Life Is Good

Last night as we were driving into town my husband Richard said "I like your blog a lot, but maybe just one time you could be really and truly positive.  And as I started to protest, he added: "I know, I know, that's just not your way, but something a little more upbeat.  Try it."  He's a guy who bought us each t-shirts with the legend "Life Is Good," and I have always refused to wear mine.  Too embarrassing, too ridiculous, too untrue.  "What's untrue about it?, he always asks.  "We have comfortable pensions, enjoy good health, have justifiable pride in careers well spent, hey, we have each other."  It's just that  . . . oh, I don't know.  I think life is a grim proposition.  He thinks that we come at these things from such a different perspective.  His family was poor, they lived crowded together, education was minimal, and yet he managed to become valedictorian of his high school class, went on to City College, had a junior year Fulbright in Germany, earned two different Masters, and was a highly praised teacher and department head who now enjoys a very good pension.  What's not to like?  Whereas in my home the auto accident death of my father (when I was six)left a bitter rage and despair under my mother's upper class repression and charming social manner, which we felt, me especially crippled and in pain from a fall at four when I broke bones in my back, and thus an object of repressed, but, oh, yes, still there, impatience, in my mother.  "Get over it," he would say, if I were reciting this story to him.  "Your books, your articles, your Harvard PhD, your children, oh, God . . ." and yes, he is absolutely right.  It's just that tragic sense of life, it's got me under my skin, as that song might go, if Chekhov had written it.  And, yes, it would be better if I did not feast on the parade of horrors in the front section of  The New York Times for my breakfast nourishment.  The mess and agony of our imperial wars, our rapacious and corrupt banks, insane system of health care, the plight of the immigrant workers, the ideologies of the conservatives, oh, on and on. Richard, who cares just as much about these matters, has the benefit of a perspective that comes from his years in AA.  Let go and let God-- something like that.  Or as the stern Vietnamese lady in the spa said when I apologized for my ugly misshapen toes before she began a pedicure, "Get over it." I guess that's another way of saying have the courage to accept what you can't change, another AA thing.  Okay, there is really balmy sweet clean air blowing in our open sliding glass windows here in Sarasota, last night's sunset on the clouds was as extravagantly colored and textured as anything Tiepolo ever painted on a ceiling, one of my daughters is about to fulfill a dream as she graduates from divinity school at age fifty three, the first of my grandchildren is getting married this summer to an absolutely charming young woman whom I so much enjoy talking to, one of my sons just wrote me in long hand, no less, a detailed letter about his life and times, and we had dinner last night with two fabulous, intelligent, witty women.  What's not to like?

Out for a walk to the supermarket

The other night a friend exclaimed that her one great worry in the aging process was the moment when she could no longer drive her car.  It doesn't seem to worry too many people here in Sarasota.  The high speed roads are dotted with cars conspicuously moving at low speeds, gearing down to impossibly slow forward motion at intersections, hesitating at making left turns long after any obstacle to the maneuver is still apparent.  The town,  often called "God's waiting room," is said to have the highest concentration of eighty and older in the United States.  When we became snow birds we made the conscious choice to live where walking would produce some other result than circling the lagoon in a park.  It's a gritty area, a condo stuck between the backside of Sarasota's big concrete middle school and the giant parking lot for the high end Southgate Mall.  But we live within a few blocks walking distance to an excellent supermarket, a CVS, the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club, Trader Joe's, and four first rate restaurants, one Japanese, one French, one Italian, and one a high end steak house.  There is also the transfer station for the city bus system (provocatively known by its acronym SCAT!) which will get us to whatever one wants to define as "downtown" or "the center" of Sarasota in a very few minutes. Having spent so many years in New York, Boston, Rome, and Athens, we wanted to depend upon our feet for locomotion.  But almost no one walks here.  From the trainers at the gym to the baggers at the supermarket when we announce that "we are walking," there is the stare of disbelief. I find it a relief not to have to drive.  The town is laid out in a grid of what are often called avenues.  But it is really a miniature Los Angeles with really broad high speed highways on which the through traffic is funneled, where almost none of the smaller streets are more than a few blocks in length, roads leading to nowhere.  Many of these big boulevards are bordered by strip malls so that riding them means not only the tension of high speed driving in packs like a speed car race, but having to gaze at serious ugliness. I manage to avoid the car except when I want to go on the relatively long ride to the north where the Ringling Museum, the Asolo Theater, and the University of South Florida are located--my "culture" destinations.  It took me awhile but I have mapped out a tortuous route of twists and turns on small side streets.  I can go slow, I can look at small houses, trees, kids coming home from school, people out walking baby carriages.  It is such a blessed relief.  The other factor that takes getting used to is that drivers take "Turn Right on Red" seriously, meaning they fling their car at the intersection and around the corner at high speeds, often on cellphones or texting, with nary a thought of a potential pedestrian in the legitimate cross walk, even sometimes when discovering said obstacle, honking furiously.  You must never let your guard down, be ready to gesture in the magisterial fashion of someone very old, and keep smiling.  And I guess in that effort of keeping your wits about you the mental exercise parallels the muscular as you walk.

What a day it has been, what a rare mood I'm in!

Funny how some days just to go right downhill.  Like yesterday, for instance, which was fine enough until I got the idea to look myself up on Goodreads.  This was prompted by a news article that spoke of Amazon's purchase of Goodreads. I hadn't thought of Goodreads since my book came out, and I liked almost all the fifteen reviews posted for my book on Amazon;  Well, that was a bad maneuver.  The readers on Goodreads gave the book a relatively low cumulative score, can't remember now--embarrassment and despair has blurred the memory--but it was  something like 2.6, not good for a straight "A" over achiever.  And the comments!  "All he talks about is sex," "narcissist," "boring," "supposedly he's some world class professor, so he could have written something meaningful, but all that sex, who cares"?  No, no, the inner me was sobbing, you don't understand, I was just describing the way I managed a life in the male world when I was young, or I was just describing the efforts I went to for some kind of male sex life in all those years of marriage.  Hey, didn't you read the introduction?  The sex per se didn't matter, I wrote that in the intro!  There was even a comment from someone who I think was my late wife's niece to say that I must have been a teenaged sexual bully! Was she projecting from the book or her familiarity? My insecurities welled up in me, my need to please, to hear applause, caused my heart to pound. 
I shut the computer and turned to the March 11th issue of The New Yorker  for distraction. The first article was on insomnia, perhaps not the best way to begin, since it's been a problem for years. Not long ago my kids hinted--then encouraged by my husband--flat out told me to get Zoloft, but the psychopharmacologist to whom I was sent, after getting me to describe in one hour my life story, opined that I was already so manic that he was afraid that a prescription from him for Zoloft would just put me over the top.  That encounter has given a little spice to the midnight meditations on my sleepless nights! Next, it was the writer of an article on John Kerry's fluent French who happened to mention Bradley Cooper's fluent French.  That gorgeous hunk? fluent French? learned in a college semester at Aix en Provence? I turned to YouTube, and yes, there he was being interviewed on French television speaking in French!  The comments beneath included one from some French person who claimed that Cooper's French was so good no one would know he was a foreigner.  I looked at the sidebar and there was an item featuring Jodi Foster and, damn, if she didn't speak fluent French on television as well.  My insecurities mounted.  I was once a professor of ancient languages, a cultured man of the world, I have studied all the major European languages, but I don't speak fluently, not in French, nor German, nor Spanish, and in Italian, well,  I lived there long enough to speak it easily, and now without practice haltingly, but fluently? go on a television talk show?  Nowadays when English language study is mandatory across much of the continent,  Europeans upon hearing me speak their language immediately switch to flawless English. My ego was collapsing rapidly as  I turned to the article on the jazz pianist Jason Moran which described his considerable talents as they appeared to him in his early youth. Alas, poor Charles, now so vulnerable and in weakened psychic state, could only fasten on the memory of little Charles visibly trembling, sitting at the piano, after maybe six years of lessons, still not able to get it together for his teacher's recital program.  With a deep sigh I moved on to an article on the life of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she turns eighty, almost my coeval, having lived a life filled-- no jammed, bursting to the seams--with accomplishment.  By now my sense of failure let me identify with the psychological frailty and damage in the miserable life of Aaron Swartz, the topic of the very next article. 
With relief I put the magazine down; it was time for the evening film.   Netflix had sent us Crumb, the documentary of an extraordinarily weird personality with the focus of course on his equally weird comic book art, both of which were marvels of sanity in comparison with his brothers, who were also interviewed at length. So much madness, anger, and manic highs on display for two hours!  Whew! It was now nine o'clock and I was ready to slit my wrists, but luckily I had noted the name of David Boeddinghaus, the piano player in the sound track of Crumb whose soothing ragtime piano I soon found on YouTube where he was playing with Andy Schumm and his Gang.  The wretched fragments of the day were stitched up, and, as Samuel  Pepys would say, so to bed.

Holy Week

In the days of my belief in the Christian dogma Holy Week became more important to me than Christmas. The latter seemed to center more on activities in the home, the decorated tree, the pretty packages beneath, the stuffed stockings, whereas the former was a series of theatrical enactments into which I invested myself.  It all began with Maunday Thursday as the purple vestments of Lent, symbolizing the blood of Christ, were stripped from the altars, and the setting was left bare to enact the truth of the coming death of the god worshiped there.  The theatrical cast to the event dramatically changed when the white hangings and decoration of Easter Sunday were laid on and the congregation moved from the darkness of death into the blaze of light of the Resurrection.  As an altar boy in our church in Iowa City I never failed to make the connection between Sunday Holy Communion service and the details of the Last Supper ("Take, eat, this is my body. . . . This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for thee . . . . ") always investing the offering with magical powers from the transformation which I felt in my youthful body as the alcoholic fumes of the sacramental wine filled my lungs and I became ever so slightly tipsy.  Jesus was in the wine and the wafer and I was filled with His spirit.  So powerful was this impression that seventy years later when I was visiting a Methodist church where the congregation shared in the communion of a loaf of bread and grape juice I declined to step forward, instinctively rejecting the lack of magical power in the grape juice, and uncertain of the fairy tale transformation that might reside in the bread.  I often think over what remains to me of the gospel account of these days even though the literal belief in them has long since faded, I mean Jesus mandating that we humble ourselves for love on Maundy Thursday, his clear eyed understanding of Peter's betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, of Judas' treacherous kiss before the soldiers, his to me startling calling out to his divine father "why have you forsaken me?" as his dying words.  When he declared to Pontius Pilate "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth" what is more startling and powerful than Pilate''s reply "What is truth?" which Nietzsche considered the greatest statement in the whole of the New Testament.  The elements of this account that I mention remain a staple of my understanding of the experience of human death: Life betrays us finally and we do not know why.  The Resurrection is beyond my imagination.

chirp! chirp! meow! meow!

Ted Williams, no, not the late, great Boston Red Sox star, after whom the tunnel to Logan airport is named, but the writer for the Audubon Society, was mentioned in yesterday's Times where he was described as having gone rogue in writing for another publication an article in which he recommended Tylenol as a method of killing feral cats. Killing feral cats!  As one could have guessed, and I can't imagine what happened to his thinking, cat lovers of America went crazy.  Talk about Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents!   I wish him well, but I am not sure the retraction of his initial position will calm the fury.
I have to watch where and with whom I confess it, but I'm with him. Twelve years ago when we moved to our seaside home and began our garden, I was disappointed to discover that there were no song birds, and as we turned over more of the soil, and established beds,  I discovered the pungent and obvious traces of the neighborhood cats.  I had never even heard of feral cats before  There were feral cats everywhere in those days, in part because a neighbor, whose religious affiliation prohibited her practicing birth control, extended that interdiction to the cats spawned on her property.  All I could think of was Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats or whatever that children's book was called, from which I read to my own offspring more times than I want to think.  And with kitty shit came bottle flies, and they were a constant menace whenever we set out our lunch in the shade under the wisteria covered gazebo Richard had built out behind the house.  But then--oh, glorious!--in the fullness of time our little town got coyotes.  Of course, there were the horrified complaints when some one's little pooch was picked up and carried off as its owner walked with it on the beach (I self righteously noted that said dog had been on the beach where dogs are prohibited, and off his leash), but we saw the benefits within six months: the feral cats were gone from our garden. Alas, there are the neighbors' cats.  Until one has encountered the mountains of fecal matter produced by over-fed, fat, sluggish American house cats--nutritious protein products that also feed our nation's impoverished elderly and whose ingredients were once the staples of diet in the southern American hemisphere--one does not understand.   The smell of the refuse can overwhelm the roses, the mess makes garden work unappealing.  Suggesting kitty litter boxes to your neighbors and an in-house life for their pets is like asking them to mutilate the animal physically.
Okay, let's forget about the fecal matter, let's be positive.  The coyotes have given us back the song birds in our garden.  Oh, to sit on the porch in my rocking chair and watch the birds flitting up with straw in their beaks to the nests they are building, swoop down into the fountains and flutter their wings at their bath, to hear them warble and sing, watch them among the beautiful butterflies!  Oh, the Lord is in his heaven and all's right with the world!  Give me coyotes, give my Tylenol, I am happy.
How strange it is to think back to another me; in the early years of our parenthood my wife and I had pets, like any other self respecting mom and dad.  We had two giant golden retrievers, and five black cats.  I cannot conceive of this now, nor remember these creatures as physical realities, but I know this from photographs.  Our children loved it all.  We lived in the real country, the world was our kitty litter box.  The house was a mass of animal hair.  Animals seemed forever to be bounding about the living room, the dogs' tails upsetting martini glasses, or yowling, if they were the cats, when some guest tipsily sat down without looking on the sofa.  Is that really how I lived once upon a time a half century ago? These days I seem to recoil from any household pet I encounter.  Some I have to say are truly overwhelming; my older daughter's dog in New Hampshire when last we met was so excited that he bounded from the house, threw himself at "grandpa" with all the love and affection a giant canine can muster and knocked me flat on the ground.  Better to sit quietly by my fountain and watch the birds.

Same-sex Marriage

On this, the third day of pesach, I have been thinking back to the seders I have attended, all of them so different from the Easter dinners of my youth.  I was startled the first time by the discussions and friendly disputations that swept the gathering, expecting instead the comfortable reiteration of the Biblical detail that was the occasion for the celebration.  Christians tend to recite articles of faith, Jews question the nature of that faith.  It was a revelation to me, that intense discussion and argumentation, and I will never forget it.  Sentimental that I am, I last year bought the Foer-Englander Haggadah just to set out on our coffee table, as though that would somehow be proxy for a seder.  I imagine that the subject of gay marriage must be prominent discussion topic this year whether for or against; it is such a startling reshaping of human relationships.  I remember several years ago when Richard and I were at B.J.'s buying the stuff we were going to make into refreshments for our reception, the check-out clerk, a jolly, tubby woman with a cross around her neck, remarked on the quantity of our purchases. When we told her our wedding plans, she blinked, took in a deep breath, almost visibly went through a kind of transformation, then offered a smile that turned from timid to strong, at the same time saying:  "Well, God bless you."  I look at the pictures of all the couples arm in arm, holding hands, camping out before the Supreme Court in Washington, and think back to my own timidity in demonstrating public affection or even connection with Richard.  I hate myself for allowing the conditioning of my youth to govern my present behavior.  It took me a long time to be able to refer to Richard as "my husband," and when we winter in Florida, a place not known for its liberal sympathies, I always expect some backlash.  None has never been evident, so it's just my paranoia at work again. Initially we decided to get married to obtain financial rights available only to married couples, but the momentum of the occasion carried us to renting a beautiful church, adorning it with flowers, buying cases of champagne, making mountains of hors d' oeuvres and inviting my daughters' minister to officiate. The pastor, in turn, provided a Christian service (including as a kind of equivalent scripture reading the majestic words of the Massachusetts Superior Court ruling on same sex marriage) that infused the occasion with so much genuine love, commitment, and transcendence--I know it sounds corny, but it's all true--that both of us left the church feeling somehow irrevocably changed, and the one hundred fifty guests, who gave us a standing ovation,  as we were presented to them "newly married," were all in tears.  The odd thing, the important thing, was that so many old friends of mine who were bewildered, maybe embarrassed, maybe a little offended, when thirty years earlier at the time of my divorce I set up as a single gay male, subsequently acquiring Richard as a "partner," were transformed at this public, ritual celebration of my sexual orientation and my affections.  Same-sex marriage is so necessary for social cohesion that I cannot imagine anyone resisting the notion.  The idea that two men or two women in a marital union is going to shake the foundations of the institution of marriage in western civilization, considering their puny numbers, considering the damage already inflicted on it by the high rate of divorce and the ubiquity of unwed mothers, not to mention the refreshing sight of so many same-sex couples struggling to get married, is somehow laughable.  I often fantasize a good will gesture on my part of throwing my bridal bouquet from the church porch to Fred Phelps as he stands out there picketing.

Autres temps, autres moeurs

Or as L.P. Hartley wrote in his Eustice and Hilda trilogy, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."  My mind is going in that direction after watching Tom Stoppard's televised version of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End.  Earlier we watched the second season on DVD of Downton Abby to which I have been indifferent from the start but endure to promote marital happiness--my husband, Richard, loves it--because I have refused to watch Homeland or Dexter, his two absolute favorites.  Two years ago we watched the whole of the original Upstairs/Downstairs which took us from January until June, an experience from which it was hard to extricate myself.  I well remember tending the roses in our garden at Hull, Massachusetts, and looking out dimly to see that we were no longer in the Bellamy home in London.  While we were watching we kept up a running commentary that came at the drama from two very different perspectives.  Richard grew up on Staten Island in a working class family; his parents had been born at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. I grew up in a small Iowa town as the son of a prominent surgeon; my parents were, or at least in their fantasy, American "gentry" from suburban Oak Park Illinois, and my mother who had come out in 1910 was an Edwardian belle.  The dynamics of upstairs and downstairs were very familiar to me. I remember criticizing the  crude set erected for the Bellamy family home since it had but one stair which seemed to be used by both servants and children as well as the adults of the family.  No child or servant in my family home ever went up or down the front stair,  a procedural rule that absolutely mystified Richard and made me realize that we really and truly approached life in different ways.  He could not believe the silences, evasions, innuendos, and muttered half-truths that I took for quite natural among the Bellamy family members.  As an adult after lots of therapy I had grown, or so I imagined, to be as carefree and expressive as he thought himself to be, and we both identified with the folks working in the kitchen.  Except of course that I knew in my heart that the workings of the world were pinned on a myriad notions of what one did not do, one did not say, perhaps one did not even think.  I remember early on Richard's asking me if I wanted some tea as he headed to the kitchen to make himself some to which I replied "Oh, don't bother," and when he returned with none for me, I was indignant that he did not understand the locution as meaning that I wanted some, and he has ever after been amused at that aggressive ambiguity.  The two principals in Parade's End endure years of personal misery because they are locked into behavioral patterns from which there is no escape, he to honor his marital vow, but avoid sexual relations with his adulterous wife, she to accept a sexless marriage, refrain from other men, but refuse divorce because she is Catholic.  Neither can speak clearly on this subject to their friends or to each other so that the years are a horror of repression, submission, and depression.  It is difficult to escape the notion that at some level Christopher Tietjens nurses a profound contempt for women, not to mention an English upper class school boy's complete unfamiliarity with them, and that Sylvia's extraordinary cruelty and bitchiness are the acting out against that contempt.  Horrible as they both are, I was drawn to watching the lies, the silences, the repression, the life lived within the gaze of a servant class, what my parents brought to me as a childhood experience.  It worked so well with my having to hide the fact of my gayness back in those long ago days. Still and all, they both seemed to be dreadful people--even if she had the most brilliant taste in clothes--and I was glad when the film ended.  A few days before that we had watched the final episode of the second season of Girls.  Now there's a different generation, for sure!