The Black Penis

In the Sunday Iimes magazine Wesley Morris, the former drama critic of the Boston Globe, and now a cultural critic at large, in his usual beautiful and thoughtful prose wrote an interesting piece on the penis, specifically the general expectation upon seeing a black penis, the fear in the public at large that the black penis will be so large, much more commanding than its white counterparts.  I know of this expectation lodged in the hearts and brains of white males, have heard it referenced often when the occasion for talking about naked black males among white males arises.  I was once indeed amused when in a hotel room with an enormously tall majestic black professional athlete who had disrobed down to his underpants in preparation for our having sex, he paused, looked over and said, as a way of warning : "I only have an ordinary sized prick." I would not have imagined otherwise.  Starting when I was fifteen years old I had had a twice a week encounter with a kid my age, the only black in our small town high school, who lived with the cruel experience of being a star athlete and very popular with the boys in the locker room, but because of his skin color never invited to the parties nor asked out on dates.  He and I encountered each other one night in the shadows near the stadium trying to sneak into a basket ball tournament, and when we failed in that endeavor, I discovered myself wildly aroused, and he a sexual outlet for his otherwise untapped libido.  Larry and I became great friends of a special kind.  He was a young male with normal sexual appetites who took advantage of the only game in town available to him, I was a bright gay young middle class kid who wanted into his pants.  We spent the next eight years two evenings a week in the shadows of the city park in my car, and both talkers, followed the coitus with a half hour of banter.  He never acknowledged me especially if we came across each other down town or at school.  So it never occurred to me that black males are supposed to be especially endowed.  And further experience of them in bed over the years gave me no reason to change my expectations.  They were just guys, like any other male on the planet.  I always told my children and my students that they should have sexual experience of persons of other races so as to dispel the mystique.  How I secretly envied my daughter's year in Kenya and her Masai boyfriend!  But straight males are always worrying about their own equipment, how it measures up.  That's one of the virtues of teenaged gay promiscuity: you learn that although they come in all sizes and shapes, they are pretty much the same.  The ancient Greek sculpture shows them small, seems they found larger penises aesthetically unpleasing.  Ancient athletes exercised and competed in the nude with their dick strapped to their leg, to avoid its flopping around.  The myth of the large black penis is certainly a subconscious reaction to the guilt of the white slave owner.  Revenge rape is a natural concomitant.  Look at the army of invading Soviet soldiers who methodically raped every woman they could manage when they entered Berlin.

Halloween

Back in my youth in Iowa, seventy five years ago, Halloween was a moment of great excitement that always began ritualistically with a drive out of town to the farms so we could buy a pumpkin, looking for the perfect one, among the piles lining the roadway as we passed farm after farm.  There were six children in my family, but the older two had graduated from carving pumpkins.  Every one of us had strongly held aesthetic notions of what constituted a good pumpkin face--the size and shape of the mouth, the teeth (requiring some very special carving and not for sissies).  We sat in the kitchen to work on our pumpkins, overseen by the kitchen help, who were constantly and verbally vigilant as we wielded knives that were too big for our hands.  After the candles had been installed the four were set on the front porch and the entire family went out to inspect.  Then I grew up and moved East for graduate school, having long since abdicated my role as a participant in Halloween.  In Cambridge we lived among students; the only carved pumpkins we saw were in store windows.  I took to loathing Halloween as a cheap commercial trick.  Time went by, and my memories of Halloween with my own small children blurred into a vast swirl of costumes, carved pumpkins, walking the streets with my costumed charges, and the many, many responsibilities, their nervousness at the competition from neighbors pumpkins, costumes, etc. somehow blotted out any positive memories.  Flash forward to Hull Massachusetts and out house on E Street.  My husband positively loved Halloween, had all kinds of false teeth fangs, capes, masks, and as it turns out so did my older daughter.  The two of them carved pumpkins, got bowls of candy, worked on costumes, and then came the night.  It was an extravaganza.  This little down was bursting with children, it was safe to walk down our street, no sidewalks, no cars, children marched along, with their parents trailing discreetly behind like the Secret Service for the presidential family.  It turned me into a lovable old coot when I beheld these very young children in their pride of costume climbing our porch stairs to meet up with my husband and my daughter acting their parts, the parents staying behind down on the street in the wings so to speak.  All ages, scarcely speaking to early teens (one boy stepping into the living room said unexpectedly: "you have some nice art here").  Now we are in a condo in Sarasota Florida where no one under fifty five can live and no child comes near the building.  But it was great fun while it lasted.

The Bonus Years

Bonus years? What does this mean?  Just read an advertisement for a lecture here in the Sarasota area.   What is a bonus?  A reward for good performance?  Something quite unexpected?  My sisters who are ninety two and ninety are hinting that their excellent health and energy is a kind of downer.  The older of the two is dynamite; she walks out every day with her cane or whatever four blocks to have coffee with her daughter.  The younger goes on a scooter down to her pond and gets into the water for a swim.  But the fact of that matter is that they are both rather sick and tired of doing the repetitions.  Life has absolutely no surprises.  I used to love working in my garden, but that has become too tiring, the struggle with the rapacious weeds, the constant oversight of the pruning and deadheading process, well, I am just tired of the whole thing.  I've had gardens since I was a boy in Iowa, gardens everywhere, in home after home, and some of them quite large, the last one at the seashore a considerable fraction of an acre.  I used to kneel down to trim and then came the epic struggle to right myself.  Plastic flowers is the way to go.  It was interesting to notice that in central Rome you just don't see old people my age, not on the street not in the restaurants.  Also interesting is that the city itself has without meaning it, I am sure, established a million traps for the elderly.  I have never seen so many stepped up segments of pavement, meant to be a graceful stair I guess?, but  of course just a perfect invitation to tripping over.  And in a city so breathtakingly beautiful they are not going to mar such disruptions with yellow warning lines--the idea is grotesque.  Better a dead old soul than ruining whatever is otherwise the "bella figura" of the city.  So I guess the Roman bonus years are spent away in a closet or some other impediment to movement. And remember the incredible heat wave in France a few years back when thousands of old people perished in Paris apartments lacking air conditioning while their children and grandchildren disported themselves on the beaches during the August annual vacation period.  I calculate that I haven't the strength to do the walking, the gardening, the hours of attending theatrical productions, walking through museums peering intelligently at paintings, so I am not sure in what sense these years are bonus?  Maybe in the same sense that the somewhat worn out clothes you pass on to your servants are a kind of bonus, perhaps even a tip, although make-do items tend to  remain cast off.  So we old folks here in Sarasota can go to this lecture to hear about these so-called bonus years?  It will take me a while to figure out what the expression mean.  Sounds like an invention of AARP

My New York Trip

On Day Two I left the small bag I carry with my money, passport, and telephone in the cab which was bringing me and my handler back to the hotel after three intense hours in the Met.  The taxi driver found his way blocked at the entrance to 87th street, so had to let us out in the street, in the traffic, which caused me to lose my orientation and my caution and the bag got left behind.  Consternation, on the one hand, a kind of end of life acceptance and calm on the other.  The hotel desk clerk let me monopolize one of the lobby phones as I set about setting things to rights; life grows complicated without a cellphone.  Lo and behold by three o'clock the taxi driver had called to say he had the bag.  This was the miracle of that story: he had looked at telephone numbers on my cellphone and called my doctor's office in Sarasota and they put him on to me, and after calling me with reassurances, next morning when he set out on his job, he stopped by the hotel and returned it.  I did not look into it as he did so feeling that was bad form, and I gave him one hundred dollars for his goodness and effort.  Later on checking the contents I found everything intact except the several hundred dollars packed in an inner pocket.  The disappearance of cash is usually a traditional aspect of lost or mislaid or stolen items, so I took it in good part, although half those I have told this tale to are indignant.  Thereafter the visit proceeded without incident except that it was all I could do to hobble up the distance of a city block for my morning coffee.  One more  day with my excellent escort, thereafter leaning on the arm of my cousin who was visiting Manhattan at the same time.  Dinner dates with lots of friends, some very intimate hours with an old dear friend and former student who was having her drama when as it turned out the gas main had broken under her entry way. She is English and not attuned to when smelling gas represents a threat so it was lucky I was at hand at got her to call 911 and usher her out the door.  The repairs took twenty four hours during part of which time she and I had a marvelous long lunch filled with witty remeniscence (never can spell that word!), in her ice cold house--gas furnace off--and I shivering with the vulnerability of a Floridian.  Most of my days I sat in my hotel room and read the electronic book I had with me.  Kindle is gross and invaluable at the same time.  The room sparsely furnished and lit by glaring overhead light was perhaps not the sweetest reading experience in the world, but, Reader, you must understand:  I just can't walk anymore!  Ghastly.  On Sunday--change of subject--hobbled two blocks to the sung mass in an Anglican Episcopal Church, where I discovered that I still knew the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer by heart since last I was an altar boy every Sunday of 1941--42.  Although I am a firm non-believer I still get a glow of happiness from hearing the language of salvation and redemption that are contained therein.  Clouds of incense and gorgeous robes also appealed mightily to my inner gay self.

Back From The Big Apple

It's all I can do to sit at my computer I am so tired.  The New York expedition was pretty much a disaster from start to finish.  The wheelchair attendants associated with the Delta flights going up and coming back were as usual magnificent, always energetic, thoughtful, sensitive, I cannot say enough nice things about them.  Many were immigrants proving yet again how hard working, kind, and intelligent immigrants can be.  (On our return from Rome a few weeks ago, the Alitalia flight was met with one, yes, just one, wheel chair attendant born in Guyana, he alone had to deal with at least six passengers which by a miracle of organization he shepherded through US Customs--what a guy!)  Curiously enough Delta does an email quiz follow up on their wheelchair service ("Would you recommend Delta for its wheelchair service?" Not really, in this monopolized industry, you take what airline you can get going where you want to go.)  I stayed in a charming little Upper West side hotel, the Belnord, nothing fancy but with newly built handicapped bathroom, so it was perfect for me.  I discovered, however, that even with my cane I was at risk of falling constantly.  I just don't have command of my balance anymore.  Luckily I had friends visiting every day and I went out on expeditions with their support.  Once I hired a former student from the Sarasota theater program and we spent two three hour sessions walking through the Met, hand in hand, hand on arm; he was a big strong fellow, a former athlete and I felt totally safe.  I can imagine that there might be lots of young men available for this service, it's sort of like hustlers in days of yore, and I am not sure how to advertise for what I want.  In any case, I more or less said "goodbye" to the New York years.  Just too hard.  My cousin was in town and I hobbled along with her to see Anna Deveare Smith, whom I thoroughly enjoy always.  We also went to the Guggenheim to see the Agnes Martin show, and I found the climb up the ramp too much and fell by the wayside before we made it to the top.  The grid concept of Martin's work does not to my mind lend itself to a ramp, and I was glad to have seen the show last year at Tate Modern.  Maybe tomorrow I will write of the crazy experience of losing my bag with passport, telephone and several hundred dollars and its recovery--it was that kind of week, everything saying over and over "Stay Our Of New York"--.  At least I did not fall down.  But what if I go on living for a long time? 

A Perilous Expedition

I am off for a week in New York City this afternoon. Going alone.  With my cane.  Staying in a hotel because our studio is sold.  Resisted calling upon friends, because the last time when I stayed with a friend, we went everywhere together, and that was partly because I was terrified of being alone on the city streets and she did not like to see me doing so.  I have a compromise this time.  I have made a great number of "play dates" so that I will have an arm of someone to lean on, and what is more I have hired a young guy, an actor, to accompany me for a couple of mornings to museums.  At the moment, 6:50 AM, I don't want to go, completely nervous.  So this is how it ends up?  My doom and gloom personality has taken over in full force, but maybe, just maybe, a week from now upon my return, I will be bubbling with the recollections of all the great art I saw, friends I was with, and not the stumbling, the near falls, the missed connections, you know, all the things I am envisioning right now.  It doesn't help that Thursday morning, tomorrow, is predicted to be very rainy.  The young man whom I have engaged to join me for a couple of mornings has an entirely even tempered generous personality, and he already is bubbling with the "adventure" of it all.  The dear friends with whom I will spend time are all persons I have known for fifty years of more, so we have a lot to say to one another that will be a slight defense from the barrage of the politics of the presidential campaign.  I am so negative a person that I am already envisioning revolution in the streets from those who are convinced they have been cheated of their rightful election.  When I want to whine and say "I didn't want it all to end this way," meaning my life, I have to say sternly "get a grip! Think of all the dispossessed of the world, pushed and pulled and chased from pillar to post. I don't think someone sweating about flying up to New York and staying in a small residential hotel on the Upper West Side even gets speaking rights in today's dramas."  It doesn't stop me, however.  There will be no blog writing for a week, and if I fall down on the sidewalk and maybe go into a coma--it happened to a friend of mine in Los Angeles--then there may be longer delay or permanent blackout.  Friends of my friend in LA who fell on the street had only one question, such a Los Angeles moment: "Well, why was he walking?"

Cleaning Day

I woke up late this morning.  The cleaning lady is coming soon, extra early in fact, as my husband informed me last night.  I am in the process of packing for a trip to Manhattan which has me altogether panicked.  I will be alone with my roller suitcase from the carousel at Laguardia into a taxi.  Again from out of the taxi on the upper west side until safely in my room in a small residential hotel.  And what will I find there?  Walk in shower?  Grab bars in the shower?  I asked for this when I reserved the room but never heard back.  I can always take pseudo baths with a wash cloth and the sink.  Done that before many a time traveling in Southern Europe.  Oh, the delights of students days all over again at 86!  Can't think of these things now.  Must clear off the counter in the bathroom.  Why does everything I own stay messy littered across every surface?  I know, I know, that if a rhetorical question.  Well, no more time.

Monday Blues

I try to separate the personal from the public, get the blog focused on the inanities of the mundanities of my private life, the big one now being why do sugar ants continue to haunt our kitchen, despite the waves of poison dishes my husband set out for them.  To me they are harmless, I do not sense that they are now greater in number nor less.  Richard sees these things as though he were Napoleon; I have more the take of a simple peasant ground under the heel of the landed gentry.  These are the way things are: there have always been ants, there will continue to be ants.  What has sunk me into almost irretrievable gloom is the morning's headlines repeating Donald Trump's assertion that the election is fixed.  One can only think of the banana republics to the south of us which have such shaky and fraudulent governments that these claims are routine and more often than not are followed by political uprising.  One thinks of the early days of Hitler and his claims against the established government.  Surely the majesty of the United States of America is being tested in dangerous ways, and I do not understand why the target of these outrageous charges, the government and its elected officials, do not stand up against them.  But perhaps I understand nothing, do not see the potential for real civic unrest, in doing so.  I am a catastrophist, have vivid memories of the wars and upheavals of the last eighty or so years, and now, old, weak, and impotent, I fear for my children, my grandchildren.  Our charming well spoken young plumber came back to finish the work he began on Friday at which time we had a strange minuet of a conversation in which we delicately hinted at our political allegiances so as to establish our ground but not damage our working relationship.  It reminded me so, dirty old man that I am, of tentative, exploratory remarks with working men from days of yore, before AIDS, before gay consciousness, when libidos were less inhibited, desires were not so freighted with "meaning," and fun, unexpected things could happen.  Well, that got me back to the personal and away from the public pretty damn fast.

Saturday Morning at the Market

We are lucky to live near a number of farmers markets, although I am never convinced that all the vegetables what are set out in open crates have actually just been plucked from the ground.  No matter, there is a freshness and liveliness to the several blocks of tents and booths which make up for a lot.  Beside we adore the family who do indeed make and sell every variety of pasta. so real, so Italian, although the younger generation had to pass through Argentina on their way to our shores.  There is a lady making quacamole that is do die for, a great couple turning out exquisite pastries after his career as a business executive, now no longer operational.  You get the picture.  Fifty years ago my first wife and I used to go on Saturday mornings to Boston's North End for the same thing, only most of the stuff was left over sale bargains from jobbers working the supermarkets.  Cheap, though, perfect for graduate students.  We were learning to cook, so shopping together was part of our adventure.  My husband and I both cook, he looks forward to turning out his favorite recipes, I, after ten years in the kitchen of cooking for my children, and twenty years cooking Richard's dinner,  would truthfully be happy to never go near a stove again.  And, indeed, I don't often do so.  The problem is that Richard goes through the market buying items that strike his fancy "oh, eggplant, we haven't had that in a long time" without any developed expectation of the day ahead when this item will be featured in the dinner.  Thus too much produce lingers in our refrigerator and rots, especially vegetables. It is a scandal, but no matter how devoted we are to one another we don't seem to be in sync when it comes to planning menus ahead of time and sticking to them.  Richard is a superb cook of fish; he started working in his father's cousin's fish restaurant in his early teens and he knows the product, and at the market we get really fresh fish.  So that and the pasta are stellar; I need to muscle in and assure a good vegetable side at every dinner, but Richard who is commendable for the way he has taken over as my strength and skills fade is also when in command in command and does not brook my entrance into the kitchen which I must admit will scarcely hold two people, and then I lose interest and go sit with my drink in the living room, and a vegetable side does not get cooked.  And so the vegetables sit in the refrigerator growing older and older.  But occasionally he makes a run on a box store and buys, say, three long English cucumbers bound up tightly in cellophane.  No way they will not rot.  I must stop before all my positive projections end in the evocation of grim realities.  We have friends who receive from some company boxes of ingredients for pre planned meals each week.  Maybe that is the way to go.

Confusion

I just noticed that the day before yesterday I published a blank blog, just the space with no words.  When I discovered that fact, right now as a matter of fact, my instinct to tidiness (non-existent, my husband would say) made me want to delete the page, but then I thought no, it is an expression of me at this moment in time.  That is to say, I am growing more noticeably forgetful and careless, the commonplace predicament of the over eighty five set.  Not to be confused with the onset of Alzheimers, I don't think.  I sometimes consider it early stage dementia.  No, no, friends insist: you are just distracted.  I guess it is that I can no longer carry two thoughts in my head at once.  It used to be that I would lodge Idea One in my brain and go on to thinking of something else, and then circle back to take Idea One to act on it.  But that is a perilous maneuver these days; often it has disappeared completely or grown sufficiently denatured by an overlay of impressions and emotions that it is scarcely recognizable.  At the moment I am making the initial motions to pack for a trip to New York City, while at the same time, organizing a bunch of medications and toiletries set on the counter of my bathroom so that they will be out of the way of the cleaning woman who comes on Tuesday.  And, I had also to keep ahead of the plumber who is hopefully coming on Monday to finish up work the requires him to go under the counter top and so I must empty the contents of that area.  This morning I have managed to assemble ready to be thrown into the trash a number of items, bottles of Vitamin E oil which someone foisted on me and now a year later I have not changed and will not.  Time to let go.  There was an article in the Sunday Times about a boy with exceptionally fine features who has taken to making his face up with cosmetics which he claims many teenaged boys would like to do.  It certainly makes him extraordinarily beautiful, and if he can live with the suspicion and occasional hostility of his peer group more power to him.  I thought back to a moment when I was at Vassar College as a visiting professor, aged fifty or so, and there was to be a celebratory birthday party to which I was invited, and I was sitting with the organizer with whom I had become special friends during my sojourn.  We were in her bedroom, and just for the fun of it, she began to make up my eyes.  I had never had such an experience except when I was in theater and getting ready for a performance.  When she finished with my face she held up a mirror so I could see the result.  That was over thirty years ago, the shock of the beauty of my eyes still registered with me today.  A woman friend once got me to buy very light pancake powder to smooth out the skin of my cheeks.  Loved the effect, but the inner boy from Iowa stayed my hand from using it on a regular basis.  It's there in the drawer of the bathroom counter, and it's not going anywhere.  Hey, they're going to need it for my corpse!

Mashers

My mother who was raised in the Edwardian era, always used to make us children laugh when she warned her daughters of "mashers" lurking everywhere in public spaces, particularly signifying the dangers of close proximity on public transportation.  But I have to say in the polite repressed world of my youth and then fatherhood I heard many stories from sisters, daughters, casual women friends, stories of smutty insinuations, gropings, hard cocks pressed against thighs, even exposures- this was in front of my teenaged daughters, for God's sake, on a respectable suburban street, by a man who stopped his car, jumped out and unzipped his flies as they were walking along to school.  When I finally learned of this it was more their amusing anecdote than a crisis story.  My mother constantly warned my sisters against entering a room alone with a male and not leaving the door open.  I was thus so conditioned that when colleges changed their rules for visitors of the opposite sex to dorm rooms, I as a professor always spoke out against it, people thought I was a fuddy duddy.  When I made two woman friends in Italy I, the brother of four sisters, was interested to see how they managed to be perfectly friendly to their masculine friends and acquaintance, accepting the ritual of constant masculine flirtation and invitation as a societal norm of Italian relationships but never allowing the pseudo stylized erotic to be in the slightest way erotic or invitational; it was all style, and meant nothing.  When I taught at Stanford I knew a brilliant aggressive woman professor who always no matter what replied to any male who made any remark that had even the minimal chance of being interpreted as a come-on "fuck off, you son of a bitch."  I have always despised the Muslim use of the veil but those women who champion it bring up the unwanted attentions of males all day every day, but sometimes I wonder when you hear the stories surfacing now about the veil's validity for those who want it.  As a gay male I am in an interesting position to study the obsession.  Heterosexual males are restrained from openly gazing at women sexually by their codes of proper behavior; construction workers on the job, as we all know, have license-- or used to- to stare, whistle.  A friend of mine has described the constant stream of males who pass her on a crowded Manhattan street who called out sottto voce "ya wanna fuck?" or something similar.  I have spent my life learning not to cast my erotic gaze on nearby handsome males wherever I am, not to make even verbal advances, since this natural form of male sexual aggression is absolutely or used to be dangerous in almost any circumstance.  Jokes are sometimes made describing a gay guy in a locker room of naked straight athletes.  It has its amusing salacious aspects, but essentially it is an exercise in painful repression.  But it is the obligation of males straight or gay to develop their defenses against arousal.  That is what being a gentleman is all about.  One must not become a masher.

Suits

We tried giving "Suits" another chance but gave up again in the first episode.  The script writers rely too much on formulae.  The young hero who comes into the law office, pretending to have gone to Harvard Law School, well, we gave him a chance to fake it convincingly.  But we could not stomach his willingness to surrender his integrity, his security, to a childhood friend who as we learn has betrayed him time after time, and, as we know him better, understand that this "friend" is a druggie without scruples as almost all of them are, who yet manages to maintain incredible good looks and perfect skin tone.  That seemed to us as unlikely as the protagonist's repeated inclination to trust and forgive his miscreant boyhood chum.  People who live by their wits trust no one.  His position in the law office is threatened by an ugly fellow--that's also a strange business since everyone in the series except for this one guy is super good looking.  The ugly bozo improbably enough--very very improbably enough--went to Harvard, back in the day when the Ivy League was for good looking Wasps, not somebody whom even liberals would want to put up a wall to exclude from these shores.  The script writers have fastened on the narrative line taken from fairy tale of the enchanted prince who is preyed upon by ugly monsters and we the spectators tremble for this innocent lad beset by powerful Ugly on the one side and seduced by sinister charm and childhood loyalties on the other.  It's all so obvious and he ends up seeming to be such a dope; in the fairy tale he would be the enchanted victim, in real life he is just a dope.  If we the spectators have seen this plot line a million times, we cannot willingly concede that this dimwit does not recognize it himself.  Perhaps it is also the case that we the spectators are a teeny bit bored by the fact that none of these highly educated (except the waif hero who has no college degrees) characters can manage to say anything that suggests even the most minimal attachment to a humanistic culture, or to anything else that suggests the web of human society. But then they are lawyers.   Do I harp on this because I am a retired professor who imagines that everyone slings the academic bullshit with extraordinary finesse?

Waiting For The Fat Lady To Sing

I am never good at speculating on outcomes, having been conditioned by my mother from childhood on to anticipate disastrous reversals, as we listened to the story of her first husband's sailing for France as a soldier in the First World War only to be felled by the Spanish Flu before he even entered battle. This inducement to foreboding was augmented in my early childhood when my father kissed us all goodbye  as he left with some colleagues to drive off to a conference only to return in a coffin after a head on collision four hours later which killed almost all of them.  So I have a hard time listening to my husband tell me the latest projections of Nate Silver and the other pundits on the fate of Trump and Clinton in the upcoming election.  My husband is jubilant, my trainer at the gym keeps telling me it is a "done deal."  And I smile and say to myself "not so fast."  As a professional classicist I tell myself the story of Oedipus who left what he thought was his hometown and in so doing proceeded to rationalize all the conceivable obstacles to avoiding disaster, only to discover in the end that his worst fears were realized.  In the times I have lived in Italy and Greece I took comfort in the sense of foreboding that informed casual conversational comments about future events; I consider it a habit of mind inherent in Mediterranean peoples, although I suppose one might put it down to the experience of living through the events of the twentieth century in that part of the world.  It is tortuous to live through expectation and foreboding for so many months.   The campaign season should be limited by law as it is in Europe.  I am sure that what prevents that here is the television advertisers who profit so from this circus of politics.  We now have degenerated into a public entertainment aided and abetted by those professional entertainers called newscasters.  The televised debates have been a scandal, the one candidate who comes from the world of entertainment would be more suited to debating with someone like Kim Kardashian.  The descent into so sordid a level of campaign oratory and behavior is the direct result of allowing Fox News to pretend to be anything other than entertainment, but I am beginning to froth at the mouth, so shall stop.  But I can't help thinking of that earnest, idealistic, ambitious, moral and thoughtful Wellesley college student giving her speech, thinking to herself, as sometimes she must, "has it come to this?"

Rome And The Hassler Hotel

My husband was determined that we stayed at the Hassler Hotel because it was what he knew to be a major luxury hotel and he wanted this trip to be completely memorable. Although I was raised in what they like to call very comfortable circumstances, I am often intimidated by luxury confidently presented; somehow I immediately think of ostentation.  But the Hassler has been around forever, dating from an era when the rich had much greater confidence in wealth, unlike the nouveaux riches of today who always seem to be looking enviously through the window at what in fact they have just paid good money to enjoy.  Since we were both of us not able to spend large amounts of time "doing the city," we took advantage of our confinement to stay in our splendid room, or better yet to sit for a long time over our breakfast and dinner, two meals we much enjoyed when taken in the splendor of an outdoor pavilion, formed by the open space created by four six or eight story walls.  One of these walls was made of brick, ancient, perhaps, or at least old enough and the right color to make an impression of Roman antiquity.  Another similar wall had bits of ancient statuary embedded into it, and a plant grew everywhere on it, of a delightful green which formed a color field as background.  The tables were set about under a tent like protection from the sun or open to the heavens.  At the far end away from the "ancient wall" was an art deco construction of a kind of large shell--in a delightfully lurid blue--the sort of thing from which Busby Berkeley would have chorus girls emerging in the stream of water that ended in a splashing torrent just behind the bartender mixing cocktails, which were then passed about by a team of splendidly handsome young Italian males impeccable in green jackets and black pants.  In the middle of our stay the hotel decreed that it had now become winter and the operations moved into a room of riotously overdone swag and brocade and gold trim and the beautiful boys passing the trays were now kitted out in maroon jackets to match the predominant color of the velvet which covered everything.  The space was so aggressively over decorated that it achieved a kind of greatness in its confidence.  It was the Hassler, for god's sake, an experience that those gathered there recognized to be sui generis, just the same sensation that overcomes those slack jawed viewers walking through St. Peter's

On The Streets Of Rome

Rome is one of the cities that I know quite well, street by street, partly because I have visited so often since I first was there in 1962, and of course from having lived there with my family in two stints of fifteen months or more, in the late sixties and mid seventies, but mostly because whenever there I walked the streets incessantly, thereby gaining a visual and visceral sense of the city.  This visit was dramatically different, for me because I have severe problems with my balance, and for my husband, whose joints as well as the nerves in his legs make extensive walking very painful. Walking Roman streets is a challenge since the brick construction of so much of the pavements makes everything uneven, especially in a city hardly known for its repair.  Even with my cane I was fearful, even with Richard ever ready, ever helpful.  So we took taxis everywhere, and went on only one excursion a day.  Since we knew the "tourist sites" so well we only revisited one, the Villa Julia, for some reason my husband's curiosity about the Etruscans was especially keen at the moment.  An odd choice I thought until when inside I realized that the objects on display were in some instance curiously unfamiliar to me and thus there was the pleasure of the shock of the new. and of course the tomb monument of the reclining husband and wife is also for the centuries a monument of connubial bliss.  As we sped through the streets in surprisingly inexpensive taxis, and for the most part more easily navigable than the Rome of my memory, I was terrified by the barrage of high speed motorcycles everywhere defying rule and rationale in their deathly passing on the left, on the right, cutting in front, always at top speed, zooming here and there, and I have to salute the taxi drivers who went through this mess with scarcely a complaint.  Moreover a majority of the taxi drivers left their seats to offer me a strong arm to use as support as I ascended into or alighted from their car, gentlemen one and all, and who did not expect tips.  We resolutely drove to locations for designated walks--in the Borghese Gardens, for instance, or the banks of the Tiber where a paved bike and running track has been built down below the Lungo Tevere street near the Ponte Sisto. a pedestrian bridge where on can stand to gaze down at the water or north or south at its passage. Every day we journeyed out for a two hour walk, laboriously achieved, always rewarding, with brilliant autumn weather, and the casual sights as thrilling in their own way as the so called "sites."  One reason for this is the incredible physical beauty of the average Roman, beautiful in youth beautiful in old age and very few disfigured by the commonplace obesity that marks the average sampling of population here in America.  And this must surely be tied in with the surprising dish of pasta which is the course served before a meat or fish course (the second plate so designated on the menu).  It always surprises me every time I am back in Rome.  Just enough for maybe ten bites, a taste, not a gluttonous major blob of food as in a so called Italian restaurant in the States, but don't get me started . . . . .

Bella Roma

My husband planned a trip to Rome for us as an extravagant gesture of gratitude to me for suggesting a  real estate venture to him twenty or so years ago which is now paying off well.  When he told me his motive--since he has often said that he did not really want to go back to places we know so well--he kind of teared up.  Yes, he wanted something that would truly thrill me, and this he did, and spent a lot of money in the process.  This latter feature, vulgar as it might be, turned out to be sadly enough an important and necessary part of the trip.  We both have traveled much in Europe over the past decades, both firmly convinced that walking about the streets of any city is the only, yes, the only way to acquaint yourself with the territory.  It helps that he speaks fluently all the major European languages and I at least can make myself understood even if I do not get more than the gist of what is being said to me.  He had to confront the increasing infirmity of us both, and chose to send us first class.  Seats that turn into a bed--that indeed is what separates the sheep from the goats.  We arrived at Fiumicino Airport as though newly risen from a night's sleep in our own bed.  Well, perhaps I exaggerate.  But we were rather well rested and our bodies free of the aches and pains that hunching up overnight in a coach seat always induces.  The Italian wheelchair people were as sympathetic and efficient as one could want, and of course those in wheelchairs get right through immigration.  And there we were ready to be handed over to a car and driver from the Hassler Hotel which he had also magnificently engaged.  It was the setting for our entire week: comfort, convenience, minimum stress, no exhaustion. Staying at the Hassler is--to use the hackneyed language of advertising--magical.  Perched atop the eastern edge of the declivity that was long ago formed by the erosion of the Tiber river next door to the landmark church called Trinita dei Monti which presides majestically over the famous Spanish Steps an elaborate stairway of many turns and platforms built of marble ascending from the piazza below, the Hassler is a throwback to an era of truly luxurious hotels.  Our Hassler driver presided over his car like an first class private chauffeur and once at the hotel, handed us over to one of the several uniformed and capped doormen whose attentions were as constant as they were entirely discreet. Our luggage was brought in and sent in its elevator to our room where we arrived after checking in.  The lobby and the other public rooms were done in wine colors and velvet fabrics accented everywhere by marble and mirrors.  I immediately felt that I was on the set of a major film about nineteenth century Europe.  We had anticipated this, packing suit jackets and long pants, rather than our customary jeans and Florida shorts.  This was the first surprise: to see so many persons in the breakfast room in shorts, young women in indiscrete short shorts, in this gilded setting, waited upon by an impeccable uniformed staff.  I was shocked, and with that knew that I  had turned into my mother