physical appearance.  These are the people who are in dialogue with the American public for better or for worse, and the clear implication is that I am out of the conversation.  And, indeed, if I stop to examine my situation I am very much on the sidelines, signaled as nothing else quite can, by the fact that I do not watch news or commentary programs on television, thus definitely am not sitting at the breakfast table or in the parlor with my fellow Americans.  I remember well enough talking to my grandmother when we visited my aunt in Oak Park who housed her mother in her declining years.  Declining?  At the time I doubt that she was as old as  I am right now.  But she seemed exceedingly remote in time, if only by virtue of her faint voice, the words all pronounced in a Beacon Hill Boston accent (I have to mention Beacon Hill; I would die if anyone imagined she spoke like a Southie.) which made her almost foreign to me.  She came down to take dinner with the entire family, and sipped sherry beforehand during the cocktail hour.  The conversation went back and forth, and I could see that although Grammy Beye was an exceedingly alert woman, she really did not care to enter into anything because she did not care that much--the rest of the group almost shouting as they went back and forth over the behavior and ideas of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  That's sort of like me.  I confess to never having seen or heard either Secretary Clinton or Donald Trump speak on television, although one day I was somewhere perhaps in a store and busy with something and while waiting for the service whatever it was that I required caught a glimpse of Clinton on a television screen across the large room I was in.  Nothing however prompted me to draw close and investigate.  Somehow events have eluded me.