It's All In What You Wear

My remarks today will be offensive to many of my readers, I am sure of that, but they are heartfelt, and represent an interesting perspective on social tensions in our time.  Like everyone else I have been following the horrendous news emanating out of Ferguson MO, grieving for yet another young African-American male victimized for being black essentially, the focus of suspicions and fears that have nothing to do with the youngster in question.  I remember years ago when I taught an undergraduate class up in the Bronx and in a discussion on social relations a group of young black men in my class remarked on how if they were in high spirits and ran forward as a group to board the subway the other riders, they could clearly see, shrank from them.  And their fellow passengers were mostly dark hued.  From my upper middle class white perspective I unthinkingly said: "It's the clothes."  And this is an idea that has never left me.  There is a popular image of young black loser and dangerous teenagers wearing hoodies, pants that extend to mid calf, and sneakers.  What if a nice looking young man were to come along in chinos, loafers, and a button down collar dress shirt?  I can hear the howls of outrage from my readers.  Yet, I myself know, that as a gay male who has a powerful urge to wear necklaces, bracelets, rings, sometimes a flashy little scarf wrapped around my wrist, I would be branding myself in the larger society.  I know for a fact, because I well remember people with their pained smiles moving very subtly away from me in the eighties, not saying a word of course, but not wanting their children "to catch AIDS from me."  I remember at Harvard we loafer and chino garbed students were always menaced by muggers from the Irish Catholic parts of Cambridge.  Our clothes gave us away, something I knew well, since I had to walk through dicey parts of town every night to my job as a night watchman.  The clothes were not suitable for a nightwatchman but it was before the era when the gentry could wear levi work pants ubiquitiously.  Recently I hired a young white working class male, aged twenty three or four, to help me pack up my house.  He was as handsome, soft spoken, courteous, hardworking, gentlemanly as you could ask for (although a director on the set would have ordered: "Lose the accent!")  We talked of possible futures for someone with only a high school education.  I didn't know how to tell him that pants with a mid calf cut off says ghetto or imitation ghetto.  I offered him suits that were on their way to Goodwill, beautiful, some from Brooks Brothers.  Even after I said in an avuncular fashion befitting the old queen who was his neighbor how important clothing of this sort could be in certain human interactions, social situations, he declined.  I was sorry for him, and for all the young males, black particularly, that the insidious social painter that is television has devised their immediate personal identification in clothes that they will not shed at their peril.
An addendum two hours later, as I realize how utterly simpleminded I am in my analysis, depending as it does upon the notion that "clothes makes the man," that there is a badge of gentility all men assume by dressing in a certain fashion.  This dictum of course utterly denies the experience of hundreds of persons of color in this country who have been dressed as the New York fashion dictates for middle and upper middle class males who are still routinely subject to harassing search and interrogate procedures unknown to the rest of us.  In my own life I am so conscious that I have no occasion to talk seriously with an African-American after a life in which a high school buddy was black, a sister dated a black in college, my first wife's best friend was a black woman who introduced us to her circle of friends, most of them African-American, and my eldest sister's marriage in all but name to a black gentleman for the last ten or so years of his life.  Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, it makes assumptions flakier, insecurities more pronounced.  So what I have written in the first paragraphs let them stand as the instinctive remarks of a very elderly person who just doesn't "get it."

Getting The News

I read The New York Times every morning, always have, since I acquired the habit from my mother of whom I have the strongest memory of her sitting in the living room every morning reading The Des Moines Register and Tribune.  I notice, however, in my dotage that I seem to be less well equipped to handle the extravagance of the prose that the copy editors routinely allow into the published pages.  Here is the opening of the fourth paragraph taken from a background article on Gertrude Bell found on page A7 of the national edition published August 15.
     "Today though, her legacy which has always been fragile, is at risk of being undone amid the renewed sectarian violence that has already seen Sunni militants effectively erase the border she drew between Iraq and Syria and raised the possibility that Iraq will fracture into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish territories. Seen through the experience of Iraq's tumultuous recent past, the decisions made by Miss Bell, as she is still affectionately referred to by Iraqis, and others working for the British and French to reorder the Middle East after the Ottoman Empire collapsed nearly a century ago, hold cautionary lessons for those seeking to bring stability or seek advantage in the region now." (I think there is a little problem with the verb "is" doing duty for the clause beginning "and others," but we'll let that pass.)
It is always remarkable to go from the Times to television's morning news which I do when I walk the treadmill at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club somewhat later.  Apart from the fact that those stereotype glamorous women with the long hair drooping over their face would never in a million years go near a topic like Gertrude Bell, intent as they are in offering over and over again the miniscule sound bites about the day's catastrophe whether the destruction of a whole people or a little child in some American suburb who fell off his tricycle in front of moving van, I doubt that they could read sentences of this complexity.  What a refreshing difference in intelligence Rachel Maddow and her short hair offers in the evening.  I know, I know she's a dyke, and it's just like the pansy males know about books and the arts while real male announcers know about the Red Sox and Tiger Woods (but I am forgetting suave, elegant, handsome Anderson Cooper always at the center of a newsworthy disaster).  Those were asides, back to the real issue, which is that I find myself nowadays struggling to get through those high minded long winded long sentences, there is so little time left, and I am not sure I want to spend it parsing complexities, verbal ones, that is.  The malaise has spread to my reading of The London Review and The Times Literary Supplement. I read the paragraphs over and over struggling to prop up my concentration, and at the same time reaching for my correcting pencil to write as I did so long ago on student essays "wordy, wordy."  Maybe I need to switch to the Post or the Daily News.

Life With Father

The current film "Boyhood" presents the years of six through eighteen in the life of a young American male, an extraordinary feat of filming in real time in which the youngster, his sibling, parents, and associates age physically in the process of filming over this great span of time.  Although most persons find the film charming in varying degrees, I sat through much of it with dread, anguishing at the behaviors of the boy's father and two step-fathers. The dramatic situation is that of a young woman who gets pregnant by mistake, marries, and after two children are born to the couple the husband leaves, a recipe for a life of disaster--she is the dread national statistic, the single mother. But she pulls herself up, gets an education, and a secure job, a tenured teaching position at the junior college, an incredible feat (I know from a lifetime in higher education).  Meanwhile her former husband, drifts along, from one job to another, wanting to be a professional musician, hindered, it is hard to say because he has not the talent or the dedication.By the end of the film I knew that I had grown to loathe the mother for her stupid choices in male partners, first of all the boy's biological father, a part played by Ethan Hawke, who reappears in the kid's life from time to time, just infrequently enough to dramatize thoroughly how indifferent he is.  His attempts at fatherhood on weekends are painful for their bluster, their contrivance, as is his male territoriality, particularly the scene where he reacts with the crudest expression of amused astonishment to his son's anguish at the sale of an antique car which the boy quite ridiculously had always assumed would come to him when he reached sixteen.  The mother's second husband, a college professor whom she meets in his class, turns out to be an abusive drunk, but she seems not to have noticed his rigid compulsive authoritarianism on the early dates, needless to say, evolving into a nightmare father for the two kids, from whom she and they finally flee.  When she seems about to hook up with a tough, aggressive veteran of three of four tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, you look into her face for some sign of wariness, but there is only a needy sexual readiness.  So the kid gets brutalized, this time psychologically by dad number three, while all the while having weekends from time to time with the slacker who is biologically his.  Is this just a happenstance slice of American life?  Is this what awaits the single mother?  Is this what boyhood is for most medium to low income white males with a succession of male authority figures imposing themselves?  I don't know.  My father died when I was six, and I was raised in the protection of a well to do mother who presided over her six children with the same iron rule that the surrogate fathers in the film achieved but with the upper class Wasp means of voice tone, verbal indirection, veiled threats and hints.  I never talked to another adult male seriously, until a cousin in his twenties, a veteran, stopped by, took pity on me now a soft, effeminate nineteen year old, took me on a brief trip to Colorado where he was off to do is Army reserve summer maneuvers.  My memory of this experience is not of "becoming a man," so to speak, but of secretly falling in love with this handsome, sexy, caring guy whose naked body in our daily showers is an icon of my youth that I can readily summon up still sixty odd years later.

Trying Some Teaching Again

A friend has encouraged me to offer a course in a local program offerings for senior citizens.  This is a volunteer operation: the instructors offer their services, the local university offers some classrooms, the students pay a minimal fee for the mechanics of the instruction without testing or papers or final certification.  And hugely popular.  I have enrolled in several in the last four years, and dropped all but one, since I miss the more rigid form of instruction with which I am familiar from my days on the lecture platform.  Yesterday I met with two administrators to discuss how I might fashion the description of a projected course in ancient Greek tragedy. As they say, it was a learning experience for me.  One of the objections that I have had in the courses I attended was the freedom with which the students offered their opinions on the announced subject matter of the course.  It was clear to me that most frequently their questions and their observations were completely ill informed so that the instructor had gently to engage in either a quiet refutation or a lengthy clarification out of the student's obfuscation.  I found this so frustrating and time consuming and ultimately unproductive that I always dropped the course.  And I determined if I were to take on a course, I would guard against this manner of pedagogy.  I was coming from a model where in introductory lecture courses students were engaged in the acquisition of knowledge, and they would through testing and paper writing demonstrate their success in that acquisition. Student participation came only later in senior seminars or tutorials.  I had not realized that this is of course not the model nor the goal of these senior learning courses.  There is nothing to work for in that sense, no certification, no grade.  The persons interviewing me were saying "so, then, what you want us to indicate in the course book is that this is a lecture course, no class participation.  Would you be willing to entertain questions at the last five or ten minutes?"  Suddenly it sounded so cold, so factory model efficient.  Somehow I wanted to have my long polished lecture style, witty and engaged, and yet keep the students at some distance so that the participation could be controlled.  But I was all wrong, I suddenly realized.  These courses had nothing to do with an undergraduate course.  These were mature, accomplished people who were in their seventies and eighties, who felt they were bringing as much to the room as the instructor, even if it were not specialized knowledge of the subject advertised.  I would somehow have to give them participation and correction without taking up too much classroom time nor make them feel excluded.  Aha!  3X5 cards handed out at each meeting where questions could be written down, collected by me, reviewed and the more thoughtful, productive addressed in subsequent classes, as well as a ten minute Q & A session at the end of every class meeting.  I hope this will work!

Tidying Up

My husband and I are putting things away.  The moving van arrived last Thursday, the movers carried our possessions up to the third floor, gallantly accepting that some very heavy items would not fit onto the elevator. When I arrived from New York passageways had been created through the boxes of books piled high, the fifty paintings in their bubble wrap stacked carefully against walls and other boxes, boxes of kitchen utensils, . . . I could go on.  Why did we bring so many things? And yet all we seemed to be doing in the last two months was making daily trips to Goodwill or inviting our neighbors to help themselves to stacks of unwanted stuff on the porch.  Nothing is more obvious at my advanced age that I will not need or use most of the things I felt I just had to have with me, those little pouches, for instance, I always used to travel with, well, now I guess it was forty years ago.  What do you suppose I put into them?  Some very special books, Cavafey's poems in Greek, for instance, that I used to haltingly translate in the company of a Greek friend each of us lying full length on two sofas in my living room, talk about sybaritic learning!, but could I even begin to do that now?  Poems go on the shelf next to a very special anthropological study of the Maya I was so enthusiastic about when I was in Mexico learning Spanish and promised myself that I would devour.  Let's see that was in 2000. Why was, is, damn it!, this book so important to me?  I am growing afraid to bring out the successive volumes from these boxes, so many dreams, so many hopes.  Why when packing did I anticipate this bright future whereas in the unpacking I have the more than sinking feeling that it is all an exercise in futility.  The bright spot of the last two days has been hanging the paintings, both for the pleasure of the new arrangements, and for the extraordinarily harmonious way in which my husband and I have each played our parts, he using his level, the hammer and nails, me standing back and squinting, making those minute aesthetic adjustments that I alone seem to notice.  Now I have to find a place for the fifty or so framed photographs of everyone who has meant something to me.  There must be some wall space left . . . my bathroom, for instance.  Do I want to stare at my parents when they were in their twenties while I am brushing my teeth, or, no, not that?  My husband is taking me to Europe when this is all done.  He promises we will be completely unpacked in another week.  He recently handed me approximately one hundred large size envelopes to set in my desk drawer. He who does the books for our household, and was once a school assistant superintendent buys office supplies in gross lots. I use maybe perhaps five envelopes a year. 

Fear And Trembling On The Journey

For the past few years I have spent time in Boston's South Station waiting for either the commuter train home or an Amtrak train to New York.  Hanging out in the grand space that has been created from the original train station used to have a kind of festival atmosphere until the authorities who manage Amtrak decided to get in on the trend to reposition post 9/11 America as a place fraught with incipient terrorism just waiting to be unmasked and apprehended.  While high up in the station are giant screens used by advertisers to make one tiresome shill after another, much lower down and more immediately connecting with the waiting throng are screens showing variations on the now ubiquitous "If you see something, say something."  There are scenes of non suspecting waiting passengers having their luggage stolen from them, and someone just like you alerting them to their loss.  There is a young girl on the train noting a man entering and putting a package overhead and then leaving the train, whereupon she puts two and two together and talks to a "uniformed member of the staff."  In an effort to cozy up to us there are interviews with security officers emphasizing the unseen threats that lurk around the train system, there are interviews with canine officers, showing how dogs are sniffing out the dangers in the luggage, warnings not to pet them.   At one point there is a shot of a young man nonchalantly walking down the center of a railroad track with his buds in his ears, either suicidely stupid or genuinely wanting to end it all--can't imagine a rational person embarking upon that path.  To my surprise as I waited in Penn Station to go to Washington I encountered the same dread and forboding, and coming back Union Station offered the same entertainment.  What a way to sit at and wait for a train, bombarded by views played endless of treachery, mayhem, sinister designs.  It is in such an amusing contrast with air travel where the waiting space has every dreary daytime television talk show imaginable.  Can you imagine sitting waiting for your plane to be called and watching a show of sinister people carrying unlikely luggage, or police apprehending someone doing something questionable.  The airline flying public would freak out.  For some reason riding the rails is for sterner folk who can countenance the prospect of desperate people boarding the train or can well imagine a proper young man walking along ahead of a twenty ton locomotive streaming along at one hundred miles an hour.

The Arrival

While my husband came down to Sarasota ahead of the van and was here to supervise the unloading and tentative placement of its contents I was lolling about in Manhattan getting "culture," seeing friends, and as my inner voice proclaimed firmly "not pulling your oar."  But my spouse was adamant that I had done my bit in packing all the paintings, sort of crating them actually, and more to the point,  as he did indeed insist, I was "frail," and would be in the way.  Okay.  So I had fun in New York and even took a side trip to Washington to see the galleries and dine with old friends.  As one of those fun ironic tricks that fate employs to liven up things I hurt my knee while demonstrating to a very elderly neighbor in our building in New York that I could rise from a chair without needing the support of arm rests and on one occasion of this supreme braggadocio pulled something or other, so that throughout my stay I tended to totter, very much the "frail" person I had been designated.  I arrived in Sarasota yesterday morning early, and when the friend who had picked me up brought me to the apartment he joined my husband and me in immediately setting to and hanging paintings.  Hitting the ground running is my and my husband's managerial style so it was only after a few hours of this nailing and positioning and using the level that I noticed my surroundings.  My, my we brought a lot of stuff down from up North.  Yes, yes, it's all going to fit just fine, we knew what we were doing, but my, my there is a lot to set away, sorted out, thought through, and very quietly I understood that it would take a week or so.  I am not at my best in disorganization, neither is he, so we are drawing deep breaths and keeping a "this too shall pass" mood of utter disengagement from the proceedings.  It is the morning of day two and I had a very good sleep after having treated that darling spouse to a giant steak dinner at a way way high end upscale steak joint which brought the end of the day into a delightful focus as we yet again realized how much we loved being able to walk across the street well, maybe two and one part is walking through a mall parking lot--not quite the bliss I paint!--and of course the temperature was ninety something and the humidity maybe sixty five so it was not sylvan bliss or balmy moments, but, hey, to walk to walk to urban destinations, and find a huge steak at the end of the journey.  We smiled and laughed and joked throughout the dinner.  I have to say that both of us have been so happy and pleased from the moment we conceived this mad cap scheme of moving permanently to Sarasota and our good mood prevails through all the boxes, and litter that is everywhere.