Winter Paradise In The Sunshine

Sarasota must have been the charming center of a delightful landscape back when John Ringling built his house and mansion, Mrs. Potter Palmer came down from Chicago and built her mansion, and a man named Burns put up a number of cottages in charming little streets, all of which survive to this day.  As readers of the newspapers must know Florida has now surpassed New York State in the number of inhabitants.  The prevailing philosophy of the state is loathing of government control; everyone wants to have a gun on his or her person whether in the woods, in a restaurant, a church, a school or on the front seat of the pickup truck.  And this vehicle, thanks to another stand off with government, is not inspected, and is free to belch its fumes, as indeed most cars do.  Motorcycles are everywhere; you don't need to read bumper stickers to know this, the incredible noise proclaims it.  Motorcycle noise is to straight men what tights pants are to gays: it shows off their virility, or at least perceived.  To make the motorcycle all the more butch, some one of the governors awhile ago cancelled the law requiring cyclists to wear helmets.  Just another cross for the overburdened emergency rooms to bear, stretched as they are with a population underpaid and without health insurance.  But hey, there's always Siesta Key and Longboat Key, and various other ghettos, with populations so rich, in houses so large, that it is truly another universe.  The charm of old downtown Sarasota is being eroded by the mindless city permission to developers to build towers for the rich, here there and everywhere, springing up, grotesquely, incongruously looming over the charming real estate of yesteryear.  Pretty soon it will be like 72nd and Broadway where the monstrously large populations of all the towers Donald Trump was given permission to build along the West Side Highway flow into the miniscule IRT subway stop.  One wonders where the increased population will dine out; lines, reservation tension, frenzy to turn the tables over fast, ah, well, larger profits.  The somewhat quaint down town area is fenced in by a number of multi-lane--I would call them highways--avenues upon which ceaseless heavy traffic bumper to bumper flows at a ceaseless forty five miles per hour, the worst of them all being historic Tamiami Trail.  Woe to them that would cross these roads on foot, which I do daily to walk to my gym.  Turn right on red is the law down here, more freedom from government control, and no one looks up from their texting to consider objects in the pedestrian cross walks.  Knowing the statistics for pedestrian deaths in Florida, I have devised a maneuver of extreme caution, which I hope will see me through my remaining days.  I press the pedestrian walk light.  Do not move from the curb until it is clearly illuminated, then look to my left, wait until I have established eye contact with the driver waiting--and I use the word loosely--to turn right, then signaling with my arms by waving vigorously, I then step off the curb, and as I go along I keep close tabs on cars coming from the other direction and turning right into where I am walking and I keep an eye for maverick turns from any direction.  But if you come, don't miss the glistening white high rise condos facing the marina along Tamiami Trail studded with giant palm trees.  The bay glitters, the white gleams, the sky is blue, and in some funny way it looks exactly like the Boulevard des Anglais or whatever it is called in Nice.  Quelle beauté!

Paris In The Spring

Well, it was really only mid-March, twenty five years ago, and my husband--then a very, very new friend--and I were ensconced in the Hotel St. Germaine, on the Rue de Bac.  Breakfast time, and there was a knock at our hotel room door, which I jumping out of bed, rushed to open.  There stood a stout lady in uniform bearing our breakfast tray who, as she entered, trumpeted, "Bonjour, Madame et Monsieur", then looking more closely at the other figure in the bed, drew a breath and came out with "Bonjour, Messieurs."  The next morning, the knock again, I opened, and she was in the middle of "Bonjour, Madame et Mo---" stopped, and managed her "Messieurs."  The third morning, as I opened the door she smiled triumphantly as she proudly proclaimed, "Bonjour Messieurs." Later on one of those days we were in a very elegant patisserie; my husband always laughs and says he will never forget the shock that ran through the assembled ladies, staff and customers, everyone dressed with the elegant and compulsory neck scarf, when as the woman who waited on us began to wrap up a scone which I had bought to munch on I called out in my impeccable French.  "Ça n'est pas necessaire, Madame.  Je l'achetée pour manger dans la rue."  In those days eating on the street was an unpardonable vulgarism, certainly never encountered the Rue de Rivoli.  The ladies drew back fascinated to be in the presence of a monster so naive that he did not even scruple to admit this horrid truth.  Mais, il est americain. vous savez, pour cette chose rien n'est impossible."  As I recounted in the memoir, at one point we sat on a bench by the Seine and gazed into each other's eyes and kissed.  The crowd aboard a passing one of those Batteaux Mouches applauded.  We are remembering out trip this week having congratulated ourselves at surviving twenty five years.  At a party last week amid a crowd of heterosexual couples, none of them  could claim such connubial longevity.  Extraordinaire!

The Cleaning Lady

Yes, it always a question whether the rigorous straightening up and organizing of everything in our house before the arrival of the powerful, smart young lady--a former military officer-- who cleans for us is worth all the effort.  We have always been intimidated by our cleaning ladies, only once relaxed when we had instead a cleaning man, a slightly rotund blonde youth who wore a black spandex suit and called me "Doll."  This morning we were busy with the cleaning and then hustling ourselves out of the place and to the gym so as "not to be in the way."  I, as they say in Iowa, clean forgot my blog.
Better luck tomorrow.

You're Bleeding

A few hours ago I stopped at a nearby copy shop to get an estimate and as I lounged against the counter waiting for a clerk I heard a voice saying softly:  "You're bleeding."  It was a young man nearby using the copying machine.  I knew right away what he meant, and looked down over my exposed body parts, and sure enough there was blood trickling out of a small gash on my right arm below the elbow.  In my general unsteadiness I often bump against the frame of doors as I walk into places; it must have happened here.  The rich flow of red blood was moving down my arm in a dramatic way.  "The bathroom's over there," said a clerk who had just arrived at the  counter to help me.  "It's either blood thinners or a stroke," I said as I went in to get some tissue, but realized that that kind of gallows humor does not work so well with the young who firm of mind, body, and soul cannot imagine the disintegration the lies ahead of them.  I have eighty five year old tissue thin skin which rips at the slightest provocation and the blood conduits beneath are only too happy to release their liquids.  A year ago whilst boarding a subway at Columbus Circle enroute to Grand Central Station, I was severely jostled by a wheelchair and knocked against a metal pillar while waiting to board.  Only when I was seated on the train did feel the unaccustomed warmth on my arm, looked down and perceived the blood flowing, indeed more copiously than usual--it must have been a large tear--, and I had no tissue.  My respectability drained from me along with the blood.  What could he be, I could imagine my fellow passengers asking themselves, some old wino, homeless, derelict, pathetic!  Desperate to staunch the flow, plus eliminate the evidence, I, like any dog or cat, began to lick my arm, grotesque I know, but a normal human reaction, no?  As I discovered later some of the blood adhered to the skin around my mouth, ugh!  After a ride to 42nd street, a transfer to the Shuttle Train, I arrived at Grand Central, by now, with bits of evidence of blood here there and everywhere, still licking away, and shunned by one and all.  I raced downstairs to where I knew the mens room was located, pushed the waiting occupants aside, barged into a stall, grabbed at the toilet paper, oblivious to the seated astonished figure trying to take a crap in peace.  Outside at the mirrors over the sink I applied copious amounts of tissue, wadded up more to put into my pockets, regained my composure, met my friend at Track #46, and went off with her to a delightful meal with her family in the burbs.  Another day in the life of an old timer.

Flowers

The White Flower Farm Spring 2015 Garden Book has arrived in my mailbox, conjuring up the years, decades, really,  in which I opened it to seek inspiration for the coming growing season, to identify through the photographs flowers I had seen in other gardens but failed to remember the names.  More than that, it is a catalogue that one can spend the day with, large, detailed, entirely helpful, and with any number of photographs of beds of flowers grown on their extensive estate in Litchfield Connecticut.  These more than anything else are the true porn for a gardener; I have pondered those photos year in year out and sick with desire imagined the plants, the flowers, the patches of sun and the tender shade as being possible for me in my humble plot of land.  My real strength, however, came from a nursery in Hingham to which in the first year of our ownership of our new house at the seashore I trekked again and again to get advice, and buy and buy and buy flats of flowers, shrubs, everything that was blooming so dramatically and seemed destined for my space.  It was disconcerting after spending upwards of a thousand dollars, or so I imagined, to read an interview with one of the nursery's owners who insisted that anyone who would start a garden in such a severe drought year needed his head to be examined.  So said the heroin dealer about the addict he had created.  Still and all, despite it all, we watered and watered with brackish water from an eight foot deep well we had dug, close enough to the ocean to have an eternal supply.  Ten years later we had covered almost all the space of what had been sparse grass with stone pavements, raised beds, geometric arrangements with a fountain at its center.  Forsythia succeeded to lilac and in turn came wisteria followed by peonies, then roses, fifteen bushes of them, then the great buddleia plants with their myriad purple blossoms, standing tall over the beds of phlox, oh, every conceivable plant designed to bring color and variety straight through to the end of October.  It is odd to live now with my third floor terrace enhanced by an etagere holding terra cotta pots of geraniums, by a large terra cotta pot containing a variety of succulents and a large opulent and vulgar and thus "fun" urn on a pedestal containing a rather large species of fern.  I turn the pages of the White Flower Catalogue as though viewing a distant exotic land which I only dimly remember.  I wonder if the new owners, an innocent young couple, have been able to hold their own with the pergola covered with the most aggressive wisteria I have ever known, demanding cutting back at least once a week or seeing the tendrils reach the gutters on the side of the roof, with the de-buding of all those roses, the phlox, oh, I cannot even imagine it all now, it was an all day every day job from May through September, for two people who were not working.  I sit on my little third floor terrace in the morning coffee in hand gazing at the geranium blossoms and the weird shapes of the succulents in the pot.  Not quite the same as sitting on a bench amid blossoms staring at the water making its plash (as Henry James would say) into the fountain basins.  But I look at the clouds scudding overhead and it is good.

Power And Violence

My husband wants us to watch "The Godfather " Part Two this evening and I am resisting.  A few days ago I brought out a rather weak Ivory-Merchant film of a Jean Rhys novel called "Quartette" about a sadistic rapist (only in the twenties they called it a rich man having his way with one of his young friends), his constantly tortured compliant wife, and the young girl who at least as the film depicts her is both repelled and fascinated by what they used to call the cad until she finally kills herself as did his previous victim.  The film is static, I agree with its critics, but of course beautifully made and beautifully acted.  But we were both bored by it, and I was intimidated by hubby's disdain and we turned the monitor off.  Next night he got me to watch the first part of the Godfather trilogy.  I really did not want to.  I am tired of brutality, don't want to watch "The Sopranos" ever again, I think.  I cannot get out of my mind, Tony strangling the informer when he and Meadow are visiting a college in Maine, will never forget Drea being dragged across the ground to her death, the strangling of Christopher, and these images are there along with a lot I have manufactured from reading The Kindly Ones, naked Jewish women being forced to run as the SS soldiers shot at them, or maybe I have seen that in a movie--naked women running uphill in a cattle run. Of course, I saw all those black and white news reels when the camps were first liberated.  I  know I saw the video clip of the American Army helicopter with the boys shooting down at a family in Iraq out on the street, killing the kids among others, on the very vague suspicion that they were all harboring weapons, and saying when told that they had just blasted a couple of kids along with the adults "Well, hell, they shouldn't a brought their kids along."  I have that in my head.  Now my husband wants me to see the film "Sniper" but I saw the clip in Coming Attractions yesterday, blowing away the Muslim woman and her child .  I've read descriptions of torture at Guantanamo and I've heard Cheney say he'd do it all over again, watched the bombs falling on the people in the Gaza strip, and I'm one of those people it doesn't go out of my head.  I think of a student who'd been in some invasion we had in the Dominican Republic a long time ago and when I oh, so stupidly asked if he had ever killed anyone described picking guys off a distant ridge running along in silhouette and say it was like a shooting gallery, in his memory forever.  And I can never forget the women who have described to me being gang raped, friends, brave ladies, nor the student prisoner I had when I volunteered in teaching in prison who quietly told me quite unbidden in detail how he had surprised a woman at a bus stop dragged her somewhere nearby and raped her.  I was classified 4F so I have never served in the army, led a very cushy life, protected in every way, really.  My husband can't get enough of violence and brutality on the silver screen, well, he's at one with everyone else in America.  Maybe if I just drank more when those films come on.  Last night I stared in disbelief at Diane Keaton playing Michael Corleone's wife; she was in "Annie Hall" and is still here such a strong, well-mannered principled WASP lady; never would she have married him, certainly never would she have submitted to the demands of his world, never would she have sat around with his vulgar relatives, never would her parents or her brother allow such an environment for her or her issue.  Puzo, Coppola, clearly have never emerged from their own ghetto long enough to see how the other half lives.

The Women And The Men A Very Long Blog For The New Year

I grew up in a home with four sisters, two live-in women servants, two or more who came to work daily, and a widowed mother who directed all the house activities.  Because she grew lonely eating alone, she had us six siblings join her for meals.  Thus it was from the age of six on I was immersed utterly in a woman's world (my brother, seven years older, avoided the family life as much as he could with his persistent pursuit of athletic success at school).  Being crippled kept from the masculine playing field, and home reading books.  In my home I saw a powerful woman running a complicated show, who, however, only when necessary actually involved herself in the day to day details.  Apart from shopping. I often accompanied her to the various small shops which preceded the invention of the supermarket where we bought the different ingredients that made up our daily meals.  She alone knew the right cut of standing rib roast, the perfect ripeness of the pears and peaches; it poured down from her as a mystical aura.  Choosing food was sacred, something I took over when I lived with my four children in Rome years later, and shopped daily with my string bag.  Mother was my model of an adult human being--in command, respected (she was the president of the school board, a much socially invited faculty widow), although I knew that she thought males like my father and my uncles were what made the world go around, and that my brother would be a surgeon like his father, and I would be, well . . .the decision was out on that considering what a poufta I was clearly turning into (concern registered through brows knitted together in consternation, nothing said).  My first wife was truly brilliant, an unusual thinker, taken to makeup and glamor, and dropping out of college once she got a husband who would support her.  She had never thought of career, she'd thought of everything else, in what she read, looked at, walked through.  She was an original, a provocation, only like my mother in the sense you couldn't mistake her in the room.  She was happy to leave the idea of working for a living to men, thought it their problem, not hers. I was going to become the professor; she would sit home reading novels once I was settled into a job with my PhD.  Her death left an immediate and huge vacuum in my spiritual life, and indeed, economically, since she ironically had been supporting me through graduate school.  My second wife was a determined student architect when I met her, and I gloried in everything she told me about the field, and the efforts and career projections to which she introduced me.  Our ignorance of birth control and our constant sexual intercourse found us with four of the most adorable boys and girls one could want who have never  been less than wonderful and perfect even as they approach the grand age of sixty.  But they were not expected--there were no pills back then, condoms disdained, and diaphragms ineptly applied.  Four babies and one miscarriage in five years.  Changed abruptly our thoughts on life.  The first ten years we struggled with changing diapers, feeding babies, lugging home groceries, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, preparing classes, teaching classes, researching and writing a PhD dissertation.  Nothing in our parental homes prepared us for this dramatic change and inversion, indeed perversion of our lives, but we stuck it out.  Luckily our children were robust little darlings and always precious and fun even when tiresome burdens.  And when you are still in your twenties despite the constant pressures and distractions you can usually find some moment in the day for a quick shag, even if, when finally horizontal and the lights turned off in nightime's quiet, the tired brain says sleep often before the orgasms came to release the woes of the day.  But things righted themselves.  I took over a lot of housekeeping after the first ten years, the live in student helper was replaced by a mature cleaning lady who came by afternoons, my bride got out her pencils, and the professional clothes and went back to work.  It was pretty much my house now, with an assist from the mom.  It's a trajectory that is possible for any male/female couple, just first finding the right job situations.  The point of this long winded blog is that if a male will start out with a firm understanding that it takes two people to run a household then as circumstances change, he is prepared to take over more and more of the housekeeping and subtly managing his outside employment to fit these home needs.  I grant you that a machinist on the assembly line does not have the luxury of home working conditions that I had.  But I think for more men than can be imagined adjustments can be made; some might opt for the cleaning and dusting rather than my forte, the shopping and cooking.  The dialogue with the employer must be started day one, the idea must be planted in graduate school even before. It must be seen as normal that any male is fully capable of being a homemaker.  And the great thing is, and I felt  it at my granddaughter's wedding this summer as I looked at my middle aged kids, how close we were daddy and kiddies, the bonds of the experiences we had together, the hours we spent in the kitchen together, traveling in europe together, crying on each other's shoulder.  I am very very lucky.