Snow Birds Going Home

I guess I should be pleased that I am able to control so many details of my daily life as I make the plans involved in moving myself along with our household from Florida to Massachusetts.  Packing items into my briefcase is the test: will I remember the electronic chargers, the Kindle, my numerous medications and vitamins, my passport, the keys for the apartment in New York, "the New York wallet" with all the museum passes, the subway card, and so on and so forth?  Our condo apartment has been readied for our departure, cleaned up, swept out; I actually feel tranquil and what is more not the least apprehensive for having that feeling.  Is it at last a mastery of my situation or a demented old person's ignorance of all the issues that are involved in this south to north move?  It will be the last time.  We have decided to sell our house up north and move back down here permanently, a decision that fills me with waves of uncertainty.  Florida is not our kind of place, despite the superb temperatures in the winter months: it is a little hard to take the obvious disapproval for same sex marriage one sometimes encounters; I will not go into guns and religion.  And the summers are so hot and humid.  Still we are doing it, moving down here.  Unlike every other move in my life, and there have been many, this one does not generate the enthusiasm of expectation.  I don't know how to describe it.  If I say "it doesn't really matter," I can hear the voice of a friend of mine complaining that her aunt, very much my age, confessed recently--complacently not depressed-- that "nothing really matters anymore."   My friend says that's depression or the onset of dementia.  I don't know.  It seems to me that the goal is to be in a place where you can walk around easily because there is no ice nor snow.  Maybe I'm crazy, but mobility is all.  I can even drive a car down here easily because there are very good side streets for my kind of driving alongside the Los Angeles inspired four to six lane roadways that they call "roads" or "boulevards."  I wonder what it would be like if I lived alongside some one of my children and grandchildren, as though we were in Greece or Italy, old nonno there by the fire or out under the arbor.

Quite the Hiatus!

I wonder if anyone will happen to read this blog, it has been so long since I gave my readers the option of dropping the habit, summer of 2913, to be precise.  Why did I stop?  Because I thought that I should be doing writing more deserving of my talents, like writing a novel, although my history of fiction writing is studded with rejections.  Unlike most aspiring writers, I cannot claim to be the "unsung Milton" or whatever that phrase is, since for the past three decades I have formed friendships with editors, agents, publishers all of whom at one time or another have generously read my storytelling efforts, and all of them have come back with "close, but no cigar."  I've had better luck with memoir writing, and friends sympathetic to my writing craving, have suggested a memoir of my teaching years, something I had begun and abandoned when I concentrated on what became "My Husband and My Wives," where a reader might notice I have larded in lots about the teaching.   So I have been alternatively writing my teaching memoir and an ambitious novel of events largely taken from my life starting with a young married couple with two sons living in some place not unlike Palo Alto and ending with their marital despair played out against the suicide of a favorite student.  On the way the husband discovers his inner penchant for male sex when he is seduced by a young Sicilian waiter one summer whilst working on inscriptions at Selinunte.  That last event, having nothing to do with the real life of the author, though crucial for the narrative arc, is a lavish verbal statement of the author's wishful fantasies, and one of the major reasons he took his hands permanently from the computer keys. Sex fantasies for this eighty four year old male, rather than exciting a flutter, make the psychic eyes scrunch up at trying to make out the dim and completely out of focus bit.  Suddenly converting bits of reality into fiction to make a story seemed like too much work, and the author stopped work on his memoir because, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn (gives you some idea of his originality).  Still and all, I love to write, I love to talk and, because I live in venues where most of my auditors, stare at me quizzically with an explosive "hunh?" as their considered response to my words, I guess doing a blog may resolve all "my issues" (God, I love that phrase!).

I'm Going To Take A Break

The brain has gone dead, and I have to spend my waking hours weeding the garden anyway.  And maybe I will really and truly start the write this novel I have in my head.  I told the plot to a friend who is not given to soft words of encouragement, and she liked it, so maybe in fact it is appealing, or at least to her and to me.  I am tired of reading and writing, perhaps not the best thing to admit whilst also announcing that a novel might be in the works.  Oh, well, let's hope for the best.  Have a Glorious Fourth of July.  We've got rain and mosquitoes, that's for sure.

Time Marches On

“To every thing there is a season,” saith the Preacher, known to most people by the Greek version of the word, to wit, Ecclesiastes.  I was reminded of it again when a dear friend from California who used to be very close to me and my family in our Brookline years remarked on the telephone a few days ago how extraordinary were the dinner parties I gave in our house in the waning days of the sixties and into the early seventies.  Sometimes twice a week sit-down dinners for twenty or more, children, children’s friends, my friends, strangers, a crowd given over to riotous laughter, lots of wine, hilarious singing, hours of merriment, psychic abandon verging on total madness.  I can never stop smiling when I think back to those long ago evenings.  When I was divorced the party moved, often to the seashore where I had bought a large and exceedingly ramshackle summer house (“resembles nothing so much as a third class pensione in Sicily,”  my two Italian friends would laughingly exclaim whenever they visited.) “It was the dirtiest house I was ever in,” a Newton friend confessed years later when after selling it I used to wax nostalgic for its, I guess I would have to say, dubious charms.  Funny how all the wine, laughter, dope, sex, and general hilarity from morning til night covered over a multitude of imperfections. After I sold it, the new owners tore it down before it fell down, thus sparing me an ever present memorial to younger and happier days.  Fate and the financial markets brought me and my husband to another house in the same little town, in much much better condition, a kind of permanent home, with Florida as the winter getaway, the northern abode replete with an exceedingly large and elegant garden, terrace, and manicured miniature lawn.  Life here, forty years on, is all very sedate, charming lunches out in the shade under the wisteria, quiet evenings watching Netflix, a hint of the gracious life.  And, yet, there are the neighbors.  The house in the old days was in an area despised and neglected, somewhat deserted.  Absolute quiet reigned, broken only by the water’s action.  As Arnold so famously described it:
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Our new house is set in the midst of houses, as a typical low income summer beach town generally looks.  What more than anything else characterizes the place for me in this the second decade of the twenty first century is that everyone on all sides seems to have got themselves a small shrill barking dog.  We might as well be in a kennel.  From morning til night it is not the grating roar but the high pitched shriek, over and over again, from thousands of furry throats.  If they do not have a dog, then they have at least two cats, an animal which, considering its small size, can generate an amount of fecal matter that I would have ascribed to an elephant.  In the spirit of the town, feckless, unlettered, rude and untaught, the cats roam freely, most often to their preferred toilet area which is our spacious yard.  I sometimes think that this is god’s punishment for caring so about the garden and for being so proud of it.  Whatever, it makes for a certain sense of being beleagured, which reminds me often enough that these are certainly not “the good old days.”

Margaret Thatcher

I have been reading Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, or at least the first volume which will take us up to the Falklands War.  I am not much of a political person, enough to get through The New York Times every day, and read Truthout often but not always, as well as articles that deal with politics in such publications as The New Yorker Magazine.  I somehow feel that whatever happens is way beyond me.  I am also not very good at understanding economics, having never studied the subject formally at university.  Since public life is nothing but theories of economics clashing with one another I am very sorry for this, although on another level, I can’t bear to think about the subject even as vague as it is for me.  Moore’s biography requires a great deal of understanding of economics, macroeconomics, monetarism, supply side, finance, and on and on. The exciting feature of this biography is its detailed exposition of the day to day confrontation with the issues of governing that make up the life of a Prime Minister.  Fascinating!  I marvel that Mrs. Thatcher, trained as a scientist, mastered economics sufficiently to hold her own in discussion with the experts and her ministers.  Perhaps I am misled, but I am struck with how even handed Moore seems to be in presenting the Prime Minister.  His range of quotation from those who observed her and worked with her is extraordinary and one is left with a very detailed picture of the situation in which she found herself, her challenges, her ideas, her blunders, her successes.  On one level she comes across most definitely as a shopkeeper’s daughter with a strong sense of propriety, an unwillingness to move outside and beyond the culture in which she was raised.  She is always the outsider among the Tory party’s aristocrats, she has an instinctive empathy with lower middle class people and their aspirations.  She was raised as a Methodist; she was not an intellectual, so she did not stray far from the strictures and structures of her religion and her childhood home.  Her strength and her failing was that she thought that there was an answer and that she had it, coupled with a housewife’s concern to make things neat and tidy. Economists say there has to be a trade-off between equality and efficiency; she clearly voted for the latter, and enraged the public who cared first and foremost about the quality of citizens‘ lives.  She was tough and strong, but then again vacillating, and sometimes wildly emotional.  She drove her associates crazy, but there were legions of them who admired her immensely.  One doesn’t get the sense of a lot of love, but there is no question about her devotion, her sense of duty.  She took refuge in her ideologies, but could be argued out of a position.  She loved to dance, she loved clothes.  The story of this particular Prime Minister that Moore has to tell is fascinating, this lower middle class small town girl landing,  good looking woman that she was, landing into the midst of a group of males whose education at single sex English boarding schools made her a monstre sacré whether she had that in mind or no.

Writing A Novel

I want to write a novel.  This is not the first time the urge has gripped me.  In fact, I have written four novels, I believe, none of which have been published, although I cannot claim that I am like some unsung Milton or whatever the expression is, unknown in a country hamlet, since from the moment I published my first non-fiction book on ancient epic poetry with Doubleday I have been introduced to numerous people in the publishing industry, have dined with publishers, editors, agents, all of them of great renown.  Of the books that I have published the first "went over the transom" as they say, i.e., not solicited by Doubleday, the second commissioned by that outfit, the third suggested to me by La Terza in Italy, the fourth solicited by the author/editor John Gardner for a series he was contemplating, the fifth born from an idea in the head of senior editorial staff of Hyperion, and this sixth and last picked up as a second thought after a twenty year hiatus by a publisher and editor who had been shown it and rejected it in the first instance.  But no one wants to publish my novels, although almost all of the welcoming and helpful people engaged in those other publications were kind enough to read my manuscripts.  I am sure they read them in the first instance because they recognized that I knew how to write and were thus trolling for new fiction.  But, since such a large variety of people in the business politely declined, I have to believe that I don't have the chops for fiction, although one more sympathetic than the others once said to me that if I were to come by his office, he would be happy to sit down with me and go over the list of agents and select those who might like my stuff, and so after months, maybe years of submissions and rejections I might strike pay dirt.  I have known persons who submitted a manuscript for inspection to agents and had it rejected twenty odd times before finding one who would take it on.  It is not that I would hate the repeated rejections, although I am not good with that.  I have a friend who is an actress who for the past fifty years has faced that over and over again in audition, who despite it, gamely goes out again and again and indeed finds work, but oh, the first polite moment of rejection.  I find that hard.  "This is a great story, but I don't think we have a niche for it."  "You characters come alive in the very first page, but somehow, the implications of their story is lost on me." "This is more like Junior Adult fiction, not for us, and, no, I really can't recommend anyone who does that sort of thing." I don't send my stuff around, I don't self publish.  Why?  I am lazy for one.  I want to write and send the stuff away and have someone else deal with it.  Then, I am a serious ecologist, well, of sorts, and I am not sure the world needs these works of mine, cluttering up the environment of the mental/aesthetic life of the community.  But, there's another story brewing in my head, a shameless rearrangement of the facts of my life which I covered in last year's memoir.  I am getting to the point that I want to write it.  I may have to stop these blogs for a few months.  My career calls!

Less Is More

My happy days on the Cape began and ended with a wait on the dock at either end for the ferry. It was in such shocking contrast with the the rest of the experience that I cannot erase it from my mind.  It has been several years since I was in Boston’s harbor area, where the old overhead highway has been replaced by a grand pedestrian boulevard covering over the traffic tunnel below ground.  Quite splendid and many blocks long.  Any sense of majesty, calm, or grandeur, befitting a great and historic city like Boston, is immediately destroyed by the absolute hordes of tourists milling about waiting to board tour buses or filling the shops and cafes of a more or less designated tourist area, that is, the famous Quincy Market, designed for them to get a sense of “history” “old” “historic” and all the other things that come to mind when you think Boston.  Of course, tourism is a major source of revenue for Boston and New England and we cannot fault it; I guess one must just stay away.  It happens the world over.  I think of the crush of humanity being marched mindlessly through the Vatican Museum who came not for the treasures on display therein but because Dan Brown’s novel talks of it.  Well, it helps pay for the cost of the architectural treasures, so be it.  I left  Provincetown on the very same ferry on which I arrived four days later, but this time proceeded by a long lunch and stroll about the town. Driving to the dock parking facility required driving through the throngs filling the streets of a density and indifference to the car that reminded one of any major Indian city.  Then we joined them as we walked to our restaurant.  The crowds of visitors were overwhelming, back and forth, to and fro, densely packed, looking at nothing really, registering the look of “Oh, here we are in famous Provincetown.”  Indeed, the shops and houses along the way were dressed up to be so quaint or so camp that it more or less defied rational looking.  Provincetown is one of the gay meccas of the United States, and the jubilant crowd was rejoicing in the decisions handed down the day before from the Supreme Court.  It was good to see so many gay men and women walking hand in hand with the ones they loved, or embracing them publicly. It was also amusing to contrast the Boston tourist crowd, usually groups of four, mother and father bulging with fat, and two tubby tots with hands full of candy working on the avoirdupois and the Provincetown male couples, dressed so neatly, such trim bodies, such elegance, perhaps a little bit over done, but working to preserve a look of youth and beauty, but overall, we shuddered. It was just the crowds, the milling.  Less is more, said Mies