No Backward Glances

Past the point
of no return -
no backward glances:
I remember so well the first time-twenty or thirty years ago now--when I first heard them singing those words in Phantom.  Actually I have a lot of funny memories of that musical since one of the ballerinas lived in our building, and for a time, one of the phantoms lived there as well;  they were always vocalizing in the afternoon just like all the other performers, making the building a kind of music box. She it was who arranged on the occasion of my husband's birthday, not only to get us splendid house seats for the performance, but arranged--it must have been her--to have the ballerinas come down to the apron at some point in the performance and mouth the words "Happy Birthday, Richard" while the show was going on.  When later on in the evening I in my wonderment asked her how that came about, she said quite casually that the audience were all Japanese tourists and they would not know what was happening.  In any case, when I first heard those lyrics I thrilled to them, lost in the exaggerated narcissistic wonder at my own splendor as being the natural and obvious subject of a major song in a major musical.  Breaking the rules in a small midwestern town when you are sixteen, becoming a pariah, simply by asking the boys of the high school if I could relieve their sexual tensions, even if you are only even a teen-weeny bit self conscious makes you know that you have crossed some boundary, made yourself in some way a non person or a person with whom no one could any longer identify.  I think I knew this from day one, the day I had an encounter with a tough so called "no good" "bad boy" of the town, knew that I had crossed the point of no return, moving into a land where the proper, upper middle class, white bread world in which I was raised did not figure.  Yes, point of no return.  Yes, no backward glance.  I became a notorious cocksucker, if I may use the parlance of the street, and no way back from that, back to the charming little boy who was his mother's jewel and treasure, no, past the point of no return, and she never forgave me for the disgrace I loaded onto the family.  But somehow I had already discarded the Judaeo-Christian notion of sin, that idea of the willing transgression of the laws of god, where I do not know.  But, yes, I did not feel that my taking a boy's penis into my mouth somehow offended the god, whoever he, she, or it was,  which they were only too happy to oblige, and usually with a minimum of derogation and hostile notoriety.  And later on when I for whatever reason married a woman and continued my excursions into the male erotic world, and she died, and I married again and fathered four children, yes, I had certainly passed the point of no return, but, no, I did not feel doomed or damned by this, as the narrative arc of the musical Phantom implies.  Now here I sit aged eighty four, and I have no backward glances, thinking back to the point of no return, and maybe finally I have to say that it seemed so natural that despite my religious upbringing, despite my mother's pieties, I never noticed that I was doing something out of the ordinary.  Could that be true?  My tingle when I hear the song says no.

Identity

Out neighbor across the street like so very many  residents in this town hangs a large American flag from his porch.  But he also pairs it with an equally large national flag of Italy.  His surname is indeed Italian, as is true of a large percentage of the population of the town.  I was therefore surprised when we moved here and set up on the front of our house an amusing plaque in the Italian language, and found that this produced absolutely no response from him, either of recognition, or of connection.  The same could be said of all our other Italian-American neighbors.  I am not sure what being a Italian signifies.  I do know that one day when another neighbor brought us freshly caught and filleted cod, as was his kindly wont, I responded by offering to give him some smoked salmon.  A look of horror came over his features.  "That's pink, isn't it?  I don't eat pink fish," he exclaimed.  "It's delicious," I said, "a great delicacy.  You know smoked fish, lox, it's something that Jews particularly love."  "I'm not a Jew, I'm Italian," he said, the horror at having to eat something smoked, pink, and a treat of some other ethnic group clearly mounting.  Visiting the country does not seem an option, much too expensive for most folks.  The one couple who went for two weeks on the beach in Puglia, where the Italian-born husband hailed from, were back in a few days.  Neither could tolerate the locals; she who had never been before to her parents' birthplace did not like what she found ("So loud, so rude") and claimed that he had quite forgotten how much he did not like his former compatriots.  And they were always quick to claim that they were "Italians," not even "Italian-Americans."  Some distinctions die hard.  A former student of mine, the daughter of a couple who spoke Yiddish when they didn't want their children to understand, had a habit of characterizing what some persons twenty or thirty years ago might call "average Americans," as "real Americans," (the contrast being with, obviously enough, herself and the rest of her family).  According to the last census, the town contains one of the largest concentrations of persons of Irish descent.  Around me it's pretty much all Italian, although if you continue down the street for a couple of blocks you are suddenly confronted with shamrocks as a decorative motif to the houses.  About ten blocks away is a rather large and beautiful synagogue signaling the third ethnic group of the town.  Persons often remark that there is a dramatic paucity of African-Americans, Asians of any kind, or Latinos, and wish to ascribe this to discrimination.  I used to think that myself until I realized the fact of the matter is that the families of these earlier immigrant groups who settled here were large and tightly knit.  No one has moved away and the urban space is limited.  As in many small towns the truly unifying cultural cement is the local public school's athletics program, particularly high school football, the stars of which are featured regularly by photographs in the local weekly newspaper.  The various town governing boards to which the members are elected are predominantly persons born and bred in the town.  A year or so ago the issue of cronyism was much in the air, people noted that almost no one not born here was elected to any office, more specifically that veterans of the high school football team seem to predominate.  But perhaps at last their opponents will be able to make use of the growing contemporary disenchantment with football as more and more players turn out to be somewhat permanently befuddled by blows to their heads.

A Trip Into Boston For Opera

Yesterday was Mother's Day for the millions, but I went to the opera, the final performance of Boston Lyric Opera's production of "I Puritani."  I had never seen it, do not often go to the opera in Boston since Sarah Caldwell ended her spectacular if ill managed reign, and had never heard this bel canto masterpiece in the theater, knew it only from the recording of Maria Callas, who was party to the revival in interest in bel canto some fifty or sixty years ago.  It seemed like a good idea; my younger daughter was game to go with me.  It was an extraordinary trial, and I suppose we have to say a testimony of my love of culture.  You can perhaps get a better sense of why the gentry on the South Shore seem so philistine; it is so very very difficult for the culture bees to get into their pots of honey in Boston.  No commuter train on the weekends, a response say the MBTA to comparatively lower interest, one of those chicken or the egg things, and the Red Line which first you have to get to over roads that are narrow and clogged with madmen steering and putting on the speed whilst glued to their cellphones, well, the Red Line, as usual, is "undergoing repairs on the weekend" requiring its long suffering, patrons, to leave the train and enter a bus at JJK for a two stop ride to Broadway where the train starts up again.  This festive jaunt combines the push pull crowded hilarity that attends any out of the ordinary excursion involving the young with the honest to god exhaustion that is the result of going up and down, down and up, narrow crowded subway station stairs, and of holding on in a torture of crazy balance as the special buses lurch and speed their passengers on and around the corners.  I suppose being eighty four in this mix means that my point of view can scarcely count as representing the norm and what is more perhaps suggests why I should stay home abed in situations like this.  But there is no other way to get from the South Shore to Boston and dammit, I thought after two years that damn subway repair would be finished.  Clearly age and experience have taught me nothing.  Still the opera, though a mixed bag with two males whom I found slight and one who was strong in voice and gesture, was altogether made beautiful and compelling and brought me to tears again and again in the great bel canto arias of Elvira gone mad with what she perceives as the betrayal of her lover.  From those few words you can guess that the plot is as loony as they get, made even wilder and more fun by a directorial decision that at the end when the star crossed lovers are reunited and it turns out Arturo will not be executed because the Catholics and the Protestants have signed an amnesty and there is a general reprieve, and any rational person is suppressing yet another giggle at the improbable turn of this nutty story, the director  will have none of this all around sappiness and the losing lover Riccardo reaches into the folds of his cloak finds a sharp and glittering knife and plunges it into the back of Arturo who is deep into an embrace of Elvira, and the curtain comes down.  Take that, you happy ending!  Take that, Arturo, if you think for a moment that I, Riccardo, have any of the customary gentlemanly qualms at stabbing my opponent in the back! A fine solution in keeping with the crazy milling about throughout the opera's action of a chorus of soldiers with shiny helmets and long shiny pikes doing their darndest to suggest, at least to me, the sexual desire  a-foot by their penis-like accoutrements, who appear in scene after scene where romantic intimacy and mad desire are afoot, and in an rational assessment they would be otiose.  Their female counterparts who bound about like Wellesley girls on May Day, although here cloaked in bright red--mad desire?, hymens shattered? hard to say--perhaps are meant to suggest the erotics bubbling up in Elvira as she grows deeper into mad infatuation and then sinks into her madness.  The mad scenes are worth the show: Bellini's bel canto music is intoxicating, Sarah Coburn is beautiful, a strong actress who delivers mad and sad and miserable and lost with powerful gesture with consistently great vocals and looks a bit like Carrie Bradshaw which makes the over the top quality of this bel canto moment seem an entirely probable action of the girl next door.

Downsizing

As I recently wrote, our real estate agent asked us to remove our personality from the rooms of our home as we readied it for sale.  On the surface of things this task was made easier by the fact that we were moving "our stuff" into a space considerably smaller and already half furnished, so we really had no choice but to--and here I use the trendy word--"downsize."  When you are in old age, everything is about downsizing, including your stature; I who once measured in at 5' 9 1/2" now stand meagerly at 5' 6".  I have had some experience of downsizing in the last decades, personally and sympathetically.  It all began when I was divorced and moved my own things from a fifteen room house in Brookline, Massachusetts, that I had shared with my family for long enough to build up a stash of treasures typical of the anally retentive personality.  The upstairs apartment of my newly purchased two family house in Cambridge simply could not contain what I wanted to bring to it, and so I was a frequent visitor to Goodwill for months on end.  Years went by and I was joined by another man, soon to become my husband, for whom I took over the downstairs apartment and we were back to fifteen rooms, three or four thousand books, walls of paintings, an entire room given over to clothes.  He bristles if I call him a pack rat, so I will say it here, and perhaps he will not read this, usually does not, tired as he is just from my talking to him (at him?) at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  In any case, at this time I got a serious lesson in downsizing when my sister in Woodstock New York had to enter a nursing home permanently, and I had to empty her house where she had lived for four decades.  In her later years there she had not been able to manage the stairs so the upstairs rooms and closets were dust covered stashes of just everything that she had casually told visitors and cleaners to take up there.  I trembled and teared up as I went through the mess, identifying again and again the evidence of glory days and tragic days, days of sadness, days of laughter; it was all there under the grey-brown dust. Downstairs, sorting through her papers, her books, her clothes, I was stymied by what to save, where to save it, knowing that she would never leave her new place of residence again, and yet that she was completely sentient, and wanting things.  Like the framed Chinese prints which she angrily insisted were being stolen from her by my son when he casually and kindly mentioned that he would find them a home.  At the same time I was busy helping my daughter clean out her grandmother's country property--house and barn--which had been in the family since 1735.  If you wanted to see impressive clutter, go through a generational history contained in the closets and barn storage areas of this place, from Philadelphia Chippendale dining room chairs that were a gift from Benjamin Franklin to a mahjong set from the Dowager Empress in Beijing to a box of Christmas cards received evidently during the decade of the seventies.  Months went by agonizing over the destination for all this what I in exasperation sometimes called "crap."  Then my ex-wife died and I helped my daughter clean out her stuff, and then Richard and I moved out of fifteen rooms in Cambridge to a five room apartment, and from that into a little condo in Sarasota Fl along with a weekend house treated suddenly as our main residence in Hull Massachusetts.  Now we are leaving the latter and concentrating everything into the Florida property amplified by the purchase of the condo next door.  There are fifty paintings, more than a thousand DVDs, hundreds of books, and, you know, I thought we had thrown out almost everything in the last few years, but discover that I am a sucker for Brooks Brothers knit boxer underwear.  I could outfit the US Army!  We are working night and day removing our damn personalities from the place.  Oh, antiseptic is hard to achieve, but we'll get there!

Depersonalizing

So here we are in our Massachusetts home, one block from the ocean, far enough in and high enough (although still in a flood plain) that probably the waves won't reach our front door until maybe the late decades of the twenty first century.  Not exactly my worry!  We have contacted a real estate agent who went through the house and grounds exceedingly carefully, oohed and aahed over the garden, seemed very much to admire the house and the disposition of its rooms, and finally in consultation with her colleagues who came along for the viewing, settled on a selling price which exceeded our wildest expectations.  It was then, when we had signed a contract, and she was setting out the schedule for the coming weeks of the showing, and hopefully the very immediate sale, that she sternly told us that it was necessary to "depersonalize."  I have been involved in the sale or purchase of at least twenty properties in my lifetime, and this was the first time I have been introduced to the concept.   To depersonalize is to rid the house and grounds of anything that suggests you.  This way the prospective buyers can fantasize themselves immediately in possession of the rooms, madly, wildly, and creatively decorating the spaces without any thought for the personality you had tried to impose on the place.  First thing, said the real estate agent, must be to get rid of all the art works that show nudity.  I understand that there are people out there who don't want to see two naked males kissing.  In fact, I do not have any depictions of that scene.  But Giorgione's "Fete Champetre," of which I have a large and truly beautiful sketch by the late Keith Boyle? Giorgione's nudes are as familiar to us as Whistler's mother, for god's sake.  No, said the agent, persons walking through the house will be deeply offended, and by a miniature copy of an ancient bronze of Apollo standing of course in the altogether not less than by a whimsical contemporary landscape in which the hills in the foreground actually from a different perspective resemble the ass and flanks of a sexually indeterminate human being.  Actually I guess I could understand.  We were not in Cambridge or Manhattan anymore, Toto.  But then all the framed photographs of my nearest and dearest, lots of them, maybe forty or fifty scattered about my study, on the walls, and on the counters.  The agent claimed that this profusion denied to the prospective buyer any chance of fantasizing him/herself in the place. After a time we were ready to remove a rather large and spectacular collection of art so as to make the place "accessible." I became increasingly balky as I realized that these pieces had to be covered with bubble wrap and stored in our neighbor's garage absolutely immediately so that we could proceed to the business of showing.  For the past three hours my once ever so nimble fingers have been cutting lengths of bubble wrap, wrapping framed photos, going through the torture of pulling sections of tape and getting them onto the folded bits without entirely destroying the integrity of the package.  Tomorrow I will reduce the books on display in my study,pack up the disks shelved in our living room, and most important put all my medicines into a weekend shoulder bag that I can hide away from the intrusive persons doing the open house in some not too distant future Sunday. Luckily all the sterling silver is already in Florida; the prospective buyers are welcome to our stainless!  It is Massachusetts so we don't anticipate that our obviously same-sex married status will offend prospective buyers; in Florida it would be a different story, and one would have to be prepared for obvious contempt or disdain.  Ah, well, warm winter weather compensates for a multitude of sins.

Snow Birds Going Home

I guess I should be pleased that I am able to control so many details of my daily life as I make the plans involved in moving myself along with our household from Florida to Massachusetts.  Packing items into my briefcase is the test: will I remember the electronic chargers, the Kindle, my numerous medications and vitamins, my passport, the keys for the apartment in New York, "the New York wallet" with all the museum passes, the subway card, and so on and so forth?  Our condo apartment has been readied for our departure, cleaned up, swept out; I actually feel tranquil and what is more not the least apprehensive for having that feeling.  Is it at last a mastery of my situation or a demented old person's ignorance of all the issues that are involved in this south to north move?  It will be the last time.  We have decided to sell our house up north and move back down here permanently, a decision that fills me with waves of uncertainty.  Florida is not our kind of place, despite the superb temperatures in the winter months: it is a little hard to take the obvious disapproval for same sex marriage one sometimes encounters; I will not go into guns and religion.  And the summers are so hot and humid.  Still we are doing it, moving down here.  Unlike every other move in my life, and there have been many, this one does not generate the enthusiasm of expectation.  I don't know how to describe it.  If I say "it doesn't really matter," I can hear the voice of a friend of mine complaining that her aunt, very much my age, confessed recently--complacently not depressed-- that "nothing really matters anymore."   My friend says that's depression or the onset of dementia.  I don't know.  It seems to me that the goal is to be in a place where you can walk around easily because there is no ice nor snow.  Maybe I'm crazy, but mobility is all.  I can even drive a car down here easily because there are very good side streets for my kind of driving alongside the Los Angeles inspired four to six lane roadways that they call "roads" or "boulevards."  I wonder what it would be like if I lived alongside some one of my children and grandchildren, as though we were in Greece or Italy, old nonno there by the fire or out under the arbor.

Quite the Hiatus!

I wonder if anyone will happen to read this blog, it has been so long since I gave my readers the option of dropping the habit, summer of 2913, to be precise.  Why did I stop?  Because I thought that I should be doing writing more deserving of my talents, like writing a novel, although my history of fiction writing is studded with rejections.  Unlike most aspiring writers, I cannot claim to be the "unsung Milton" or whatever that phrase is, since for the past three decades I have formed friendships with editors, agents, publishers all of whom at one time or another have generously read my storytelling efforts, and all of them have come back with "close, but no cigar."  I've had better luck with memoir writing, and friends sympathetic to my writing craving, have suggested a memoir of my teaching years, something I had begun and abandoned when I concentrated on what became "My Husband and My Wives," where a reader might notice I have larded in lots about the teaching.   So I have been alternatively writing my teaching memoir and an ambitious novel of events largely taken from my life starting with a young married couple with two sons living in some place not unlike Palo Alto and ending with their marital despair played out against the suicide of a favorite student.  On the way the husband discovers his inner penchant for male sex when he is seduced by a young Sicilian waiter one summer whilst working on inscriptions at Selinunte.  That last event, having nothing to do with the real life of the author, though crucial for the narrative arc, is a lavish verbal statement of the author's wishful fantasies, and one of the major reasons he took his hands permanently from the computer keys. Sex fantasies for this eighty four year old male, rather than exciting a flutter, make the psychic eyes scrunch up at trying to make out the dim and completely out of focus bit.  Suddenly converting bits of reality into fiction to make a story seemed like too much work, and the author stopped work on his memoir because, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn (gives you some idea of his originality).  Still and all, I love to write, I love to talk and, because I live in venues where most of my auditors, stare at me quizzically with an explosive "hunh?" as their considered response to my words, I guess doing a blog may resolve all "my issues" (God, I love that phrase!).