Waste Not, Want Not

I was brought up short on page 178 of the English translation of Roberto Bolaño's The Third Reich when the narrator describes buying a book or pamphlet from a street vendor reading it then and there, actually saying "I glanced through it and then tossed it in a trash can."  It is something I cannot imagine my doing. My shelves are filled with the results of casual curiosity.  I am not a hoarder, but at the same time I consider anything I have purchased deserves its time on my shelves, its very materiality must be respected, before perhaps a timely review will suggest casting the item away.  This instinct which I choose to believe came to me from having grown up in the Great Depression, even if in very comfortable circumstances, gives me pride.  I like to "make do" with what I have.  Just this week I was putting on a pair of kakhi pants certainly a decade or so old, with frayed cuffs, with a serious tear, neatly sewn by my beloved, and I have to say, without giving a glance to a several other pairs of kakhi pants newer and in far better condition on nearby hangers.  I don't feel comfortable wearing them when this older pair "will do." In another closet I have been pulling out winter clothes to give to Goodwill in preparation for living the rest of my life in the tropics, and as I worked there, I came across a number of light weight summer formal jackets, some actually with matching pants, thus a suit--indeed the one in which I married six years ago--and my heart sank.  It is not exactly a perversion but there is something peculiar in my appetite for seeking out the perfect lightweight summer sport jacket.  There must be six or seven in the closet here, two or three in New York, and already four on the rack in Sarasota.  Of these there are only two I believe that I wear enough to justify owning them.  When I go to throw one of them out, something stays my hand.  "But, wait," my inner voice counsels, "you may really love that jacket next season, may have underestimated it all along.  Once gone, never retrieved."  And yet, in the course of my life I have left, moved out, emptied of furnishings, four or five houses where I had lived a wonderful life, full of excellent memories, and never looked back.  Thirty years in Cambridge, and all I can see when I go back into the town are the uneven sidewalks and the unkempt crowds.  No nostalgia at all!  I must work to develop the same indifference to the contents of my closets.  A long ago lover of mind counseled that one should never own more than one change of clothing.  Extreme, perhaps, but I get the point even if I cannot surrender to it.

"Have I Played The Part Well?"

It is Sunday afternoon, I have a tickle in my throat and wonder if I am coming down with the cold which a recent house guest brought with her.  I feel languid--it must be the impending cold.  I could not nap, am bored with reading the books I have stupidly assembled on economics, since frankly I cannot understand a word of them.  Ditto for the latest book by T.J. Clarke on Picasso.  Am I really getting that dim or is his prose and thinking as tortured as I fancy it is?  Should I confess that instead of worthwhile activity, I have been sitting at the computer bringing up photo news items about the Duchess of Cambridge and the rest of the Royal Family?  My husband is constantly deriding my interest in the royals, laughingly assigning it to my rube Middle Western upper middle class background, fraught with temptations of imagining a kind of aristocratic aura when of course none obtained.  Maybe that is so, although I tend to think not.  It is rather that I am fascinated by persons who perforce live public lives that are a self conscious construct at all times.  When I first studied Roman history I was deeply moved by what Augustus Caesar is reported (by his wife Livia and her son, Tiberius) to have said as his last words before dying: " “Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.” He came to supreme imperial power by ruthlessly suppressing all the opposition following the death of his great-uncle Julius Caesar.  A country boy from a middle class background despite his pedigree (his mother married down) he used his connections and his ambitions to take on the opposition and rule the country, eventually being given the title of Imperator, from which descends the western tradition of royalty and emperors.  He realized that the political situation upon the  death of Caesar threatened anarchy and he made himself become the focus, and eventually the very symbol of the Roman State, and on the way to this, collapsed all democratically elected opposition to his position.  "L' état c'est moi," yes, indeed, and perhaps it did not begin with him, but he survived long enough, and made the Roman Empire stable enough that he left an indelible stamp on the idea.  Now while it is true that the English royal family has, as they say, zilch political power, they clearly hold an enormous totemic fascination for the English people as well as other nationals.  It is fascinating to me to watch them in action since they  are exactly what Augustus was talking about.  One is not supposed to touch the Queen, the people gasped when Michelle Obama hugged her in an impulsive gesture of friendship.  She cannot be touched because she is not supposed to be a flesh and blood human being but sacred as an icon.  That is fascinating to me.  When her son,  the Earl of Wessex, on her eightieth birthday was asked "What sort of person is your mother?", he paused and finally answered, "She really isn't a person, she's the Queen."  It is said that members of her immediate family make obeisance every day when they first are in her presence.  The idea that one self consciously inhabits a role at all times while in public is fascinating, that denial of any social reality for the sake of a constructed identity.  I can never make up my mind whether I am fascinated or horrified, thrilled or terrified by it.

Father's Day

My late wife always used to say that the days for celebrating parents were inventions of the Hallmark Greeting Card company, vulgarly commercial and to be disregarded.  Unfortunately the one for fathers has sunk into my consciousness enough that I am always aware when it rolls around.  It makes me so sad, since I seem unable to look at anything other than my many flaws as a father.  First off, I did not play catch.  These things are part of tradition, I guess.  No one threw the ball with me (I cannot imagine my father, even if he had lived past my sixth year, throwing the ball with me, but then I can scarcely imagine him, period.)  I never ever thought to throw the ball, nor encourage my sons in neighborhood sports, and actually declined my younger son's request to join something called the Pop Warner league, I guess it was for football.  There is an article in this Saturday's Times op-ed page on the virtue of a man demonstrating a strong work ethic to his son, the idea being that a male is defined by his having a work ethic and a serious job.  I was always compulsive about fulfilling any obligation that my work imposed upon me, and I was always ambitious to succeed at a higher level than that at which I was working.  But at that same time I valued slacking off, wasting time, and doing nothing.  One day--out of the blue--when the children were in grade school out in Palo Alto I perversely said, "Let's all go to the beach," and so they did not go to class, but instead we packed lunches and went over to San Gregorio Beach  My older son says he was oppressed by the energetic ambitious drive of both his parents and wanted none of it.  That's one of the few remarks that have come my way since the children have become adults.  As the song goes, we don't talk much anymore.  It's probably inevitable when strong personalities develop and go their own way.  My younger daughter once said when I complained how unlike me all four of my children were, "You gave us independence, complete independence, and that meant freedom to be different from you."  So there you have it.  I guess I am sad because I don't have the sense of being a father.  And maybe that is because I never had one and don't know what one is supposed to be like, and thus can only imagine myself to be me, not a father.  And that has to do with my instinct for playing roles, and not knowing how this role goes.  And that probably has to do with my being gay, and though I managed to my mind to conceal this from my children while they were growing up, I never felt close enough to other fathers to belong to the fathers club and thus never got the walk, the talk, the attitude.  Years ago my children's friends once called me "more of a Jewish mother than our own mothers."  There I was in the kitchen making cookies for them when they all trooped in after school.  I guess I auditioned for the wrong role.

Schooling

One of my granddaughters will start college this fall.  She lives in the Midwest where she has chosen to go to one of the smaller units of the state supported system of higher education about a three hour drive from her home.  Of course, she will live on campus, but she is anxious to be able to get home at least once a month.  Recently her family sent me the announcement--maybe also invitation--of her high school graduation that astounded me because it was so fancy.  Printed on quality paper, some attractive gray blue color, with lace edging, all the information printed with unusual, flowery script, containing a photograph of the young lady, set in envelope within envelope, as though it were a high class wedding invitation.  I can imagine in the days when a high school diploma was the end achievement for most youngsters in America that such a document made some sense, but nowadays when it is the merest bump on the race to educational triumph kindergarden to doctor of philosophy (I exaggerate), such pretension surprises.  It is not unlike so many Americans today who will sacrifice everything to go to a college well beyond their means.  I can think of a family who actually eventually declared bankruptcy after sending their daughter all the way across the country to a private relatively costly college when she could have taken an apartment with some of her high school chums and gone for considerably less financial outlay to the local public metropolitan college, a branch of the state university system with considerable academic reputation.  But both daughter and parents wanted the higher priced spread, like having a Miele dishwasher.  Because of the cost the public and the educational review magazines are demanding more and more immediate result from the college experience.  This is perhaps the dreariest fact of contemporary higher education: administrations are stripping away all the philosophical and cultural surround that once made it such an exciting, different, mind blowing experience and concentrating on offering courses that suggest immediate application to a professional life.  It has become a trade school writ large.  I have nothing against learning the bare facts that are immediately useful, but to take the focus away from all the richness of art, music, literature, contemplative discussion, hours of idleness, crazy thinking going nowhere, conversations between student and faculty, chilling out instead of getting ahead, that's sad.  But like everything else in America most institutions of higher learning have become part of the world of business.  When I started out I was paid so low a salary that no one but the truly dedicated would consider working for that amount.  Like going in on the field in the Marines it tested your resolve and I am glad of it.  Now senior faculty make a really lot of money, and despite their pretentious claims they don't work all that hard.  Beneath them on the salary scale are the new feature of education, the faceless, nameless hoards of temporary teachers--the so-called adjunct faculty--who will never be eligible for tenure (because that costs the university big bucks).  They are the Walmart workers of high education, they are the ones who teach these kids whose parents just paid the fantastic sums for the education. Sounds like every other scam in America today.  It's sad that it is our future generation here which is being shafted.

These Are The Times That Try Men's Souls

A long awaited guest is coming to stay today  until Saturday noon.  Since we have "depersonalized" our house for the  real estate market, the room we have for her contains nothing but a futon which will be removed directly upon her departure.  She can live with that.  Since we stupidly packed away almost all our cooking utensils for the depersonalization, making something pretentious and interesting in the kitchen is more or less beyond us, so we will go out to dinner both nights during her visit.  Fine.  But then the real estate agent drops the bombshell that because Sunday is Father's Day when everyone will be clustered around the barbeque in the backyard watching His Nibs demonstrate how important he truly is the running of the household, the open house this week will be on Saturday.  Luckily our friend is scheduled to leave on a ferry at noon on Saturday, so we will get her  out of the house  and on her way just in time.  But then, as it turns out, the agent calls again to say that someone must  see the house at nine on Saturday morning, no other option, so that means that the house cleaner must come in on Friday evening--very kind of her--and we must hide ourselves away Saturday morning early.  Okay, let's see Friday evening, the house cleaner arrives and works upstairs, and we sit downstairs making brilliant conversation, then we go out to the restaurant, and with luck return home and the cleaner has finished the downstairs.  Saturday morning, we pull ourselves together and go out to breakfast at nine, linger til we get the all clear sign from the agent.  It is supposed to rain, so there will be no diversion of walking on the beach or in the nearby conservation park.  There are no bookstores, or any commercial diversion like a mall.  None of us drinks which always provides enough blur to any social situation that you don't quite notice.  Martinis while the cleaner is vacuuming upstairs?  No big of a deal, as they say in California.  Mimosas for the Saturday morning breakfast? Best way to take the morning in stride.  None of this will be happening.  But luckily the friend is a very dear friend, talks as much as I do, and we, as they say, go way back, 1967 to be precise.  She has been through it all with me and my family.  So, I guess, and it is indeed true, we can just sit and stare at each other quietly.  She just called to say that she has come down with a cold, and was that going to be a problem.  That a problem?  Get real, dear.  Pneumonia is an old man's best friend, I told her.  Don't forget that.

Smiling Through

I like to think of myself as a jolly fellow, possessed of great good humor, who brings light and joy to those among whom I move.  In the last six months I have had that sense of me more than once acknowledged, nay, insisted upon by others, not least by two doctors who attended me, once in a delicate surgical procedure to remove a nearly melanoma-like growth and the other in my annual physical examination.  In neither instance were the circumstances what immediately calls to mind gladsome moods, and yet I have to say that both doctors in the midst of the proceedings had to exclaim what joy I always brought into any encounter, the surgeon declaring that I quite made her day, if not her week, of otherwise totally somber and serious undertakings in the surgery, and the primary care physician insisting that he waited with joy for my annual visit and examination.  I bring this up principally because my husband, after twenty five years in my company, and as one can well imagine finding things growing dry and stale, is frequently insisting what a sour view I take of life, how negative I imagine everything to be.  It is true in a way, I have to agree, that I am quick to note what might go wrong but I find it a liberating perspective.  I look back upon my life and see myself at six being kissed by a father leaving the house in the morning, brought back at the end of the day in a coffin after a fatal auto accident.   I think of myself as a twenty five year old husband who has spent a dreamy Sunday over the newspapers, helped his wife lay out a spread with which entertain two friends at midday meal, spent an afternoon locked in amorous embrace, only a few hours later to summon a physician hurriedly at the wife's insistence, and an hour later watch in speechless horror as her corpse was loaded into the undertaker's car after a doctor pronounced her dead.  And then at thirty six to learn that my dearest friend, seven years my senior the father, brother, uncle I never had, a kind of family priest to my second wife and me in our growing marital tension, whose last words to us as he left for Europe were  "Be nice to each other," who six months later on the day he was to return to the States, as it was reported to me, rose from his hotel bed, and fell to the floor instantly dead of a heart attack.  And finally to find at fifty eight a wonderful new friend at the university I had begun to teach in, who spent enough of his weekdays in New York to allow us to enjoy theater together, whose wife often invited me to join them near Hartford where she worked, a man of only forty something years of age, suddenly stricken with a virulent cancer whose treatment the oncologists threatened would be arduous, long, and very uncertain, who an hour after that pronouncement suffered a fatal heart attack in his hospital bed, something that both his wife and I instinctively knew was his psychic and physical rejection of their words.  Well, in sum, I don't expect good things to happen necessarily and prefer to fortify my soul for the misadventures of life that make it all too tragic, to expect the betrayals offered by circumstances and my fellow creatures.  But what my husband does not seem to understand is that this view of things allows me the freedom to feel pleasure, laughter, and joy almost all of the time, because there's nothing left to lose.

The Peace of God Which Passeth All Understanding

This morning I sat out a long wait for the next available commuter train home after a visit to a medical lab for tests.  I was in a large room with high ceilings and glass panels through which natural light filled the space, where people with their coffee from a nearby shop occupied maybe twenty or thirty tables reading or talking with one another.  I had a lots of time to kill, so that from time to time I took a rest from my reading to survey the others as they came and went in the room.  There was one table at a certain distance where a man of maybe sixty or sixty five years of age, with greying hair and jowels, sat placidly talking.  He was thoroughly nondescript and would hardly have engaged my attention if it were not first for the fact that he was talking to no one visible.  Of course, nowadays we are familiar with people talking into some apparatus on their person which conveys their words electronically to another, but upon careful inspection I determined that this was not the case.  My man was talking to the air.  Interestingly enough, he did not seem to be wildly declaiming into space, or evincing any of the other behaviors by which lunatics are so easily identified, but rather he seemed to be speaking quietly and calmly, gently and at peace, sweetly I might even say to judge by the look in his eye and the curve of his mouth.  On the table in front of him sat two stuffed animals, one a rabbit with long floppy ears, and the other a bear, who was modestly dressed in a pair of blue shorts, both of them sufficiently shabby and threadbare to suggest that they were in some way life long companions of the gentleman speaking to them.  I was interested to note that he was so non-threatening that a youngish fellow perhaps a student came to sit at that table to drink his coffee and read his paper not the least bothered by the strangeness of his table companion (or companions?).  After well over an hour the fellow gathered up his stuffed friends one under each arm and made for the entrance to the hall, and he passed close enough to my table that I caught him saying "Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la" on his way out.  Shortly thereafter I myself left to make my way to the train station which involved passing in front of two persons who had set up with placards, microphone, and loudspeaker whose message had to do with God's imminent destruction of the earth, the horrors of punishment awaiting those who did not follow the commandments of the Christian god.  Hell and brimstone and Sin, always Sin, were the important items of the texts written out on the placards, and these were accompanied by the harsh and angry voice of one of the two, calling out with a sneer and a howl, pointedly directing his words to whomever chanced that way.  What defense does one have against such hostile and destructive imprecations?  Well, instinctively, I suddenly said softly "Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la," the perfect protection against the malignity of the moment.