Sometimes I think my brain is empty

I read somewhere that persons in their late eighties are in a mid level beginning stage of mild dementia.  There are enough qualifying words there to soften the blow, I guess.  My husband insists that this is nonsense, that I am sharp as a tack.  Since we have never really made many friends here in Sarasota I have few persons with whom I can test my conversational skills and powers of intellectual invention.  I sit in my readers chair in my bedroom compulsively working my way through the TLS, LRB, Guardian, :Prospect, The New York Review, the New Yorker, and on and on, as well as novels, or books I think I should know about like Comey's memoir or "Fire and Fury", that scandalously crazy account of I guess it is more scandalously crazy life in the West Wing of a few months ago.  The fact of the matter is that I forget almost everything, certainly the details.  That to me smacks of dementia, my husband says no.  He claims that a I try to keep up with so many subjects that there is bound to be massive slippage of detail. Years ago I was driven to write several books about various aspects of classical literature.  Driven is certainly the right word, whatever pleasure I took from the writing, there is no doubt of the compulsion.  I have written a memoir, I wish I could write a novel or rather one that was worth publishing.  I wish I could write something, anything, but in fact I can't hold my subject matter intact enough to form a context. I guess that is a form of letting go which we could call old age.

so what"s it about?

I can't seem to get back into the groove.  once upon a time i started the day writing a little piece for this blog.  i still live by a schedule.  but i don't honor deadlines, don't recognize them if truth be told.  sit in my chair, read, forget what i have read.  i am not sure i should continue this.  not right now in any case.

Renewing Magazine Subscriptions

I have been at my computer sorting out which journals I need to renew.  It's not all that simple since the terms vary, i.e., longer terms and the charge is lower, and, for that matter, sometimes the renewal comes right on the heels of the initial subscription, and then there is the new practice of persistent automatic renewal with the proviso of cancellation if the subscriber happens to think of it. these various systems work to the advantage of the magazine: they can keep an eye on their profits down the road, but I am not sure that they are good with all kinds of subscribers, I mean those of my coevals who take on a slew of magazine subscriptions.  Alongside the New York Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, et aI I very much like having the great and good of England, the GuardianWeekly, The TLS, The Lrb, the Economist, Prospect Magazine, but there is a nervous suspicion growing in my gut that before too long my brain will have pretty much relinquished control of my purchases long term.  If I were signed up for automatic renewal, oh, the mess.  As it is, ever other Tuesday our cleaning woman arrives with the expectation that I will have "tidied" the area of my bedroom which constitutes my reading corner.  This entails my sorting through the reading materials and throwing out old stuff read more than once.  You need a clear mind for this and I am just now approaching the boundary line.  In fact I sense a definite relief when I do not renew a subscription; I suppose it's like an addict finally able to pout the pills down the toilet what you used to see in dramas about drugs.

So Much Time Has Passed

And it is mid April and I have celebrated, if that is nothing more than a cliche for the actual event, my eighty eighth birthday and am awaiting my husband's seventy fifth.  My father died, albeit in an auto accident, shortly after his fiftieth birthday.  My mother, half way into her sixty first year,  lay down on the sofa to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV and was found dead there.  Of my six siblings one survives at 94, another at 92, and then there is me.  My trainer at the gym with whom I, as the expression goes, "work out" three times a week, says I am very strong as I perform on the various machines.  A neighbor lady who sometimes stops to give me a peck on the cheek if she spies me in the gym corroborates this estimation of my strength so maybe it is true.  Since I last composed a blog entry at the time of the presidential election I have suffered severe balance issues, as they say, which means in real language that I am incapable of walking for any great distance without a cane and I actually feel as though I were drunk and ready to topple over much of the time.  This is a great drag for someone who used to walk from my apartment at Ninth and Fifty Seventh up to a friend's for dinner at a Wesr End Avenue address somewhat south of 110th Street, and thought nothing of it.  So I have ended up sitting in a chair much of the day reading.  As an old timer I forget what I have read soon after or have a very garbled version to offer to those in my conversation.  As I seem to enjoy excellent health I may be around for some time to come.  I may attempt a daily entry again although perhaps it will be just too inane!

Now That I Am Fully Awake

I can't really post such nonsense when our country is threatened as never before in my lifetime.  It is all so eerily reminiscent of the early days of Adolph Hitler's taking the reins of government in Germany in the early thirties, I think particularly of staffing it with extreme partisans and the singling out of a segment of the population to demonize.  Just as I am too old to lift the peanut butter jar, I feel shuttered and stifled with senile inactivity. My daughter emails with exhortations to telephone my senators with my views.  I have never been political.  Do they actually take account of the calls?  Well, I will do it.

Housekeeping

In our condo apartment everything has its appointed place.  Efficient, neat, orderly.  My husband who was the department head of foreign language programs in a series of top notch public schools is especially good at keeping order, if I were more honest, I might say frighteningly so.  He has the demeanor of the high school hall monitor who checks to see if you have the pass to leave the classroom to use the toilet.  Though I am more sloppy, let's call it "more creative," my years of department chair have also kept me on the side of compulsive, although hubby sneeringly reminds me that I always had a secretary to keep order.  I am reminded of the bright and negative sides of this personality quirk? disorder? almost every morning when  I cover two pieces of toast with peanut butter for my breakfast.  Above the counter opposite the sink is a cupboard on the first shelf of which are stored a variety of containers used in stove cooking or storing foods once cooked.  Above that on the second shelf are various food stuffs used as they are, one of them being the jar of peanut butter.  Because we get the healthiest the oil is separated and needs to be worked in.  I just keep it tightly sealed and upside down and set it in a saucer with a paper towel in it in case of leakage.  This has been our practice forever, well, for a decade.  This morning I got up late and thus everything was seen in a new perspective.  And I had to ask myself: why does an old man who has minimal strength in his feeble old arms reach up much too high above his shoulder level to take hold of a somewhat greasy jar which is relatively heavy (since his spouse cannot bring himself to buy the smaller container and thus most expensive) from its place on a shelf irrationally  and unstrategically (probably not even a word) positioned to begin with?  Well, I can no more answer that than I can think to rearrange the items of the kitchen.  It is at these moments that I have those flash visions of the police breaking into the place after having been called by the neighbors because of the smell and discovering the utter disarray of items littering  every surface and crammed into every cupboard.

A Day In The Life Of A Blogger

Compulsive readers of my blog will note that none appeared yesterday and today I am writing several hours later than usual.  It is the season here in Sarasota, by which I mean that visitors seeking warmth descend on us.  Not so grim as I make it sound.  Granddaughter, great grandson, daughter, all good, but only the last actually stayed with us. How odd it is that I had so looked forward to house guests when we moved down here, but that enthusiasm has sort of gone.  I remember living in Cambridge and Rome and Brooklne and Hull, in houses and apartments mostly big, but even when small, and always crazy fun when guests were on hand.  What has changed?  Well, first of all, everyone is much older.  The genial host of forty five waving a bottle of wine in his guests' faces has surrendered to a wizened up old gentleman of eighty seven who stumbles from room to room, anxious over the appointments of the guest room, and myriad other hospitality concerns.  However, without question, the greatest test of hospitality nowadays is the problem of diet: gluten free food, lactose intolerance, vegetarianism, vegan diets, aversion to alcohol-- the list is endless.  Oh, carefree graduate school days when one ate what was set before him or her, and loved it, and drank up a storm and laughed oneself silly, and maybe smoked oneself into a higher consciousness, when sexual games and satisfactions so outweighed dietary requirements.  Aging hosts such as ourselves are exhausted by the time the guests arrive, the effort at being cheerful so burdens someone in his eighties, and I am ready for bed as I show them to their guest apartment and hear them exclaim that they will be over in half an hour.  I do not want to talk to anyone.  I do not want to catch up, I discover.  I just want to go to bed.

Life Is Too Complicated

Today is Saturday and my daughter who has been visiting from Cambridge Massachusetts will be leaving for the airport mid morning.  She arrived on Tuesday, as did her niece, my granddaughter, down from Canada with her family to visit her brother's family who lives forty miles south of here.  We joined them all for a dinner at a seaside restaurant on Wednesday to which my husband drove since he was between cataract operations, and alone can see to drive in the dark.  Thursday at the crack of dawn he went for the second cataract operation, my daughter drove back south to spend the morning with her niece and the two toddlers, I went to teach my Odyssey course, completely tired and confused, the former condition bringing on the latter in the elderly I increasingly notice.  Despite my inner despair as I talked in class, for some improbable reason several applauded at the end, and more wanted to know what I planned to teach in a subsequent semester!  Home for a nap, then husband, daughter and I were joined by a friend who drove us in the sunset and gloaming down to Venice to see "Sister Act," exceptionally well done and preceded by a fabulous meal at Made In Italy, our favorite pre theater restaurant.  Home to bed, and up betimes on Friday, so as to get hubby to an appointment with the cataract guy to check the result,  and can't even remember what happened the rest of the day except a visit to the bank to rearrange money, and then off to down town Sarasota for dinner, wonderful Italian place, and then to the Urbanite Theatre for an opening, their latest production, "Ideation,," and marveled again at the brilliance of their productions, the energy and discipline of the acting, and home to bed and exhausted, and up this morning, thank God I never need an alarm clock, but the grim truth is that I run on anxiety.  And now I sit here, looking through my appointments calendar app and noting that the next set of arrivals will be driving in around four this afternoon, and that means drinks, dinner, charm, wit, and so to bed, as Pepys would have it in his diary.  Tomorrow Sunday and a little look around Sarasota with the guests, chamber music concert at five.  Oh, quite forgot that when being dropped off at home after the trip to Venice on Thursday night, I slipped while leaving the car and bruised my rib, don't think it is broken, but did not go to the doc.  The pain is not that bad and will last three to four weeks the internet says.  The woman behind me at the Venice theater laughing and joking and loving her evening told me during an intermission chit chat that she was ninety nine as though this were nothing special and okay with her.  I tried to get the same enthusiasm, well, at least I tried.

The Culture Of The Automobile

My daughter who lives in Cambridge Massachusetts is visiting us, and on Wednesday night we drove south of Sarasota to, Englewood, the town north of Boca Grande where we met my grandson's family and his sister visiting from Canada and her brood.  It was about fifty miles,  an hour drive through heavy traffic, not exactly bumper to bumper with a multi lane highway crowded enough to demand close attention.  As anyone who has ever driven in sprawl United States as opposed to urban areas, the highways are lined with strip malls, little businesses, god knows what, its entire length which means that cars are endlessly pulling in and out of the side of the road onto the immediately adjacent lane with the concomitant slowing down and speeding up that accompanies such maneuvers, no wonder Florida hold a record for collisions.  Add to the mix the abnormally high number of drivers over seventy five, a category which tends to hug the inner far left lane going slow and sure causing the speeding driver to weave in and out around them.  It is not a pleasurable nor relaxing ride, believe me.  After a lovely evening with the great grandchildren, and the grandchildren and spouses we headed back to Sarasota and the pleasures of relaxed dining and chatting had completely dissipated by the time we got home.  Last night we drove my daughter and a friend, who in fact did the driving for us in his car, down to Venice Florida to see a musical.  Venice, like Sarasota, has a wonderful theater with a far more adventurous program of drama sometimes.  The ride again was on the same nightmare trail that we had taken the night before although not quite so many miles distant.  Nonetheless, the positive experience of dinner and theater was much diluted by the horror of the drive.  I doubt that we will continue our theater subscription there.  The Republican government of Florida prides itself on not "wasting" tax payers' money on infrastructure nor services, so that in such a burgeoning metropolitan area as the essentially city cluster from Tampa and above all the way to Fort Myer and below, there is not a single bus nor trolley, only the insidious car.  My daughter who lives in the civilization of the North East and particularly Cambridge marveled at the fact that she can walk to many of the shops she needs, take a subway or bus to other destinations, and remarked that her husband's mechanic advised him to turn over the engine of the car and move it slightly so as to give the tires a chance to redistribute their weight because they use it so infrequently.  Well, we gave that up to be warm, and so far it seems a delicious bargain, and we do indeed like the warmth and absence of snow and ice, but the shutting down of activity which is concomitant with advancing age in a car culture is disquieting.

Grandpa

I know I must have written about this before, me being a grandfather, although it is always a surprise when I think of it.  Somehow I never thought of Charlie, the grandfather.  My own were dim shadows in the periphery of my childhood family history, two dying after lengthy illness in their beds in our home, where grandparents used to die, the other, much more robust, the "Boston grandmother," with the Beacon Hill accent and Edith Wharton manner, always exciting my mother's admiration and trepidation lived in Oak Park with one of her aunts and we saw her on our trips to Chicago, taken into her presence, being inspected through her lorgnette and dismissed.  Lots of fun, right?  That was a grandparent, those three, to my childish mind.  Remote, formidable, ugh!  When I became a teenager and such a silly, flaming fruitcake, Charlie as grandfather was the kind of laughable idea that my siblings might come up with in a round of merriment.  Ha, ha, ha.  Well, here I am folks, eighty six and counting, and father of four, grandfather of six, and great grandfather of two.  Whew! is all I have to say.  Last night we journeyed down to a beach front cafe to have dinner with the two children of my oldest child, and their two offspring,  the Canadian great grandchild who was visiting his uncle and wife and their daughter, his cousin, and my great granddaughter.  Dynasty.  I sat at the head of the table along with my husband and my daughter who was visiting, and surrounded by my grandchildren and their spouses, plus these two adorable baby children one under one the other under two, neither making the slightest fuss, betraying the incredible good natures of their parents, if not their grandfather.  I felt enclosed in love and respect.  As I made my progress from the restaurant tottering along with my cane, with all this retinue, I knew that somehow somewhere I had arrived.

Manchester By The Sea

I continue to think about Kenneth Lonergan's new film "Manchester By The Sea," trying to make sense of its morality.  The hero Lee Chandler is a person completely shut down after the disaster which befalls him, and for which he is entirely at fault even if the fire department lets him off the hook.  Stumbling drunkenly into town to buy some more beer and forgetting to put the fire screen in place is what the Church might call the Sin of Omission rather than the Sin of Commission.  Since Lee is a believing Catholic to the degree that he explains seriously to his nephew that the boy's father's corpse must be kept frozen until spring since as Catholics they cannot countenance cremation as a mode of burial, we must assume that other aspects of the Church also have power over him.  Lee encourages his nephew in his sexual pursuit of the girls in his high school, an interesting but common male dereliction of moral duty, although he himself is too shut down to pursue sex for his own satisfaction.  It seems to me, on the other hand, that his failure to seek absolution from the priest of his parish, despite the fire department's fellow working class Irish buddies' words, is unlikely, first because the priest would have come to him, to bring him to the confessional.  It is also a moral duty for Catholics to confess to sins and seek absolution.  It makes no difference what the fire department buddies think;  the entire film is about the effect of a drastic sense of guilt which grips Lee.  He wants to live with his guilt, he cannot seek absolution which is the bounden duty of every Catholic.  It is prideful to continue to carry his guilt with him, but doing so allows him to indulge his nephew in his pursuit of making out with the girls in his high school, the same pride that permits him to turn down the plea for a healing from his former wife who must carry some sense of guilt herself.  It is an interesting film for its depiction of a man who is guilty of the sin of pride and dying while still alive.

I'm In The Mood For Love

Beside being a well known song from the fifties, the phrase is the title of a film made in Hongkong by Wong-kar Wai starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung and premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for the Palm D'Ore.  It is a favorite of mine although not of my husband. I have been wanting to watch it again for some time, and so last night he went to our other television screen to watch Jake Gyllenhaal in "Nightcrawlers" while I watched this.  It is the story of two young married people whose spouses travel a lot who by chance live next door to each other in the kind of impossibly tight, intimate living conditions familiar to Asians.  One thing leads to another obviously, and they become acquainted, romantically involved, but actually it is unclear whether they actually physically consummate their emotional involvement.  I suppose they must but it is never shown nor really implied.  The film is a visual study of two incredibly good looking people filled with sexual longing and excitement who pass each other in the corridor and occasionally go out to a meal together. The dialogue is so minimal as to be almost non existent. The film is unusually sensual for this reason, because you have to construct from what you see.  Seeing is everything, like an old fashioned silent film, because the director has a cinematographer who has brought out the incredible beauty of color and shape in every scene, while at the same time keeping things totally ordinary.  The one unusual feature is that Maggie Cheung who is physically superbly beautiful is dressed in the most ravishing street dresses slim and form fitting with mandarin collars the traditional Vietnamese style called Ao Dai, made of marvelous fabrics. Wong-kar Wai for this departs from the essential realism of the film to show her in a different and truly dazzling gown every time she appears which is a lot.  This is even acknowledged when another character remarks on her going out just for some noodle soup in a very fancy outfit.  The result is that the film is non-stop beautiful, with Cheung's beautiful body and the handsome yearning face of Tony Leung in nearly every frame.  Tony Leung was the star of another visual film triumph from 1992.  "The Lover," in which he plays a kind of rich Asian play boy who takes a teenage European girl as his lover and the film is essentially the most beautiful expression of sexual desire and ecstasy with no real dialogue but incredible visuals of two outstandingly beautiful naked bodies.  Despite the frequent shots of full frontal nudity of both actors the extraordinary thing about it is that it is not in the least lewd or salacious just incredibly beautiful sex; as in the previous film beauty quells the inherent physical desire. Both films are deeply moving for the feelings of longing and separateness that are invoked.  Dialogue is really unnecessary.  Yes, I would move on to watching "The Lover" tonight but I think my husband would revolt.  Evenings are supposed to be "our" time to watch film and we don't always really have the same taste in film at all, although we struggle to be accommodating.

The Experience Of Harvard

A post to a Harvard Magazine article about income disparities between students in which a student from a low income background describes how many of his fellow students could not understand that fifty dollars was a considerable sum of money to him took me back to when my wife and I were in Cambridge where I studied classics and she worked for something under a dollar an hour in a Harvard office.  Times were difficult, money not easily come by.  Harvard students had university supplied health insurance; spouses did not.  When I brought it up with an old Harvard alum, he exclaimed "but that would be socialism!"  We scrounged for food on Saturday nights at the Italian market in the North End;  produce which at the end of that evening was left over and to be discarded we could buy really cheaply, bruised and beginning to spoil, to be sure, but a judicious trim made it all worthwhile.  We had no friends who were in this economic fix, and we were known for our fun boozy (BYO) parties, so we socialized a lot and made a joke of our poverty so as to make it acceptable to the other classics students, because the study of Greek and Latin in those days was still strictly upper class activity we were surrounded by people listed in the Social Register.  They would always speak our names and roll their eyes and say "Charlie and Mary are soooo original and funny," as in poor house derelicts, I guess.  Well, sad to say, Mary never lived to see the happy days when I became a full professor with an endowed chair and a correspondingly pretentious salary.  And when I look back on the climb up the academic ladder and the jump into the gravy train I am reminded of black and white films of the kick, shove, and gouge narratives.  I can't say the experience filled me with joy, but it did not leave any lasting scars either, and one can never mention having a Harvard PhD often enough!

Inauguration Day

Well, I am trying to be positive about yesterday's inauguration.  I was particularly impressed with Mrs. Trump's blue suit by Ralph Lauren, her regal stance and walk which derived from years on the runway.  President Trump's call for heavy investment in America's infrastructure recalled the theme of FDR's Happy Days Are Here Again.  As a literary critic I reached out to themes and hints which set the tone, and I saw, as I said, FDR in that one moment, and JFK in the allusion to Mrs. Kennedy's inaugural Ralph Lauren blue outfit.  So like anyone in bleak situations and clutching at straws I was comforted by what I saw.

The American Dream

We watched "The Big Short" a few nights ago, and not for the first time, maybe the third in fact.  I think it is a remarkably clear exposition of the subject of Michael Lewis' book which has to do with the economic downturn brought on by the collapse of the mortgage securities industry and the subsequent large scale economic depression that ensued.  I am completely ignorant of economic theory, economic history, never took even an introductory course in economics in college, and so the book and the film and the economic collapse are very hard for me to understand.  But it is certainly clear that the banks were enormously culpable for the collapse, and also clear that the American economy had to be radically refunded so that the capitalistic system that provides the underlying stability of this country would not go under. But it is also clear the the government let the banking industry off the hook, never mind that they did not initiate suits against those in charge to make them liable for prison sentences since they were obviously operating in a crooked way, but they did not make these corrupt officials give back all the money they made in this period of time.  Drug dealers do not get to keep their money when they are apprehended, for instance.  The "little" people all lost their homes, these homes they had no business buying, but were seduced into buying, were victimized by the banking industry and the real estate industry, and because they were ignorant they are the fall guys.  At the gambling casino you see the guys down to their last chip, desperate because they stayed at the table too long. Why did these poor ignorant home buying suckers have to pay one hundred percent on the dollar while the banks got refunded for all their losses?   But a family's home is not the same as a gambling chip, and it is not the "housing industry" or "the real estate industry," it is sanctuary and place of family and it needs to be protected from the vultures of capitalism.  And now it's happening all over again, at least here in Florida, where a beautiful little town like Sarasota is being completely shadowed over by the condo towers going up everywhere, where on side streets little old forties and fifties bungalows are being torn down and monstrous vulgar palaces are going up in their stead.  I have an artist friend who had us to dinner a month or so ago where we met her husband,  a modest home builder who apologized for coming in late for dinner but blamed it on the volume of the workload.  I said it made me uneasy all this building.  "Yes," he laughed mordantly, "the banks and the developers, same thing all over again."

My Friend

It's winter in Sarasota, nights can go really low, dangerously low for the citrus industry to the thirties occasionally, otherwise uncomfortable forties and low fifties.  Most days it bounces back to seventy five unless the sky is overcast.  On those cold nights since I tend to sleep with open windows on both sides of my room thus allowing the Gulf air full passage. I put on top of my modest quilt a peculiar yet recognizable item: a limousine robe, I guess you'd call it, some grey fabric that mimics fur to cover the knees and feet of the passengers.  A friend sent it from California when she was making one of those housecleaning sweeps; her parents who always were driven in a limousine were dead, the chauffeur long since dismissed, she herself lived modesty and drove a Volvo. She knew my New England house leaked cold air in winter and saw me reading in my big chair with the robe draped over my knees.  Years later it has migrated to my dear little bed in Sarasota.  Every night when I snuggle under it I think of her.  What was she?  My surrogate mother?  wife?  I met her whee I came to teach at Stanford, she was at a meeting representing the administration where the discussion was promoting the newly launched fund raiser.  She had just arrived at Stanford, in her forties, formerly an assistant to the famous Mike Todd who had just died in a plane crash.  She was "Hollywood," though the mystique of her moneyed youth in a grand mansion on San Francisco's Pacific Heights clung to her; she was that snobbish.  Still she dressed like Carol Lombard or Greta Garbo, neat and tailored blouses, often in pants suits and always the prefect gold bracelet, trim simple loafers made from the most expensive leathers.  When she opened up as I got to know her she described Ceorge Cukor's Sunday brunches "actually a lot of fun" to which her art galley owner husband was always invited, weekends sailing off Catalina island, as guests of what were still real "movie stars."  None of this impressed.  The sweet young faculty wives asked her once at a reception why she had left LA to come north and I overheard her say in a direct matter of fact tone "Well, I had slept with all my friends' husbands and there was nobody left." and then in her tone and facial expression made clear that the subject was now dropped.  I loved her style.  She had a small house filled with marvelous bits and pieces from a life of picking and choosing at random, she had wonderful drawings on her walls.  I once complimented her on her taste and she furiously turned on me "don't ever use that word, disgusting!"  I talked to her every day, then when I moved back East by telephone, we traveled  to every major art museum in the United States, as well as England, France, Germany, and Italy.  i was besotted with her but not sexually.  She said that if she were an Inca Princess she could have been my mother with the sixteen year age gap.  I have photographs of her living room to remind myself of her on the wall near my desk.  She knew everything there was to know about style, aesthetics, color; she defended herself against other people with her irony.  It was Jewish irony although she dismissed being descended of the Jewish merchants who outfitted the miners who came to Sutter Creek.  In her own way she was so super Boston Wasp.  I can never stop talking of her, but now I will snuggle up into the chauffeur's robe and dream.  I think of her every day, something I can say of no other person who has ever crossed my path.

The Piano Lesson

We were planning to see August Wilson's "Piano Lesson" recently, and it started up a lot of memories of heirlooms and land, which is what the plot turns on, to wit, whether to sell off the old family piano redolent with memories and buy land to be able to farm as something better than a sharecropper farming a landlord's property.  My thoughts turned to my wife's family's land, first purchased in 1735 and added to later on, and to the furnishings of the main house which was burned down in 1923 and the much less grand original house which waa on the other side of the road and thus spared the flames.  It ended up being the retirement home of my former wif's parents and so we visited a lot, a place therefore where my children spent lots of time and which I sort of thought of as the"homestead."  It was filled with eighteenth century furniture far finer than the nineteenth century stuff that went up in flames because in the nineteenth century the family members who occupied the "big house" across the street disdained such old stuff and wanted up to date Victorian furniture.  Years went by and eventually the house, the extensive land and the furniture ended up as an inheritance from my wife to one of my daughters, and arrangement made a decade or so ago.  My ex-wife kind of forced her daughter to assume some of the cost of buying it all from the estate, and so there it was after her mother died, an unwanted inheritance, a kind of museum of antique furniture in a house with very small if indeed picturesque rooms.  For decades everyone had tiptoed around the fact that no one really wanted to live there, it was too remote, and too uncomfortable.  Trouble was it was historic, it was family, it was oh, all those compelling and impossible things people murmur while thinking at the same time "thank god, this is not mine."  My daughter tried it for a year or so, until her husband said "this is like living in a museum, i want to be able to put my feet up on things."  And she cut the Gordian knot, as it were.  She put most of the acreage into conservation thus ensuring the town that some hideous developer would not put up a cute little village; she took the furniture to an auction house and it was sold off; and she moved to the city.  What courage she displayed!  Her grandmother did not have it, her mother did not have it. You know the phrase slave to tradition?  Well, she would have none of it.  Brave woman!  I decided not to go to the theater; I had already seen the drama played out over a decade.

Martin Luther King Day

Today is MLK jr holiday, so designated by the federal government, and acknowledged by government entities across the land in varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment.  Sarasota where I live is a southern town, and although there is no legal segregation black people live in one particular part of the community and you don't see them often in the other parts.  That there is some conscious segregation occurred to me last year on this date when I sensed that the town was not honoring the holiday in any special way, and then I happened to be driving for a few blocks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and turned on the corner that borders park and saw that it was fillled with black people gathered around a band shell, and this was a celebration, but it was not centered in the downtown where the perky shops are.  In other words the city fathers were treating this holiday as a"black' event.That, of course, is partly because Sarasota is jammed with really rich white people for the most part; where they go I don't really go, either, like St Armand's Circle, for instance, a place filled with pretentious boutiques where the merchandise is way, way beyond my price. In fact we don't really go out to the boutiques which make up downtown Sarasota.  It always saddens me not to see middle class blacks in restaurants the way you do in New York City.  My brother who lived his life in Iowa and was entirely racist in an amiable sort of way marveled when I told him that in Manhattan it was possible to see black males all over the place with pin stripe suits and briefcases.  Yesterday I was in a yarn shop here in Sarasota with our house guest and it was a delight to see a tourist from Atlanta, a black woman, dressed to the nines but not aggressively over dressed, with a really good diamond on her finger.  And she and I, we talked about a booklet with patterns for men sweaters on a display table.  I yearn for more interaction which once I had in my youth when I gave sexual pleasure to a football player in my high school and we used the occasion to talk randomly, which I had again when my sister took a black male as her partner and he was part of my domestic life until he died ten years later.  And then there were random black hustlers.  I think it is easier for gays to walk across the color line.  One of my greatest teaching experiences was at Lehman College in the Bronx where my lecture classes were routinely filled with at least forty often fifty percent black persons.  But here I am at eighty six and I have no acquaintance, nor a friend of color, except for my wonderful trainer at the club who is of Puerto Rican ancestry and can't speak Spanish--I love it!--and claims he is black in the sense of being part African.  Well, yes, I see, and he is right, people forever label him as black, even an uncle an Italian-American married to his blood relative, and having lived in Italy I can see this: never met so many racist people, fearful of the dark skinned ever so handsome and beautiful Sicilians.  I love it that the Africans are arriving in numbers into Italy off the boats from the coast of Africa.  It will shake up the population.  Sadly the same mix up really does not work easily in the United States since the horror of slavery and the evil Reconstruction period has never been digested as the Holocaust years have been acknowledged in Germany.

Crime, Again?

My husband and our house guest exclaimed over another English crime series not unlike "Vera," which we had watched for all its available seasons and were urging on our visiting friend.  So instead of watching what I have been told is a "sweet" romantic comedy starring Chris Evans we sat down to this "Broadchurch" or something like that in which a dear lad of maybe ten or twelve is murdered and his body hurled off a cliff.  Crime solving is what it is all about.  But I don't want to watch another one of these.  Are my friends and family daft?  The families, the next of kin, the local greengrocer, the postman, the police officer, his assistant, all those make up the fabric of this wee village in Scotland, I think it is, are all reasonably nice people clear enough but if they had not been endowed by the scriptwriter with the fairy dust of a murder in the neighborhood to agitate over, they would clearly be the dullest people in creation.  None of them seems capable of carrying on a conversation with even a shred of clever repartee. I'm not asking for the acerbic one liners of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, but, hey, just something to spark the remarks.  Irony is unknown to them, literary references even of the simplest sort are beyond their ken, the outside world, politics, the facts of movie stars, none of this information seems to have entered their heads, been processed and come out as part of their conversation.  They are ordinary people, I get that, but blank, and dull, and really without affect (But, come to think of it, maybe that is what ordinary people mean.) There is a young handsome reporter on the make, or so it would seem, whose plastic features are as airbrushed as his emotional repertoire.  The rest of the cast which is hardly as toothsome are rivals to him in their ordinariness.  Well, we have only watched the first of this series, and indeed were aghast to learn that the little boy's murderer will not be found for several episodes.  I am not sure I can endure such a focus on something so unbearably uninteresting.  I kept asking my husband and our friend how they identified with the drama we were watching.  We are not plumbers in a small village in the north of Great Britain, we are not a drab housewife nor her equally boring sister who seems to be second in command in the police department, nor the dreary lady who runs the newspaper where the incredibly handsome but empty young reporter hangs out, not anyone else who wanders in and out of the set and says some lines that for the obviousness would not need memorizing.  What is it?  And then they get annoyed when I ask this question.

A Little Learning Is Really Basic

Last night our house guest who had flown in from NYC took us out to dinner and then suggested we watch a television standup comedy performance by a quite pregnant Asian-American at which I laughed and laughed heartily, as did my husband, while I at the same time registered shock at some of the language used and ideas explored by the performer.  I was equally shocked at how her very appreciative audience of men and women in their twenties I should say into maybe their forties--so hard to judge when you are more than fifty years older!--seemed to be relaxed and thoroughly enjoying her humor and the subjects she chose to bring up in her routine.  As a male who tried out homosexual experience from age fourteen on I deeply regret that I did not know what I was trying to do, had no experience, no role models, no teachers.  I realize now how tentative and inadequate were my moves to achieve sexual satisfaction from another man's body because we were both of us often frightened, sometimes one of the other repulsed, not sure this was "right."  There were no manuals, there was no internet to offer pornography which along with giving viewers a masturbatory stimulus is the great teacher of sexual practices to gays and straights alike.  If, just if, if all those brutalized ignorant women in this world had access to internet along with their husbands and learned that the marital bed did not have to be a clumsy rape scene.  One of the very first times I was penetrated anally the youngster doing it was a sixteen year old classmate who knew no more about it than I although we both understood the virtue and necessity of Vaseline.  He was a straight youth, horny as teenage males can be, who followed me up the ladder to the loft to the small barn at the back of our family property, and without hesitation disrobed alongside me, and took possession of me.  But he was gentle in proceeding,  and I was comfortable, although of course he knew nothing nor did I about the sweet spot of the prostate organ which can give a male so much pleasure in anal stimulation or intercourse.  The comedy performer dwelt on this at length in her show and as the camera again and again panned the audience of middle class educated ordinary men and women out on dates or perhaps husbands and wives who'd left the kids with the baby sitter that night all of them laughing and clearly accepting what they were seeing, I thought of all those years of being fucked in the ass, and sometimes it was good and sometimes not but we were too ignorant to make a satisfactory knowledgeable performance of it.  So, some things do get better!