The Admiral

Sunday afternoon at the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra performance I was reminded of my second wife’s father, whom I met when he had just retired from the Navy in his late fifties, separated from the service early because of serious physical disability, but with the title of Rear Admiral bestowed upon him.  His daughter and I were planning to marry, young people in our mid twenties, graduate students at Harvard, myself a recent widower.  That made me suspect in his book, as well as, I am sure, my obsessive intellectuality, tendency to argue points for the hell of it, and a certain pansy manner. I thought of him because I always remember early on in our relationship while a house guest in their New Hampshire home, when I had coughed (as I thought, innocuously) several times during the cocktail hour, he had said to me quietly, firmly, and pleasantly sternly “Don’t cough.”  When I remonstrated with “Sir, I can’t help it.,” he replied “Of course, you can; so stop it.”  Thereupon he explained how a navy officer was not allowed to cough, and it was something any man, gentleman, you name  it, could learn to suppress.  He taught me that afternoon--almost sixty years ago--and I have never coughed since, unless I had something serious stuck in my throat.  I thought of this during the exquisite piano solo portions of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat minor as the women in front of me barked out like terriers throughout.  I guess it has to do with age, but I am sensitive to so many sounds, whispers between members of the audience, the constant zipping and unzipping of purses (Jesus God, what are they after, those women?), although I have to say in this very large concert hall in three years I have only once heard a cellphone ring out.  Go, Sarasota!
The admiral was unusually handsome, and very shy; I thought he despised me but I later realized my verbal agility and mental acrobatics terrified him, and my instinct for insubordination, the product of a fatherless home, bewildered him.  i was sexually much attracted to him which mitigated the fear and aversion he otherwise aroused in me.  Later on we became I guess you could call friends when I realized that he had a very hard time reading.  He wanted to do miracle reforms of government in the little town where he and his wife retired, and this required reading and digesting journal articles and books on urban renewal.  The idea was crazy; this town was not going to be reborn, its inhabitants were blood descendants of seventeenth century settlers and nothing was going to change.  He just couldn’t read all that material, and so I went along with the game, read them myself, and sat to discuss them with him as though we were equals in our comprehension whereas in fact I had the material read and assimilated for his easy digestion.  Our moment of intimacy was when he asked me to accompany him to scout out several hundred blueberry bushes for transplanting at the farm.  On our way there, he stopped the car by the roadside to take a pee, and somehow I sensed that the moment called for me to perform as well.  We went over to a kind of gully, and all the way he leaned on me, because one of his legs was artificial and he had never really mastered walking on it on uneven ground.  I was terrified by this physical proximity and his dependence, this good looking man, so much an admiral and the father of my fiancée.  Then he fumbled with his flies, brought himself out and began to piss.  I realized i was to do the same, side by side two streams of urine pouring down into the same stream.  We were bonding.

Grading Papers

Yesterday’s New York Times brought notice of negative reactions to the automated electronic grading of not only multiple choice, but even short essays devised for the Harvard-M.I.T. online course. I don’t get computer-graded essays, either. I guess that is because what I always treasured in teaching--as much as I also loathed  it--was my interaction with students and their papers. Yes, grading papers in large courses can be loathsome;  most students are indifferent to general education courses which they view as a tiresome obstacle in the progress to their major field. It sometimes put me in mind of those horror story memoirs of people enslaved to assembly line jobs.  One after another after another, crude, indifferent, shallow, and hurtful to grade because so dishonest all around. Curiously enough, my first experience of college paper writing came about when as a sixteen year old I undertook to write a paper for a  former high school friend at university who was stumped by the assignment; as word got around, this morphed into a kind of industry for the two years remaining until I too went across the river to college, when suddenly the  whore became a nun. The experience, however, helped prepare me as a teacher.  Because I bought back some of of these essays which I resold as “used”, over time I got the chance to read a range of instructors’ comments on the margins.  It stunned me how very superficially most readers/graders treated these student efforts (of course, egomaniac that I am, these were my papers, my efforts).  Of course, it was utterly reasonable for the time; higher education was overwhelmed by veterans on the GI Bill. Overworked instructors were running a paper grading mill, and I was operating a paper writing mill. The experience influenced me years later in my assignment of essay subjects, which I tried to shape as some kind of immediate and close dialogue with what we (I) talked about in class. Smaller classes, however, with a decent assignment of papers, even when the students are not first rate, or perhaps especially so, can be wonderful; the youngsters have so many things to say, and sometimes a very piquant way of expression. There is so much you can do to help students learn to organize and articulate their thoughts.  It is the most satisfying aspect of teaching, and what a world of difference it would make if the student/teacher ratios could be reduced to take account of the potential intensity of serious interaction on an essay paper.  Perhaps the way out is by jettisoning the lecture course, really nothing more than a high class dictée--an educational necessity before the invention of moveable type in the 1450’s which one would think might have run its course. Once when teaching classes with mostly foreign born students, I had them number the lines of their essays, which allowed me to give detailed criticisms keyed to these numbers. I have to admit I practiced triage of a sort for which I might justifiably be criticized. I omitted this tiresome maneuver on the papers of those students I felt were hindered by their age or circumstance of moving upward in the American Dream. But what arrogance was that when I decided that a fifty five year old woman, newly arrived from Albania, say, burdened with her grandchildren, maybe working one or two jobs as a hotel cleaner, did not need to get the niceties of middle class English usage and style  A funny comeuppance came my way one day from an elegant young African who followed his first paper, which had been atrocious, and thoroughly corrected by me, with a second, flawless piece, clearly copied out from some other text.  When I confronted him with this, he quickly acknowledged that this was so, clearly pleased with himself, and to my amazement volunteered that he felt sorry for me, and wanted to hand in something that would be easier and more pleasurable for me to read!  What a gentleman he was, what a gracious demeanor!  You have to love students  like that!

Loquaciousness

It’s really no surprise how many old friends who read my blog make a joke about the improvement of encountering me in this electronic medium where with a click I can be turned off.  Of course, they are being witty, but I detect an underlying truth. Here at home my husband who retired five years ago has made it clear that he can take only so much conversation with me, and I think back to my second wife, a demonstrably laconic lady, who would deliberately turn to her reading, which I now see was her way of shutting out more talk. We have recently become friends with a former therapist, and I note that in our evenings of chit-chat together she will suddenly turn to Richard to ask him a question that draws him into the conversation.  She was a family counselor and I suppose on the alert for the family member who never gets his/her say. I am used to aggressive conversationalists, having grown up with six siblings, all of them voluble, loud, and witty, monitored at table by our mother who was herself no mean speaker.  So while some males have an instinct to go for the jugular, I go for the verbal opening. I well remember my second wife’s mother, another talker, who was once in conversation with me when her husband, a retired admiral sitting near us, cleared his throat in that way people have of demonstrating their intention to speak.  We paused, but inarticulate guy that he was, the struggle to shape his thoughts into words was going to take a bit of time, and we, having paused, proceeded to open up another volley.  The admiral was enraged, to which his wife said sharply: “Sweetheart, this is conversation, and you have to fight to get into it.”  I guess it’s true that I never tire of talking.  I remember once driving to Provincetown from Cambridge with a dear friend, another great talker, and all the way there, all the time at the restaurant where we ate lunch, and afterward strolling on the National Seashore, and then in the drive back we never stopped talking.  The next morning we both admitted that our jaws muscles were so sore from a day of constant motion that we could hardly speak. I was a university professor for forty two years, and lecturing is natural to me, an occupation that also habituates one to being the center of attention, as well as enjoying a certain built-in prestige.  All of which, obviously, encourages the tendency to run off at the mouth endlessly.  Naive and self-obsessed that I am, the rude awakening came rather late in life when a group of young people, chefs and hair dressers, were required to suffer my presence at an evening’s gathering because I  was a house guest.  After having politely presented themselves and made the obligatory verbal niceties, they none of them again acknowledged my presence the entire evening, and I thought of films of peasant life in Eastern Europe where the elderly toothless crone with a kerchief around her head sits by the fireplace in silence. On the other hand, my professional life required study and research which acquainted me with solitude and silence, which have become the essential elements of my retirement years.  In the first year after I stepped down, when the phone no longer rang, it was hard for me to comprehend that I was no longer needed.  At the time of the financial crisis we made the decision to create a permanent Massachusetts home in our house at the seashore.  It is lovely there, the garden is stunning, walking on the beach brings on utter peace of mind, but on the other hand it is extraordinarily lonely.  The other residents seem to be cut from some other spiritual and intellectual fabric, there is the sketchiest of public transportation, a town center which exists in theory more than reality does not harbor a bookstore, an art theater, or a lively tapas bar, all of which means a life of utter isolation punctuated by somewhat arduous trips on a commuter train to Cambridge from a nearby town. As I have adjusted to this new phase of my life, I have benefited from pondering what I remember of the memoir of Albert Speer, called Spandau: The Secret Diaries. My reader will no doubt find this odd, but the book is his account of how he survived the mental torture of twenty years, some of it in solitary confinement, in Spandau prison for his role in the Nazi atrocities. If one was born to be gregarious and loquacious, then learning another way of life takes effort.

The Play's The Thing

Sunday we go to a brunch to honor the third year class at the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training.  Soon they will be going to New York as a group for auditions in front of talent scouts.  We will be saying good bye to the student we have sponsored for the last three years.  When we came to Sarasota we subscribed to the season of the Asolo Repertory Theatre, and discovered the Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training which offers four plays in the winter season performed by second year students. The quality of the student productions impressed us from the start, partly because their teachers were giving them some interesting plays, a stunning and tense Machinal, for instance, and a Blue/Orange that seemed to me--maybe I’m daffy--better done than the London or New York production I had seen. Last year there was an excellent  student production of Cheryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, one of my favorite plays, and not easy to do, since it requires playing different genders in each act.  For example, an exceptionally tall lanky guy who took on the role of the planter’s wife in Africa, did a performance of a woman that was also somehow a parody of a woman that was absolutely brilliant, and another fellow after having appeared as a native house servant in the first act, reappeared triumphantly-- male body hair and all--as the tiresome little girl child of the family. By contrast the Asolo Rep seems much more cautious in their plays; after all they have to think about selling tickets to eighty year olds from the Middle West whose notion of theater is probably derived from the Eisenhower era. Sponsoring a student costs us more than we probably should be spending, but we love doing it. Besides it gives us access to observe voice, movement, and singing classes, plus the all important chance to get to know our guy, as well his young colleagues. Spending time however briefly in the company or even proximity of energetic, talented young people is a remarkably rejuvenating experience for two old geeezers.  Our student has been a wonderful new friend, and we are delighted that we can follow a bit of his future from our vantage of being Manhattan theater goers. We saw him first as Jeff, the security guard, in a moving student production of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, where he demonstrated his remarkable ability to project character through the movements of his mouth and hands.  The student actors in their third year have the chance to be cast in productions on the main stage, working with professionals, and a few weeks ago we saw him when he appeared with the look and gesture of a matinee idol in that 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play You Can’t Take It With You.   Because we know all the actors these performances are all the more interesting and thought-provoking, every time.  We are so lucky to be part of an added treat which is the occasional late night semi-staged reading of very recent pieces, last year, Dying Cities, for instance, and this year Will Eno’s New Town as well as Venus in Fur, which our student and a friend read heroically; recently some students did a staged reading of something old which was quite a very tough undertaking: the large cast revival of that 1920s Noel Coward favorite Hay Fever.   The young lady who performed with our student in Venus In Fur has a physical beauty and manner that recalls the great Hollywood film actresses of the thirties, a species of beauty and femininity no longer extant; she appeared this year as our student’s love interest in You Can’t Take It With You, and she, like him, could have stepped right out of an MGM production.  More amusing was her performance in a truncated version of Macbeth which the students took around to the local high schools.  I had never before perceived Lady Macbeth as Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth, and that was what she brought to this performance.  Because of the rehearsal schedule the students did not go home for Christmas and we asked our student and this young lady for Christmas dinner. By chance they had acted together in so many things it was a natural choice.  She sat next to me, and I have to say, it was a rare experience to sit so close to so voluptuous a beauty, whose intelligence, charm, and gracious manner was everything Santa could have wanted that day.

Brave New World

The March issue of the English monthly "Prospect" focused on a recent finding that a third of the babies born in Britain last year can expect to live for a full century.  There was a contributing essay by Garrison Keillor at age seventy, who has an exceedingly upbeat take on this prediction.  Keillor’s essay reads like those glowing accounts of exciting, new and active celebrity lives described in the monthly journal of the American Association of Retired People--you just know that Cher will still be striding the stage in her thigh high boots at Las Vegas when she's a hundred. But I thought immediately of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” that stark, chilly, and deadly description of the intimation of our end.  I thought of Brian Moore’s The Lonely  Passion of Judith Hearne, the story of an aging alcoholic alone in rented rooms, or Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, a kind of wry narrative smile evoked by four lonely office workers nearing the end of their time at work, or Evelyn Waugh’s short story “Bella Fleace Gave A Party,” in which an elderly woman waits with dance band and hired footmen for the guests who never arrive because she had forgotten to mail out invitations. And I think of the folks I have known in our building in Manhattan, the one on our floor, for instance, growing blind, and still somehow creeping out of her room, leaving a trail of powder in footprints, to feel her way to the elevator and down the front steps, turn left and somehow end up at the all night diner on the corner where she got her meals, and other shadowy figures alone in their rooms until one fine day they were carted off.  I think of my best and dearest friend with whom I spoke almost every day for fifty years who finally admitted to being ninety.  “Why did you tell me?”  “Because I am old now and I don’t care.”  It was the beginning of conversations on another plane.  “Charles, what do you think it is to die? I don’t think I’m ready to.”  “I drive to the store; I don’t care.  What am I supposed to do?  I would be a prisoner.” (This is California where there is no life without a car.)  “I need projects.  I need something to do.”  “These damn people around me, they keep coming in to visit me.  What for?”  (No point saying “They want to assure themselves you’re still alive.”)  “Charles, Elizabeth is dead, now I am the only one still alive from her wedding party. Everyone I grew up with in San Francisco is dead now.” And finally she as well at 97. I think of my mother-in-law who fell on the stairs at 98 that sent her into a sharp decline, her pain eased by morphine, who said softly one Thanksgiving when her daughter invited her to come to the table, “I don’t want to eat anymore,” and, God bless them, they upped her morphine, and helped her to take her leave.  I think of her neighbor, an old, old regal lady who lived alone, found one day by someone who noticed her absence at church, frozen on the floor, the furnace having failed. Let me be upbeat, sort of, in an anecdote that gives me comfort,  an extraordinary experience a while back at Sanders Theater in Cambridge at a performance of Bach’s Passion According to St. Mathew, almost at the end after the Evangelist has described the death of Jesus, when the chorus sings an impassioned, beautiful passage that recapitulates one of the great musical themes of this work, in which they call out for the Lord to be with them when they die. At that moment in Sanders Theater an old man three rows in front of us, let his head fall backward.  As we were soon to discover he had died.  I have always thought to myself “Old man, what a great way to go.”

Freedom and Restraint

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a bizarre column about gay marriage claiming that gays were a group of people willing to buck the trend toward unbridled freedom to accept the fetters of matrimony, restraining their individual freedom.  To begin with most gay persons I know want marriage so they can get the financial benefits that the institution guarantees, or access to hospital rooms, or some other freedom from whatever other restraint not imposed upon straight married people.  i know my partner of almost twenty years and I marched down the aisle so we would not have to pay an inheritance penalty meted out to unmarried inheritors of a partner’s estate.  I believe the Supreme Court is right now considering a suit brought by a woman who had to pay an immense inheritance tax on her partner/wife’s estate because the federal government did not recognize her rights as a spouse.  Brooks has an odd notion of social restraints in any case.  I think history shows that most persons with libidinous gumption will enter into adulterous relationships, marriage be damned, but they try to adhere to the maxim of the great Edwardian actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who famously advised: "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don't do it on the street and frighten the horses?"
Brook decries “the contemporary lack of restraint in a reckless pursuit of freedom.”  Decline in marriage.  More children raised in unsteady homes.  Higher debt levels as people spend to satisfy their cravings.  How about decrying the financial institutions of this country, the health industry, and the real estate industry and their reckless pursuit of profit which puts so many families at risk, breaks up the integrity of a marriage under the burden of debt?  How about government spending on infant day care as a way to ensure that toddlers have a healthy start in life?  How about a vast increase in the money spent on education from kindergarten to low or no college tuition  as it was before it became yet another financial burden from which young people are only released in their middle age?
Marriage, Brooks claims, is one of those institutions--along with religion and military service--that restricts freedom.  Well, if you go A.W.O.L. you eventually end up in prison, while, on the other hand, if you misbehave with a youngster, you are sent to another parish, not quite the same thing. Other than that, it's finally between you and your god what you do and what are the consequences.  No, gay persons want to get married in order to have a public, socially approved statement about the validity of their union.  And from that will flow the inherent decency and right for the teenaged adolescent to date a member of the same sex, drink one soda at the drugstore with two straws and go to the prom together with another gay person. It seems to me that young gay males are so promiscuous because society gives them no recognition, their relationships no social approval or sanctity, and they simply follow their biological instincts. I know that was true of me. What a day  it will be when two persons of the same sex can demonstrate public affection for one another without fear.  That will only flow from the ubiquity of socially approved marriages.  As it is, now the only reason I can feel comfortable walking down the street in Florida holding my husband’s hand is I am so old that passersby assume I cannot maneuver alone.

Life Is Good, 2nd installment

In the final years of the first decade of the twenty first century, as the financial institutions of this country collapsed from their own criminal bloat, my husband and I were forced to make drastic revisions in our plans for "the twilight years."  What we did was to take a bunch of money out of the bank targeted for plans now derailed and fly to Sarasota, Florida of which we had little knowledge other than that it was supposed to have "culture," and it was warm in the winter.  We blindly bought a condo big enough for a couple who wanted intimacy, yet individuality (i.e., 2 bedrooms, 2 baths) on the top floor with a galleria running the length of it, accessible by sliding glass doors; we knew we were not in Massachusetts anymore.  The move to sunshine was predicated upon the experience of the previous two or three winters, specific memories of not being able to cross the street from our apartment building's front door to the subway stop because the intervening space was literally a sheet of gleaming ice, of being marooned in our Manhattan apartment regretfully clutching tickets to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center because the deep snow or melted snow turned to ice made locomotion impossible.  The problem was exacerbated by my recent decline in physical stability so that I needed a cane to get around.  The gloaming of old age seemed to be increasingly impenetrable.  But, Sarasota in the winter, wow!  First off, we found the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club and our trainer Mike Vega, who has literally transformed my life.  Six months under his aegis, the cane was gone, I was walking not all that slowly to the Club from our condo, mounting the three flights of stairs easily, and shortly thereafter standing from a sitting position without support.  And it was easy to take the bus as I chose, and for the first time in years I could drive the car on quiet streets as I chose.  I was free and independent again, and the sun was shining and the breeze was balmy, and life was good.
Last month I flew to New York for a weekend of art where I saw the fabulous Abstraction show at MoMA, a dazzling wall of Kazimir Malevich, a chronological grouping of Mondrians, ravishing Delaunays from both husband and wife, and so on and so forth.  And then to the Frick to see a small but intense show of every Piero della Francesca in the United States plus a marvelous loan of a matching panel from Portugal.  I always thrill to Piero ever since I saw the singing angels in his Nativity in the National Gallery in London who illustrate what Walter Kaiser characterizes as Piero's "serene immobility." Then on to the Met for the exhibition of Matisse and his reworking of themes in his paintings.  The two versions of his Young Sailor painted within a few months of each other in 1906 , are always a dramatically thrilling insight into a great artist's sudden, dramatic aesthetic rethinking of color, shape, and detail.
So, there we have it, two bits, one large, one small, of a life that is good.