The Golden Years

I have just finished reading an online communication from AARP which showcased twenty five celebrities in the their seventies whose photos reveal that they are remarkably well preserved.  This follows upon The New York Times Sunday Magazine issue with a title something like "The Fountain of Youth," in which a number of persons are featured who are well into their seventies and eighties who are still running races, writing books, making new discoveries, oh, any number of remarkable triumphs in which they defy the natural expectations of their age.  Except that the idea is that theirs are the "natural," whereas the rest of us are pikers, cannot manage to achieve any of these triumphs.  This goes hand in hand with The New York Times' shift in their Sunday issue to focus on persons and places and housing tp which there is no way that the average person would have any access.  Now, of course, one must not imagine that their readership is the average person, and of course they focus on New York City and its environs, but still the lavish decor, the expensive houses, the ravishing gowns of the persons photographed at society events all these things are so beyond even the well-to-do average New Yorker.  I have a friend in New York who says that she and her husband live on half a million dollars.  They are in my estimation "very comfortable" but not wildly "extravagant," and clearly they could not live the life that the Sunday Style, Housing, Travel sections envision.  But forget about money.  What I resent is the present day emphasis on the very limited group of people who defy the expectations of their geriatric cohort and make it seems like the rest of us, the slow, the halt, the lame, and the retired are at fault for not being engaging, and engaged, and up to the mark with new ideas and job plans.  Yes, I do get out to the gym, yes, I do walk without a cane, yes, I travel often to Europe, yes, I keep up with the latest, and I am in some sort of way enjoying life.  But I feel more like a latter day Norma Desmond remembering the heartwarming and enchanting hours with my glorious children when they were youngsters, the wonderful parties, the martinis one after another, the great classes I taught when fate delivered so many bright students, and, yes, the fantastic sexual partners that enkindled many an otherwise lacklustre afternoon, and I am in a kind of a funny way waiting for my comeback call from the studio, but unlike Norma I know that it will never come.  So I do indeed resent all these glistening people of seventy five or eighty all these enchanting pent house apartments in Manhattan gleaming and sparkling and listed at ten or fifteen million, and all the exciting recipes, and restaurants, and new bars.  I know that the paper's readership does not want the somewhat drearier truth, so I guess I should cancel the subscription

Making My Way Around Manhattan

My last visit there was a little scary, because I was so insecure on my feet.  Midday, still somewhat off balance from the jet lag I went down to Times Square to get tickets for a play that evening.  On the 59th street platform waiting for the train there was some delay with the result that an inordinate crowd of people were gathered to enter and exit.  These people, almost all of them much younger than I, seemingly much taller, with bodies strong and muscular, outfitted with back packs and large purses or totes, flowed furiously to and fro and I discovered that my declining body mass, height, and general frailty left me to be no more than a tattered leaf blowing in the autumn winds.  I was reminded of a friend my age who absent mindedly followed her instinct to crush herself into the subway car as the very last person and the next stop the crowded disgorged knocking her to the ground and breaking her hip.  I stepped back and waited for another train which indeed came soon and had far fewer occupants.  Of course the stairs to and from the platforms is always a challenge because young people run up and down the stairs letting their baggage bump out at whoever is nearby, and no one is being mean, it's just that when you're young in our culture you don't see or care about the little old people hanging for dear life on to the railings on the stairs.  Of course many people have long since given up riding subways for the dubious pleasure of standing for hours waiting for buses.  In Times Square the mass of movement was equally terrifying, and I vowed that when I returned that night for the theater I would find a more circuitous route to the theater to avoid 42nd Street and 7th Avenue.  This I did and took a cane for good measure and the trip was successful so much so that when I left the theater I walked in the pleasant Manhattan night all the way up Sixth Avenue  to 57th Street to catch the crosstown bus.  The next day I was coming from the Metropolitan Museum and waiting for the M11 to take me down Columbus.  When it came I had to laugh.  There were two ladies with walkers taking the right front side for the elderly and handicapped and I grabbed the last on the left, between two challenged walkers with canes, and then another fellow got on who was so unsteady and determined to sit that he pushed and shoved--there was nothing else to do--between the ladies with the walkers.  Meanwhile two sets of the new Upper West Side parents got on with their giant baby carriages which also seemed to  carry half the tot's wardrobe and luncheon aboard. This took some manuevering just to get past the walkers and canes at the entrance, and then just some space to shut the contraptions up and stow them under the seats.  But the great thing was nobody got exasperated.  Life is now lived very much i slow time on Manhattan buses which pass through the neighborhoods where children are coming into existence and old people are not dying off.

Disgraced

I recently saw a revival of Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced" in New York which is resonating in my brain still.  It is the story of a young successful lawyer on the way to making partner married to an artist who invite some friends who are also colleagues over to dinner.  He is the son of parents born in India, although due to the Paritition his mother was actually born in what is now Pakistan.  He himself, although a nominal Muslim, is not practicing because his education has left him deeply skeptical of the claims of all religions.  His wife is a pretty blonde WASP of no religious conviction either.  The story turns on her urging him as a liberal Upper East Side American would, to join a group of lawyers who are raising a defense of a Muslim cleric held on charges of terrorism.  He is reluctant to do this, not wanting to get the "taint" of being a Muslim around his office which is from his perspective a den of Jewish "old boys" whose sensitives toward Israel, as he sees it, would not take kindly  to Muslim intervention.  The WASP can't see the dilemma, the Muslim realizes that he is tarred with that brush if he does not always leave no doubt of his indifference to that faith.  A young angry nephew, alienated by America, and newly aware of his Muslim identity,  browbeats him into doing what the wife has been urging.  The friends who visit are a Jewish art dealer who is promoting the wife (and at a Paris art association outing sleeps with her) and his African-American wife who is also a young person on the make in the lawyer's office.  Too much scotch turns the evening ugly, with snide ethnic comments all around, terrible anger, and ultimately a hideous moment of out of control wife beating.  It is a very sad playing out of the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the WASP, the supreme Unmarked in our culture, urges her husband into a dangerous identification with a Muslim cause which has nothing to do with him but she thus "marks" him as Muslim, and thereafter his Jewish bosses do the same for that same association, thus profiting his fellow lawyer the African-American woman whom he "marks" as using the fact she is a "woman" and an "African-American" to leap frog ahead of him in promotions.  I have given a bare bones recital, but in the dramatic working out of every person's fight against someone else's definition, all the while making each his own definition of the other, you get the play's important story.  A long speech by the young nephew radicalized and aggressively Muslim about how his kind will never fit in is really the cry of the young immigrant as he confronts the aggressive energy of the older receiving population which insists upon defining each new person with a mark of identity as they struggle to make one of their own.

Home Again

The trip to Greece was wonderful in every way, far more than I imagined when I thought it up.  Despite the constant evocation in the press of a country on the skids, dirty, desperate and graffiti-encrusted, I found the downtown parts of Athens where we walked to museums and archeological sites, full of storefronts filled with goods, people well dressed and going about with animation.  I was most of all surprised at the change of attitude in those who must serve the foreign tourist, what we would call the hospitality industry, I guess. Unlike their exceedingly dour bretheren of yesteryear, they were almost uniformly young, attractive, outgoing and friendly, spoke excellent English, and exceedingly helpful.  Two young males I remember  best (naturally!).  One, a waiter on the rooftop restaurant at the Benake Museum, a very young fellow with serious mein who was just in his offbeat way cute enough to win our hearts, gave us serious advice on the Greek wines on offer, announcing that he was in his own way an "oenologist"-his word-. compelling enough that the young glamorous member of our party had to be restrained when she wanted to give him her address in the States.  The other, in a small town in the Peloponnesos, was the evening attendant at a very interesting museum of modern scale models of Archimedes' various inventions who in a sort of unblinking Asberger manner, lectured intelligently on the items, in a very good English which he claimed to have learned on his own because "the schools are stupid," all the while brushing the unkempt hair out of his unbelievably beautiful eyes like any techie in Sunnyvale.  The monuments we saw filled my heart as I wanted them to with a powerful nostalgia for glorious trips and stays in Greece from yesteryear; I even staggered up to the heights of the ruins at Mycenae on the arm of my cousin, amusingly enough inviting applause from other tourists seeing so old and feeble a specimen shambling along!  I invited a delightful young couple, archeologists, to a dinner on a roof looking up at the Parthenon shining bright in the night light, and we talked of times we had known together and the archeological world of which they were part and my own desire to see Greece on this trip one last time before I died,  and the young man congratulated me on speaking frankly of my anticipation of death, saying that his father dead that past spring had not managed ever to bring the subject up, nor his mother who sat daily with her rosary beads.  I don't think you can study ancient Greek literature for very long before realizing that death is the great subject the Greeks found to write about, implicitly cancelling out life's meaning and thus endowing those who make this discovery with a burning determination to live every moment to the fullest, to know that every choice and gesture counts here and now, since they have no real future.

Greece

On Sunday I am flying to Greece for ten days.  I imagine that this will be the last visit of my lifetime, and I wanted to see the monuments and the museums for one last time.  It was August 1962 when I first went, and I will never forget the blue of the sky nor the sharp, clear light that made the edges of buildings so startling.  The architecture of antiquity is more about light than one might imagine.  From that time I have always loved the food in Greece, I used to enjoy the simple service of restaurants, everything so unpretentious.  I loved that the waiters were always asking if you liked the water that they served out in the villages, where every town's water had it own taste.  I loved the waiters in the small eating places counting up the numbers of pieces of bread the customer had taken from the common basket when toting up the bill. I loved that when you called for the bill and the waiter said "immediately," it was a kind of signal to relax since it would never ever be coming soon.  And I truly believed that was because the Greek restauranteur somehow thought he was genuinely the host and hated to impose a bill.  I remember once when on a trip to Delphi I waited later and later for the bill, finally got fed up and left, and the next day as I was walking through the street the waiter came out of the restaurant with all geniality to hand me last night's bill!  I loved evenings from the terrace where I stayed in Athens when I lived there looking at the extraordinary light sunset purples  soaking into Mt. Hymettus.  I hated the cars in Athens, the grotesque custom of parking on the sidewalks when other space was not available, hated the smog and thank god that I lived above it.  I enjoyed the random company of a great number of young men, just chatting them up on the street, to which they responded, at times quite well aware of my preternatural fondness for young male flesh.  The taxi drivers I learned to avoid, since as a group they were the most devious in setting their charges.  Shop keepers were stern, the bread was always weighed, a kilo was a kilo and that's what you got, even if it meant cutting a piece of another loaf and shoving into the bag, the lamb roast had extra bones added to make up the weight whether you liked it or not.  Service with a smile was an unknown.  There was a stern honesty there just as the classical lines of the architecture and the light.  Times have been very hard for the Athenians in recent years I have heard dire tales of the poverty's degradation of the city ("it looks just like the south Bronx did twenty years ago now"), and my husband is not going with me because he cannot face seeing that change.  Well, I am going for the Parthenon in sunlight, the Parthenon in sunset, the agora, the theater of Dionysos, oh, I can go on and on.  I will tell you all when I come back and start up again sometime after October 26.

Life Is Really Not About Reading Beautiful Poetry

Occasionally I open the junk file of one of my email addresses, and read the stuff sent there.  The range of subjects is small: penis enlargement offers, treatments for male impotence, and notices of unexpected funds, legacies, etc., usually in some country in Africa to which unaccountably enough I am heir or legatee or whatever.  In its own way it reminds me of the drive up the east coast of Florida and into Georgia and the Carolinas, where there are two signs that alternate with each other along the route:  Sex Shop and The Bible Saves.  I know that the times that I have overcome my intellectual scruple and bought a lottery ticket I went about in a delirium of expectation in the days remaining before the drawing, so pleasantly anticipating the grand house, the first class accommodation on international flights, grand gifts to my children and good friends.  So I suppose it must be the same for the man anticipating the arrival of a package containing the penis enhancer, envisioning how different he will suddenly appear to his girl friends, and the guys at the gym, or the impotence treatment, same thing.  And they are no different from the pleasing sensations that the thought of a roadside stop at a sex shop can induce in a weary traveler, just as those spiritually tired and heavy laden can imagine that a new and heavenly path will be open to them.  On the other hand, I once knew a fellow when I was a university student, and how I met him I don't know, but he was either recently discharged from the Navy or still on active duty, all I remember was his wearing navy whites whenever we met, or when he had his clothes on.  Other times he was nude, sometimes in the company of several male friends of his, and what was remarkable and I have never forgotten this.  He was well over six feet tall, or maybe that just seemed true to me who was only five eight or nine, and broad of shoulder, handsome, a bold aggressive feel about him, a real guy, for sure.  And, yet, what amazed me was that he had the smallest penis I have ever to this day seen, and still more amazing he seemed indifferent to this, had no hesitation displaying this dramatically miniscule item.  And then there was this with whom I used to swim a kid about two decades younger than myself.  Although he was, as they say, very well endowed, he seemed entirely indifferent or unaware of the package he had on display.  One day throwing caution to the winds I remarked that I wished that I could come out from the showers to the locker room with a similar display, and to my surprise he calmly suggested that I should take the occasion while under the warm water to rub myself ever discreetly so as to produce some engorgement and my goal would be achieved.  Who, I thought to myself, would imagine that he had ever envisioned such a strategy?

Public Urinals

Today's New York Times news article featuring the arrest of two males for lewd behavior in a public restroom took me back to a long ago day when males who were sexually attracted to other males were desperate for venues where they could advertise that interest and find someone congenial with it.  Public lavatories were the place where a man who quite naturally has his penis out of his unzipped pants and in his hand could with a little adjustment and restraint turn into a man with an erection which he is stroking, the transformation suggests an entirely other agenda.  That's lewd behavior in the eyes of the police and get you days in the poky.  When I was eighteen and living in Manhattan, a rube from Iowa, sights of such men in public lavatories frightened me, either because "they didn't do such things in Iowa" or my own attraction to stroking erect penises came into play and scared me.  I tended to repress any attraction and moved on out of the urinal area.  As I grew more sophisticated I grew to understand that lots of lavatories were simply de facto meeting places for men who had nowhere to go to meet another male sexually.  These were the deeply closeted males, in a rigidly repressive society, the fifties, for instance, who might desperately crave even the merest hand-penis or mouth-penis contact to satisfy a deep well of desire, men who could never make so open a statement of desire as to walk into a gay bar.  Sad and desperate but all very true.  As a professor who used many a public toilet I can remember in the sixties the ground floor mens room in the Stanford University Library where the excessive foot traffic suggested other uses, the Boston Public Library's ground men's room where someone with a legitimate call to urinate sort of had to fight his way through the assemblage there for other purposes, the fourth floor of a certain classroom building at Boston University only in the evening, which I discovered once when I was teaching a night class on that floor. Nowadays it is sad that there are males out there who still cannot understand that it is now okay to meet other gay males socially and proceed to the dating game from that.  From the ones I have known these are male so damaged by their families, so thoroughly made to hate themselves and their desires that they have made a complete separation of their personalities and daily comportment from their homosexual desires.  A quick orgasm and out of the place has a kind of sordid logical alignment with the quick dump one can take in the stall of the same room, then relief, clean up, on to big and better things.  The orgasm should never be left behind dismissed and forgotten, it should be the beginning of a whole new life. But then there are the "happily" married men, along with their wives "pillars of the church," whose brief moment of ecstasy in the stall stinking of urine has to make do for the other side to the relationship they know at home and support on Sundays. All so sad.