Our Garden

When I retired in 1997 I searched for an engrossing project, and settled on making a largish flower garden.  My husband was agreeable to the idea that we buy a small house down in a seaside Massachusetts town where once before I had spent time, provided that the property had considerable space for a garden.  The place we found was perfect; we took possession in January and began working the outdoors in May.  The previous inhabitants had enjoyed the large outdoor space of maybe 150' square as a play space for their children.  Their only embellishment was large 20' square sand box substantially made with railroad ties behind the house in which they had set play equipment.  In the months of their absence this had become a giant kitty litter box for the area's cats of which there were many, especially feral ones, often quite beautiful which shyly moved in the shadows and had the devastating habit of killing all the song birds.  Richard is a great and enthusiastic builder, and perhaps he cares little for gardening, but he can help establish the architecture of a grand garden.  His first project was to make four large raised beds 6'x12' which are too wide for doing anything easily in the center but we only realized that after the fact.  These were set two by two six feet apart forming a giant square with grass space intervening.  Somewhat later we laid down stone slabs as pavement, and then he ran wire underground to come up in the center where we erected a large fountain which continually spills recycled water down from several successive basins.  It is some kind of phoney cheap substance molded and vaguely suggesting Italy and the Renaissance to us.  In the heat of August he set to work on paving over the sand box area filling in with foundation stones and paving with fake brick, working ever so slowly and carefully so that ten years later the surface has never sagged nor tilted.  Over this he erected a pergola on which we at once planted wisteria which now blooms in great profusion of white, pale lavender, dark blue around the middle of May and once these blooms have died and fallen to the ground the area beneath becomes the shadiest coolest spot around in summer's hot days.  The property was surrounded by a hideous metal fence waist high inside of which we planted a succession of japanese lilac, forsythia, lilac, buddleia, arborvitae, and privet, and a relatively long fence covered with climbing hydrangea.  This provides blossoms in the spring in succession in some places, and dense privacy in others.  In one bed we worked to make the yellow spring daffodils, jonquils and yellow tulips predominate among which later spring up hibiscus, purple aster, and a marvelous plant the foliage of which is gorgeous, but which I cannot name; in an another box we have a giant Lilian Austen rose bush and in front a yellow Julia Child, the rest of the box is filled with white and purple iris, a giant sage bush that blossoms purple right now, farther from the house we have boxes with the taller things, one with six foot tall yellow Cone flowers, a sturdy prairie flower that stands together with white Phlox David, both of them with strong enough roots to hold their own with the other, in front of them are the most beautiful white poppies with black centers, ravishing!  At some point I got carried away and added long narrow formal strips filled with peonies, pink poppies, more roses and more sage, and then in yet another flurry I made a square area for nine rose bushes some of which have died and been replaced with boxwoods, which are the solution for the aging gardener, as they require little care and are always beautiful, alone or in groups.  The arrival of coyotes meant the end of feral cats and the renewed sound of song birds.  Early in the morning I take my coffee out to a bench near the fountain and sit listening to the plash of the water, and the early morning bird calls, take in the various perfumes emanating from all around me, contemplate the nature of growing things, and the beauty of the flowers making their appearance from May to October.  It is an agreeable retirement project.

Rape

The recent news of party rape among the students at West Point makes me ask myself once again how it is that a young woman could trust males to the extent of going to that off campus house. Whenever I express this sentiment, I am attacked.  I don’t know why, and need to be instructed. When my husband and I exited the theater last Saturday night in London at Piccadilly Circus there was an enormous crowd of young men celebrating the results of some soccer match, and just looking at them, their height, the breadth of their shoulders and chests, their muscles, the shining intoxicated eyes, their drunken smiling mouths made me want to get out of the area instantly.  While I have a hard time understanding Russian soldiers on the march toward Berlin raping every woman whose path they crossed, young, old, whatever, I can more easily understand the problem of sexual control.  I remember very well in bed with a young man with whom I was having a very casual but fun relationship at a time when we were on a trip to New York City, and we had already had sex twice on that day when I once again penetrated him, bending his legs back to do so, and he said “You know, I really don’t feel up to this again,” and I ignored him, and then he repeated what he had said, but I was too far along on the orgasm train to pay him heed, and I just pumped away to conclusion.  I apologized, and he wasn’t really angry, because he himself understood the loss of control at that moment, but clearly he thought if I had responded by withdrawing when first he asked then I could have, and that was right.  I remember another time when I was in a bed with a guy I had just met through friends and we were in his hotel suite and he asked if he could enter me and I said no, because it had been a long time since I had something like that, and so we went along, and then he asked again, and he was such a nice guy, and so sexy, and by chance such a celebrity American athlete, that I said “okay.”  Well, indeed, it hurt, and after a moment or two it hurt more than maybe I really wanted to endure, but then I realized he was well along on the orgasm train and was probably not going to hear consciously, and he wouldn’t stop, so I thought well, it isn’t the end of the world, and let him go on to the end.  One night when I was out buying some cigarettes back in my high school days,  I met one of the star athletes of the school with whom I had had lots of encounters, and we chatted for a few moments, and then he looked me in the eye, and kind of crazily demanded that I give him some satisfaction, and when I said “no, not tonight,” he grabbed me by the shirt, ripping it, as I squirmed away, and ran out the door, jumped in my car, and fled.  He pursued in his, and it was only by some really crazy dangerous maneuvering (turning off the headlights, going down a darkened lane, making a sudden turn) that I eluded him.  I pulled over, shocked and terrified; he was always mild mannered, he had never done anything like that before. 

A Clean House Is A Life Misspent

Fecal transplants is one of the new boutique health procedures which may be counter intuitive to lay persons but as described by Mary Roach in her new book Gulp it seems to make for a new healthy gut.  It means putting a healthy person's intestinal bacteria into a sick person's digestive tract. Makes one laugh to think that maybe it is possible to make a case that there are positive medical reasons for rimming.  I remember when we had little children and two large golden retrievers and five black cats.  The dogs lay about licking their private parts with an obsession equaled only by their bestowing big wet tongues on our tots' mouths and faces.  Their golden hairs mingled with the black cat hairs to make a kind of angora sweater like cover on all the pillows on our sofas.  When toddlers were still crawlers they edged across the kitchen floor through the spill from cat dishes and dog dishes which seemed to be everywhere.  Maybe they even sampled bits and pieces.  I do know that when they could walk their habit was to take a handful of kibbles out of the fifty pound bag we had in the back hall, but snacking on kibbles, our pediatrician told us, was a good thing, since they were devoid of any of the sugars and salts that the food industry uses to beguile and destroy us at the same time.  These youngsters are now healthy hearty men and women in their early fifties.  My wife and I were never keen on keeping house, and I was happy to learn from a friend whose house is immaculate, that her mother, a woman of my age, and, thus, one would assume, that old time kind of housekeeper, always told her daughter: "A clean house is a life misspent."  When I was a teenager I was obsessed with long hot showers, the perfect location for serious masturbation, and I am sure why all boys who resist washing up to their pubescence take up long showers with a vengeance thereafter.  Long hot showers were abandoned by my husband and me when my doctor brother, then our dermatologist told us that a shower once or twice a week is best, that water destroys your skin, and it's enough that the aging process turns you into bits of tissue paper clinging to bone without giving water its clout.  I suddenly  discovered that kind of musky smell I have always found so sexually attractive when standing around males who have been working hard, and while I had certain misgivings about the auto erotic nature of my new love of my own smell, it made not bathing take on another attractive aura.  I already picked up the habit of not shaving every day before the cute young male models made it the facial style of the day, although in my case the grey and often white hairs sprouting from my face say "homeless" or "bum" rather than "stud" which is why, I guess, that store detectives sometimes follow me in ritzy Fifth Avenue stores.  The other day Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about getting rid of his library of many thousands of books.  I did that about a decade ago, moved into smaller quarters, and find that the big fight it so keep from piling new things into the house.  So hard not to be a shopper, hoarder, accumulator in the heart of the consumer society.  The only virtue to "things" is they can be used to hide the dust on counter tops.  Ah, well, . . . .

Ivy League On-Line

For those who know Harvard Professor Greg Nagy, about whom Nathan Heller writes in some detail in his recent New Yorker article on MOOCs, there must be the supreme irony that Nagy, the Homerist who insists upon the theory of oral poetic performance constantly in flux until the Hellenistic age of the text in contradistinction to his great rival M.L.West who argues for a written text for the Iliad and Odyssey as early as the seventh century BCE, is so keen on the possibility of video DVD versions of his celebrated lectures to his students, wanting above all else a fixed text, not only that but one that will survive his own lifetime, even as he tries by putting off retiring as he reaches demonstrable old age, to make no room for younger, alternative interpretations of the ancient poems at Harvard.  Nagy a very witty and simpatico gentleman would be the first to smile at this observation, I imagine, without denying its fundamental truth.  I shudder to think that Nagy on Homer will continue through the ages as the definitive "take" on the poems (which the prestige, ubiquity, and low cost of MOOCs will ensure), simply because I have always agreed with my great Harvard teacher Arthur Darby Nock, who used to remark often enough that literary takes on ancient works are like women's fashions, they change with the year.  So personally I really think it would be a good thing to retire Nagy on Homer which is now pretty much showing its age in any event.  The fact that my meager scholarly or critical offerings on the subject of Homer scarcely made their way out of the showroom to the catwalk for one evening is not a factor (he said, clawing the air, snarling through his put on smile) in this assessment. Criticism and discussion of texts belong to the age in which they were born; they present the ur-text which has no life really beyond each century's grasp of it.  It is not too ridiculous to say the the poem is simply the reception of it.  This is all a very complicated critical and scholarly subject, of course, which leads me to think of the unwashed thousands out there ready with their laptops to take in the highly refined and sophisticated perceptions of this elite faculty gathered for the project.  I am reminded of the times that I, the Distinguished Professor of Classics at Lehman College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (whew! how pretentious can you get?  Very, believe me, would be my husband's reply, if he were here at the moment), taught a Tuesday evening three hour literature course up in the Bronx which I agreed to do since I had no young children and no pressing need to be home.  I remember two aggressive, uncouth young women angrily demanding to know why my course was the only one available at the hour which they had set aside out of their work week to go to school.  Sorry, not my fault, I didn't make up the course catalog, was my meek reply.  They were not happy campers throughout the term, considering it absolute nonsense-and voicing that opinion more than once-to sit through what they considered utter twaddle, although they were bright enough to do what it took to get B's.  Then there were those parents whose baby sitter failed them just as they were coming to class who brought the little seven to nine year old along, requiring the child to stand next to their seat in class for three hours without complaining! They were often Mexican with obvious Aztec, or Olmec or Mayan features and I considered how those cultures had valued stolidity, and I realized that I was in the presence of it then and there.  In the end I could not tolerate it, so I bought several boxes of crayons and drawing paper, to hand out on those desperate occasions.  The two classroom scenes I have conjured up required the masterpiece theater performance live, in the room, the compelling animal presence of the speaker, whose various asides if they did not completely repel, managed to convey perhaps some of the eternal fascination, nay even glamor, of a man who lived for learning and literature.  I know that the televised version of Cher's Las Vegas gig is endlessly thrilling, nay, captivating, but I don't think anyone speaking on Homer on a video can compel the same surrender.

The Good Old Days

Roman Polanski, at Cannes for the showing of his film version of David Ives’ “Venus in Fur,” lamented the disappearance of the era which celebrated the difference between the sexes with such niceties as flowers for the lady.  That, along with his objection to women striving for parity with men in the job market, de-feminizing themselves, as he put it, may have made him seem like an old fashioned guy, but there was no mistaking the obvious underlying refusal to accept women as equal players in life’s game plans.  As someone who is liable for arrest in the United States for having sex with a minor, an event now decades past, but still on the books, Polanski demonstrated in those days another sense of the differential of power between men and women, but it all boils down to the same thing.  It will be interesting to see his cinematic take on Ives’ play which is a marvelous duel of the sexes played out in both witty and cruel sado-masochistic terms.  A similar nostalgia seemed to have animated a large portion of the English public as they reacted to the debate on gay marriage in the Commons last week.  What is the celebration of marriage really all about these days, when an increasingly smaller percentage of persons attend church on any kind of regular basis, when almost half of marriages end in divorce, and there is no shame attached to women bearing children out of wedlock, as the term so quaintly puts it, nor for males to get women with child and leave the relationship utterly casually?  Gay persons, on the other hand, who are willing to fight for the right to marry are ironically enough just about the most enthusiastic brides and grooms on the scene these days.  What does marriage have that partnerships do not?  I can tell you very simply that when my wife and I were divorced, and I moved from the situation of father and head of the family to a gay male living in or out of relationships, the majority of our old friends were polite but kept their distance, contenting themselves with a polite handshake and smile when they were introduced to my current heartthrob.  That all changed to a very positive and obvious social acceptance when they watched me and my man stand at the altar and exchange vows.  It was the ceremony, the public dedication, the merging of ourselves into the centuries of cohabitation that brought us finally into their welcoming embrace.  So, I say just go to a gay wedding, folks; it’s so liberating.  And while you’re at it, watch Michael Douglas and Matt Damon going through the utterly sad story of Liberace and his lover, son, and servant, two males locked into so much neediness, self hating to a degree that is hard to watch, and at the same time devoted to a public persona for Liberace that is so outrageous, flamboyant, and feminine that it defies any commonplace understanding of what a “homosexual” was all about in those long ago days before most persons even understood the word “gay.”  Up there in his furs and glitter, flashing his bejeweled fingers over the keys, he just seems so beyond any public definition of anything that he defies interpretation.  Brilliant, sad, and tiresome all at once.

Mother

My mother, Ruth Ketcham Beye, died on 28 May 1954.  She had called her doctor to complain of something, told him it was no big deal, and suggested he come by at the end of his working day for a drink, and a little examination.  He found her lying dead of a heart attack, stretched out on the living room sofa, with a small table holding two glasses, a bottle of whiskey, and a silver bowl filled with melting ice cubes.  The television was turned on to the Army-McCarthy hearings.  She was born October 17, 1892 so her formative years coincided with the Edwardian era.  If the first World War had not changed the serenity and security of her class, then the death of her first husband, newly married, in the influenza epidemic of 1918 would have done it for her personally.  She had little better luck next time around, as her second husband was killed in an automobile accident, after sixteen years of marriage, leaving her with six living issue.  Still I can remember the mother of a classmate sneering when I suggested my mother had had a hard time of it, "about time she had a bit of bad luck!"  True enough, she had a staff of five or so persons whom she was able to retain as a widow; although she did not work outside the home or keep house, she had a large establishment to oversee, and shortly after my father's death, she was elected to the public school board, where she served as president for at least a decade.   She was a rather snobbish ambitious woman whose children for the most part disappointed her.  Two daughters married Jews, something she took very hard, although one was on the surface of things quite rich, and she spent time in their Palm Beach establishment, presumably basking in the sun if not in her son-in-law with his to her distinctly foreign aura.  Her brilliant oldest daughter lived in what she considered a slum in New York City, wrote poetry, and was quick to tell her mother how much she despised what she stood for.  Her youngest daughter had to get married to a man whose parents were the simplest of working class people.  The worst was perhaps myself, a flamboyant queer notorious throughout the town.  I don't think she made any of us six feel acceptable.  I remember her once crying out to me "You're all failures."  The best thing I guess was that she departed this life when we were all still relatively young, and we had years and years to live free of her judgement, at least openly expressed, although of course what we repressed and carried with us took its toll.  She was 44 when Daddy died, 54 when the money ran out and she moved to a smaller house, and commenced to do her own housekeeping.  Poor thing, all the children had decamped except for the fruitcake son, who at least was an amusing cocktail hour companion for a widow, even if she had to overlook the derisive remarks directed at him, even in her company when they drove together through the downtown.  She never complained really, never explained.  She died at 62, when I was in Cambridge at Harvard Graduate School.  I was married, something inexplicable she never chose to bring up.  In fact the saddest thing of my life is that she died when I was so young, and I had never had the chance to bring anything up with her.  What was she like, what were the struggles of her life?  What were the joys?  Did she love Daddy?  Marry him because the other guy, her high school sweetheart had died?  How sad that she never got to see her children triumphing in their own individual ways as they went into mature adulthood.  We never knew her, she never knew us; as for Daddy, well, for me he really never existed.  Now here we are, the survivors, aged 90, 89, 87, and 83.  She and Daddy, they were so young!  My God, my own children are in their mid fifties!

Let's Twist Again Like We Did Last Century

When I was a boy we had a Victrola up in the children's playroom, but what I remember most of all was mother joining us to wind the mechanism up, put on "You Are My Lucky Star" from Broadway Melodies of 1936, if I remember rightly, and sing along with the music while the tears rolled down her cheeks.  She was thinking of my father, her late husband, whose death that very year put an end to the fun, merriment, and music which she always implied was the daily fare of life with Daddy.  I got into phonograph records myself early on when I went off to Andover, buying them in prodigious quantities, although we were not allowed machines to play them on in the dorm, nor indeed did I manage to pay for them.  It was another era, and storekeepers assumed the young gentlemen would make good, which indeed I did, after an enormous scene over the telephone, an instrument usually available only to announce a death, with my mother sternly and harshly taking me to task for my wayward, spendthrift habits.  All these 78" shellac records somehow made their way to Iowa without breaking, and in the next eight or so years were joined by literally about two thousand others.  I had discovered Dixieland Jazz, and learned that I could do my homework with the music blaring right into my ear.  Then I went to graduate school at Harvard, and Cambridge forced me to give up my loose ways, and I discovered eighteenth century music, and realized that Beethoven and Brahms were too heavy for my refined tastes.  Bach's Goldberg Variations was just about perfect.  The children arrived, and the house rocked with the Beatles and the Supremes, perfect for shimmying around the kitchen, martini in one hand, plates of macaroni and cheese in the other.  And later when I was living alone a young man entered my life whose severity coupled with demonstrable genius in music, art, and drama left me speechless.  He vetoed the background music on the phonograph--"either listen to music or don't, but give it respect and attention."  Gee, he was right; now my house is silent as the tomb.  "Disgusting," says my trainer at our Florida gym, a Bronx born American of Puerto Rican ancestry.  "You should have music on all the time, you should dance.  Come with me; we will take you to a place where you can learn salsa."  "No, no," he protests, "never too old for salsa, for music, for dancing."  I remember when I taught college in the Bronx, and stepped from the D Train at some stop up near the Bronx Botanical Garden, and as I walked the five blocks to my job, I was assaulted almost physically by the intensity of the music pouring out of the windows of every apartment on the street, from the cars driving by, shaken by the thudding and booming, by the piercing cry of the horns, shuddering as I noticed how many people turned their speakers to the world outside, oh, such a perversity.  On Puerto Rican Day I told my students that I could only live among WASPs.  No, no, I was not racist, I said, could not take the noise.  If there were WASP Day, I told them, the ranks of marchers would each carry a martini and not a sound would be heard, not a word spoken.  Ah, WASP day!  They say that the public address systems of Pennsylvania Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal are programmed to play only classical music because teenagers and vagrants will not congregate or stay near where they must listen to such music. I know that whenever I get my car back after it has been in the shop the radio has been changed from 24 hour classical to something with a loud driving beat interrupted by endless chatter, as though the repair man could not work listening to classical music.  Well, it is true I could not drive listening to that horrible stuff he chooses.  But I have to say that somewhere in the fluff of my forgetfulness lies the provocative recollection of years of teenaged jitterbugging, then being thirty and doing the twist, and forty and disco, disco, not to forget the fox trot, (it brought my husband and me together) and the waltz dance steps forever .  Yes, once upon a time I could have danced all night, and the thrill of it was just enkindled in me vicariously as I watched the London staged musical version of the 1935 film "Top Hat" Irving Berlin's confection made for Astaire and Rogers.  If it comes over here, don't miss it, is all I have to say.