Sarasota

I am now finishing my second summer in Sarasota, having abandoned our large garden by the seashore in Massachusetts as the work of gardening finally became too taxing and the garden lovingly built up over ten years was too ravishingly beautiful to consider demolishing so as to make life easier.  No, it had to be given one last kiss, then turn the head away, just like all those tearjerker lovers' partings in the black and white films of my youth.  Life down here is lived indoors much of the year with central air.  My doctor cautions me against prolonged exposure to the extreme heat and humidity but I see old geezers hobble out onto the courts at the tennis and exercise club we belong to, so I don't quite understand.  My walking is done on a treadmill, however, in air conditioned settings which is just as well as I can get up some steam by holding on to the side rails, whereas otherwise I am too tipsy to keep erect whilst walking.  Walking near our condo is not really a safe option even if one is erect and stable since the intersection of what are laughably called streets down here actually merge two super highways with nominal pedestrian crosswalks, a hazard at best considering that turn right on red is the law and half the people doing so are texting or otherwise electronically engaged. Not to mention that half the drivers are, I assume. southerners out in pickup trucks with a loaded revolver on the seat next to them---this is all surmise, but nothing about their looks, political attitudes expressed in the paper, would lead me to imagine otherwise.  I could set up the regime of walking the two or three city blocks through a parking lot to an adjacent shopping mall and arrive at an air conditioned concourse where I could walk daily for half an hour, what the docs say we all must do. Well, we chose to live in an area that is scruffy, close to shops, near an urban bus network, but it wasn't exactly urban in our sense.  Still, I have become rather old and tipsy, and get most of my exercise, my so called "work out" with a trainer at the gym and a balance instructor at a balance clinic.  Now if I could just hit that mall twice a week I would be the latter day Jack LaLaine or whatever his name was.  Florida, land of sunshine.  Ahem, you will note that I never go out of doors, but if you would study the medical records of my dermatologist you would see why this skin cancer ridden old carcass is strictly enjoined from taking in the sun.

Your Password, Please

Everywhere I read they are writing about Pokemon.  What is Pokemon?  Our nation's political figures are all sending out messages on Twitter.  What is Twitter?  I never signed up for Facebook, which I gather is a big thing.  All my grandchildren, well, everybody, really are on Facebook, and this, according to my son, is why there is complete silence from all of them. They assume I am "following them on Facebook."  There's a site for sending everyone photos.  I was with one of my sons the other night when his son sent an image of the young man and his wife all dressed up and out on the town at a concert.  What fun to know that your progeny can get dressed up of a Saturday night, hire a baby sitter, and take in the theater.  I am completely out of it.  There are several other entries to communication I haven't even mentioned names like Snapchat and Instagram because I don't know their names, but sometimes catch a syllable or two when overhearing conversations at lunch or dinner. The bigger social problem for me is that I have the most horrible memories of evenings at the house of friends when they brought our their slides of photo albums of recent trips, a distant friend's wedding. These new sites,  I might as well be deaf and dumb, sitting in the corner.  Don't mind grandpa, he's harmless.  It's much the same with the television.  I just cannot master those various sticks with all the buttons, the open sesame to all the images in that big screen sitting in our living room. The times my husband has gone out of town and left me elaborate handwritten instructions I have almost immediately summoned up nothing but snow. Well, at least, as my husband observes condescendingly "you handle the new IPhone very well."  Hey, I have had a Mac product since 1984, written books and articles with it.  I am not dummy. But I do see the slippage.  The other day when trying to open up the message site to send a text off to my granddaughter, my efforts were blocked by a bar appearing on the screen which said something like Googlechat or something like that demanding that I enter a password.  Well, that's the end of texting, at least on the computer, I murmured.  But somehow it has never reappeared, but I will not be lulled into false security.  I realize that this is the way my world will end not with a bang or a whimper but with my inability to come up with a password for my every action.  Texting today, farting tomorrow. You just wait!

Sin And Error

It is interesting, (a neutral word, more fitted to the cocktail hour perhaps than serious discussion) that the ancient Hebrews just as the ancient Greeks found a similar concept at the heart of wrong doing.  The words are chet or chait in the Hebrew and hamartia in the Greek.  These words both evoke the scene of shooting at a target and missing the mark.  We who are raised in the Christian tradition, whether believers or not, have embedded into out thinking the notion of sin.  The English language word very specifically refers to ego action of one sort or another, its root cognate with that for "to be."  In other words sin defines the act of someone willful, demanding recognition, "here I am, " so to speak.  Some translate sin as the knowing transgression of the laws of god, probably a pretty powerful rendition of knowing transgression, just as putting out a cigarette on the White House upholstery before being ushered into the Oval Office to meet the President is, too.  In any case, the Greek word hamartia describes someone aiming at a goal and missing it, in other words, a mistake, an error.  This is a very different construct posing a frail person not altogether in control of his actions.  Missing the mark is tragic.  Oedipus moved heaven and earth to escape the oracular pronouncement that he was doomed to murder his father and marry his mother, but in the end as he was trying to escape his doom and flee Corinth and went on the road, killed this old guy at the crossroads after which he went on into Thebes and married the newly widowed queen.  We the onlookers put two and two together and you have to ask why didn't Oedipus.  And we have to cry out in sympathy for a guy trying so hard to escape his doom to the extent that it came up and hit him in the face.  The target hit him in the face, really.  Altogether different from Adam and Eve who were specifically told to avoid the fruit of the Tree in the Garden of Eden and then followed the seductive advice of the serpent and ate the apple.  They were told not to, and then they did it anyway.  That is the delicious thrill of sin; it's not a mistake, it's a deliberate act.  There is something so exciting and sexy about the willful disobedience of the laws of god that those who surrender to the fatal intoxication of a misreading of the signs on the ground will never know.

Life Is Hard

I have lost the capacity for walking easily and what that means when I travel is wheelchairs at the airport.  It makes a lot of sense particularly at a place like Atlanta which is huge, has underground shuttle systems and on the departure level the corridors are thronged with people moving urgently with their luggage and not for a minute walking politely on the left or on the right.  I never thought I would come to this, but there is a lot I didn't foresee which is now part of my everyday life.  One of the positives of the new me is the great group of people I have met, if only superficially, who push the wheelchairs.  It is hard work, a thankless task, and they almost invariably are caring people, quick to be sure their client has a chance to use a restroom and pointing out good places to grab a sandwich within the terminal.  I couldn't figure out a tip system, and sort of worked out that given the horrible wages that unskilled labor can expect, I give a five dollar bill for each segment from gate to gate on my trip.  They always seem surprised and grateful and I am happy to do this.  The disparity of our situations is mind boggling, as I perceive it.  In keeping with this perception, I have also decided to tip thirty percent as a minimum in a restaurant; my son who is in the restaurant business says thirty five when I am dining with non drinkers who bring the bill of the table way down.  I wish there were some systematic way to get money for lunch into the lives of the legion of famished youngsters in this country who have no food at home and no school lunches over the summer.  And why can't the USA fund some kind of housing for the homeless?  Yes, there will always be moochers and losers out there, but there are millions of abandoned mothers, children, shell shocked vets, damaged persons trying to deal with a drug  problem, and they all need help.  I was about to say legitimate, but, hey, the moochers do, too.  Living on the dole is a desperate measure, and as a Christian, even if I do not believe in the literal truth of the Christian story,  I know that redemption for one and all comes through charity (the word means "love," by the way, for those whose knowledge of Greek is shaky).  Not from developers building more tower condos in downtown Sarasota where I live and despair of the city's future.  Last Thanksgiving I was seated next to a property developer at dinner; I almost choked, although as someone born to privilege I guess I have no right to take a position--pampered whore from birth, as many would note.

Remembering Sydney Nova Scotia

Lying in bed this morning suddenly overcome with the unwelcome dark of the approaching winter months at six, clearly at six in Florida, I cast my mind back to sunnier memories, not even later in the day, hence the sun closer to the arctic circle in Nova Scotia.  Sydney is a small town with a demonstrable downtown of shops, especially agreeable to me who grew up eighty years ago walking the streets of such a town holding on to my mother's hand, darting into one storefront after another, always being greeted by my first name.  The grotesque strip malls of Florida well, half of America, are unknown here, downtown life is not lived in parking lots driving to stores that are ten feet from one another.  Sydney's mode of shopping encourages intimacy, people on the street say hello, there isn't that steel reserve of meeting where men are all carrying loaded guns.  Makes you realize how unfriendly and isolated Americans are.  And there is abundant chance to meet and greet on the streets of Sydney; people are all out walking also obviously for their exercise, they have the practice of a gym routine when they get down onto the boardwalk that fronts the water, a body of water that is a large divide, a lake as it were for the community.   Folks are walking on the boardwalk all day,, what is more, middle aged, fully constructed and padded older couples march along vigorously hand in hand as they have been doing since they dated in high school.  Charming!  My imagination, of course, wishing to endow the people of Sydney with all things sweet.  Sydney, land of enchantment..  And an extraordinary Lebanese restaurant with truly authentic cuisine is just above the boardwalk.  The proprietor are two young men of such stunning physical beauty as to make my daughters and me gasp.  Ah, the men of the Near East!  My grandson in law tells me that the Lebanese not French speakers as you might expect constitute the second largest ethnic class after the Anglophones in Nova Scotia.  There are charming early twentieth century houses sitting looking out onto the bay, newly restored, their hardwood floors gleaming, the old wooden door frames glistening with polish, new kitchens, and so on and so forth.  One of my daughters and I were momentarily aroused by my son to buy a house for sale and thus have a large family home where we could all visit in the summer.  I guess the new baby was a psychological draw, our hearts jumped but then stopped and lay still when we thought of the winter and draining the pipes, and the furnace going off, real life intruded.

Daddy, Dad, Father, Pops

I know, I know, it's a bore when a parent goes on and on about his or her special wonderful offspring, but I cannot help it.  I so rarely get to spend--what do they call it? ah, yes,--quality time with my children, some of them almost never.  Especially my oldest boy--boy?,--well a gentleman about to turn sixty in another year.  We had a hard time when he was a teenager, being the eldest and thus having to take the strong opposition as he and his siblings fought to establish their push back against demanding parents.  Now all these years later, he is a grandfather twice over, and the same gentle person who at the age of fifteen, sixteen and up until he left home at nineteen, was resolute in his opposition to me and my values, or so I read it then, and not altogether incorrectly, but the opposition was not hostile, but thoughtful and deliberate and now I see him as a principled person who inwardly decried the ambition that fueled his parents workaholic behaviors, what is more I almost burst into tears as he gently reminisced and spoke of all the wonderful things he had learned over the years from me, yes, by god from me!  I am closer to my second son who is a professional chef, having learned cooking first of all from me, and we are in weekly telephone contact over the slight shifts in intensity and accent in whatever dish I am planning to cook up.  But I see him rarely, and miss him at lot, if for no other reason than his love for me is so transparent, and like everyone else I need that.  My daughters I see more frequently, geography being what it is, and also they have no children, so they are more free, a choice I always feel they made contemplating the extraordinary prison their mother unwittingly created with her chance but relentless motherhood--four children in five years.  We all of us marveled over the government of Nova Scotia awarding my granddaughter a year of maternal leave to tend to her new baby boy, coupled with four months of full pay and I forget what follows that.  The two daughters came specifically to help the new mother, the one of them out in the kitchen helping her brother chop, cut, and stir, the other taking over the baby care when my step great-grandson had done his share and more.  These darling daughters surprised me by their intense attention to my failing powers, helping me in and out of cars, up stairs, through complicated thresholds.  How funny it is, indeed, as one reads in novels and short stories, to find how gradually and innocently familial roles reverse and the commander figure becomes the one in constant need.  Not quite yet the baby in his nappies, but, yes, moving in that direction.

A Vacation From Real Life

Every day I sat by the side of my granddaughter who lay back in an old fashioned over-stuffed comfy velveteen chair with a view out the window to the sparkling waters of an inlet of the coast of Cape Breton.  She was mostly nursing her six weeks old first baby and my second great grandchild.  The house was alive with visitors, my two daughters, and one of my sons, the grandfather of the new baby, who had come to help out since his ex-wife was busy tending to her dying mother.  It was my first extended exposure to him in many many years and one of the most pleasing surprises of the visit. Apart from his continued great good looks, he was the most agreeable kindly father figure, cooking up meals for his daughter and her family as well as his siblings, not just pick me up either, but successful efforts at cuisine, night after night, assisted ably by his sisters and his son-in-law.  Other times he spelled his daughter's fourteen year old stepson in rocking the baby, singing a variety of made for the moment lullabies.  What could be nicer than to see two males of the family tending so assiduously to baby details?  While my granddaughter rested between the incessant breast feeding, she often had the baby across her belly, and I thus had ample opportunity to gaze at the infant.  I don't remember studying one so intently although having been father to four such tiny creatures I must have. This baby upon constant and close inspection grew upon me, I noted every detail of his physiognomy, the darling little face, the mouth, the eyes, the way his hair grew, his tiny toes, and on and on and on.  I was filled with equal amounts of love and, what can I say?, generational joy, I, the patriarch, sitting in a room filled with my progeny.  My parents who died so young never knew the satisfaction of surveying their brood of six expanded to over a score or more, scattered thither and yon over the North American continent.  And for me the days were filled with discussions of the fat content of mother's milk, did the baby have the hiccups, was the diaper filled with poop, why did the diaper leak urine, was the baby smiling at me or was this reflex, and on and on, and never once did I give thought to Donald and Hillary, except when my exceedingly intelligent step-great grandson at fourteen astounded me with a detailed astonished Canadian's assessment of some of the loonier aspects of the American political scene.