Once Upon A Time And All So Strange

Once upon a time I was sixteen and very, very good looking.  I was also becoming aware of my sexual attraction to other males and what this might mean.  In essence I was becoming "a gay."  A slow process for some, really years of agony, indecision, and growing determination.  It is difficult to say why that was not my story.  In short order I was comfortably promiscuous, in my small home town, relatively notorious as a "cocksucker."  I credit it to my family's prestige, our money, my good looks and my instinct for making nice in every social situation. I had a strange experience in the midst of this which I have generally repressed, and only occasionally does it surface.  Today was one of those days.  In those days on the main street there was a cafe presided over by a tubby middle aged cook and his helper the dishwasher, who also set and cleared the tables.  They were utterly nondescript, the patterning on the ugly, tired wallpaper of life.  The cafe was popular with the kids of the town; I spent a lot of time in there, pseudo flirting with all my girl friends, trying ever so subtly to put the make on the good looking dudes of the town, totally horny and utterly stupid who more times than you can imagine were willingly led into assignations with me in my car on a country lane.  Our transactions were all witnessed by the chef who presided over his hot plates and handed the dishes across the counter top to us all.  One Sunday when the cafe was of course closed (this was god's country) I got a telephone call at my home which surprisingly enough, as I came to realize through the coughing stumbling and mumbling, was the cafe chef inviting me to his room over the cafe.  I was apprehensive, not that I feared violence or anything like that, but I grew up as a social snob and I knew that his guy was not someone one "knew."  Why did he want to talk to me?  Could not imagine and with my generous arrogance told him I would stop by.  It was a strange experience.  He was naked when I arrived; I don't remember seeing such an old person without clothes.  He wanted us to get into his bed and make out.  Suddenly this self assured center of attention in the cafe downstairs was a tubby loser, and so lost as to be desperate.  How did he ever get the nerve to telephone me?  Make the assignation?  The funny thing was that the matter turned upon my mother's social graces which had led me to spend so much time with her chatting up entirely improbable people as a gesture of grace and kindness.  I stripped down, lay beside this guy who by then was sniffling and verging on crying, and took his body into my embrace.  It was, as kids say nowadays, "weird," and I have never had an experience similar to that in my entire life.  But I think that it is important for arrogant, proud, self assured persons, somewhere along the line, to experience the ordinary, the ugly, the desperate, the deserving undeserved.  Hey, it's only a roll in the hay; it's not a night at the opera.

Sunday

It was a full day yesterday.  The brunch at ten in honor of the new students in the drama program, and since we are partially supporting one of the guys we were there at a table with his other sponsors, and him, and a few people sniffing around at the idea of shelling out four thousand and up per annum.  It's our big philanthropy; many donors take on two or three, other sponsors pony up a hundred thou or more for a production.  A few years ago at the same kind of brunch the director happened to mention in his speech that he was only four thousand short of his goal to raise money for audition tours at which some gentleman at my table jumped up and shouted: "Oh, Good Lord, we ought to be able to get that easily enough right in this room.  I'll pledge a thousand!"  Amid good-natured shouts and pledges twelve thousand was raised in minutes.  That's life in high end Sarasota where we paupers just watch from the edges with our mouth open in wonder.  So we were at the brunch at a big round table trying to make conversation, always a torture and a triumph since the over seventy set are all hard of hearing and the room is devoid of acoustical proofing.  But very few of the people can count on hearing much anyway there is really no attempt at serious communication.  After two hours of making nice, and actually everyone shutting up to hear each of the new students make a brief and oh so self assured presentation, we left, went home took a brief nap, and wheeled off to the symphony hall where we heard another sublime program from our Sarasota Symphony.  The hall itself is one of those multi purpose places with however very good acoustics.  It was obviously built for young people going to rock concerts although its mission is more to house programs for eighty five year olds remembering Edie Gorme and that ilk. It's ossified Las Vegas, I guess.  The arena is steep climbing, the passage ways wide and very poorly secured with railings.  The rows were squeezed as tightly as possible to increase revenues.  The ideal customer is a rake thin kid.  Watching elderly over weight people with canes, find their way to their seats is painful and then to know that when intermission comes their bladders are going to be calling out.  You go through hell to get to listen to great symphonic music.  It is not Boston's Symphony Hall, that's for sure.  But, hey, we parked our car easily under the shade of a tree, walked (stumbled) to the building under beautiful sun, fluffy clouds, breezes off the Gulf.  All is good, in it's own way.

Married Life

Today is one of those days that tests long term marriages by revealing the strengths of two people hanging in there through thick and thin.  My husband is suffering through political troubles with the people on our condo board of which he is the unwilling president.  A very large and complicated strategy which he worked through with what he thought was the assent and encouragement of the other board members now when push comes to shove, they have rejected acting on it.  At the very same time the second applicant for buying his New York studio has been rejected by his coop board there, and since coop boards by law do not have to divulge their reasons, he who is a very cooperative take charge guy is as a complete loss.  There is some suggestion that the board there wishes to hold everything off the market to wait for the rise in prices in studios, but there is no way of knowing.  He is going mad with the anxiety of the impotent.  And none of these things improves his mood.  We had company last night and I opted to cook some veal scallopini, but he jumped in angrily determined to cook it his way which involved breading--much too heavy in my opinion.  He was angry that  I even thought to take over the kitchen, although as he often describes for twenty years I cooked his dinner every night.  But he had to have control.  That's one of those things in long term relationships, it's like therapy, and you have to play act situations and not surrender to emotions.  Tedious, made more so by the fact that he does not drink nor drug and has no way to relieve his tensions. God, thank god I am only a heavy drinker and not an alcoholic!  The pre dinner cocktail which Mommy introduced me to when I was sixteen has been a life saver.  Last night was One of those Moments--when one would prefer to be out at a restaurant rather suffering through someone proving his manhood.  We have been a couple for over twenty five years; our "anniversary" is coming up, the date commemorating the day we met since legal relationships were not allowed back then.  We met at a party---it was, indeed, a set-up--and this was so different from so many of the gays of that era who met their significant other cruising in the park or wherever gay persons could effectively hook up in a time of police control and prison sentences.  The new movie "Loving" tells the story of a white man and a black woman who ran afoul of the miscegenation laws in this country.  It's the same story but far crueler. 

Plans For Teaching

I was just notified that the advance enrollment in my prospective course in Homer's Odyssey is sufficient to make definite plans to offer it in the winter season which begins in early January.  It's an offering in the so-called life long learning institute or something like that, an educational program devised for the large number of elderly people in the Sarasota area who have the time and enthusiasm for instruction but perhaps not the educational background nor as they say in German the Sttzfleisch (the flesh on the ass to endure sitting for hours on end) to take a full term academic course. The course meets eight times.  Learning lite, you might say.  I taught one in ancient Greek tragedy two years ago, Homer's Iliad last winter and this will be my last since the only other subject that would interest me would be the invention of democracy in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries for which I would have to prepare strenuously since I do not know the subject that well.  I realize that I am turning eighty seven in March, and have balance problems that make standing for any length of time problematic, so I am sure that this will be my last. Since I started some students have complained about the length of the reading assignments, but I always say the course is a general survey, you certainly don't need to feel obliged to read every line of every text, I am handing out outlines and paraphrases of everything, and since you are not receiving academic credit nor paying much beyond administration fees, you should only do what you want. I anticipate that the course will be an antidote to the general woe in which our country, if not the world, is mired.  Last year the soldier males of the Iliad were engaged in killing every day, or watching their comrades die, and the expectation of every one was about the possibility of a short and rather unhappy if glorious life.  The Odyssey is the great happy contrast: a soldier overcomes a variety of obstacles to get home to his wife, a teenage son searches for his father with whom he is reunited for the first time since infancy, a variety of louts and despoilers are either tricked or overcome with tests of strength, and in addition to his beautiful wife (albeit by the time he gets home perhaps a little long in the teeth) the hero has had long term affairs with two ravishingly beautiful bewitching--in every sense since this story is partly out fairy tale--women, and politely declined marriage with an extremely nubile princess whom he first meets when as a shipwreck he emerges naked from the bushes on a beach where she and her playmates are playing catch themselves only scantily clad.  The Odyssey  is a totally fun story, and I anticipate sharing my enthusiasm for it with a group of interested people my age, which has the benefit of not having to play the mule driver, whipping a group of youngsters through something that is definitely work, a labor, however much of love.

Osso Bucco

Today we must go shopping for the ingredients for Osso Bucco a la Milanese.  It is one of my favorite dishes to serve guests first because my recipe makes way too much for the two of us, and second because it is so wonderful, so impressive, and really almost no work.  It's all in the assembling.  I have a marvelous Belvue I think it is called cooking machine which can cook slow, steam, pressure, just about everything.  Osso Bucco is cooked slow for six hours.  So get the ingredients at the store, sautee them on the sautee setting, add the requisite liquid,  lock the lid into place, and that's that.  One other thing I often make in this machine is Risotto a la Milanese, which as we all know, used to require constant attention and judicious stirring for over an hour to achieve that perfect creamy texture and taste.  Now put the rice in the cooker, press the sautee button, get the rice slightly brown, add the chopped onions, broth, butter and whatever, put the lid on, set it for ten minutes of pressure, come back open the lid and there is perfect risotto every time..  Sounds like a commercial, doesn't it?  Love it, love my cooker, but almost never use it. We just don't cook like that any more, nor entertain.  If I break down and cook risotto we have a jar left over in the refrigerator for weeks.  The curse of growing old is the left overs.  No one eats his portion. Oh, the food we have brought home from restaurants!  I remember visiting my mother in law who would exclaim over the moldy old titbits in her fridge she had "saved" for me.  Could not bear to throw away food.  Neither can my husband wnich shows it is psychological and not conditioned, she rich as Croesus he poor as a church mouse.

Billy Elliot

Last night I went with a friend to a local production of the original musical, performed in a town nearby famous for its high end amateur stage productions.  It is always an extraordinary experience visiting Venice Florida, first because the main streets have so many very, very good restaurants, then for all the interesting shops that are interspersed between the places to eat, and then again because the layout of the town has not yet surrendered to gaunt towers of residential condos which is the tragic fate of down town Sarasota making one wonder it he has wandered perhaps into the industrial parts of Gary, Indiana.  No, Venice is very dear, if a little bit too twee for my taste.  The musical was also to my taste well done, my companion was far less impressed with the talent on display, although we both warmed--perhaps too much--to the cute young man/boy playing the lead role.  What surprised me, however, was my companion's wanting to leave at the intermission because he was having too serious a negative reaction to the dismal household affairs of little Billy, the grotesque, ill educated and loudmouthed grandmother, the ignorant, ill-educated brute of a father, a coal miner, and brother similarly limited and engaged.  This was England at the height of Mrs Thatcher's war on the unions which is harsh and cruel and which the film soft pedals.  My companion who grew up in an American equivalent low income, uneducated, uncultured home only himself to escape it through persistent education plus the analgesic of being gay, found it too sad, too terrifying, too much close to home.  It was one of those moments when I realized once again of the incredibly easy time I have had in life despite my vaunted lower back troubles.  It was also a reminder to me of what I guess Donald Trump seems to represent to low income voters somehow a way out, although will that turn out to be  chimerical as so many believe?  Here in Sarasota, famed for it "culture," where every fundraiser for theater, art, music, etc. is immediately oversubscribed, and I have actually met people who have a condo over looking the bay in downtown and a "country" place out on Longboat Key, an investment in real estate running into the millions, there evidence of poverty every where you turn, not to mention the homeless who line the streets.  I don't see it, until my companion remarks on one or another resemblance to the world of his childhood, and it comes into my house, so to speak, close up.  The musical ends with the miners having lost their strike lining up to descend into the bowels of the earth again and then being swallowed up, while little Billy, an acclaimed genius of dance, goes on into another life.  That was true in my companion's life, the glory mingling with the guilt, which is offering us all yet another life, which is those of us who are "successful," by virtue of special brains, talents, skills, owe a debt that comes from God to those who are so much less fortunate.

Pride . . .Fall

A defining event of my younger years was the moment I fell from one floor to another in the stairwell. I was four; the fall damaged the bones of my lower back to the extent that I wore a corset until I was ten or so, then, when more active, graduated to a steel and leather truss, a kind of brace, designed to hold my skeleton in place as it grew rapidly through the teen years.  At eighteen I threw it away gladly, surrendered to intermittent joint pain, sometimes shockingly lacerating, but registered the freedom of movement for my sex life and jitterbugging.  As one can see, it is right to designate it as defining, not only for the continual pain, but for my withdrawal from an active life to a sedentary scholarly existence.  Abruptly in my mid thirties all pain ended.  Who knows why?  The fall, however, has been a leit motif in my family ever since.  My brother, aged ninety, visiting his daughter in Texas, fell down a flight of stairs and died from complications two weeks later.  My sister, aged 80 or so, was alone in her house, walking through her kitchen when her femur suddenly shattered, and she fell to the ground, and with effort dragged herself to the telephone and hospital services.  After five years in a wheel chair and sometimes with a walker, and after some years of slight improvement, she fell again one day, while overbearingly standing and offering someone a chair in the nursing home dining room; she died of internal bleeding which she chose not to have staunched.  My ex-wife, a feminist before her time, alone in a large barn in New Hampshire, decided to move a large antique chest of drawers from the upper store room to the lower floor, and in devising a system of weights and pulleys to achieve this feat alone, she instead managed to fall over the edge and plummet to the floor below where she lay from maybe mid morning until evening in more or less freezing temperatures when her daughter came home from work.  After extensive surgery which many claimed was botched, she never stood erect again, and walked only with the aid of a wheel chair or cane for the rest of her life.  She never complained, always insisting that it was entirely her fault.  At eighty six I have developed severe balance problems which have been variously diagnosed but one of my favorites is the inherent sense of acting out the primal fall so to speak of my very youth, and thus I will always be tottering on a precipice imagined or real, psychically.  When I fell initially I was crouching over the staircase a floor below in order to throw a blanket down on the head of my unsuspecting two year old sister whom I knew was coming to join me in the nursery.  So the event was a kind of primal sin as well. I remember every moment vividly.  Pride goeth before fall, and, boy, don't I know it!  As an absurd coda to it all, I was reminded last week when describing this nexus of falling to a long ago lover, and he recounted the time we were vigorously making love in a great old Victorian double bed when suddenly the slats which supported the mattress gave way and we crashed to the floor.