Happy Days

My husband was 46 when we met, I was 59.  He was living on very limited funds, having resigned a full time position in order to explore the possibility of getting a PhD.  I was the holder of a prestigious endowed chair and well known for my books and articles, six years away from retirement.  He was exceptionally handsome, vivacious, and charming, and I was somewhat heavy set, more than a little bit pompous if also witty and fun.  He was in awe of my position and what he perceived to be my many attainments.  I was dazzled by his youth and sexuality.  We have lived together almost from that moment to this, along the way getting legally married in Massachusetts when such a feat was possible.  We are two alpha males, over achieving, controlling, passionate people who are used to holding center stage in a class room situation.  In the early days of our relationship he had to push back against what he perceived as my obvious superiority in position, wealth, prestige, and social position, whereas I was always worried about where I should be making allowances for his various kinds of insecurity, financial, social, educational.  Over time I grew to appreciate his rock solid capacity for endurance and his total commitment to me and our relationship even though in little matters he sometimes seemed unbelievably insensitive, as for instance his nonchalant departure from the table in the middle of a meal when he wanted to verify something on Google (never was the difference of our backgrounds more sharply displayed!).  He is now 71 and I am 84 and this morning at breakfast he was remarking on how most couples seem to experience the most extreme emotional conflicts and ruptures when in the soul destroying process of moving households, but that he felt we had grown even closer together.  It is because, as I don't think he sees it, he has become in the course of this move so very aware of how vulnerable and frail I have become in the last few years.  I am so very much aware of his great patience with my fumbling, forgetting, and slowness, all of which is a very new aspect to my being.  I was happy this morning that after having weeded the garden in my topsy turvy way for two hours I came in to make him scrambled eggs with capers for his breakfast, happy because he was delighted, and I felt that in some small way I was repaying him for the extraordinary amount of the shared labor of preparing the house for the move which he has assumed.  Two days before the movers arrive I will take a train to Manhattan, he will get ready for the van, then drive to Florida, while I will stay north until the van has arrived and unloaded at our condo.  Then I will fly down.  That is the way it is now, and I look forward to hanging the pictures in his company.  I hope he is ready with his hammer and picture hangers, and then maybe I will make him a delicious omelette with smoked salmon.

Ma ride ben chi ride/ La risata final.

So sings Falstaff in Verdi's opera--"He who has the last laugh has the best laugh"is more or less the translation. It is a thought which is how a friend would describe my triumphant ride to the exit of life.  When he began reading my blog he counseled me against yielding too often to the morbid tone as in Horace's famous poem the first verse of which is
Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume                            Alas, Postume, oh, Postume the years are flying by,
labuntur anni, nec pietas moram                              they drop away, and no amount of goodness
    rugis et instanti senectae                                      will hold at bay the wrinkles of old age
        adferet indomitaeque morti;                             nor grant delay to death that conquers all.
Anyone who has watched the documentary of Joan Rivers will shudder at the intensity with which she is determined to follow Falstaff's advice.  I found the film quite exhausting and her as one of those monstres sacrées better viewed than known.  I cannot imagine what her legendary Thanksgiving dinners could be like.  Living in Sarasota which is often jokingly called "God's waiting room" has been a revelation for me who has spent almost his entire life in university precincts where the average age of the resident population must be twenty.  I really never noticed old people before that even though as time progressed I had ample opportunity looking into a mirror or talking with my husband, not to mention lunching in Cambridge with friends from graduate school days.  But nothing really settled it for me until I began to work out at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club which is famous for its many tennis courts always in operation from early morning until the evening hours.  They are filled with energetic people darting about and returning serves with a fluency that belies the age they reveal in repose which has to be well up into the high eighties, the women whose naked arms and legs in shorts reveal skin hanging in subtle folds, having lost all the flesh that once provided the padding for the skeleton.  The energy and enthusiasm of their glance shows that they are going with Falstaff not with Horace.  I can see that it was my mother who kept me in thrall as a child to the morbid view of things.  She never got over losing her first husband to influenza four months after their marriage, her subsequent marriage to a dynamo who impregnated her twelve times in his zeal for family, her horrifying discovery that she was utterly alone some sixteen years later when he died in a sudden car crash and left her with the six that survived to birth far from her natural family and friends.  I remember once making these observations to a crabbed old lady as we sat in a limousine going to the funeral of my first wife, a proper time for melancholy thoughts, to which the old lady responded furiously and angrily "Well, with all her money I'm crying for her."  My mother was so witty, and gracious, and fun at table, while introspective and melancholy over cocktails when we were alone.  She died at sixty one; the melancholy won out.  As you can see, she has quite a hold on me.

Best Not To Be Anxious!

A recent echo cardia something or other also revealed imperfectly a possible cyst on my liver, so I have been scheduled for a sonogram, I believe it is called.  I am unusually vague about the proceedings since the scheduling staff member caught me on the telephone whilst I was busy at my primary care doctor's office officially requesting the forwarding of my medical history to a doctor in Florida.  It is always dicey when I accept instructions by telephone rather than having an email or some other written communication before me since my memory for verbal instruction is extraordinarily faulty.  As it was I took down hastily on the back of an unused check in my checkbook the relevant information.  The instructions for arrival were preceded by the important fact that I must not ingest anything after ten o'clock at night and then in the morning between 7 and 7:15 drink 32 oz of water and present myself at 8 at an address she gave me where my very bloated and full bladder will be part of the x-ray photo taken.  Or at least that is what I gleaned from her remarks.  An attempt later to call back and verify the instructions were stymied by an answering machine which said "do not attempt to consult with anyone in this office, seek information from the person who authorized this appointment."  Well, that didn't go very far, so I am left with the instructions to appear at 8 at an address which is in an industrial park, where I have luckily been before twice so that I at least have some notion of what is involved, because frankly at my age the thought of holding all that liquid for that length of time part of it consumed with the nervous making drive through the winding roads of Boston's South Shore, relics of its colonial past, in turns and narrows and every other impediment to sensible driving is worrisome.  This industrial park is not a pattern of winding lanes but rather a wide open space devoid of anything older than ten or fifteen years, in some a developed area.  There are a number of medical offices that have sprung up in this area; it is the place to go for bone density scans, heart scans, all those technical features of modern medicine.  To my simplistic eyes the area is an unlikely site for medicine.  The buildings were obviously designed to be part of an industrial park and it seems that the financial collapse of 2008 put paid to that enterprise and the medical profession moved in.  Everything is grand and glass, and there are no cozy receptionists at the front door, just acre huge parking lots with signs at places saying "parking for elderly," and I guess you are to make the call yourself.  When I went to that area the first time I was put off by the street names, things like Production Boulevard, and Satisfaction Lane and Global Returns Alley,well I am making these all up, but that was what it was like (I kept thinking The Wall Street Journal had designed it all) and the many entrances, many corridors, and there were very few signs, and even fewer sightings of human beings and I kept thinking I was in a remake of "Alphaville."  I just wonder about all that piss sloshing around in me as I negotiate the drive, the parking, the hunt for the relevant entrance, office and  . . . . . oh, well, best not to dwell on it or I might have an accident right now!

To Have And Have Not

Yesterday my husband and I who had a dinner date in Cambridge took advantage of the fine weather to go into the Square early and browse in bookstores.  After that we walked into Harvard Yard and sat in two of the chairs which have been provided throughout one of the green grass lawns.  Dappled shade fell upon us, the grandeur of the old brick architecture provided an aesthetically pleasing backdrop, just as the attractive young people sitting about on all sides reading and talking, their faces lit up with all the strengths that high intellect, sensitive perception, and a decent reservoir of wit can provide offered a reassurance of the power and goodness of humanity.  I had just read the latest New Yorker in which there is an article on the scandal of grade alteration in the Atlanta school system, in which the author describes the frequently high minded or at least utterly sympathetic motives which impelled teachers who loved their seriously challenged students to make them seem to perform better than they had.  It was all about the horrible effects of teaching to the test which to their minds had incalculably damaged their students.  So many of these youngsters battled with drug addicted parents, crime on every side of them, often even living alone abandoned in their homes by errant adults, factors which the adults considered to be as important an element in the statement of a child's progress as the actual score received on the test.  When you consider the grandeur of what Harvard has to offer, and in most instances to qualified candidates for admission who got to that point by having been raised with every conceivable advantage that upper middle class life has to offer (even if the Harvard publicity machine scours the campus for photo ops of students who came from humble backgrounds), you cannot but feel utterly depressed by the inbalances, not to mention feel for those teachers who could not take the false implications imposed by those tests.  I have taught at institutions as different as an Ivy League college and a local junior college in California, taught in places where working class parents sent their children because it was local and it would not disrupt the family, other places where the students had been away for their education since they started prep school in the ninth grade.  Often one is astounded by the utter naivete of a student, at other times dazzled by the sureness of control and awareness of an eighteen year old, and yet it is not about intelligence often.  It is about security, good meals, a warm bed, and for some of course exquisite grounds, shaded quiet places to sit and meditate while for others a station not too hot in the back kitchen whilst slinging the hash.  I remember once an American Latino student from the South Bronx who was interviewed in his freshman year at Harvard and the reporter asked him about how easy it had been to make friends with the other Latinos at Harvard, and he laughed and replied that the reporter didn't get it, the others were all rich, there were after all such a thing as rich Latinos, whereas he was from the South Bronx, dirt poor and had nothing in common with other students.  Poor, just not a word that you hear around Harvard.  Those kids destitute and desperate in that ghetto school in Atlanta had to keep it in their face that they were "failing" "failing" "failing" to meet the standard of the national test.  God bless their crooked teachers is all I have to say.  I am sure a de Maupassant or Zola could have done justice to this story.

The Cacophony Of Modern Life

Yesterday I was sitting in South Station waiting for my train, and trying to read an interesting collection of essays by Mary Beard on a variety of subjects having to do with classical antiquity.  I say "trying," because even though I have a rather powerful capacity for concentration, the surround, as they say nowadays, was putting me to a severe test.  There was the endless loop of the Amtrak television screen advertising the virtues of dogs sniffing the luggage, of the necessity of "See Something, Say Something" and various other scenarios guaranteed to raise your paranoia to the max, there was a giant screen advertising a local performance of "Phantom of the Opera" with the endlessly repeated opening chords of music and the scene of the phantom pulling the heroine along a flight of stairs, but, new and even more revolting, there was a "live" broadcast from something called the Herald Radio set at a counter in mid station where three young men interviewed each other about the prospects of some sport or another, baseball most likely, which while it may have gone out to the masses, also came over a receiver set loud enough for those at the adjacent tables to get an involuntary hearing.  As I could plainly see everyone was bent over their tablets and phones busy with their various social media, or plugged in to a musical device; nobody cared about these silly fools and their broadcast.  Only the day before I had gone to a doctor's office in the wilds of Weymouth where the waiting room was adorned with a large tv screen broadcasting some day time tripe which I guarantee no one was noticing.  Ditto the last time I sat waiting to board a plane, ditto the doctor's office I visited last in Sarasota Florida. Listen up, Everybody, are we living in the Twilight Zone?  What is with all this background chatter, murmur, music every goddamn minute?  Today I was raking something in the back lawn and suddenly heard a daytime radio show, and where was this coming from?  My next door neighbors were having work done on the siding of their house, ladders had been set up, and workmen scaling them, and of course they had to have a radio going or they would not have been able to concentrate or whatever it was that their psyches needed.  When I last had my roof redone in Cambridge, I specifically insisted that there be no outside radio playing while the roofers worked and even though I was paying them top dollar, they almost balked.  I kept trying to impress upon them that the  houses were too close together to permit this promiscuous music broadcasting, they kept trying to insist that their mental health depended upon it.  And I thought of the average American home these days, the children shouting, one or two television programs playing, the dishwasher going, the washing machine going, the wife on the phone with a friend, the husband on another, and realized it's just poor old me, the neurasthenic who doesn't get it. I look forward to the silence of the tomb.

The Sound Of Music

When I was a teenager I spent time with my older sister who lived in Greenwich Village with her new husband who was a dark eyed, long lashed, swarthy exotic with antecedents in Eastern Europe.  He was moreover "a Jew," as my mother always pointed out when he came up in conversation (I can't of course create the tone in which that midwestern lady pronounced the phrase).  At home in the Bronx his family spoke Yiddish, and I with my three years of high school German fell in love with  the language, adoring it from the periphery and hoping somehow that the constant phrases he threw out would by osmosis sink into my consciousness.  Over the years I have lamented the decline of Yiddish speaking persons, applauded when institutions such as Brandeis University offered formal courses in the language.  Today I was saddened to read in the Times that the small Congress for Jewish Culture had lost its funding and would close its doors, thereby closing off a source of Yiddishkeit.  Of course, Yiddish is not synonymus with Jewish. I remember reading a memoir of a Hungarian who as a teenager was a forced laborer in Buchenwald toward the close of the war and found that none of his fellow inmates considered him a Jew because he could not speak Yiddish, and on another occasion when I humorously attributed a Yiddish saying to a woman whose daughter quite firmly insisted that her Sephardic mother would never have let Yiddish pass her lips.  Two years ago in Sarasota I took an adult education course in the Yiddish language; it was a marvelous review of all kinds of Yiddish from songs to jokes to stories and the teacher was a wonderful woman who had been a professional entertainer, she was perfect.  But as it turned out, every person enrolled in the class except myself had grown up in a household where the adults spoke Yiddish among themselves and these students wanted to retrieve what they had so nonchalantly  discarded years ago.  Very soon the class was ratcheting up their Yiddish to a fabulous degree and the teacher more and more omitted the helpful hints in English until this old goy was left in the dust.  I will always love the sound of it, and perhaps that is as close as I will get just as after my adult education course in Arabic script I could write out the opening lines of the Koran in a series of very inventive and beautiful specimens of calligraphy.

Countdown

We are in the final phase of the move now.  There is scarcely anything left to pack other than a few dishes, cutlery, and our shoes and clothes.  Every morning I resolutely work through the garden pruning and deadheading and weeding.  That work is relentless.  Then I sit about and read since the packing that remains can only be done at the very last, just before we leave the place forever.  And so it is that life is very much on hold, and a wonderful opportunity to consider how to live out a day without any real distractions.  The weather offers a psychic complement to the moment by being oppressively humid and sullenly hot.  Everything I read, my books, my journals, are not being absorbed; I am just waiting, and so forgetting even faster than I ordinarily do.  I guess that's all I have to say on the subject