Au Courant

As I think I mentioned a day or so ago, the people who organize this blog site have introduced various mechanisms to "improve" things for those using it.  As usual I freeze, not exactly in terror, but with the knowledge that I do not understand and indeed will not understand if instructions were made available to me.  Somewhere along the line of the evolution of new technology I dropped out, and I guess it was when universal symbols were introduced to eliminate the potential confusion of a national language.  Since that language usually had been English I was not the least inconvenienced and merrily read "Delete," "Try Again," "Next Page" etc with grace and ease which is not the case when I am confronted by little symbols, the little man holding up his hand, so stylized that I did not even realize it was a little man until it had been laboriously explained to me more than once and yes, still today, I have forgotten.  I own the latest IPhone, IMac, IPad, you name it, and can barely do more than turn the instrument on, always amazed when with others who excitedly describe the intellectual and technical maneuvers available to them with these devices.  I was once comfortable in my space, recognizing like old friends the knobs and switches and routines associated with all the gadgets of my life.  I wander now amidst what I do not recognize as old friendly faces; I still cannot turn on the television or Roku or whatever, since one needs to manipulate three wands or tuning sticks or whatever they are called. I am terrified of rental cars since their various electronic features are not always instantly comprehensible nor the symbols that direct the driver to their use.  Ah, terror, terror--the world grows too unknown too fast for me.  As a soothing idea I think I will make my guests for Monday night southern fried chicken.  There were instructions in the Times with photographs; everything seemed so simple if you just watched out for the hot, hot fat and didn't let it splatter. No advanced technology here, although I know that my daughter if it were she making the platter of southern fried chicken would then "post it on Facebook," something else I have not come to grips with.  "You wouldn't want to, Dad," she once warned me, "the posts are too simple-minded for you."  What do you suppose that means?

Reveille

After my open heart surgery this March I have oftentimes awakened in a dream state.  I once had a friend who dreamed every night in which he was participant in elaborate narratives so intriguing that he was loathe to awake.  I envied him that, but these were no match.  In my dreams I am always fleeing pursuers and in escaping them I take the last desperate maneuver of waking up, and dissolving the narrative plane in which they are embedded, a cheap trick of narrative which always embarrasses me when I realize that I am no longer in the dream.  The angry pursuit and my frightened flight often seems somehow connected with the male companions with whom I went to high school or maybe junior high--they seem younger.  That saddens me when i reflect on it when once awake.  I thought I had successfully mastered that crowd back in the day, becoming quite the popular lad in my class, indeed, in my school.  Quite rationally I know that I was a natural object of hate for fourteen year old males whose normal instincts were being challenged by my insinuating homosexual vibes and whose priests and parents no doubt thundered out a message of damnation for the likes of me.  Still over those months of 1945 and 1946 I brought an energetic magic to making myself attractive and entertaining, and succeeded utterly.  So it is interesting to know that the fun and laughter and camaraderie inspired by my wit and glamor had this underpinning of fear, flight, and desperation. A half hour ago I woke unaccountably in a refugee camp, a Jewish boy, with a big cap on my head, such as one saw in Life magazine articles devoted to the plight of European Jews back in the late thirties, early forties.  I was leaning against a hill, exhausted, surrounded by others who were cooking food over an open fire, repacking satchels, while still others leaned against the edge of the hill peeking over the top as watchmen, I suppose.  I felt desperate, and looked to my left which I always did when I was caught in nightmare circumstances and dimly perceived the white frame of the door that went into my bathroom where the figure of Botticelli's Primavera glowed on the painted shade of a night light. Safe!  When I finish typing this I am going back to bed, turn off my bedside light, try for a bit more sleep, so as to dispel, the deeply unsettling mood that has attended me from my dream state into this darkened early morn

Summer In The City

I come back from New York and read that the blog people have "enabled automatic spam detection for comments," and I have no idea what that might mean so I shall plunge blindly on in my weary and unknowing senectitude.  I did, however, learn to put my boarding pass into my telephone, a giant step forward since previously I have always feared that when the moment came to show the electronic version to some official, the power would fail or in some other way the "system" would falter; electronic technology is not my strong forte. In another way I scored a triumph on this trip: I took taxis everywhere.  This was I admit a triumph of necessity rather than the final defeat of a life long aversion to taxis as being too expensive a means of locomotion.  There is a subset of those surviving from the days of the Great Depression who share this aberrant view of spending money.When in the past I have mentioned my extreme reluctance to hail a cab because of the expense friends and acquaintances will laughingly bring up eccentrics in their families with a similar aversion.  Well, it is gone, all gone.  My walking with a cane precluded long patches on foot, the crowded subways made entry there entirely perilous.  Cabs it was.  Of course, the thrill of adventure was dulled by my regretting the utter lack of exercise crisscrossing Manhattan in this manner imposed.  Ah, well, temperatures were in the high eighties and low nineties the entire time: stroke weather for elderly walkers.  I had made a list of museum shows I wanted to see, and pretty well covered this.  As a friend who lives in Manhattan remarked "The nice thing about New York is that there is always something to see or do."  And I thought how true, and as I began to regret not living there full time I heard my mother's stern admonition "Inner resources! Use your inner resources." when I as a child complained that I had nothing to do when we summered in Vermont. I must confess I am not bored in Sarasota, a proposition few New Yorkers can believe. My hostess who is entering her eighties and still takes the subway complains of being crushed down on the platforms, sometimes unable to board as the throngs thrust her aside exiting and entering.  We drove up the West Side Highway passing a score of giant towers and shuddered at all the people who will soon be pouring out of them to join their fellows on the crowded streets.  And my mind turned to recent attempts to cross through Times Square for an evening of theater.  I guess I should be thankful for the heat dome over the city which sent more people out to the Hamptons or kept folks indoors, and made the streets empty for me.

New york

Well, here I am in the big city and its so hard for my arthritis fingers to type and the script is so small that I think I will call a halt till I get home next Friday.

The Cookies

Remember in 1969 when those guys walked on the moon?  We, my wife and I, and our eldest child were on the Vineyard with friends who had a friend who invited us to watch the event on television.  Our hosts did not have a television set so this seemed ideal.  The woman who invited us was an imperious self important rich, and I mean rich, person whose marital career included among others a European titled gentleman.  This was the real McCoy.  As we were seated before the screen a maid brought in a large scotch cooler container filled with freshly baked cookies which she passed around to our oohs and aahs of delight, and then set down on the carpet next to the mistress of the house.  After a certain length of time my son, who was 12, I believe, got up from his seat and went over to the container and took out a second cookie.  Our hostess sharply reprimanded him in the way no thinking adult would do, no polite hostess would do, and in my mind only a colossal bitch would have managed to pull off.  Still we had to preserve the amenities.  To her remonstrance my son, without visibly seeming to be shaken by her words, replied calmly and coolly:  "Well, I thought that the lady had brought them out here for us to eat and enjoy, so I just helped myself to another."  No apology because he clearly did not see that one was called for.  No acknowledgement of a hierarchy where adults call the shots, where hostesses most particularly do so.  A clear understanding that a large container filled with cookies brought into a room, unless intended to be consumed is nothing but weirdo display and delayed gratification in the power of a dominatrix hostess.  I saw this charming, genial, kindly young man in a new light ever after.  He is a gentle soul, father to two, now grandfather to two, who has always followed as they say his own drummer.  My wife once bought him a used Boy Scouts uniform at the Goodwill Store in Palo Alto, and his fellow Scouts all quickly noted that his was "used," and asked him why, in a sneering tone, to which he genially and comfortably replied: "Well, when you get yours washed, then they'll be used, too, so I just wanted to get a jump on you guys."  That was more or less at the same age, maybe a year or two earlier, since we were still in Palo Alto.  Sticks and stones may break your bones,  and all that stuff; he was a remarkably self possessed child, remains so now.  A peculiar kind of constant good will flows through his veins.  He is not in competition with anyone.  When he was maybe a junior in a very high end  public high school where the best of the Ivy Leagues was supposed to be everyone's target he once quietly said to his mother and me that he really did not like aggression and the competition that went with it, that he was turned off by trying to succeed and that he would never like to live life as his professor father and architect mother did, searching for success, anxious to achieve, proud of our endeavors.  Well, that was that, and he never has.  He is, as the expression goes, laid back, works odd jobs, and remains genial, incredibly intelligent as he always has been, well read, ready to take another cookie if the chance presents itself, but not really caring one way or the other.

The Local Newspaper

For twenty or so years I had a house down by the seashore in a small town south of Boston.  The population was a mix of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and Jews; once a fishing village on a spit of land jutting out into the sea, it now housed a working class community who left town at six or so in the morning for their various commutes. There were two large Catholic churches and a very grand and ornate synagogue.  Everyone was committed to an ethnicity, and had come from other parts of Boston, the Italians from East Boston, forced out of their space when the airport was enlarged, the Jews leaving Roxbury when the southern black migration came to land there.  The town was proud of itself, of its children who played well on the high school sports teams, of the ones who went on to college or professional schools.  The Garden Club beautified the major intersections, there was a very well maintained and supported charitable agency offering clothes and services for those in need, and the town's elderly had a building just for their activities; every year the Catholic Church staged a parade when the priest blessed the sea or the fishing boats or one of those Old World routines that made for cozy headlines nowadays..  Yes, it was cozy, everyone nodded to passersby, the traffic moved slowly except when "the summer people" arrived to open their houses and crowd the streets, although actually everyone took it in good part since these folks brought considerable money into the town.  My being a professor kept people at a distance, afraid they would be embarrassed into saying something stupid.  That was okay with me since I was truly afraid of having to respond brightly to some of the banalities in conversations I overheard in the stores.  Although you could see that there was a lot of financial hardship, it was a lazy kindly mindless life in that town, and I liked gardening and keeping to myself.  Since I am a reader and researcher of chronicles I instinctively subscribed to the weekly local newspaper, providing me with verbal testimony of what I might have experienced by simply walking around and engaging.  I loved reading the paper, the police blotter's amazing record of bizarre crimes and misdemeanors, not to mention sheer craziness, like the woman who called in to report seeing a kangaroo in her backyard!  The photos of the youngsters who won awards, the look of pride and joy on their faces, the wedding announcements, the photos of fiancee and future groom, simple and grand, the planning board, the selectmens meetings, the letters to the editors; I was living social existence vicariously. And most of all, the obituaries.  I am a great devotee of obituaries, surveying the passing parade of American humanity, from the Harvard Magazine's review of our greatest over-achievers, who generally had three careers before going to meet their Maker to those in the Times and finally to those in this little local rag.  So many eighty five, ninety year old women, "a homemaker, whose greatest joy were her grandchildren, who took pleasure in crocheting, and attending church."  I could not part from this experience when I moved out, and now six years later I still subscribe and every week in the relative isolation of Sarasota Florida where the news is all of the condos which developers are putting to block the sun, ruin the traffic patterns, destroy whatever vestiges existed of small town life, where the local newspaper's accounts of local traffic fatalities, stabbings, breaking and entering, and the endless list of persons slain by guns accidentally or on purpose, make me remark to myself "We're not in Kansas anymore Toto," and I turn and pick up the little weekly newspaper at my side for spiritual refreshment and reassurance.

The Footstool

Where I sit and read here in Sarasota I have a footstool, a firm sturdy well built piece which I had covered in wine velvet.  This I did when I had it in my house in Massachusetts, and here it goes very admirably with the wine carpet I recently purchased for the room and a covering of the same color for my bed.  I never look at the footstool but I think back to the circumstance of its arrival in my house.  One upon a time--and, yes, dear reader,  it has assumed a kind of mythical or legendary quality for me--there was a young man who lived in my house.  He had a been a student of mine, a kind of tough guy or, as they say, "a diamond in the rough,"  He came from Colorado, and was on some level unsophisticated and but in some way incredibly subtle and knowing.  His relationship with me was so multi-valiant I would be hard put to dissect it at all easily.  Needless to say, I fell in love with him, and after a year when he was no longer a student, but still in the vicinity, we became lovers.  It was of course a ridiculous coupling, the fifty year old gay professor and the twenty one year old straight student who was passionate, tender, and committed and would never admit to our having a relationship.  He could not demonstrate his feelings and we lived with that and I understood.  But then one day he appeared at the front door with a footstool he had found on the street in someone's trash put out for the dump truck.  "You need this," he said in his serious and determined way.  "You don't have anything to put your feet on when you read."  He cleared his throat as he always did when he had to say something that was costing him emotion.  It was a shabby piece; the fabric covering the frame was early twentieth century bad rooming house ugly which had long since suffered kicks and shoves and who knows what other abrasions.  But I loved him for it, his earnest expression as he told me how I was to use it.  He has long since gone from my life, on to the fatherhood and grown up life that he was meant for.  But I have the footstool and have covered it in velvet a little remembrance of times gone by but not forgotten