Why Do We Need The Moon When We Have The Stars?

Yesterday at the gloaming I wandered through my garden dead heading the spent blooms of the fifteen or so rose bushes bursting in flower and watering the newly planted petunias.  The temperature was perfect, dry, not too cold, not too hot, there was a stillness, the world around me was at rest, the garden had never looked better.  I reminded myself of the numerous mornings I had sat on a nearby bench deep into the garden's perfumes, watching the fountains playing, hearing their plash (as Henry James would have it).  In thirty days I will leave this scene forever to take up residence on third floor condominium the long galleria of which overlooks a courtyard with swimming pool, shuffleboard, and lawn, and distance glimpses of a shopping mall parking lot while out the front door onto the walkway the view is to the nearby middle school, actually a form of some architectural interest, although in the foreground is the macadam parking lot for the teachers.  By midday the temperature will reach the high eighties and the humidity will go above fifty; air conditioning will be inevitable.  We have wintered in Sarasota for five years, and the relief at being able to walk out every day without the fear of slipping and falling makes it wonderful.  But we have discovered in addition the delights of the symphony, the opera, the five theaters, the chamber music concerts, jazz concerts, all easy and close to drive to.  There is the bus that takes me in minutes to the  public library and the wonderful bookstore.  If I am willing to take the time I can take the bus to a university library, an major art museum, and a university lecture series although I usually drive.  That is our winter in Sarasota.  Summer will be emptier.  But I will still be able to go on foot to the supermarket, the gym, Trader Joe's, the home pasta shop, the masseur, and three fabulous restaurants, one French, one Italian, one Japanese.  Here I sit in my garden, loving every minute of it, but knowing that the winters make it impossible, knowing that almost every one of those activities above require either a tortuous trip into Boston 21 miles away over hideously overcrowded highways.  People on the south shore, well, I just don't know what they do with themselves.  So, bye-bye, blossoms, it was great to know ya!

The Fall Of A Sparrow

Today's (Sunday June 22) text was Mathew 10:24-39 containing Christ's celebrated observation that not even the fall of a sparrow is outside God's concern. "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them fall to the ground outside your Father's care" is the modern day translation into English, and for some reason Google won't come up with the King James version.  The passage was used to good advantage by Shakespeare when Hamlet shrugs off his own death saying (V.2):
"There's a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be
not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.
In the same exhortation in Mathew Jesus is quoted as saying:
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother . . . ."
It is a horrific vision, and yet both passages taken together work so well with the news of the world as reported in today's Times--the Israelis versus the Palestinians, the Ukrainians versus the Russians, the Shiites versus the Sunnis, the Buddhists versus the Moslems, one religious war after another (even those that do not on the surface seem to be over religion, e.g., Putin's actions, which are perhaps more nostalgia for Stalin than a new found allegiance to the dastardly Russian Orthodox Church).  All these, however, are the end result finally of a god against whom it is useless to resist.
The monotheism of the religions of the Book, as they are called, is frightening in its implications, the demand for blind belief, and what else could it be, since none of us knows anything about the world beyond our senses.  The sparrow falls and is seen by no one, because it does not matter.  Will this great truth ever be recovered?  Will those who insist upon fighting against their fellow man because they have the truth, that the sparrow in them is being constantly watched, will they ever realize that all their killing, their maiming, their cruelties, are simply the outcome of their fragile beliefs in the unknowable?  Sunday's text is a terrible text, humankind's absolution from their actions, because responsibility rests with a higher authority.  As the sparrows fall in Iraq, Syria, all over the Near East, Southeast Asia, thither and yon, it god's eye that beholds and is accountable.  The humble human perpetrator satisfies his instinct for blood lust and is not responsible.  As a student of ancient culture I have always been more comfortable with religious belief that stems from a notion of a deity or set of deities who have all the human frailties and as such will inadvertently trample on humans, in a childish rage kill humans, in an irrational passion favor a faulty human, a deity or deities who is an acknowledged force but not something to be obeyed, since one never really knows what is involved.  Today's Old Testament reading was the story of God's commanding Abraham to cast out Hagar and his love child to placate his old wife Sarah, and how Hagar and baby suffered in the desert until God was done with his sadism and said enough is enough and found her a good husband and good things ensued.  Abraham's absolute loyalty to God is the underlying subject and it is rewarded finally in the hapless Hagar's successful marriage.  Such misery and rejection, and the happy ending because Abraham did cruelly as he was told.  It's a perfect fit with what Jesus had to say today.

Exiles

James Meek has an interesting piece in the current London Review on being English or being Scottish, living in one or the other place, the degrees of identities, in his case with an Anglo father born in India.  Deep as I am these days in packing to move forever from our home by the seashore renders me susceptible to thoughts of my own attachment to place.  My husband and I have lived in this house for ten years, although to be fair, the winters were spent in Cambridge and then in Sarasota; it started out as a summer home and weekend home.  My first encounter with this little town was years ago in a random search in the Boston paper's Sunday real estate lists, where I encountered an incredibly cheap unheated place, in liveable but ramshackle condition, which provided me with an excellent occasional retreat from my wife as our marriage slowly disintegrated.  My neighbors were cheerful working class folk with whom I had nothing in common, and our relationship was limited to the wave and smile when passing on the street.  My husband insists that it is my consummate snobbishness makes me say "nothing in common," but, no, what I mean is that I don't talk sports, I don't talk jobs, I don't talk salary, I am not a religious person, and I am at odds with America's foreign military adventures.  As a younger man I spent many, many hours chatting up males very similar to my neighbors in post coital situations, so I absolutely do know how to relate under the proper circumstances.  "Nothing in common" seems like a reasonable observation.  It was the same when I bought my house in Cambridge; at first the neighbors were elderly retired working class people who eventually sold out to young couples whose interests ran from child rearing to granite counters in the kitchen.  I'd long since finished with  the former and had not money for the latter.  Before that it had been Brookline where our aggressively upwardly mobile Jewish neighbors looked from their windows at us with our raggedy children, out in our driveway, surveying our old Volkswagen Microbus, me with my long hair and our echt goyish habit of standing about, my wife and I, there in the driveway  a martini glass in hand and said: "There goes the neighborhood!" Before that had been Palo Alto and Stanford where everyone we met seemed also to be thirty, have four children, drink too much, teach at Stanford for the same sort of pay,have an Ivy League PhD and live in a Miesian knock off.  But it was the Californian culture that alienated us, the endless drives on freeways, the complete strangers who stopped to offer me a ride when I decided I need to start walking to work, what Gertrude Stein identified in Oakland seemed to us everywhere in California "there is no there there."  I  could go on and on, all the way back to my natal spot where too large a family income and my gayness kind of separated me from the crowd, and so I guess it is in the nature of things, although I think of myself as gregarious and once upon a time was known as the life of the party.  And now Sarasota where we have been, as they say, "wintering" for the past five years.  I don't think we're going to be a big success, certainly not in our condo, where our neighbor two floors below us sets the tone with her bumper stickers:  "For God and Country" "Prepare to Defend Our Freedoms" "Vote Republican"  "Vote Marco Rubio" "Vote Rick Scott."   A couple of years ago at a brunch for donors to the wonderful Asolo Theater Student Conservatory which is our one big philanthropic effort  I was getting on famously with the woman seated next to me, who as we were leaving said "I hope you won't have a problem getting over the bridge like we did," to which I replied "what bridge?" to which she said  in a puzzled tone "Well, how did you get here?" and it dawned on me that she thought we came from one of the barrier islands, Longboat Key or Siesta Key, where all the million dollar condos are, and of course where the donors live.  I said "we don't come over the bridge, we live down by the mall."  She, stupefied murmured "mall?" then asked fiercely "which side of Tamiami Trail do you live on?" and I said "the east side."  It was as though I had farted.  She turned away and I was back in no man's land.

Weeding

Woke up much too early, but that is what was ordained, so arose, went out into a crisp--for this Florida blood glacial--sunrise morning to do some weeding.  There was growth all along the edge of the raised beds and between most of the slabs of the pavement between them.  I stood bent over for a bit, and was instantly reminded of my mother in a similar position.  She was a short, definitely rotund woman, who had a commanding manner, being not only somewhat of a snob (family in a America for centuries, late husband super star doctor) but a long time president of the town school board, commanding, when she was standing, but bending over in the garden did not show her to advantage, plus she had a habit of wearing plaid cotton wash dresses as she went about her notion of household tasks (there was staff who did the heavy lifting).  Weeding was an obsession, nay, an addiction.  And so I saw her this morning in my mind's eye--that large plaid bottom of the bent  over figure.  Our property had many formal gardens on different levels of the land as it sloped up from the street and then sloped down to the fields that lay beyond.  The gardens were tended by a man who worked six days of the week, but there was always a weed here or there, and they caught her  eye.  Always, and no matter what she was doing and where she was going.  I can remember her weeding "just a bit, just for a moment," while waiting for her to drive me on some errand.  I can see her in her dressed up business suit, about to go to a school board meeting, the big pinstriped bottom, of the bent over figure.  Weeding is perhaps like saying the rosary, it frees you from having to think, relaxes the anxiety of things left undone, worrying about children and friends who need your correction. Weeding is meditation.  Moreover, weeding in as an absolute good, an unequivocal forward march in the struggle against the tyranny of encroaching nature threatening in its blind instinct to insinuate into everything, just as here where I am weeding the formal gardens, the raised beds, the stone pavements, the fountains with their jets of water depending from one level to the next, the carefully trimmed and pruned rose bushes are the imposition of order upon anarchy.  I weeded for two hours, standing and bending over, delighted that I managed to keep from toppling over, as I often thought I was going to do, kneeling on a little cushion to rest the muscles in the back of my thighs, but instead damaging the kneecaps, and again glorying in the pathetic little fact that I could rise from that position without a railing.  Then to breakfast, to read the Times, and when it came time to go once more into the breach and do battle against the weeds, I found that all the joints had frozen while I sat, and so I limped back to my battle station, and only very slowly managed to bend and then to kneel, and I thought to myself that it never occurred to me in those long ago days to wonder if my mother found weeding the least bit taxing physically.  She seemed like a fixture of the garden, like the plants, the trellis, the ordered rows of flowers and vegetables.

Passwords And Systems, And The Way Of Life

Some days are living hell, and you know you were not meant for the times in which you are living.  A trip to the Apple store where I bought another IPad and, completely by chance,  my husband and I got newer versions of the IPhone, set up two days of such torture that I am not yet recovered, although at the same time, trying desperately to realize that from the perspective of the gods (for whom we are but sport, right?) it was my experience that was all too comic.  My first act of utter pride was to insist to our genial salesperson who had quickly enabled the IPad and handed it to me, that I knew perfectly well how to use it.  As a matter of fact, I had bought one in 2012, took several "lessons" from the Apple people, but never figured out what I needed it for, and eventually handed it on to my daughter. I was now in the market for another only because I was infatuated with the ease with which a recent visitor had been able to field all the questions during our cozy hours together sitting deep into the pillows on the living room sofa simply by glancing into the Google site on her IPad and typing in all the questions and reading the answers.  So easy, so much better than jumping up all the time and rushing over into my study to Google on the computer.  The problem of using it only developed later--I mean Google and Youtube were not the least as they are on my big computer; but it was setting up the cellphone that almost destroyed me.  It required I cannot recall how many separate steps, each with a different password, all of which I had to recall from my brain, since I had not come prepared with my typed out list, more valuable to me than my passport, and indeed kept in the same "safe place."  Miracle of miracles, although with many a false step and tortured efforts of recall I got all of them right and the cellphone was up and running.  My shirt was drenched with sweat, somehow the agony of it all, the constant terror of memory failing me in the midst of the fog of misunderstanding--I mean who knew what all those strange terms and nicknames were referring to?--left me defeated even in my triumph, as we sent successful test emails from the store. Successful because we were using the store's Wi-FY, but as I was to discover only days later, I gave one wrong identifying number of the access to the WI-FY in our home so that when I tried to send more emails from home the cellphone's screen lit up with the notice "Does not Recognize Network" or words to that effect, it's all a nightmare jumble in my memory.  So I called Comcast and a genial man proceeded to "talk me through," as they say in the business.  But at least half the screens I brought up at his direction turned out not to have the boxes, or the buttons, or the numbers, or whatever else he was directing me to, and he was left to offer such gems as "I guess they've done an upgrade," or "you need an upgrade," or "these things are so much easier in Microsoft."  After an hour of wandering under his direction from one screen to another, I said "Enough! I'll go back to Apple." "Good luck!" he replied, "they invented this email system but they're not too good at understanding what to do."  Next day back at the Apple store, standing at the Genius Bar, my genial genius was too kind and understanding, and we went through all the passwords, for which this time I  had the list, but in the end, the fog of confusion had not lifted.  He recommended going home trying the cellphone near the modem, plugging and unplugging the modem, telling my cellphone to "forget" the WI-FY system and then re-enter it.  I was close to tears.  Once home I realized that I had not remembered the crucial words "Does Not Recognize Network" and so quickly called a number that the fellow had just given me.  A new and busy voice answered to say  that the man I was supposed to talk with was "not on the floor," but that he would be happy to help.  He began a series or rapid fire questions, and each time I had to ask him to repeat, I grew vaguer and fainter, and more and more minimal, and I knew that we were enacting one of those terrifying scenes of interrogation in old black and white Nazi era films and I was sitting under the naked bulb, and growing more and more confused.  At which point I said in almost a whisper "never mind, I can't take it, I can't talk anymore, I don't care about the emails, I have to hang  up," and left him sputtering into the phone.  As I was about to lay my head down on the desk my husband picked up the phone and proceeded to toy with it.  "Look here," he said, "I think you told them the wrong identifying number to begin with.  You said you were going to use your old telephone number from when you  lived in Rome."  And so I had, and so I did, and so thereafter we lived happily ever after and the mail system works.  But why didn't the problem of that wrong number ever surface during the two days of nightmare and torture?

Marriage

Derek Jacoby, the Boston Globe columnist wrote enthusiastically yesterday of a rally soon to take place in Washington in support of "traditional" marriage.  I am not sure they come right out and say, marriage between a man and a woman," but that's what the thing is all about.  I have no trouble with endorsing that idea, although I don't see that it has anything to do with the present day ubiquitous transformation of the relationship into legalized unions of persons of the same sex.  Legalized says it all; every citizen ought to have access to a union that is sanctioned and fostered by the laws of the federal government.  But if I were planning a march on Washington in support of traditional marriage, then I would be concentrating on that which brought the institution into being in the first place, and that is the production of children, and more broadly the continuation of the species, the support group for their elders in their decline.  Obviously the emphasis upon man and woman in the traditional definition of marriage is production of offspring, which makes childless marriages whether for convenience or the geriatric status of the bride and groom rather beside the point.  So children would be the focus of my march on Washington in support of traditional marriage because our culture has created the highest divorce rate in the world and the greatest percent of homes headed by single mothers, and the largest group of children born out  of wedlock.  These statistics are the truth that is eating at the blissful institution founded by Adam and Eve.  There has to be a giant cultural shift away from the individual and toward the collective, anathema, I know, to conservatives.  But before we even get to the issue of the moral necessity for greater social welfare there must be a radical rethinking of the individual's obligation to the group.  In marriage the children ought to be the focus, rather than the relationship of the parents.  Private happiness must give way to working on the welfare of the family, which most often translates into the increased well being of the children.  And here the notion has been lost that the children's immediate obligation is to the family.  They will not grow and mature and become better persons by their cello lessons, Little League memberships, play dates, oh, yes, those are enriching and enlarging, but it is by clearing the table, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, shopping for groceries, and as they mature cooking the meals, that children become happy, competent, and fulfilled, even if along the way there is incredible bitching and whining.  Most couples who separate and then remarry discover that the second time around is pretty much of the same old, same old; after all they are bringing their very same personalities into selection of the new situation, and those personalities probably most likely made a similar choice in the second mate.  Marriage could come back to being the biggest emotional and physical event in a person's life more than the best party ever thrown, something entered into as a way to lose oneself in a larger entity, forget self, and along the way create a group of people who maybe might be there at the end of the road with some positive support and true love.

Behind The Peaceful Calm Of A Good Night's Sleep

Once a month I must renew my subscription for the sleeping pill I take nightly by calling the office of the doctor who writes the prescription.  He in theory writes other prescriptions, for instance, ninety day supplies of lisinopril and metoprolol and so on which indeed some flunky in the system actually handles. but zolpidem (which is the generic name of the sleeping pill), because it is a "controlled substance," must be dispensed by the doctor himself, and only in thirty day renewal orders.  And, I must request a renewal in a timely fashion, too early, and the insurance slaps my hand, and tells the issuing pharmacy to hold the order.  A "controlled substance" means that it is a drug to which I might become addicted and abuse it by wanting larger and larger doses. Prescription pain killers like the oxycontine products are the big trouble makers; they figure in all the seamy stories of suburban housewives and their addiction.  Because I am someone prone to take on any feeling of guilt I can find, I cringe at the moment of reordering, sure that the receptionist to whom I make my request is sitting in judgement on my need.  The matter is always fraught when I see that I shall run out on a Monday and know that to be sure that the request from receptionist to doctor to pharmacy is made in a timely way I must start on the previous Thursday, but that is also five days ahead of the projected expiration of my supply, and will the powers that be come back at me with "You're too early" ("you sick druggie", is always the subliminal addition).  Next week I am going to the Cape and while there I will run out.  This means ordering a new prescription days in advance of normal, and that means explaining to the receptionist, and she to the doctor and he making a notation on the prescription order so that the pharmacy can clear it with the insurance company counting out the pills.  That's how I see this transaction, a bunch of disapproving, head shaking persons one talking to another about this guy and his sicko needs, when of course in a rational moment I realize it is a series of electronic transfers.  And if this were not enough, I cut each pill in two so that I might have solid sleep throughout  the eight hour period, waking up mid night to take the second half.  You should see these little old arthritic fingers using the cutting machine, trying to keep the miniscule pills even on the chopping block.  I suppose the executioner in olden days had the very same problem.  The pills tend to bounce off and god forbid they role away, and I don't notice or simply cannot find them.  I will be short, and there is no reprieve from the insurance company, no notion of a "bakers dozen" with that outfit to prepare for such a contingency.  And when the month has thirty one days and the prescription reads only for thirty pills. well, we won't get into that.